Catching Up

Posted: May 10, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Writing | Leave a comment

Red QuillThis is what I call a catch up post. I have been busily writing my heart out, but unfortunately none of it has appeared here on Writing to be Read. I want to apologize for neglecting all my faithful readers and perhaps make up for it, in part, by sharing what I have been up to.
I’ve been working on a middle grade mystery novel, The Adventures of Ann and Kinzi, that has turned into quite the project. With 26,000 words down, the first draft is now well on its way to being finished. I also wrote a political op/ed piece that has a good shot at being published after making revisions, and I wrote a query letter for my western novel, Delilah, the first draft of which is waiting for revision at this time.
I covered the 2013 Pikes Peak Writers Conference as the Southern Colorado Literature Examiner, and I’ve also been working on a blog post for the Pikes Peak Writers blog. While attending the conference, I had my first pitch session, where I pitched one of my children’s books and got a “send it”, so I have also been working on revisions of the book, as well as writing a cover letter and synopsis for it.
In addition, I’ve worked up a chapter outline and a start on a non-fiction book, The Unseen Victim, that’s been brewing in my mind for several years, and developed a good idea of the research that I’ll need to do for it. I’ve written the first draft for an article on creative and critical thinking skills in writing and how to teach them in the classroom setting, which may eventually end up here. In class, I learned to write out a syllabus and lesson plan, knowledge that has the potential to be very useful in my future writing career.
With the end of the semester just around the corner and most of these projects finished, or at least close to being wrapped up, I find myself in an unusual dilemma. While many writers complain of not knowing what to write, my question is what to work on first. I have Delilah awaiting rewrite, with query letter ready to go. I have the remainder of the first draft of The Adventures of Ann and Kinzi to finish. I have research to do for The Unseen Victim. And I’m compelled to work on my memoir about the death of my son, which continues to cry out to me from somewhere inside, needing to be written. With the whole summer looming ahead of me, I don’t know what direction to work in next.
All of that just to say I’ve been really busy. To make up for my negligence here dear readers, I bring s peace offering of a short excerpt from my western novel, Delilah. I hope you enjoy reading it, as much as I enjoyed writing it.

 Delilah watched as the prison gates opened, the gunnysack of rations they had given her thrown over her shoulder. She was dressed in the same clothes she’d arrived in–worn brown trousers and a chambray shirt, with the leather fringed coat that Manuelo gave her for her sixteenth birthday. She loved the fringe that adorned the sleeves and breast, making her feel fancy. It held a special place in her heart because it came from Manuelo.
     She reckoned she’d head back to the little town in the San Luis Valley where she grew up. She didn’t know what awaited her back in San Luis, but Manuelo would be there. His letters had promised her as much. He was the one person who had always been there for her and who believed in her. He was the only person who understood why she killed her step-father when she was seventeen.
     Delilah strolled through the gates, not looking back at the line of prisoners waiting to go the brick yards in their black and white striped duds. Being female spared her from the brickyards, but she’d slaved in the laundry, scrubbing the red dirt from those stripes for two long years. She wouldn’t miss the sight of those dirty striped uniforms or most of the prisoners in them.
     Outside the gates, she examined the contents of the sack Shamus had handed her. The prison had given her rations of flour, sugar, coffee, beans and a hunk of lard. She pulled out the chunk of jerky she’d seen Shamus slip into the sack when the other guards weren’t looking. The young, rusty-haired guard had always been kind to her. Delilah thought he might even be a little sweet on her. She was certain the jerky wasn’t part of the standard rations for a prisoner being released.
      She wandered through the dusty streets of Canon City chewing jerky, not sure where she was headed. A rather plain blue dress with hand stitching was displayed in the window of the Mercantile Store. It was the kind of dress her mama would have wanted her to wear. Mama was constantly harping on her to wear dresses like her little sister, Katie, but Delilah refused. She hadn’t worn a dress since she was old enough to ride.
      As a girl, her mother and the school teacher, Consuela harped about her un-ladylike appearance, but Papa never minded her wearing britches instead of dresses. They were better for riding and for hunting, which they both enjoyed doing. Even after he died and Mama had sold Delilah’s horse to pay the outstanding mortgage payments, she still wouldn’t dress in lace and frills like the other girls. She spent her time hunting to put food on the table, selling the skins of the animals she’d killed to do her part in supporting the family. These were activities for which a dress would be most cumbersome.
     She stopped in front of the livery to look over the horses in the corral, the smell of hay and manure filling her nostrils. She leaned her arms over the top rails of the corral fence, watching the horses stomp and snort to one another. A tall, bearded man in overalls approached her, smoking a pipe. “Can I do something for you, Miss?” he asked.

How writing is like building a storage shed

Posted: March 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Writing | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

StuckMy husband asked me to help him build a storage shed and I agreed to the task. How hard could it be, right? Except that I am not a carpenter, and I was committing time away from my writing. Well, that’s not true either. I’m never very far from my writing. I’m always thinking about my writing in my head, even when I’m physically occupied with other tasks. So, although I was out hammering nails, my thoughts kept straying to how building this shed related to the YA mystery I am working on for my Genres II class.
The good solid twang you hear when you hit the nail head on reminds me of the feeling I get when I find an element the story is missing and added it in, knowing I’ve nailed it, (pun intended). But more often, I don’t get that direct hit, the story elements shooting off pell-mell into the forest, like the nails that I miss, or curling up like the nails that hit knots and won’t be driven forward, and I have to keep going at it from different angles until I am able to drive it home.
The story is sort of along the tradition of the Nancy Drew mysteries, with two young girls, growing up in the 1940’s as the protagonists. The story is three-quarters of the way finished, but I keep second guessing myself on what it is lacking. As I begin to pound nails into a new wall, I notice that I am starting on one side, with the intent to work my way to the other, yet I begin halfway up from the bottom corner. I wonder why I chose to start where I did, and it occurs to me just how many different places there are to begin on this wall, just as there is in my story. There is no hard and fast rule that a story has to start at the beginning, just as there’s no law that says you must start nailing a wall from the top right hand corner. With the wall, where I begin won’t really make a lot of difference in the end, but with my story it might. I toy with the idea of changing the point where I begin the story until I’m abruptly brought back to the here and now by the throbbing in my thumb after I missed the nail and hit it with the hammer. All these thought about writing are very distracting, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.
I’m afraid of heights. It’s a fear I’ve been dealing with for the past thirty years. I believe the official term is acrophobia, from the Greek words that combine “summit”, “edge” or “peak” and the word meaning “fear”. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines it as an “abnormal dread of being in a high place”, although I’m not sure I would define it as abnormal. I like to think of it as a healthy fear of potentially dangerous situations. That being said, I am a firm believer in meeting my fears head on and overcoming them. I have forced myself to face this one on many occasions, yet it still keeps rearing its ugly head to challenge me.
When I agreed to help with this project, I knew that at some point I would be required to climb a ladder to help with the roof, but we weren’t to that point yet, so his request that I climb up and slid across the ladder he had positioned across the top, extending from one side of the building to the other to nail in a small board caught me by surprise. I had gone for four solid hours and was tired when I started out this morning, and I couldn’t muster the energy to fight off my fear. Instead something inside my brain just mentally snapped.
“Oh, no. Oh, no,no,no,” I said even as I picked up my hammer and nails and began to climb the ladder with tears streaming down my face.
“What? Just climb up there and pound in a couple of nails. What’s so hard about that?” my husband asked, absorbed in whatever he was working on and not really paying attention to my reaction.
“I’m going,” I said.
There must have been something in my voice that made him look up and take notice. “Are you crying?” he asked. “Really?” He was puzzled by my reaction because I usually just buckle down and do what needs doing in situations like this, without making a big deal of it.
I swung my legs over the vertical ladder and slid my butt across it. “No, I’m fine,” I said, hammering in two nails as quickly as I could. When I turned to slide back the way I had come, my body didn’t move. I was temporarily frozen. I’d had this happen before when I climbed out under a large cement bridge that spanned the Colorado River to get pictures of my party of rafters, so I knew eventually my body would respond to my minds commands to move, once I got control of my fear, but knowing that made the experience no less terrifying for the moment.
“Wait, I’ll get a picture of you up there,” my husband offered.
“No!” I said.
“It’s okay,” he replied. “You look good up there. Just stop crying a minute and look up at the camera.”
Having my picture taken was the last thing I wanted at that moment, but as I was stuck for the moment, there was nothing to do about it. So, I wiped the tears from my face and resolved myself to the fact that I would have a photo to capture the moment. My eyes remained glued to the top of the front wall however, because every time I tried to look down at him with the camera, I felt my fear rise once more.
“Oh, you decided to come down,” he said, as I finally emerged from the opening that would be the door. He had gone about his business, allowing me time to gather my courage and get myself down from above. “I thought maybe you were going to make a nest up there.”
Now, with my feet firmly planted on the ground, his statement made me realize what a great opportunity I had missed because of my dumb fear and it made me angry. There I was, sitting with a bird’s eye view of the forest around me and I hadn’t taken advantage of it. I’d been too scared to even notice.
That’s when I realized that I’ve been doing the same thing with my memoir. Writing the story of my son’s death and my own grief is a difficult task. There are many issues that the memories stir that I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with. I’ve been putting off doing the research for several sections for this very reason, because I didn’t want to rehash the pain that interviewing the people who knew my son would inevitably produce. My instructor at Western State, Barb Chepaitis, has emphasized that eventually I must face these memories in order to portray the story honestly, and I suddenly realized how right she is. By putting off the necessary interviews because I fear the pain they will bring, I’m depriving myself of the full picture, just as I deprived myself of that high altitude view that would have allowed me to see the world a little differently. Eventually, I’m going to have to do them to present an honest portrayal of the story I need to tell, and by putting it off, I risk losing track of the key players. It’s already been four years since my son died. His friends have all gone on with their lives. They aren’t just hanging around waiting to be interviewed by me.
That night, I got on the computer and sent messages to several of the people who knew Mike, asking for their assistance. Already, I’m going to have to track down some that I no longer know how to contact. Once I have this part of the research done, I still won’t have a finished book, any more than pounding in those two nails produced a finished shed, but it will bring me one step closer to having all the material I will need to do the job.

It’s Not About Speed

Posted: March 2, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Writing | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

Red QuillI’ve heard a good average for writers is one book a year. For some of us aspiring writers, that seems like a break-neck pace. Then there are those that whip out a novel in a month’s time for NaNoWriMo each year, and there’s a girl in my class who participated in a 365 stories project where she wrote a story a day for a year. Many of us may not write that fast though. I’ve done NaNoWriMo twice unsuccessfully. Those who do finish may have something that resembles a novel, but it’s far from a polished manuscript. It’s good to be able to write fast if you’re writing to deadline or if you want to make a living as a novelist, producing one or more books per year. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not how fast you write that is important, as much as it is that what you write is good, quality writing.
What is important, my instructors at Western State will tell you, is that you find a writing speed that is comfortable for you, that allows you to produce quality writing and set your own pace. I’ve heard it suggested that if you write three hundred words a day, which probably adds up to a couple of hours on slow days, you can complete a novel in a year, and supposedly, that’s a reasonable pace. That’s probably true, and it at least shows dedication, but some writers may find that even meeting that three hundred word per day mark is difficult at times. I know for me, if I have what I want to write, firmly planted in my head before I start, I can write a lot faster than that. But, if I start out with only a vague idea that I’m not sure how I want to express it, those three hundred words may come agonizingly slow, like pulling cactus needles from my derriere after not choosing my seat carefully on a long mountain hike.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel, Delilah, in six months, which I’m told is pretty good. I wrote between 600 and 1,000 words a day on the days I actively wrote. But honestly, I didn’t write on Delilah every single day of that six months. Many days I just worked out stuff in my head, figuring out what I wanted to write and how I would write it. It was a pace that worked for me. I didn’t feel I was pushing it too hard I sand I still produced some quality writing. I still have a lot of work to do on the rewrites, but it feels good to know I have a good solid base that can withstand some minor alterations or even major reconstruction if necessary.
Writers are human beings, and just as each and every one of us are unique individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, every writer has their own speed at which they write. Can someone else write a first draft faster than I did? Yes, my instructor, Barb Chepaitis, wrote a novel in a weekend. It probably took her longer to regain her sanity afterwards, than it did to write the story, but it is possible. She did it to see if she could. It’s not her normal writing speed, but she does write much faster than I do. Other writers struggle to get a first draft done in a year.
On the first day of class last summer, Barb asked us if we knew how many words we could write in an hour. Being beginning MFA students, most of us did not. She said it was important that we know how fast we write, but she didn’t say it was important that we write fast. Finding that comfortable rhythm where the story flows out without being forced is what produces good quality writing. It doesn’t matter if you only put down two hundred words a day, as long as they are good words. It’s not about speed. The story will always get told in its own time. It’s our job to our job as writers to make sure it’s told well.

A Closer Look at My Own Writing Process

Posted: January 6, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Fiction, Writing | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Red Quill LogoSince I’ve been seeking my MFA through Western State University, my posts here have been dwindling. On top of my school work, I’ve been writing a western novel and I’m close to having it completed, but this also has put a strain the limits of my writing time, not to mention several curveballs that life has thrown at me recently. However, I’m learning some really neat things about my own writing process that can be shared here, so perhaps my readers will forgive me for slacking off a bit.
In my Craft & Practice I class, my instructor, Barbara Chepaitis, guided us in analyzing our own writing process and taught us about the different types of writing processes. This is a subject I’d never thought much about before. While some writing processes are very structured, with outlines and plot lines and story arcs, others are more organic, just letting the words flow to the page, and still others are somewhere in between. While I’ve done outlines for my nonfiction writing process, I’ve tended to be more organic in my fiction writing process. I just sit down and start writing and see what comes about.
That’s what I did with the western novel I’ve been diligently working on. Delilah started as a character driven story, when I was assigned to do a western excerpt for my class this summer. I created the character of Delilah for the excerpt and it built itself one scene at a time as the character showed me what happened next. It’s been a fun journey since trouble seems to have a way of finding Delilah, but as I neared the finish line, I needed to make sure that my plot and all of my sub-plots wrapped up neatly. I didn’t want to inadvertently leave any loose ends. So, I found it necessary to plot it out and take a look at my story arcs, one for the plot and one for each sub-plot, to make sure they all had a beginning, a middle and an end, and see how they interrelated with each other.
In doing this, I was surprised to see how many different story arcs my story actually has. After drawing out the main plotline, I drew a story arc in a different color for each of my different sub-plots and ended up with eight different story arcs, including the main arc. Every motivation or relationship that Delilah has, creates a different sub-plot with a story arc of its own. Like a good stew, where each separate ingredient mixes its own flavor into the pot to create that delicious stew taste, each separate story arc adds to the flavor of my story. Below is a picture of what I came out with.

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This enabled me to see where things were missing and envision how it will all come together in the end. It has required me to revise some parts of my story, but I can see the value in doing this. The different colors represent the individual story arcs and the colored circles represent the plot points where each one begins and ends. The main story arc includes every plot point, while the sub-plots start at different plot points, further into the story and some end before the main story ends, while at least five of them are tied in together and conclude at the end, along with the main plot. This is what I think a good story should do, so I am pleased with the results. Now that I have discovered how it all ends, all that’s left to do is to write it.
My instructor, Barb did not try to tell us that one process was better than another and she encouraged us to explore different processes to see what worked for us and what didn’t. I’ve discovered that my process needs to be both structured and organic. I’ve never tried the structured approach to fiction before, so with my next novel, which is an action/adventure story, I’ve started with the plotting. In fact, I already have the main plot line of the major events drawn out. Although this story is based on a character, Betty Lou Dutton, that I created and used for two scenes in Barb’s class, this approach will be a basic reversal of my usual process. As I write, I may find that more story arcs need to be added, although I already know there will be at least four sub-plots, it will be interesting to see how well this turns out. Wish me luck. 

Keeping My New Year’s Resolutions

Posted: January 2, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Writing | 2 Comments

Happy New YearIt’s time to bring in 2013. It’s that time of year when we all avow to make improvements in our lives, so we make a lot of resolutions that will probably be forgotten by the end of February. One reason that this happens is because we make resolutions that we really don’t want to keep. We resolve to stick to a diet and lose a certain number of pounds. How much fun is that? Or we resolve to work harder and earn that promotion at work. I know I always look forward to putting in more hours, don’t you? Many times resolutions involve giving up the things that we love, but we know are bad for us, like smoking or drinking. These are all good changes to make in our lives, but how many of us really want to let go of our vices. It’s no wonder they are given up and forgotten about so soon.
I usually don’t make resolutions just for that reason, but this year, I’ve decided to make resolutions to do things that I really want to do. They all involve doing what I love to do, so seeing them through will be a pleasure. So, here are New Year’s resolutions for 2013 that I think I can keep:
• Find a writing or copy editing job that pays enough steady money to allow me to support my family, pay off our debts and finish our mountain home
• Sell at least one novel by the end of the year
• See Heather Hummingbird published, even though the publication was delayed from the original release date of last October
• Sell at least two children’s books by the end of the year
(You can help me reach my goals by contacting me if you know of a paying writing/editing job that might be a good fit for me.)

“Chasing the Trickster” can be rather tricky

Posted: November 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book Review, Full Moon Bites | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

In April Grey’s Chasing the Trickster, nothing is as it seems. This book brings old world Celtic archetypes into a modern day world with surprising and sometimes confusing results. Two women are one, and one man is actually two, or at least one man and a fertility god. The more that is explained the less that makes sense as the story switches back and forth from past to present until the two finally intertwine to knit together all the pieces of two stories into the one that they were all along. But, that doesn’t end it, because the end is a new beginning and we have to go back to the beginning to understand the end.
Although alternating perspective from first to third person is a bit disconcerting, Grey’s main characters are larger than life and her supporting characters are interesting and colorful. Nina, a gifted photographer whose spirit visions show up in her photographs; Pascal, who shares his physical body with an ancient fertility god; Linda, who has lost everything that is dear to her – they are all chasing the Trickster without knowing it, and the chase won’t end until he catches them. Through Grey’s clearly drawn settings the chase takes readers on a journey from the city streets of New York, New York to the arid deserts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Trickster is mischievous and doesn’t care who gets hurt carrying out his will. Is it possible for each of them to find a happy ending at the end of the chase? Only when past and present meet will the answers be discovered.

The Craft is What it is All About

Posted: October 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Fiction, Writing | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

Before I decided to seek my MFA in Creative Writing, I hadn’t really thought much about the craft of writing. I would simply take an idea or character, or a situation and start writing, not thinking much about why I put this sentence here or that one there. Of course, I thought about word choices, but I usually just knew that I needed a different word, not thinking about why the one I had wasn’t right, or why this one was better. I never thought about why one story seemed to read smoothly, while another just didn’t seem to flow right at all. I didn’t think about things like pacing, focus, or what archetypes I was using. I didn’t question why a character did what they did. I just wrote what felt natural to me. Even though I knew how to manipulate these elements in my writing, I wasn’t able to articulate them. I didn’t think about the how and why of what I did. Most of the time I just sat back and watched as my story unfolded. In a graduate program, however, that is what you do. You dissect writing, pick it apart and examine the various elements to discover how and why they work, or don’t work.
When I started classes last summer, I was asked if my stories were character driven or plot driven. The honest answer would have been that I didn’t know, because I hadn’t really thought about it. But everyone else seemed to know what drove their writing, so rather than clue them in to the fact that I was a self-taught writer, I said that my writing was plot driven.
Looking back over stories that I have written in the past, understanding now how to look at my work critically, I found that it depends on the story. I have a YA mystery that isn’t a mystery yet, (but it will be), which began with the characters of two young girls; a sci-fi piece that started with the idea of a situation from a Writer’s Digest prompt, and developed from there; a short story that began with the idea of a naked woman walking into a waterfall; and the western I’m working on started with my female protagonist seeing something that looked like a body in the scrub brush. The ideas for my children’s series started with the birds and forest creatures that visited my yard and became my characters and they are definitely character driven. What I’ve learned from my courses is that my stories can be either plot or character driven, or both.
In class, we’re looking at what good dialog is; how pacing affects the story; character development; plot lines and sub-plot lines; how to move the story forward; the differences in POV; past and present tense; and how to use visual, auditory and kinetic details to enhance a story. What I found fascinating is that much of this stuff was already going on with my writing. I just didn’t realize it, because I never looked at it that way before. Now that I am conscious of the elements in a story and I’m learning how to better manipulate them to achieve a desired effect, my writing is stronger and more focused. Writing consciously means being aware of what you are doing with your story. I’ve always known what I wanted to do with my stories, but now I know how to do it. Now the elements don’t just fall into place wherever they want. Now they go where I put them and stay there, unless I move them. Now I am aware if my pace is too slow, I can see where my character is inconsistent, I understand when more detail is needed and I know what and where to put it. Okay, not always, but I am getting better at these things. I’m looking at my writing differently. I see my story in terms of craft now and I think that is a good thing, because I want my writing to be good. I want people to want to read it, and most people want to read a well-crafted story.

Bone Wires is full of chills and thrills

Posted: October 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book Review, Fiction, Full Moon Bites | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

In Bone Wires, Michael Shean creates a techno-world of the future, where cars are equipped with autodrive, dance floors are suspended from the ceiling, and soft drinks have self-chilling mechanism. Shean grabs your attention immediately, and pulls readers into the high-tech world of 2076, where police departments belong to the private sector, making concerns of profits and losses, and public relations often take priority over justice.

Detective Dan Gray wants it all: the promotion, the money, the prestige, the girl and he knows how to play the game to get it. Suddenly, it appears that he has just gotten all of it, at what price?

His new girlfriend, Angie, is connected to a case involving some grissly murders, that is supposed to be closed, but just doesn’t want to stay that way; the same case that propelled him into his new promotion.

He has a hunch things aren’t what they seem, but he doesn’t know who to trust. Everyone seems to have their own agenda: a vice cop that wants to use his girlfriend as a snitch, a coroner and an officer from the evidence room that want to fry the vice cop, a fellow homicide cop that is suddenly looking out for his best interests, a police agency that’s more concerned about profit margins than it is about people and seems content to sweep his case under the rug, and a girlfriend who may have something to hide. Finding the truth may threaten his job and his girl.

Shean has good, clear character development and a main plot, with enough sub-plotting to create tension and keep readers interest. The pacing keeps readers moving right along. Although there are a few typos, the story carries its weight well enough that the distraction caused is minor, if at all. The descriptive language is at times exquisite, as in the following example, found on page 201, (Kindle version):

“By the time he piled himself into the car, he was barely able

to focus. And so  he didn’t try. Instead he sat there, sprawled

in the driver’s seat, staring out at the empty street for what felt

like hours as his thoughts warred with one another. Finally out

of the mental carnage came the victor, a sharp thought, a thought

that glowed and smoked as if it were a blade pulled out of a torturer’s

coals.”

Shean has shown himself to be a talented writer, with Bone Wires. A must read for those who enjoy science fiction, mystery, and dark fiction. There is even a bit of the romance element thrown in. Bone Wires is available at Amazon (Kindle), Amazon (print), Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.

Writing to be Read: Honest Book Reviews

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book Review, Writing | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

I recently read several articles that discussed the value of reviews in today’s market place. These articles questioned the reliability of reviews, in a time when there are people being paid to write positive reviews and the difficulty in knowing which reviews to believe in a market saturated with positive reviews. I do book reviews here, on Writing to be Read, as well as on my Southern Colorado Literature Examiner page, so as a reviewer, I looked at my own work to determine the validity of their arguments.

According to Richard Brody in his article in The New Yorker, How to be a Critic, “Critics don’t need to be nice (programmatic niceness is itself another sort of self-falsification and self-punishment, and is at least as sanctimonious as self-justifying meanness), but they do need to know where they stand.” I see an obligation of the reviewer to the readers, to portray the books reviewed as honestly as possible. I feel a certain responsibility in knowing that someone may or may not chose to read a certain book, based on my opinion of it. Readers that concur with the opinions offered in my reviews are more likely to visit my sites again. However, I think that honest, unbiased opinions may also generate repeat readers, even if they don’t agree with the opinions expressed in my reviews.

I am not one of those reviewers that is paid to write positive reviews. Five star reviews that are bought and paid for cheat the reader, setting them up to be disappointed by a book that was not all it was portrayed to be. I don’t receive monetary compensation for my reviews, although I do receive ARC copies from the authors, which in no way influence my opinions of their book. According to David Streitfeld, in his New York Times article, The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy, part of the problem is that readers have no way to know if the review that they are reading is a paid review. In a market that is over-saturated with the rise of self-publishing and digital media, anyone can pay to have a five star review written for their book.

On the other hand, I do feel an obligation to the author, who has put his or her all into the work, to portray it in as positive a light as I can possibly shine on it and still be honest. As Brody puts it, “It takes months or years to make a film or write a book, a few hours or a few days to dash off a review…” As a reviewer, I hold in my hands the power to dash dreams with an unkind word or a negative opinion. It is a matter not to be taken lightly. Daryl Campbell explains it well in his the Millions essay, Is This Book Bad or Is It Just Me? Anatomy of Book Reviews,

“The decision to like or not like a book is where every book review

begins. This is what gives the genre its underlying suspense …

but also its frustrating sense of chaos, because no matter how

technically sound or philosophically sophisticated or beautiful

a book might be, something minor or tangential can turn off a

reviewer so much that he or she decides the book is not good.”

While in the Salon article, The Case for Positive Book Reviews, Laura Miller claims the necessity of more positive reviews,

“Everyone who has ever been disappointed by a book praised

in the press is prone to embracing the too-nice position; as a rule,

only authors worry that reviews are too mean… All too often,

people relish negative reviews with a free-floating glee that leaves

the reviewer, however justified, feeling a bit dirty afterward.”

I am compelled to be honest about my thoughts on a book, never shirking from expressing what I did not like about it, as well as what I did. Likewise, I try to relate things that I found to be likable about a book that did not appeal to me, even if they were few. Seldom have I picked up a book that I could not find something positive to say. It is a fine line that must be walked in order to achieve a balance between the positive and negative aspects, making the book review a literary work, in itself. Campbell goes as far as to claim that, “book reviewing is a genre with its own conventions, just as every murder mystery must start with a body, and every epic fantasy must feature elvish words with too many apostrophes.”

The idea of book reviews being a genre of their own lends credibility to my craft. Of course, book reviews are not the only thing I write, but I do pride myself just as much in them, as in anything else I write, and I put just as much thought and effort into them. Not only do I truly read every book that I review, I actually take notes to keep my thoughts about them in order, and I work hard to word my reviews so that are not too harsh, nor do they turn out to be gushing fountains of worthless praise.

“Kavachi’s Rise”: a very different vision of the vampyre

Posted: September 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book Review, Full Moon Bites, Horror | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

"the Devouring: Kavachi's Rise", by Mike Kearby Title: Kavachi’s Rise
 Series: The Devouring #1
 Author: Mike Kearby
 Genre: Damnation Books
 Publisher: Horror, Thriller
 Paperback/Ebook
 Words: 56,000

 Damnation Books * B&N * Amazon

The hunt is on and Thomas Morehart and his sister, Kara are in a race against time to revert to the forms of their primordial species – vicious predators that have the ability to shape shift into human form and live among us. They survive off of human blood and are called vampyre, although they are not counted among the undead. The government is discontinuing the covert operation that rescued them from extermination in Nazi Germany and has sheltered and protected them for years. Now, those of their kind have been targeted for extermination once more, and the only thing that can save them is to rediscover the predators that they once were.

In The Devouring: Kavachi’s Rise, by Mike Kearby, presents a novel interpretation of the vampyre legends offer something to ponder. Even though they could have been developed more, Kearby cleverly turns characters that might be viewed as evil monsters, into protagonists that can be empathized with. The plot for Kavachi’s Rise successfully takes readers on a journey into a world where monsters dwell among us and are controlled by our own government. The only question now is, will the vampyre become predator or prey?

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