Book review - "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles"

Here is my Goodreads review of "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" by J.M. Sullivan.

This was a wonderful book, and highly recommended.

That said, I have discussed my ratings philosophy before - how I reserve five stars for those books exceptional in their field, the best of the best.  On this scale, "Alice" is four stars - which is very high praise from me.

Like every book ever written, there are problems with it.  And further, there are things about it that I didn't connect with (but are not necessarily inherent problems with the text).  Overall, though, this was a great book, an easy read, and I expect most people would get the same high level of enjoyment out of it that I did.

So what is it?

Ostensibly a retelling of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", this book recasts Alice as a young woman in the midst of a world post-zombie-apocalypse, forced to venture out into Phoenix (now called "Wanderland") in search of a cure for her sister.

Pairing "Alice in Wonderland" with zombies is not unique.  I'm not sure where it started - Alice vs the Red Queen in Resident Evil perhaps?  Regardless, we have since (of course) had the successful "White Rabbit Chronicles" series by Gena Showalter (which I really enjoy) starting with "Alice in Zombieland".

This book is different, though.  Those stories use some symbolism or iconography from "Alice" to reflect certain themes or motifs in the work.  "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is explicitly using the story of Lewis Carroll's book - the characters, the ideas, the general progression - to tell a zombie story.  And that is something that "Alice in Zombieland" does not do.

(For that matter, the 'zombies' in "Alice in Zombieland" aren't even that - more like ghosts - so there is little common ground between that series and this one, have no fear.)

As with Carroll's novel, this one begins with Alice leaving both her sister and Dinah (here one and the same person) behind to follow a white rabbit into a frightening world.  Wanderland, of course, is not a separate universe, but its nature as a place abandoned to the Momerath (zombies) and the foreign agencies aggressively pursuing their agendas make it a far cry from Alice's little town where one can at least live one's life only occasionally interrupted by the 'Rath.

And the white rabbit she follows is a man - burdened with the only failed reference to the original novel
as a name.  Most of the references in this book work amazingly well, but "Dr Waite R Abbott" is torturous.  (I would have gone with something more obscure and less instantly recognizable like "Dr Albin Lapin" - but then there's a reason I do not pen runaway successes and JM Sullivan does.)

Why does Alice follow Dr Abbott into Wanderland?  Rumor has it that he has secretly devised a cure for the Momerath virus, which Alice needs to save her sister.  This leads her into a series of encounters with various individuals that will help or hinder (or both!) her quest.

"Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is a fast, breezy read.  It is always entertaining, sometimes intriguing, and presents us with many fascinating characters.

Are they all well-rounded and deep?  No, not at all.  Nor, quite frankly, are they intended to be.  There is a great deal more subtlety and depth to the characters here than in Lewis Carroll's source text, but this is still a fast-moving "road movie"-type story which cannot pause for lengthy character interaction.  It is all about moving forward - onto the next event, the next location, the next revelation.

Like the original, there is so much to see and do that we cannot dwell on anything long enough for the people to present themselves as fully three-dimensional (barring a few of the leads).  This is a feature and not a bug.  The characters are as fantastical and hyper-realized as Carroll's were, a bizarre menagerie for Alice to freak out over as she progresses along her path.

They are designed to be colorful and frightening, rather than realistic and recognizable.  Again, where the author intends otherwise, the characters do indeed show levels of reality to themselves.  This is a very well-constructed book, and everything it does is obviously purposeful.

As much as this book draws from the original, however, it is equally indebted to both popular Disney movie adaptations.  A famous exchange between Alice and the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's movie (for example) is referenced twice (one more... hidden than the other).  Like that movie, this one also chooses to conflate the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen from the sequel book.  And the appearance of the Mome Raths as dangerous creatures (rather than nonsensical words in a poem) appears first in the animated movie.  (For that matter, the term doesn't appear in the original book at all, only surfacing in "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There".)

This is quite right, as the pop-culture vision of "Alice in Wonderland" is at least as important to any retelling as the actual text of the book ("Alice's Adventures in Wonderland") is.  Sullivan knows when to use the book's ideas, and when to draw on our cultural consciousness' ideas about the story for proper effect.

So does this all mean that there is nothing original in "The Wanderland Chronicles"?  Goodness me, of course not.  I have described it as a "nominal retelling" in part because, as much as it strives to follow a certain template and include many analogs and references, this is a wholly original story being told.

Alice's predicament and what she is forced to do to resolve it bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lewis Carroll's heroine, who merely glides through Wonderland as a curious observer with no real agency.  (It was, after all, only a dream.)  Here, Alice is driven by her need to cure her sick sister, and her own abilities & innate nature define her actions, her choice of path.

Along the way are intense events, dramatic revelations, and exciting encounters that I will not spoil in the slightest way here.  You won't want to put the book down, as it all unspools swiftly and entertainingly, driving to a specific end that is indeed reached by the time the book is closed.

Of course, this is the first in a series, so the situation is not "resolved" as such.  But the narrative drive of the novel concludes in a satisfactory manner.  There is much left to cover in further volumes, but the story being told in this one is fully complete.  If the story ended here, it would be far from satisfactory - but as sequels have been promised, the resolution in this book works 100%.

I mentioned earlier that characters can be somewhat shallow.  As I stated then, this is deliberate due to the colorful and exaggerated nature of the "Alice" story.  The most prominent characters, however, are well-shaded and we get to know them as well as can be expected for such a story as this one.

Some will balk at the supposed "love triangle" (which is a staple of fiction, but has become a mandate for YA) but really there is nothing of the sort here.  Are there two young men Alice is even vaguely romantically interested in, or at least finds attractive?  Yes, indeed there are.

But not only is this not a focus, it's not in any way "content".  A young woman would find interesting and good-looking boys and men of an age similar to hers attractive.  This is just the way people work.  This book gives no more attention to that aspect than that, merely describing the ways in which Alice happens to find more than one person appealing.

No love triangle - no love whatsoever, in point of fact.  There's no time for such things here.  Anyone put off by Alice happening to be attracted to more than one handsome man in her travels is being affected by other (lower quality) novels and not engaging with what is actually being presented in this book.

In summary, then, "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is a very successful book that accomplishes its goals almost flawlessly.  It does not dwell on the action and gore inherent in zombie stories, but neither does it shy away from them.  It presents simple characters, colorful and variegated, but ones with enough depth where it counts to come across as fully complete.

It is fun, engaging, easy to read, and always entertaining.  If it doesn't hit five stars for me, that is mostly a consequence of its aiming for a lower bar.  The book easily clears the standard it sets for itself, which is more than good enough for me.

"Alice" is not aiming to be a literary classic.  It accomplishes its goals and then some.

Strongly recommended for... let's face it, just about everyone, really.

Buy the book

Close third - the cheating POV

Writing is tough.

Even when you've got your plot figured out, your characters, the arcs, all that good stuff.  How do you actually tell the story?

First person?  Third person?  The rarely-used second person?

And beyond that: past tense?  Present tense?

These things can greatly affect the way in which your text is received, the way the human brain processes and interprets the words.  The way the reader experiences them.

And if you're like me, you fall back on the easy one.  Close third.


Actually, I'll admit that I'm exaggerating here for effect.  Someone a while back wanted me to write this blog post, and I finally am getting around to it now.  If I get any comments below, they are sure to be angry ones!  But let me explain.

Third person is more... removed.  Obviously.  You - the writer - are not sitting in the character's head the way you are in first person, where everything is a direct translation of the character's thoughts.  Instead, you are the narrator, describing what the character sees, thinks and feels.

But "close" third: that is somewhat different.  In this POV, the writer is close enough to the character's head that he/she almost conveys it in first person - but not quite.

In essence, it's a way to get the benefits of first person POV without actually having to mess with the

headache that brings with it.  It's cheating.

No, no it's not really cheating.  It's my favorite POV to use - and usually to read, truth be told.  But it sure is easier than being restricted to first person, and can convey more immediacy and relatability than a strict third can.

Plus (and here's where I really rely on the crutch) it allows me the freedom (which I abuse mercilessly) to use my natural tendency toward lengthy, wordy sentences in my role as narrator - while also writing punchy, snappy text in character as the protagonist!

Best of both worlds!

Except in rewrites I always have to tone down this disparity.  At times I can even tell on reading back when I stopped writing for one day and took it up again the next.  One day I may have been extra flowery, the next super-slangy.  Editing is partially about fixing this.

But I still have that leeway.  That flexibility to incorporate my writerly inclinations with my character's more off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness way of thinking.

Is that a cheat?  It is the way I do it.

And then I have to fix it.

Book Review: "Ink and Bone" by Rachel Caine

Hey.  Been a while.

I have been so busy writing (or, at times, avoiding writing) that I have ignored this blog.  Shame on me.

I have several topics in mind, but for now: here's my Goodreads book review for "Ink and Bone".

Happy reading!

That I didn't give this book 5 stars is no slight on the novel.  For me, those are (and ought to be) rare.  "Ink and Bone" gets a solid 4.25 stars, and is very, very good.

One of the things I liked most about it is the thing that may be causing the (very few) detractors to have a hard time: this book cares very little about plot.

It's true.  There's barely any actual plot in this book.  And it's all the better for it.

One of the books "Ink and Bone" is being compared to all over the map is "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone", which is ridiculous on the face of it.  Neither the tone nor the content is at all similar, and apart from the rather vague alchemical machinations behind the scenes, the characters in this book neither see nor perform 'magic'.

And yet, like "The Philosopher's Stone", this book uses the 'year at school' setting as a tool to drag the reader along.  In the Harry Potter book, besides a vague sense that Voldemort is up to something and his scheme will need to be defeated, the only real plot structure is: Harry goes to school.  The incidents that occur, the real 'plot', is just Harry going to classes.  And then there's a big end-piece.

Sort-of similarly, "Ink and Bone" uses the fact that the characters are attending a class to earn a spot working for The Library as a way for the reader to infer a kind of forward momentum.  The 'plot' only drives forward insofar as time moves ahead to a certain destination.  There is no villain as such (debatable, but give me this one for now) nor is there a goal to achieve or set obstacles to overcome.  There is no overarching narrative in the sense that the reader can understand an endpoint that needs to be achieved, and what the hero is required to do to attain it, what hurdles he must jump to win the day.

There is a timeline set out before Jess (the protagonist) and us.  And the book moves ever closer to that point.  This is the only sense of momentum author Rachel Caine feels the need to give us.

And quite right she is, too.

This sort of 'false momentum' is all the rope the story needs to drag itself along, to give it a sense of driving forward narratively.  Then all the real work can be done with the characters, which is what 'story' essentially is.

Jess, you see, is something of a smuggler.  In an alternate history where the Library of Alexandria runs the world, and has supreme authority over all collective knowledge, the black market has a keen interest in original books.  And Jess' father is one of those black marketeers.

So when Jess winds up having to apply for a position working for the very Library he has been taught to oppose, an intriguing moral conflict is posed.

Setting him and his ideals against a cast of diverse characters with their own agendas and viewpoints adds even more fuel to the (Greek) fire, and this is where the actual story takes place.  The story is Jess and his instructor and his fellow students learning to deal with one another, to respect one another, and the various interesting ways they interact and grow as a result.

Events certainly take place - big, important ones.  Life-threatening and enthralling ones.  But nothing that I'd call a 'plot', because they stand alone as incidents that do not essentially contribute to any overarching narrative.  They are simply things that happen - but what those 'things that happen' do is affect the characters in fascinating ways that reveal (and change) who they are at their cores.

Are there flaws in the book?  Of course there are.  (Show me a book without them.)  For my money, the opening segments setting up Jess' world are too far removed from the setting of the rest of the book, and would be better excised.  They set up an expectation for a certain type of story that we learn some time later is not to be the case.

I would also postulate that the reason some readers give up early on, feeling that the book is 'slow' or 'dry', is simply down to extremely long chapters!  Later on, the book is divided into easier-to-swallow segments, but the interminable length of those early portions leads one to feel that the book is dragging on and leading nowhere - when simple chapter divides would kick up the pace by themselves.

As, of course, would not wasting quite so much time setting up Jess' life in London which will not bear much relation to the rest of the novel at all.  But I've talked about that already...

Jess is a well-defined character, with certain notions inbuilt thanks to his upbringing which are challenged by his own experiences as a student.  While he's neither the wise-cracking, fun-loving rogue you instantly fall in love with, nor the wide-eyed ingenue the reader can put themselves in the shoes of, Jess is likeable and interesting in his own right.

The other students are less dimensional, but diverse and entertaining enough.  There's not quite time in a book of this length to get fully into the heads of so many players, but the author very quickly lets us know who these people from around the world are, what their biases are, and how they will relate to one another.

She then spends the book picking that apart and letting the characters grow and develop based on their interactions.

More interesting (at least to me) was the instructor: Christopher Wolfe.  A hard-nosed, by-the-book teacher at first glance, as we read more and more, as Jess' experiences teach us more, we see something else entirely.  We understand the man, where he comes from, what has made him this way, and that the surface is a poor source to make one's judgments based upon.

I look forward to the later books in the series.  Seeing more of Jess, more of Morgan.  But mostly, I want to see what becomes of Wolfe - because he is the aspect of this book I became most intrigued by.

The alternate reality this is based upon uses some hocus-pocus that I feel could have best been replaced by something less obviously mystical, but I admit this is a matter of taste.  Some major developments rest upon it, but I think something more ambiguous and more technologically-justifiable would suit the 'alternative history' angle better, as what is here removes itself just a little too far from our world.

The sentry machines I can buy into.  The 'magic'?  Less so, in this context - though I'm a big fantasy fan in general.

More to my taste was the political flavor to the whole endeavor.  The Library, the cutters, the Burners.  You may begin the novel feeling one way about these people/organizations, and yet feel quite different by the end.  Indeed, I should be much surprised if you did not.

Will you know exactly how to feel about every group by the conclusion of this book?  I should hope not; it is nothing so black-and-white as that.  And this is the ingredient that (I feel) really makes the book soar.

Who is in the right?  Who is in the wrong?  As in real life, it is not cut and dried, and everyone seems to have a little of both mixed in.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Buy "Ink and Bone"

Killing Your Babies With the Bathwater

For writers, the phrase "kill your babies" is something we are used to hearing over and over.

No, not because we're part of some freaky, Manson-like cult.  This piece of advice is to remind us that sometimes an idea, a character, a sub-plot, can be holding back the work as a whole but we are too fond of it to (as Elsa would urge us) let it go.

A lot of the time you have to "kill your babies".  Throw out the trash that's hurting your fiction, regardless of how much you might have grown attached to it.

And yet, a part of me resists that advice with all of my strength.  Is it just my petty attachment to my (obviously wonderful) ideas getting in my way?  Or is there something wrong with the famous advice?

Probably the former, I'll admit, but allow me to explore this idea somewhat on the page here.  You see, if a writer is unduly attached to a particular aspect of his or her writing, perhaps that "baby" is not holding the story back but is the one part giving it life.

Look, I understand the aphorism.  And I'm sure most of the time it's right.  But sometimes - just sometimes - we might find ourselves throwing out that baby with the bathwater.  What was intended to save the story, by cutting out the parts fighting against it, instead gets rid of the very heart that beat at the center.

A (possibly poor) example, if you will.  Many years ago I was (for the sake of writing practice) attempting to condense five books of David Eddings' "The Belgariad" into one screenplay of 120 pages.

Madness, sure, but it was an exercise.  As I pared it down, and down, and down, it resembled the source material less and less.  Fine then, I said, let's change it to an original work instead, if I'm altering it to that extent anyway.

So I turned this into that, nipping and tucking and snipping until I had a story that resembled "The Belgariad" no more than, say, "The Lord of the Rings".

And yet.  And yet...  One scene remained.  The part where Garion and Ce'Nedra bathe together in the stream.  I couldn't get rid of it, I loved it too much.  But with that piece intact, it was very clearly a "rip-off" of "the Belgariad".  No matter the name changes, the source material shone through.

So the scene had to go.  But I couldn't.  That one scene (small as it is) in one of the 5 books was everything to me.  The lynchpin, the centerpiece, the pivot on which the entire story turned.  To remove that was to pluck the heart from its chest Temple of Doom style, and I could not do it.

Thus I abandoned the screenplay entirely.  Leaving in the bathing scene would make it too reliant on the source material, taking it out killed the entire story stone dead.

For me, in that instance, the baby that needed killing was the story.  It couldn't be done.

I faced a similar issue with "Straw Soldiers" - my first novel.  A mistake (I'll admit it) early on hampered the experience of the book.  And yet getting rid of it would destroy the presentation and development of the main character in the book.

So vital was this element (an element which held back the book quite obviously) that I strongly considered changing the entire premise of the six-book series to accommodate it, to make it no longer a flaw.

When I realized just what I was proposing, I decided this was a baby that could not be killed.  Yes, keeping it in hampered the impact of the novel - I know it did - but taking it out would be worse.  So much worse.

Is killing your babies a good piece of advice?  I'm sure it is.  Just, when you're working on that, make sure that what you're excising is not the heart and soul of your book, your screenplay, your poem.  Maybe sometimes, it's the bathwater that needs changing instead.

How to present diversity

Okay, so I've been busy writing my book and not this blog.  Sorry 'bout that.

But an interesting conversation I had on Twitter about presenting your characters that are people of color brought up issues that I have struggled with in the "Sleepwar Saga" series I'm writing now.  The poster made a very good point, and yet I can't say I 100% agree, either.

The Tweeter in question advised writers to state up front the ethnicities of their non-white characters.  The poster said that the presumed-white mentality is so strong that if you don't bring ethnicity up as one of the first things about your character, they will be assumed white by your audience and that view will be hard to shake.

I agree with this, actually.  I think diversity is important - not just in regards to race, but sexuality and physical ability, too - and so it is important that the reader recognizes this about your characters so as to experience the diversity correctly.

However...  I worry about stating up front that a character is black, South Asian, Hispanic, whatever.  Why would that concern me?  Well, for a couple of reasons.

One is that when you're being introduced to a new character, you are absorbing their primary traits in an attempt to understand who they are.  If one of the main traits I choose to mention is that a character is (say) Vietnamese, then the worry (possibly unfounded) is that the reader will pigeonhole that character as "Asian" above and beyond any other attributes.

In other words, they'll remember that the leads include: "the smart one, the athletic one, the nerd, and the Asian chick."

Yes, I can have a well-rounded character with all sorts of subtleties, but if I have prioritized her ethnicity as a defining feature, will the reader do the same?

Also, I never want to "other" my characters.  That is to say, if I feel the need to state one character is black, but never think I have to point out that the others are white, I have singled out "blackness" as aberrant.  I am presenting white as default and describing any deviation from the assumed norm.  And I never want to do that.

Most of the time, I try to describe one characters whiteness for every instance I talk about another character's non-white color.  To ensure that it is a descriptor applied equally and not to demarcate those people who stand out as non-standard.

What, then, is the solution?  Probably what that Twitter poster said, but I still go back and forth.  I don't want to disrespect either my characters or my readers by having race be any kind of defining aspect of my characters.

Their upbringing (of which culture, and society's response to their ethnicity, will be a part) certainly is a strong influence on who they are.  But the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes ought not to be who they are.  On any level, as far as I am concerned.

I like to use strong and unique names for my characters when I can.  If everyone is "Pete", "Dave", "Sandra", "Jill", then it is all too easy for the reader to forget which bland label belongs to which individual.  If they have stronger, less common, names then it is easier to tell them apart.

Luckily for me, this also helps with the dilemma of introducing a character's ethnicity.  In "Straw Soldiers" two minor characters (Kaz's friends at school) were named "Julia Ng" and "Daisy Rivera".  I hope that any reader knows the ethnicities of these girls without being told.

Similarly, my current work in progress features an extremely minor character named "DeShawn" whose skin color I do not feel needs to be stated.  His personality is not a stereotype, but his name is recognizably African American in the way that "Brian" would not be.

This can't be done for every character who is non-white, of course, but on occasion is does bypass the problem I struggle with.

What do you think?  How problematic is it to single out a character's ethnicity for comment?  And how problematic is it not to do so, and have the reader just assume everyone is white?

National No Writing Month

Wow.  I've been gone for a while...

So, many of you will know that for a large number of writers, November was NaNoWriMo: "National Novel Writing Month".  Basically, you set strict word count goals so that during the month of November you write a full (first draft of a) novel.

Pretty cool.  I did my own NaNoWriMo: "National No Writing Month".

Why was that?  A bunch of reasons.  I work retail (managing a shoe department) and the Christmas season is a very busy one, leaving me with little time and energy to devote to my writing.

In addition to that... well, I don't want to get into it too much here, but I'm American and early November saw a major event occur that didn't put me in a good mental state for the next few weeks.  I stayed away from all social media for a while, just to avoid dealing with people and their ways.

You guys know what I'm talking about.

As of now, I still don't have the time or energy to put in any serious writing, but I am going through my notes for The Sleepwar Saga Book 2, soaking up all of the details again.  And I'm steeling myself for a more hard-nosed writing schedule at the beginning of the new year.

If I do this right, I could have a (very rough!) first draft by the end of February no problem.  (But, knowing me, I won't - and the end of March will be the earliest.)  Then comes the real work of rewriting.  Yeuch.

But have no fear: I haven't vanished off the face of the Earth!  And with any luck, I will come out the other side of Christmas refreshed and ready to write better than ever before.

I'll believe that when I see it...

My Journey to Self-Publishing

How does one get started on self-publishing?  Well, I'm sure there are many different paths to that.  Sit down around the campfire, folks, and hearken to my own tale.

It all started with reading; it usually does.

Unfortunately, I shall have to be somewhat vague here as there is still the possibility of something happening with this property, but suffice for now to say that there was an incredibly fun series that I was a big fan of.  It was a pulp-style, 70s-set, series of e-book-only novellas starring an entertaining character in a crazy world where it seemed like anything could happen.

They were fantastic, and a lot of fun, but unfortunately a lack of interest caused the series to come to a close eventually.  This disappointed me, but it was not unforeseen.  A niche product like that will be limited in its appeal, but if it - by chance - finds that target audience then it can really take off.  This one didn't (quite).

Some time later, I (who have always been a writer since my youth, even if I had never sought out publishing in any way before) contacted the creator of this series and wondered if he would be amenable to me sending a spec manuscript over to him.  I knew the likelihood of the character making a return was low, but I figured I may as well give it a shot - I had a couple of vague ideas for what I would like to do if given the chance.

To my surprise, the creator messaged me, saying that he was actually considering a hardcopy collected version of the stories, and would like some new novellas to be included so as to make the paper version appealing even to those who already owned the stories electronically.  And he was willing to take a look at my submission!

Energized by the possibility of being published even by a small press like this one (especially one whose works I had been such a fan of) I set to writing straight away, using the concept that most interested me out of the few I had conceived.  I finished a 20,000 word story quite quickly, and sent this first draft off to the man in charge.

And this is where things fell apart.  For various reasons, the project was now not a priority in any way - and although he was enthusiastic about the parts of my story that he read, he never finished it or got back to me with any notes.  The book was dead in the water, and took my story with it.

(Or so it seemed: there remains the possibility - I am told - that the book could still happen, so watch this space for news.)

I had fun writing it, though.  A lot of fun.  Indeed, I had so many ideas for subsequent stories in this property that I would have loved to have taken over publishing the stories myself - even at a schedule of one novella per month (I thought).  Despite having had a couple of ideas for novels in my head for a few years (which will be written... eventually) I had never seriously tried to write something for publishing.  Or self-publishing.  But now...

The existing IP was something out of my hands; I knew this.  But what if I invented my own pulp novella series, that I could put out there myself.  Would such a thing be possible?

Indeed it was (a quick bit of internet searching later on showed me) and I spent the idle hours of one day at my job thinking about the possibilities.  Immediately, my love of old-fashioned pulp SF made me think of a concept involving a Victorian gentleman having adventures in outer space.  Perhaps it could be called Josiah Kensington: Space Adventurer?  Or maybe The Star Journeys of Dr Jeremiah Fotherington-Smythe?

Very quickly, this became The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe, and I set about giving myself a target of 18,000-22,000 words per story, at a rate of one per month.  I would give it six months to have a chance of catching on, of finding an audience, and if after that it was going nowhere then I would end it.

Anyway, fast forward to six months later (during which I had also written a couple of other novellas or short stories) I completed the series with Book 6: "The Free World".  As expected, it had not found its audience and, much as I adored the character and his world, I wrapped up the story.  I had ideas about where the story could go later on, should it unexpectedly find a late following, but for now it was done.  (A paperback and eBook collected version was later released.)

Quite disheartened, I decided to treat all of the previous time as warm-up.  Like it didn't happen.  I wanted not to think of that as wasted effort, but instead as little more than rehearsal.  The real writing, the real career, would start now.

Looking for something that could theoretically be commercial but that I would still be just as in love with, I devised a series of Young Adult novels called The Sleepwar Saga.  In it, a group of six teenagers who don't know each other would find that, when they slept, they were together in another part of the country.  Fighting evil, questioning their reality, learning to work together.

It took some 8 months before the final draft of Straw Soldiers was ready, but it is the work I am most proud of, and I'm ecstatic about it and the rest of the series to come.  Whether this find its audience or not I cannot yet say, but even if it does not I will be thrilled to write the rest of the installments, so in love am I with this series and these characters.

Other books fight for idea space in my head, however.  There's the fun Lawyers vs Zombies: The Legal Dead which I can't quite forget about, ever.  The Universe Device was actually plotted out to a great degree and ready to be written, until I decided that I needed more novels under my belt before I could attempt that one.  (The structure is more complex than I feel I can do justice to yet.)

I also have a Christian thriller in mind, a sci-fi murder mystery, and a few horror shorts that I began but lost track of when I didn't feel I was quite hitting the mark.  (I'll get back to them later.)

I love writing.  I love self-publishing.  I hope someday I can focus on it as a career, instead of that thing that takes up all of my time when I'm not at my "real" job.

But it never would have happened if I hadn't been inspired to contact the creator of a book series I loved and asked about writing for his characters.  I'm so glad I did.



Some links for people looking into self-publishing:
Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing
CreateSpace for the paperback version
Draft2Digital or Smashwords (which I haven't used, but are important if you don't want to be Kindle-exclusive)

Book review: "The Martian Girl"

The Martian Girl
by Paul Magrs
(Firefly Press)


Let me get this out of the way first: it's not quite as good as "Lost on Mars" was.

But given that I rated them both 4 stars on Goodreads, there's obviously not much in it.

Like the first book, it's quite episodic and doesn't feel like the plot really gets going until rather late in.  The first 50% or so of this book is kind of picking up the pieces of "Lost on Mars" and reshuffling them to get to the place this book needs them to be.

Most of this part is still good reading - although I found the ambivalent way the novel treats Professor Swiftnick to be somewhat disorienting.  At one point, it appears as though we're going to be expected to suddenly treat Swiftnick as a friendly character - though this is soon negated again.  It's probably just bad reading on my part, but it feels to me as if Paul Magrs momentarily gets lost in recreating the feel of certain other books and places the character in a role unsuited to him for a brief time.

That quibble aside (and it's a minor one) this is a very enjoyable book from start to finish.  I don't feel it has the strength of the early portions of "Lost on Mars" which had a very nice "Little House on the Martian Prairie" feel - but neither does it have the wrenching quality of that book's episodic format.

This still follows the same storybook format of a series of differentiated adventures, but somehow the whole feels somewhat more "tied together" than before.  To me, "Lost on Mars" somehow only felt as though it had arrived at the real story it was telling when Lora made it to the City Inside.

That location is where we pick up in "The Martian Girl", and remain for the first half of the book.  Even though it still takes a goodly while for this book to wind up at the next phase of the adventure, it is so breezy and fun to read that you'll never feel like the time spent is too long.  Indeed, I could have remained in the City Inside for the entire book and never felt cheated.

But that's not what this series is doing.  No, as I stated earlier, the kind of storybook, episodic format keeps us always rolling along to the next set of circumstances - and here there is a distinctly more pronounced L Frank Baum air to the whole thing than I recall from the first book.  Whether this comparison is intended or the product of my own reading preferences is of no consequence; the similarity is there (for me, at least) and is something I appreciated.

It's a necessity of any sequel, but I felt slightly let down at the fact that some of the odd occurrences in "Lost on Mars" are given explanations here (or at least a hint in that direction) which dilutes the impact of them rather - but only in the way that Poirot revealing the murderer will always be vaguely less compelling than the investigation to undercover him in the first place.

Lora's world is still zany, enthralling and well-drawn, and most of the characters refuse to remain as they are, instead developing as the story goes on.  Plenty of mystery is still left regarding events and people from the first book, and although I am eager to discover the truth I am happy to wait while I enjoy the desire for eventual enlightenment.  There's so much still to find out, things that will no doubt alter the way we understand the world of this Mars.

And Lora herself still has room to grow, to become the woman it seems she is likely to be.

Oh - Barbra the Vending Machine finally made it into the story here.  I was hoping it wouldn't take her long...

Buy the e-book on Amazon US

99c sale!

September 15-19

"Straw Soldiers" Kindle edition is on sale for:


99c from the Amazon US store

99p from the Amazon UK store



Pick it up, before this sale ends!

Book 2: The Difficult Second Album

Just as with musicians, the sophomore release is in some ways the hardest.

It's partly the artist to blame, and partly the audience.  The first book/album is the culmination of possibly years of creative percolating.  After that, it's time to just get the next product in the assembly line out, and it's likely to be a letdown.

Why is the audience to blame?  Well, in some ways the expectation of something just as amazing as the first installment is impossible to meet.  The consumer is not privy to the long history that first work had prior to its release, and can't fully accept that the sequel is simply not going to have the same creative weight behind it.

But let's face it: it's mostly on us.  The writer, the musician, the movie director.  If we experience the old Sophomore Slump it's because we haven't put the work in that we needed to.

Yeah, it's difficult.  You want any second installment to be the same, but different.  In exactly the right ratio.

It's very easy to make the second book too similar to the first.  I call this the "Chamber of Secrets" effect.  An installment that serves only to reinforce what the author intends to be the "pattern" of the series, and not to add anything artistically new to the pot.  It has a purpose - to say "this is what the series is" - but to the reader this is merely dead space.

And yet, going the other way is even worse.  When the second book is too different to the first, the series loses all cohesion and you lose all of the readers who wanted more of the kind of thing they liked so much about that initial book.

There's a line there.  A very narrow, fuzzy, hard-to-find line.  And that's where I'm walking right now, plotting and inventing, trying my darndest to pull the story of Book 2 out of the mire of swirling possibilities it exists in currently.

If you fail at the second lap, you've lost the race.  This is no time to get complacent.  This, right here, this is the biggest challenge.  And I have to be ready for it.

Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces

I've talked before about being a "Plotter".  I don't write without knowing everything that's going to happen in the story (but leaving room for surprises to happen along the way).

So what does that look like?  Well, for me, in many ways it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

First, you have to decide what difficulty level you're going for, what length of project.  Is it a 200-piece puzzle, or a 550-piece?  Then: is it the picture of puppies, the sailboat, or the bridge of the Enterprise?

After that is the hardest part: starting.  You see, it's not just a puzzle.  It's a puzzle that has been knocked over.

Because you don't have any of the pieces to begin with.  Here and there on the floor you can see a couple of puzzle pieces, but on their own you have no idea what they are or how they fit into the bigger picture.  But following the trail of pieces leads you to more, and eventually you find the motherload: the stash of all the puzzle pieces somewhere underneath the coach.

Of course, the work isn't over yet.  Oh no.  You have to sort through the pieces, find which goes where - tossing out any pieces that you think belong to another puzzle altogether.

It's hard work, this, but satisfying.  You get to see the picture come together.  And it's a fascinating experience, at times, to find that what you thought was a bird's eye is actually a black shirt button, and that edge piece is really an odd-shaped center-piece.

But once the picture is complete, you can start the actual writing, knowing in full what you're going for, what the actual story is.  Because if a character isn't heading for a specific destination, they really aren't headed anywhere at all.

Right now, in planning Book 2 of The Sleepwar Saga, I'm at the early piece-collecting stage.  I have a handful of disparate segments, but I'm just on the verge of them leading me to the main pile of spilled pieces.

And soon will begin the main planning of the book.  And then, the writing.  I just can't write about the basket of puppies without seeing what the completed jigsaw puzzle looks like in the first place - writing about a few loose puzzle pieces just leaves me with a mess of purposeless prose.

Paperback now available!

That's right, Book 1 of The Sleepwar Saga is now available in genuine Dead Tree form!

It's 6"x9" and 264 pages of awesomeness.  And you should buy it today!

$8.99+shipping from Amazon US

£6.99+shipping if you're in the UK

Or, of course, the Kindle e-book version is still available for $2.99 or £2.49 from the links elsewhere on this blog.

Character diversity in fiction

Diversity is important.

Now, I don't believe in tokenism, but I do believe in representation.  As a straight white male, it is all too easy for me to be blind to the way my 'type' is over-represented in fiction.  That most fiction seems to be directly catered to me, to appeal to me, to feature me.

But having diversity among your characters is not only about representation; it's also just good drama.  What your characters look like might not seem superficially important (in text there is no color) but even if all of the characters are white (or black, or Hispanic, or desi) it is important to make each distinct.

Basically, the less variation the characters' cultural and developmental backgrounds, the less inherent drama there is in their interactions.  Why limit yourself?  No matter how well you define your individual characters, if they all share so many of the same characteristics then there is much less scope for clashes.

For me, as a function of where I live, it is easy for me to create a naturally diverse cast.  I simply look at my friends and co-workers and draw from them - as they are from various backgrounds and ethnicities, so will my own characters be.

Especially the teenagers I work with, since the Sleepwar Saga leads are all teens as well.  As I look to real young people I know from which I can extrapolate brand new fictional versions, I naturally will create a diverse group as that is the culture that surrounds me.  Were I still living in some of the more overwhelmingly white areas I have lived in before, perhaps I would have to work that much harder to ensure I created a realistically and entertainingly diverse cast of characters.

That's not to say I always succeed in my efforts.  Only after the fact did I realize that all six of my leads (and the supporting cast of "Straw Soldiers" as well) are cisgendered hetereosexual able-bodied people.  Clearly this is an area I will need to deliberately focus on if I want to be representative (and to mine all resources for inherent drama).

Actually, one of the characters in "Straw Soldiers" is gay, but as it never came up in the text no one will ever know.

What about gender?  More than half of the world's population is female, so why are so few fictional characters female?  Especially in movies and on TV, but books can be just as guilty.

I want to be diverse.  I want to be representative.  Not just to ensure that straight white men are not the only (or even primary) type that gets stories written for them, but because when drama is all about the way characters clash and interact, why would any writer remove potential for this by limiting the variation among the core cast?

But while sometimes this comes easily, at other times I realize how far I still have to go if I want to meet my goals.  It's so easy to surround yourself with people like yourself - to write about people like yourself - that you just don't notice how insufficient this representation actually is.

What is 'Young Adult' fiction, exactly?

And why write it?

This is just a question I was thinking about lately, and figured I'd jot down some thoughts.  You see, 'genre' is an interesting concept which so many people seem to get wrong.

Genre doesn't define content; content defines genre.

In other words, no good 'Young Adult' book (since that's the category I'm discussing today) began with the author thinking: "I'd like to write a YA novel.  What elements do I need to put in to make it YA?"

Many writers do, indeed, think like that.  But not the good ones.

Writing YA isn't about taking some of the staples of the genre (dystopian future, strong female protagonist, vampires) and figuring out a plot you can build around them.  This only leads to inferior fiction.  No, instead 'Young Adult' fiction is merely fiction that is about being a young adult.

It's about writing your story in such a way that it is defined by the experience of being a teen (or person of similar age).  Not about featuring teenagers; rather, it is about being a teenager.  The entire subjective experience should be the way an actual young person views and chooses in the world.  This is what makes a YA story, not the plot elements.

So why write YA?  Why is the young adult experience such a popular topic for authors and readers alike?  My guess is that the experience of 'coming of age', of being right at the point in one's life where one is transitioning from dependency to autonomy, is simply the most inherently dramatically rich period to form a story around.

This is a time when emotions are at their height, when the weight of the future first begins to burden a young mind, when the person they will be for the duration of their lives begins to fully take form.  Obviously, this makes for a vast well of story potential to be mined.

And adults - who are actually the main consumers of YA fiction - will connect with the material every bit as powerfully as those who are going through the same experience depicted in the story.  We have all been that age, and any story that properly conjures up the reality of having been that age will bring us older folks back to when we felt the exact same way.

One of my favorite movies is Where the Wild Things Are.  It is based on a young children's book, and is about the experience of being a young child.  But is not for young children.

Oh, there is nothing there that is unsuitable for kids.  I just don't think it caters to them particularly.  It doesn't speak to them in any strong way, because its purpose is to remind us who have left that period behind of exactly what it felt like to be a kid.  What we went through, the way the world treated us.  It reminds us of that time, and helps us relate to those who are currently children.

Kids don't need that.  They're already living it.  It's the rest of us that sometimes need to be reminded of just what a fearsome and difficult time childhood actually is (or can be).

That's what I like about YA, and why I choose to write it.  It is, in a basic way, about being at a time in our lives that defined us, that we struggled through, that we sometimes find it all too easy to forget.

And sometimes it has vampires in it.

Meet Kaz Harper

KASSANDRA "KAZ" HARPER

A 17-year-old high school student from Northern California.

Loves video games, has her own guild in an online MMORPG.  Keeps her head down in school, lucked into some popular friends.  Home life a bit unsteady.

A fairly normal life, all things considered.

Until the night she went to sleep and found herself in a strange forest, with five other kids she had never met before in her life.

It couldn't be real, of course.  Could it?  Especially when a living scarecrow attacked the group from out of nowhere.  Almost like something from one of her video games...

With all Kaz has to deal with at school, at home - in life - the last thing she wants is to become embroiled in some fight against evil for some higher being she never sees.

But then, we can't always get what we want.  And as she learns to work with the other teens, to forge a team of six very different people plunged into this bizarre scenario together, she may just come to understand that if you try, sometimes you might find you get what you need...

Available now for the Kindle at $2.99

Paperback coming soon...

New YA series: The Sleepwar Saga!

Hi guys!

I've been busy for a while, but I'm back!  I decided to revamp the blog and use it for all of my stuff, not just "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe".

Out now is my new YA novel - the first in "The Sleepwar Saga".

It's called "Straw Soldiers", and it is about Kaz Harper, a teenage girl who argues with her family, plays video games, and struggles through school.  Until one night she goes to sleep and finds herself in another part of the country surrounded by five other teens in the same predicament.

Forced to band together to fight against evil, these six strangers will come together as friends, as colleagues, as soldiers in this Sleepwar.

As of now it's only available as a Kindle e-book (the paperback will be out soon) but that's okay!  The Kindle app is free even if you don't own an actual Kindle, and it can be downloaded on most mobile devices - and even your home computer!

$2.99 from Amazon US

£2.49 from Amazon UK

Buy it today!