Winter Reads

Winters in Minnesota can be very long and very cold. They are perfect for curling up by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, and with a good book in hand.

Next week the weatherman is saying that our warm spell is over. Our highs in the Minneapple will only be in the 20s Fahrenheit. That is some chilly weather with which to start December, and that means out come the books.

I have a couple stories I intend to re-read during the Yuletide season. They are Lovecraft’s “The Festival” and Crispian Thurlborn’s A Bump in the Night. Both are excellent holiday reads by master craftsmen of the written word.

As for new (to me) books, I have on my list the following:

Mannegishi by Ben Willoughby. Mr W is a very fine storyteller. He truly deserves a much wider audience.

Ganbaru by Michael Cormack. I met Mr Cormack on Facebook quite incidentally. I’m glad I did. He writes post-apocalyptic books just how I like them: cozy catastrophes in the manner of John Wyndham, John Christopher, JG Ballard, and George R Stewart. I’m almost finished with his Don’t Dream It’s Over. A superb read. Mr Cormack very definitely deserves a much wider readership.

I love Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve read his books An Artist Of The Floating World and The Remains Of The Day. I’ve also seen the movie versions of The Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go. So I’m thinking I might start with his first book A Pale View Of Hills and then go on to read Never Let Me Go.

The older I get the more I find that I truly enjoy reading traditional mysteries. At first I pretty much limited myself to private detective mysteries. But recently I’ve found myself branching out into the realm of the amateur sleuth. And I’m enjoying the foray. So I’ll probably add a few mysteries to the pile. Perhaps a couple Nero Wolfe novels. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any Nero Wolfe and he’s long overdue for re-reading.

I’ll also probably spend a little bit of time looking at those free books that I’ve downloaded over the past year and haven’t read. There will probably be a gem or two that will make for fine winter reading.

Do you have any favorites you will be revisiting over the winter months? If so, do let me know what they are in the comments below. I’m always on the lookout for a good book.

Until next time, happy reading!

Be Thankful

This Thursday, just two days away, here in the US, we will celebrate Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving and am sad to see it become a lost holiday. What with Christmas shopping being pushed earlier and earlier — why Black Friday deals are already being advertised — and the day itself morphing into Turkey Day — the whole point of a day devoted to being thankful is pretty much lost.

The beauty of Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, that it is a secular holiday devoted to giving thanks for the good things that we have. And especially here in the States we have a lots of good things for which we can be thankful.

It’s easy to piss and moan. We humans are natural complainers. It’s much more difficult to be thankful.

I love America. It’s the best place to live. Sure, we have problems. Nevertheless, we also have a surfeit of blessings. Good things abound in the United States. And I have been blessed richly and abundantly.

So this Thursday, all you here in the States, don’t worship the turkey. The day isn’t Turkey Day. It’s Thanksgiving. A secular holiday set aside so we can count our many, many blessings — wherever they come from.

‘Tis true I’ll feast on a turkey. But what I’m really thankful for is not the turkey but that I have plenty of food and the money to buy more. I’m rich, even though I’m not. Which is the blessing I’m most thankful for.

Be thankful. It’s the best feeling. Right there with being happy.

Today’s Frenetic Pacing

We read for two reasons. Information or entertainment. Informational reading has no competition. The various media do, but not the reading itself.

On the other hand, recreational reading, entertainment reading, has an ever increasing array of competing activities. Video games, computer games, board games, TV, Netflix and Amazon streaming, movies, sports activities, plays, concerts, and the list goes on.

Today’s writers, particularly indie writers, it seems to me, feel the need to compete with today’s cinematic pyrotechnics, and the ever increasing graphic sex and violence the visual entertainment media are portraying.

Today I just want to focus on pacing. I’ll talk about sex and violence another time. Of the books I’ve recently read, the pacing falls into two distinct camps. I’ll call them thriller-paced and literary-paced.

Thriller-Paced

Everywhere we readers look, we see books advertised as fast paced, as page turners, or that the pages even turn themselves. The thriller is everywhere. It’s taken over the mystery field, it’s gone into outer space, it’s pervasive in science fiction, and it’s even moved into horror.

Frenetic pacing is in. To the detriment of the reading experience.

Recently I read a space opera by a supposed USA Today bestselling author. I say “supposed” because writers are scamming the system by riding to “Bestseller” status in boxed sets where their name doesn’t even appear in any of the advertising.

Anyway, I read an advanced reader copy of Book One of the series, which had recently been rewritten and expanded, with the intent that I’d write a review. I’m not sure that I will, because I don’t have much good to say about the novel. And Book Two wasn’t much better. I eventually just stopped reading it.

I can’t say either book was bad. But I can’t say either one was especially good either. The writing, on a technical level, was fine.

What torpedoed the reading experience for me were the characters. They were flat, insipid, and pretty much lackluster. To the point where I didn’t really care what happened to them.

The author spent the entire book doing nothing but piling on crisis after crisis. There was no breathing room. And his paltry attempt at trying to establish a romance element fell flat on its face for me because even that seemed to be nothing more than following the  “insert romance here” point on the plot outline.

When I finished the first book I was so exhausted from the pacing, I almost wished everyone would die just so I could get some relief.

Now I know a writer must make his characters suffer, otherwise there is no story. But ask yourself this: how often in real life do you have days where not a single thing goes right? I’d hazard a guess they are darn few. So why in these “thrillers” are we asked to accept an entire book where the good guys have nothing but bad hair days for days and days and days on end? Because even on bad hair days something usually goes right. But not for the fictional characters.

Quite honestly, I don’t really care about plot. If the characters are interesting — real people, with real problems — whatever the story is, it will be the story of the characters. Ray Bradbury said, create your characters, let them do their thing, and there’s your story. Why don’t writers follow this?

Instead, they focus on trying to write a well-crafted plot and then insert the characters into it. The end result is that the characters are no better than marionettes and even less interesting.

Today’s plot-driven thriller is wooden and uninspired and, frankly, exceedingly boring.

I’ve made a deal with myself. Thrillers and USA Today bestselling authors are off my reading list. The books I’ve read by bestselling authors and those marketed as thrillers are mediocre at best. And why read mediocre or bad books when so many good ones abound?

Literary-Paced

What I’m calling “Literary Pacing” is normal pacing. The pacing employed by Isaac Asimov, Rex Stout, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Lawrence Block, and Edgar Allan Poe. Or the pacing you’ll find in such books as Costigan’s Needle, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, When Worlds Collide, The Handmaid’s Tale, Hidden World, and The Day of the Triffids.

The above mentioned authors and books (and the list barely scratches the surface) have one thing in common — characters we care about. Comte Saint-Germain. Archdeacon Grantly. Scrooge. Nero Wolfe. Matt Scudder.

Literary pacing doesn’t mean there’s no excitement. There may be fight scenes, or car chases, or gun fights, or tense escape scenes. These, however, are scattered throughout the story. Occurring naturally as the characters go about their business of telling us their stories. And that’s the key: the characters are telling us their stories. Not the author.

Literary pacing occurs when the writer writes character-based fiction. It’s not about the plot. Good fiction is never about the plot. It’s about the characters. 

We don’t remember Gone With The Wind for the thrilling plot. We remember Scarlett and Rhett. “Hills Like White Elephants” isn’t remembered because of the plot. It’s the characters that make the story. We don’t remember The Lord of the Rings because of the plot. It’s a ho-hum quest story. We remember the book for the characters — both good and bad. Because both the good guys and the bad guys in The Lord of the Rings are memorable.

Plot-Driven vs Character-Driven

Many of today’s indie writers are so concerned about cranking out the next book, all they focus on are the story beats and the outline. Making sure they’ve hit all the plot points at just the right time. The resulting fiction is mechanical at best. A fast-moving piece of mediocrity. An eminently forgettable book.

On the flip-side, even mediocre character-driven stories can stay with you for decades.

Who remembers the 1956 sci-fi novel Tomorrow And Tomorrow by Hunt Collins (aka Ed McBain)? Yet that book has stayed with me ever since I read it when a kid some fifty-plus years ago. Why? The world Collins created and the characters. Especially the characters. I don’t remember their names, but I remember them.

Recently I read the Dave Slater mysteries by PF Ford. I like Dave and his sidekick Norman Norman. They are “people” I care about. And what makes the stories good is that they are the stories of Dave and Norman.

Ford’s novels aren’t just plots into which he plunked down some characters. No, he did the Bradbury thing: created his characters, let them do their thing, and the result was their story.

The late Elizabeth Edmondson’s A Very English Mystery series is the same. Real people doing their thing — and we get to read the delightful tales as a result.

I think today’s rash of thrillers is the result of indie authors trying too hard to make a buck. It seems to me they think if they can just throw more action, more sex, more blood at the reader they’ll get more fans and more money.

Unfortunately for them, this reader has been turned off. Anything labeled fast-paced or thriller won’t get my buck. Neither will anyone spouting off they are a USA Today bestselling author. The books are disappointing and my time is too valuable to waste.

Comments are always welcome, and until next time — happy reading!

Happy Anniversary!

Three years ago this month I self-published my first four novels. The Morning Star, Festival of Death, The Moscow Affair, and Do One Thing For Me. I was excited and filled with anticipation of good things to come. Now, three years later? Well, let’s just say reality is sobering. Not that I regret the past three years. They’ve been a grand learning experience.

The Good

I’ve self-published 20 books so far. And am looking at launching a new series in the beginning of 2018 and perhaps a second series later next year. I’m doing what I always wanted to do — write books and see them in print.

Today’s digital and print-on-demand technology makes self-publishing easy. It also gives me complete control over my work. There is no corporate bottom line that must be met. The only person who affects my success or lack thereof is me.

I firmly believe in the free market. I don’t believe in any gatekeepers other than the reader. For far too long editors at the big corporate publishers made or broke the careers of writers. The annals of publishing are replete with horror stories of the damage the big corporations did to writers. Now we are free. We no longer need them. And that is a very good thing.

Writers, for the first time in history, have all the tools at their disposal to produce work that rivals or surpasses anything the publishing industry corporations can put out. And writers, for the first time in history, can make far more money than ever before by publishing on their own.

This is a great day for writers and I’m very glad to be alive to see it. For myself, I’m not making great money at self-publishing. But I am making a little bit. And my books will be available until Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble go away. Which probably won’t be for a very long time. Most likely longer than the 20 or so years the actuarial tables give me. And they will be under my or my heirs’s control.

The Bad - or What I Learned the Hard Way

Unfortunately, self-publishing is a bed of roses — complete with loads of thorny stems. That is, there are both positives and negatives to it.

If I could do it over again, I’d spend two years learning the business end of self-publishing — before publishing anything. Because self-publishing is publishing your own books. And to make money, significant money, at self-publishing — one needs to know business.

The writer needs to know his or her audience and then develop a strategy to reach that audience. If he or she doesn’t, then failure will result. That is, few or no sales.

I’m not saying the writer must write to market. Although that’s what most writers have done for the past couple of centuries if they wanted to make money. But even if you are writing a literary novel or a mixed genre novel, you still need to know who might want to read the book. Dean Koontz writes multi-genre blockbuster-type novels. Nevertheless, even though they contain a bit of romance and a bit of the thriller and a bit of sci-fi and a bit of horror, there is one genre that sticks out more than the others. In Lightning, I think it’s the science fiction. In Midnight, it’s techno-horror. As an indie author, if you write that sort of novel, knowing your primary genre will aid in your marketing.

Of course for every rule there’s someone out there who didn’t follow it and went on to make lots of money. But generally speaking, most of us need to understand business and follow good business practices.

Right now I’m playing catch-up and learning the business end of the writing business.

The Ugly - or Hazards and Pitfalls

Wherever money is to be made, the piranhas, and sharks, and bloodsuckers begin closing in. They operate on the supposed saying of P T Barnum that a sucker is born every minute.

Sometimes age is an advantage. I’m 65 and for over 50 years I’ve been reading books and magazine articles on writing and publishing. I’ve taken creative writing classes and courses. I went the traditional publishing route with my poetry. I can honestly say I’ve observed a few things in my time. And the most important is that there is nothing new under the sun.

Today, I see new and wannabe authors being taken in by the middlemen. Everything from expensive covers to expensive formatting to expensive marketing or writing courses to the latest and greatest software. The vultures are circling and trying to take your money.

Now some folk have the money to spend on all this stuff. Still, I don’t think they should. Most everything a writer needs to know or get can be gotten for free or for a very minimal fee.

There are so-called experts who want to teach you how to write a bestseller. Yet they don’t earn their living by writing fiction. If what they have to teach is so wonderful, why aren’t they writing bestsellers themselves? I’m amazed that writers who take these courses don’t ask themselves this question.

Or what about the successful fiction writer who no longer writes fiction. He, instead, makes his money selling his course on marketing fiction. Why? Because it’s easier to teach than to write. For that person writing is not his passion. Making money is.

Or what about the folks who say you have to have a professional editor go over your manuscript? Or a professional cover artist produce your cover? Hundreds of writers spend tens of thousands of dollars every month on these extravagances when they have no idea if their book will even earn them one dime.

You don’t need a professional editor. If you know how to write, know how to tell a good story, all you need is to proofread your manuscript. But you don’t know if you can write a good story? Then find someone you trust who will be honest with you and have him or her read it. 

People say don’t use your family. I say use them if you have a family member who cares enough about you to tell you the book stinks if it in fact does. Kazuo Ishiguro threw away an entire book when his wife told him it stunk. I’m lucky. I have my daughter and my sister. Both can be and are brutally honest. I trust them to tell me if something isn’t working.

Don’t get sucked in by the money grubbing middleman. Edit your own book until you know you can make money. Then hire it out only because it gives you more time to write.

If you can’t design and produce your own cover, then find the least expensive pre-made you can find and use it. This is an area I fell down in. I didn’t understand cover design. Now I have a much better grasp of it. One book worth your while is Derek Murphy’s Cover Design Secrets.

The best resources are actually free. Kboards is indispensable. Loads of valuable advice in the Writers Cafe. There are many closed groups on Facebook for writers. Two good groups are The Author Helper and 20Booksto50K. But as with everything, weigh and evaluate all the advice. Not everything works for everybody.

I’m lucky. I’ve spent very little money procuring bad advice or worthless software. Part of that is due to my age. I’ve pretty much read and seen it all. Sure, the scammers give things new names. But it’s still the same old stuff. Don’t pay for it. Get it for free.

Summary

Three years ago I started self-publishing. I thought I’d done my research. In truth, I didn’t do enough. The indie world was changing just as I got on board. What I learned was old info that didn’t really help me much, because it no longer applied to the new reality. Now I’m taking a much more cautious and deliberate approach.

I am still convinced the indie way is the best way for writers. Why? Because you control your rights and you have the potential to make way more money than your corporately published counterparts.

I have no regrets going the self-publishing route. I’m learning from my mistakes on the business end. Hopefully in the next three years I’ll be making some significant (for me, that is) money from my writing. Being retired I don’t need much. Just enough to cover my expenses and maybe give me a thousand a month to supplement Social Security and my pension. If I can do that, I’ll be a happy camper. A very happy camper.

Comments are always welcome and, until next time, happy reading (and writing)!