Month: June 2011

Warning: Busyness Zone Ahead

The next few weeks are going to be quite busy for me as I make the final revisions to Evil in Thebes and prepare to start the query process.  Consequently, this blog probably won’t be updated much in the meantime.  I’ll still keep up with Twitter though, so feel free to watch as my Twitter feed bears witness to my rapidly deteriorating mental state over the next few weeks!  Catch y’all on the flip side!

Even in the digital world, Formatting 101 is important

As I read more and more ebooks on the Kindle, I’m starting to detect a quality-control problem.  For example, in both of Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec mysteries (which are awesome, by the way), I’ve noticed formatting glitches galore.   Hyphens are missing.  Text is improperly italicized.  And in Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails, two characters’ dialogue will  often be smushed into the same paragraph, which makes for an incredibly confusing read.

Both de Bodard and Shevdon are published by Angry Robot, but the problem is not confined to one particular publisher.  I’ve heard reports of similar problems in ebooks published by other companies.  These kinds of basic formatting errors might have been understandable back in 2007, but ebooks have been around long enough that they should have worked out the kinks by now.   I have to wonder, do ebooks actually undergo any kind of independent proofreading?  Or do they just take the electronic files from the print edition and transform them into an ebook?

Detour!

I was going to pick up Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon after I finished The Man with the Golden Torc, but along the way I got distracted by something very, very shiny: Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard.  I stumbled upon it completely by accident, but when I saw that it was a historical fantasy novel set among the Aztecs, I had to check it out.  The sample chapters blew me away and I quickly bought the Kindle book.  I have a feeling this is going to be all kinds of awesome…

The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green

This morning, I finished The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green.  It’s been on my To Read list for four years now, but it wasn’t until I got the Kindle that I finally got around to picking it up.  Oh well.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Edwin (“Eddie”) Drood is part of the Drood family.  Their family business is keeping the world safe from supernatural threats.  This is no rag-tag Scoobie Gang.  The Droods are equipped with the latest gadgetry (both scientific and magical) and they run their operation with all the slickness of the CIA or MI5.  Their greatest weapon is the golden torc that they wear around their necks.  When activated, the torc creates mystical golden armor that covers the entire body and makes the wearer well-nigh invulnerable.

Eddie is a reluctant participant in the family business and he prefers to keep his distance.  But when a special mission goes wrong, it emerges that Eddie has been declared rogue by the Drood Matriarch and he is forced to turn against his own family, who are now trying their best to kill him.  All kinds of hijinks ensue and Eddie ends up teaming up with former enemy Molly Metcalf (the wild witch of the woods) as he tries to bring his family down.  Along the way, he learns some pretty unpleasant things about the source of his family’s power, which leads him to question everything he’s been taught.

Although the book was enjoyable enough, I can’t say that it was an unqualified success.  My biggest gripe was that there were places where Green just went completely over the top.  Early on, Eddie is attacked by carnivorous automobiles, dragon-riding elves,  the ghosts of people who died on the motorway, and evil  techno-magicians with flying saucers.  All in the same scene.  Individually, there’s nothing wrong with these these foes, but it’s a bit much to have them all attack in the same scene.  That’s by far the most egregious example, but there are many other places where Green throws everything but the kitchen sink at the reader, making it harder and harder to suspend disbelief.

On the whole, the characters are dynamic and interesting (I especially liked Molly).  Sometimes, however, they behave in ways that defy common sense.  Toward the end of the book, when Eddie and Molly are infiltrating the Drood family home, she ends up “pouting rebelliously” because she’s not allowed to look at something in the house.  Rebellious pouting just doesn’t seem like a logical response when you’re behind enemy lines and could be killed at any moment.  There’s also a supernatural entity at the end of the book whose behavior just makes you scratch your head and go “huh?”

Green’s “Secret Histories” series is basically an homage to James Bond (Eddie’s secret agent moniker is actually “Shaman Bond”), so perhaps I would have appreciated this book more if I were a fan of 007.  I’ll probably read the other books in the series, but only when I have a gap in my To Read list.

 

Reasoning with Vampires

Reasoning with Vampires has got to be one of the best things I’ve ever stumbled upon.  It’s a forensic examination of the Twilight series where the books are carefully dissected and their inner workings exposed to the harsh light of day.

Never having read the Twilight series, I hadn’t realized just how flawed they are on almost every level.  Not only is Bella’s relationship with Edward pathologically unhealthy, but she literally forgets to breathe on several occasions.  Honestly, Urban Dictionary could define TSTL with a picture of Bella Swan.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the books also suffer from all kinds of mechanical problems.  Stephenie Meyer’s sentences are often so large and unwieldy that they collapse in on themselves and become literary black holes.  She also never met a dialogue tag that she didn’t like.  Her pronouns stubbornly refuse to be tied down to any clear antecedent.  The list goes on and on.

Snarkiness aside, RwV is a valuable resource for any writer because it can actually teach you quite a bit about grammar.  It’s certainly much more enjoyable than The Elements of Style.

The amazing clockwork circus

I can cross a book off of my summer reading list!  As you may have seen in my last post, I was unsure of what to read first, but I ended up settling on Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

It’s the story of a circus whose performers have all been turned into vaguely steampunkish creations: there’s a guy whose lungs have been replaced with clockwork bellows, the aerialists’ bones have been replaced by hollow copper facsimiles, and the strongman has a metal spine with a clock sticking out of his back.    The circus travels around a post-apocalyptic world where governments come and go and never control more than a tiny smidgeon of the map at any one time.  Eventually, a scheming government official (known only as “the government man,” which made me think of the G-Man from Half Life) takes an interest in the circus because he believes that the technology inside of the performers could be used to create an army of super soldiers.

I really shouldn’t have liked this story.  The plot zips forward and backward like a trapeze artist and there are multiple POV characters.  Although most of the narration is third person omniscient, it sometimes veers into first person.  But you know what?  It worked.  These are all things that I usually dislike, but they never irritated me in this story.  The writing is so strong and artful that you just get sucked in.

Even though the main plot comes to a satisfactory resolution, the reader is still left with a number of unanswered questions.  It’s never explained how Boss (the lady who runs the circus and does all the machining) got her strange power.  Nor is it explained why the world was apparently engulfed in chaos.  But it really doesn’t matter within the confines of the story.  All you need to know is that Boss has this power and that the world has fallen apart.  The details are irrelevant.  And the more details you give, the more you invite your readers to peer behind the illusion you’ve created.

A final note: if I didn’t have a Kindle, I probably wouldn’t have read this book.  I’m not all that into steampunk, and I would’ve been reluctant to shell out $14.95 for the paperback edition.  But the Kindle edition was just $4.95, so I was willing to take the risk.  And I’m sure glad I did.

Next in the reading queue: The Man With the Golden Torc.

Kindle awesomeness

I am a reluctant ebook reader.  I knew they were the wave of the future, but I was still determined to resist them for as long as possible.  But when I got my iPhone last summer, I spent some time messing around with the Kindle app and I had to grudgingly admit that ebooks can be pretty spiffy.  While I still prefer paper books, there is something to be said for being able to download an interesting book at 3 am while you’re in your pajamas.

Although reading on the iPhone isn’t horrible, I knew that I wanted to upgrade to something with a bigger screen.  I narrowed my options down to two: the iPad and the Kindle.  At first glance, the iPad seemed like the best choice since it can do so much more than the Kindle.  Plus, everyone I know who owns an iPad is madly in love with it.

Try as I might, I was never able to fall in love with the iPad.  It’s a slick machine, to be sure, but I couldn’t escape the fact that I just didn’t need all the extra bells and whistles that it offers.  I already own two laptops, so my portable computing needs are pretty much taken care of.  Also, I just couldn’t see myself curling up with the iPad, which is kind of an issue since I do most of my reading lying down.

So far, I’m really impressed with the Kindle.  It’s the perfect size for reading in bed and the screen is a lot easier on the eyes than a computer screen.  I also like the fact that it syncs your progress in a book across all platforms, so I can start reading a book on the Kindle and then pick it up on the iPhone without having to hunt around for my place.

At first, I was a bit put off by the the flash you see when you turn the page.  From what I can tell, it’s just a side effect of the eInk technology, so all eInk-based readers are going to be have it to some degree.  I got used to it quite quickly though, and I can’t really say that it bothers me.

The only real complaint I have is that I don’t really like the built-in keyboard, but it’s not a big deal since I don’t see myself typing up a storm on this thing.  For the occasional search, it’s just fine.

Now I just need to decide what to read on it first.  I’m torn between Mechanique and The Man with the Golden Torc.  I think I may have to flip a coin on this one…

Interesting perspectives on indie publishing

I came across two interesting pieces about indie publishing on agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford’s blog.  The first is by Nate himself:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/05/why-i-chose-traditional-publisher.html

The second is a guest post by Tracy Marchini, self-published author of  Pub Speak: A Writer’s Dictionary of Publishing Terms (a guide to the publishing industry) and  Hot Ticket (a novel):

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/05/real-skinny-about-indie-publishing.html

It was interesting to see both Nathan and Tracy discuss the amount of work involved in self publishing.  For me, that’s one of the main reasons why I’m NOT going the indie route.  Writing is enough of a time sink by itself.  I think I’d go insane if I had to assemble my book and do all of the marketing for it, too.