Zafon’s writing (at least in its English translation) is darkly atmospheric and haunting. There lurks a promise of mystery, the melancholy of love lost, as well as the shadow of impending doom. I was unprepared for the horror; I’d missed the subtitle on the cover “A Gothic Tale.” Because the thirty-year-old narrator is reflecting on his adventures as a fifteen-year-old, booksellers categorize this as a Young Adult novel, but it’s no more a novel aimed at a young adult audience than King’s Carrie, or The Institute. Great writing combined with great storytelling should appeal to any age. I enjoyed the audiobook narration by Daniel Weyman, who could not have done a better job of setting the atmosphere and voicing the various characters.
Colleen Hoover caught my attention when she held Amazon’s #1 spot ahead of Stephen King’s Fairy Tale with her latest book It Ends With Us. In fact, when I looked at the number of ratings and reviews (three to six times anything Rowling, King, Grisham, or Brown have amassed from their greatest hits) I thought it was unlikely. Perhaps she was scamming the system somehow. Then I read the NY Times article about her emergence as a publishing phenomenon. The comments that the piece elicited were politically polarizing, often framed in terms of blue-collar values versus literary snobism. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, even if they’d never read her work.
So, before I weighed in with an opinion, I bought the audiobook version of her 2021 novel Verity. Despite suffering criticism from some who accuse her of peddling trauma-porn, I found Verity to be competently written and expertly plotted, crossing the genres of suspense and erotica. Throw in two narrators, one of whom is unreliable, and Verity is hard to put down. It doesn’t make a pretense of being anything other than what it is — excellent entertainment. And that’s no small feat in itself. Does the book have its faults? Sure. Personally, I would have preferred that the characters’ relationships revolved around more than just marathon sexual athleticism. But that won’t keep me from recommending the book. Verity will keep you entertained. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
BookBub calls The Seal Cove Theoretical Society “an existentially funny read about unlikely friendships and community!” Readers of Humorous Literary Fiction seem to agree.
In the past two weeks, I’ve listened to three audiobooks — Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan, and A Familiar Stranger by A.R. Torre, and Cloud Cookoo Land by Anthony Doer.
LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY, by Jenny Colgan: I’ve become a fan of Jenny Colgan since I discovered her work earlier this year. She writes Romance the way Romance should be written. Her heroines are plucky and resourceful, meet with adversity and overcome it, and are universally likeable people. I should elaborate on that last trait, but that’s a separate post. Little Beach Street Bakery is set in Cornwall, in the real-life village of Saint Michael’s Mount, fictionalized as Mount Polbearne. Colgan does a marvelous job of making the town an important character in its own right. The dialogue is natural, the characters (mostly) appealing. If the book has a weakness, it’s in its similarity to another of her books, The Bookshop on the Corner. These are feel-good, hopeful novels that will remind you of JoJo Moyes and Maeve Binchy.
A FAMILIAR STRANGER, by A.R. Torre: I decided to try this novel because it shows up in the “Also bought” line below the reviews of Evelyn Marsh, and because it has decent ratings and over 400 ratings. A Familiar Stranger is a unique psychological thriller told from multiple viewpoints, which the author plenty of room for misdirection and keeps the reader guessing. I found the beginning a little slow, but when the point of view changed, I was compelled to keep turning pages to figure out who was fooling whom. Unfortunately, the characters are, with one exception, unlikeable. Also, I found the moral denouement a little too pat for my taste, though it will probably satisfy most readers. Despite my reservations, A.R, Torre has crafted a page-turner here, and I intend to try more of her work.
CLOUD COOKOO LAND, by Anthony Doer: I don’t limit myself to one or two genres, I read across genres. After all, a good book is a good book. I love literary novels. Unfortunately, this highly rated literary/sci-fi novel fell short of the mark. The conceit isn’t enough to salvage these disjointed, dystopian stories. I felt Simon Jones’s narration made a buffoonery of what might have been an instructive little fable. Marin Ireland’s narration was adequate. But no narrator can improve a fatally flawed story. We are left with the belief that human beings haven’t learned anything over the past millennia, nor are we capable of improvement. How depressing!
I would have given up on this title early on, and only kept listening to the end because sometimes a book that starts badly is saved by a brilliant ending. Unfortunately, the ending of Cloud Cookoo Land was underwhelming. Not worth your time.
5 out of 5 stars. I’m grateful to have spent time getting to know Eleanor Oliphant. This is undoubtedly one of the most compelling character arcs ever. For some reason, I’m reminded of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. So mind-bogglingly good, it’s hard to fathom that this is a debut novel. Don’t miss it.
Evocative of another time, The Go-Between explores the mores of the late Victorian Age at an English country manor, as seen through the eyes of a visitor about to turn 13 years old, or rather it is told by an old man who, upon finding his old diary, remembers what it was like to be turning 13 in the summer of 1900, not quite fitting into the adult world, ignorant of so much, yet keenly observant. Looking back from a distance of 50 years, separated by two World Wars and the breakdown of the class system, he can see that “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.” It’s a graceful, beautifully written novel, reminiscent of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Highly recommended.
I’ve read a lot of good books this year, but none as captivating as A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor. Towles. I’m in awe of Towles’ facility with language. It’s like watching a one-man stage show, where you lose yourself in a character at once more inventive and more fluent than anyone you’ve ever met, but wish you had. I didn’t want it to end. At first, I thought this was a throwback to Henry James, but A Gentleman in Moscow is so much more. It’s full of humor and heart and erudition. For those of us who scribble for a living, this is a humbling experience.
Most of us try to write the most succinct sentence, but a great author can achieve the sublime through embellishment. As highlighted by another reviewer, the following two sentences beautifully illustrate Towles’ power of observation, his deft use of language, his playfulness, and unhurried pace. Instead of writing “It was a long sentence,” Towles writes:
“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence–one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”
And while he could have written succinctly that “His troubles kept him awake,” Towles displays an effortless inventiveness by writing instead:
“But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend. Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count’s would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.”
I’ve read the hardcover and listened to the audio edition, and I’d like to give a shoutout to the narrator of the audio edition, Nicholas Guy Smith. His upper-crust English accent perfectly portrays this upper-crust Russian. Smith handles all of the characters’ accents (including an American) with aplomb.
My review of the audio edition of BearTown, by Fredrik Backman:
Ingmar Bergman Meets The Mighty Ducks
How depressing! I would have given up on this downer at the midpoint, but for the fact that I didn’t feel I could review it without actually listening all the way to the bitter end. I wanted to review it to give readers a warning. This is the story of a dirty little town populated by despicable people with parochial views. Of the more than twenty characters, I found only three that were somewhat sympathetic, and even then I found it hard to care what happened to them. Backman’s writing style is hampered here by his choice of the present tense, which makes it read more like a synopsis than a novel; you’ll find no description here. On the positive side, Backman details the entwining relationships in this stultifying small town. It’s only made bearable by the excellent narration of Marin Ireland.
After a couple of weeks, the reviews are starting to come in and I’m both pleased and surprised. I had expected The Seal Cove Theoretical Society to get mixed reviews. Character-driven novels appeal to a certain demographic while leaving others cold. However, so far the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been really positive. Maybe it’s a matter of the cover and blurb attracting the right kind of readers.
Like the characters, the novel is flawed, or at least it’s not perfect, but perfectionists never finish a project. There comes a point of diminishing returns, where the time spent polishing needs to be reserved for the next book, the next characters. I can see now where it might be improved, but there comes a time when you just have to let your babies out into the world for better or worse and hope for the best. I’m so pleased that strangers are getting to know and to like them.
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society launched today. I hear a faint fanfare, muted by distance, and drowned out the white noise of modern life (politics, COVID, and the avalanche of email). The SCTS (as I’ll refer to it here to save long repetition) was my attempt at an ensemble piece. I’m a great admirer of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 SCOTLAND STREET series, which rotates through about a dozen characters like interweaving warp and weft. I had a devil of a time trying to make all of the character arcs resolve at the same time. It effectively stalled publication by a year. Of course, no story is really done. The author could keep on tweaking it into the grave, but at some point, you just have to cut the umbilical cord and say “The End.” The strange thing about this story is that this morning, the morning of the launch, I awoke with a conviction of how I could have made this a better book.
In retrospect, I would have cut the characters of Wexler and Rosalind, and I would have cut out the party. Doing that would have made it a novella, and would also have made it a somewhat predictable sweet Romance. Would that have been better or worse? Either way, I think it would have been more satisfying for the majority of readers.
This launch has been a bit of a disaster. This is the first book with which I’ve “Gone Wide,” which is to say I’ve gone to wide distribution instead of going exclusively with Amazon. Sales of my other titles have dwindled on Amazon, so I thought it best to try wide distribution and see what came of it. As it turns out, sales of my earlier books have picked up. But this launch of SCTS has fallen painfully on its face. If I were 30 I would be panicking. However, I’m of the ancient regime and really have nothing to lose. Win or lose, everyday above ground is a winner for me. I hope I don’t disappoint you, dear reader. I’m doing the best I can.
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society is set to launch in two weeks. I have no idea how, or even if, it will fly. It will depend on whether or not readers form an attachment to any of the characters. I have no feeling for how others may see them. Will readers be sympathetic? Will they want more plot? Will they miss the lack of a villain?
Instead of external villains, characters are kept from realizing their dreams by their own internal shortcomings and will have to change and grow if they’re to move on. Will that be enough to keep readers engaged? I have no idea. But I do believe that every book has an audience, and it’s left up to me to find it.
More than any other element, the cover design is paramount. It’s the first thing that potential readers see, and it will either turn them off, or inspire them to open to the first page.
For this book I turned to a professional artist. Years ago I bought my wife a print dress with a fabric design by Debbie Mumm. You’ve most likely seen some of her work, as her designs can be found on a variety of products, including fabric, greeting cards, and calendars. This particular design featured lighthouses. The Seal Cove Theoretial Society is set in a fictionalized version of Moss Beach, where I’ve lived for 40 years. Appropriately, at the end of my street is the Point Montara Lighthouse, which looks like this:
Debbie’s lighthouses are more whimsical or fanciful. If I did my job, the atmosphere of the book also conveys a sense of whimsy and fancy. The cover, then, will attract the right kind of reader.
The art I’ve employed for the cover is entitled The Celestial Ocean. The original painting is square, so it took some photoshopping to get it to fit an ebook cover, as well as a wrap-around paperback cover. Here is the result:
If you’re of like mind, you can buy it on pre-order at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Kobo; Apple, etc.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working on an ensemble piece set in the small coastal town of Seal Cove in Northern California. Seal Cove is a fictionalized version of Moss Beach, where I’ve lived most of my life, combined with neighboring Princeton by the Sea at Pillar Point Harbor, and perhaps a few touches of Del Mar, where I grew up. I’ve lived all but a couple of years in seaside towns and have never used it as a setting for fiction (save for an unpublished novel called Fog Beach). Seal Cove is about life and death and aspirations and disappointments, expectations, surprises, hope and discovery. It’s about the people who live here, or might have lived here. They’re a nice group of people trying to find their way through life. Here is a picture of the real Seal Cove:
And here’s a peek at the cover design for The Seal Cove Theoretical Society:
The cover illustration, “The Celestial Sea,” is by the illustrious Debbie Mumm.
The pandemic came as no great surprise to me. It has always lurked as a possibility, like an earthquake that you know is coming but you just don’t know when. What I didn’t expect was the disruption of supplies, the hoarding of things like toilet paper and sanitizing sprays and wipes, the binge eating, and the increased sales (and presumably consumption) of alcohol. And the economic upheaval. That’s been a shock.
Being sequestered during the pandemic, there is plenty of time to read, which provides both escape and intellectual stimulation in our isolation. I’ve read 18 books through the first five months of 2020. All but two were novels. Like most years, I’m not sticking to any one genre. I’ve read thrillers, mysteries, romantic comedies, romances, horror, and adventure stories. A few were mash-ups of different genres, and a few were straight-up literary fiction (i.e. focused on characters’ interior lives).
The most surprising book I read was a medical thriller called The End of October, by Lawrence Wright. Personally surprising because I never thought I’d read a book about a pandemic during a pandemic. Why would anyone choose immersion rather than escape from a killer virus. Yet I learned more about viruses and epidemiology than I ever knew before, and it was a compulsive page-turner. The amazing thing about the book is that it was written in 2019 and only published in April, yet so much of it anticipates current events. I highly recommend it.
Also this year I read the Jojo Moyes trilogy, Me Before You; After You; and Still Me. My first encounter with Moyes was her book Last Letter From Your Lover. Her characters are always nuanced, the relationships real, and the pacing perfect. She reminds me of a modern-day Jane Austen.
Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore, was captivating and original. — Every New Year’s Eve Oona turns a year older, but she doesn’t live her life sequentially. She may be 19 at 11:59 PM, but at the stroke of midnight, finds herself 51, or 37, or whatever. The book follows her only through a handful of years. My only regret was that it wasn’t longer.
Least surprising, but no less satisfying, was a book of four novellas from Stephen King entitled If It Bleeds. It’s terrific. They’re all good, but my favorites were “The Life of Chuck” and “Rat.”
I’d been looking forward to Robyn Carr’s Sunrise on Half Moon Bay, because I live in the area. Being familiar with the setting colors my review, even though Sunrise on Half Moon Bay is a work of fiction, so artistic-license is accepted and expected. But as a local, some aspects rang jarringly false. For instance, they met at the community pool (there is no community pool), and they go to a movie theater, though there is no local movie theatre. Carr references a snorkel shop, though no one snorkels here because the water is too cold. Beach volleyball is a rarity, etc. In general, it seems like this Half Moon Bay is set at least 50 miles south (around Santa Cruz), or even Santa Barbara.
The publisher might also have stayed truer to the purported setting — the cover illustration shows a woman on a fanciful dock facing the sunrise. Half Moon Bay is on the West Coast. The only east-facing sunrise, due to the odd curve of the coast, occurs in Santa Barbara. Sure, I’m being picky, but when I notice things like this, it takes me out of the story.
That’s okay, I didn’t expect verisimilitude. But nothing in the story depends on, nor is enhanced by, the location. It could have been set anywhere. The book could also have used a better editor. For instance, “Jake was in his midtwenties [sic], Adele still in high school, when he married Mary Ellen.” Yet earlier it was stated that Jake didn’t fall in love with Mary Ellen until Addie went to college.
Now, putting all of my reservations aside, I have to give Carr her due. The crux of this story revolves around the relationships between two sisters born 20 years apart, and the men in their lives. Carr succeeds in giving us complex and believable characters, natural dialogue, and sincere sentiments, with predictable though satisfying resolutions. She reminds me of a female Nicholas Sparks.
About a month ago I became aware of best-selling romance author Robyn Carr through an article in our local paper, The Half Moon Bay Review. She was being interviewed because her latest book, Sunrise on Half Moon Bay, is set here and was about to be released. So, I thought I’d check her out. Online I found that she is a wildly successful and prolific author, with several series of books set in small towns. As my latest novel, The Seal Cove Theoretical Society, is also set at the north end of Half Moon Bay, I’ll be fascinated to see how she frames the local scene. However, since Sunrise on Half Moon Bay was a few weeks from release when the article came out, I decided to try her out by reading the first of a series set in Virgin River, in the mountains north of Mendocino.
In Virgin River, Robyn Carr delivers exactly what you want from a good romance — a love story with believable dialogue, skillful exposition, lovely description, wholesome, and heartwarming characters old enough to have interesting backstories, while serving up some steamy sex on the side. The only fault I can find in it (and many would think this the best part of the book) is that the male protagonist is PERFECT. A young man might learn a lot from this book about what women want in a man. He’s good-looking, tall, strong, polite, protective, understanding, even-tempered, patient, mature, and loving without being overbearing. He’s a good example of what men might aspire to, but he’s just a little too perfect to be real. And his name is — you guessed it — Jack. What is it about the name Jack? At any neighborhood barbecue, you might find a Chris, or Mark, an Archie, a John, a Scott, or a Jerry, Bruce, Brad, or Arthur. But in the romance genre, once the name Jack is dropped, you just know he’s the love interest. Ah, well, that’s a small, nitpicking criticism. If you’re looking for a well-written, predictable, feel-good romance, you can’t go wrong with Virgin River.
In a normal year about 100 people die each day in automobile accidents. With everyone staying home, there will be far fewer accidents.
2) Fewer people commuting means less air pollution.
3) With everyone sheltering in place, family members are getting to know one another better. Board games and card games are making a comeback.
4) People are reading more books to entertain themselves.
5) Since kids are staying home from school, you no longer hear about school shootings.
6) Looked at objectively, human beings are a scourge upon the earth. The fewer of us there are, the less negative impact we’ll have on the planet.
7) The majority of deaths are men. As men are responsible for most of the world’s ills, the fewer men, the less violence, and the fewer wars. The world would be a better place with more women in it. I can say this, as I am a man and I own my failings.
8) The majority of victims of Covid-19 are old, and infirm. It’s a natural culling of the herd of the least productive among us. The positive effect is that losing that demographic takes pressure off the healthcare system and strengthens Social Security. It also frees families from the expense and responsibility of caring for their elderly. Cold? As a witch’s tit, but I can say this because I am a part of that demographic. If we die now with our wits about us, we will at least be spared the fright and indignity of slowly losing our minds as we totter toward the grave. And face it — we all have to get off this merry-go-round sooner or later.
My only concern is for younger victims, who should have most of their lives ahead of them.
I get the feeling we’re living in a Franz Kafka story. Here in San Mateo County we’ve been ordered to “shelter in place,” like sheep in the stockyards. We live in interesting times.
This pandemic, and in particular the world’s response to it, doesn’t seem quite real. We’re surrounded by hysterical pundits shouting impending doom. But the information has the whiff of an unreliable narrator. What are we not being told? This event will no doubt inspire dozens of apocalyptic novels and movies. The question is, after living through it, will anyone want to buy those books or watch those movies? In the meantime, I’ll whistle past the graveyard, write about the world as it was, and try not to contemplate an uncertain future.
I attended a talk that Ann Patchett gave before a book signing of The Dutch House recently. She was a marvelously entertaining raconteur. She was also a throw-back to another age. Her adventures in writing and publishing are far outside the norm for this time period, beginning with short story published in “The Paris Review” while she was in college over thirty years ago. An agent read it and signed her. When she finished her first novel, she drove hours to deliver the manuscript (this was in the age before the internet and email). Four days later the book was picked up by a major publisher, and she never looked back.
I’ve read everything she has published, and while I am not crazy about some of her work, Bel Canto and State of Wonder are among the best novels I’ve ever read (and I’ve read well over a thousand).
In 2011 she co-founded Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee. In that capacity she was inundated with all the new releases from the Big Five publishing houses, and became an interviewer of other authors who stopped by her store to do book signings and promotions. As a result, she has developed many friendships with other outstanding authors — Michael Chabon, Kate DiCamillo, Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt, Patrick Ryan, J.K. Rowling, Jane Hamilton, and others. So, when she gets stuck and asks for some guidance from fellow writers, she has the best in the business to point her in the right direction. That is truly rarified air, particularly in a field that is so solitary by nature. I’m not suggesting that the rest of us toiling in the trenches have her talent, nor that given her contacts we could turn out work as transcendent. I’m merely pointing out how unique her situation is.
When she set out to write The Dutch House, she couldn’t get past 30 pages. She tried changing the point-of-view and other tricks of the trade, but no matter what she did she didn’t seem to be able to get past that wall. Then she interviewed Barbara Kingsolver. At lunch afterwards Kingsolver could tell that something was bothering her. Patchett recounted the trouble she was having starting her new novel. Kingsolver listened to the bare bones synopsis, then said something to the effect that, I see where you’re going wrong. Your story is probably coming off the rails at about page 29 or 30, because that’s where you should turn left instead of right. Which solved that problem. When Patchett finished her first draft, she gave it to (if I remember correctly) Donna Tartt, who said (and I’m paraphrasing): The first third is magical, the second third is brilliant, but the last third falls off a cliff. Kate DiCamillo looked it over, saw what the problem was, and gave her a paragraph about how she would finish the book. And that was how The Dutch House came together. Sometimes the best editors are fellow writers.
The novel has garnered mostly glowing reviews, though it isn’t for the usual reader of plot-driven genre fiction. After reading along with the audible version. Tom Hanks lends his reassuring voice to the narration. Here is my take on it:
The Dutch House continues exploring the same themes as her previous novel, Commonwealth. In Commonwealth she writes “…Accepting the circumstances didn’t turn out to be the same as forgiveness.” Forgiveness, or the lack thereof, seems to haunt Patchett’s novels. What rings true in The Dutch House, is how time takes care of all transgressions. We watch Maeve and Danny grow from children angry and dismayed by their mistreatment, to middle-aged adults who find that with enough time old grudges lose their power. The middle-aged survivors are simply no longer the same people they were as teenagers and young adults. Only the house remains unchanged. For me, The Dutch House lacked the mystery of State of Wonder, and the complex motivations and interactions that made Bel Canto so satisfying. But it is still a fine character study.
I finished writing The Seal Cove Theoretical Society in June. I say “finished,” because I had deemed it finished. Since then, seven beta readers have weighed in with their comments, and forty-some agents have declined to read it based on my query letter (more on that in the next blog post). So, I solicited another friend, editor, and author in her own right to give me guidance. Her first suggestion was that I get rid of the “asides,” chapters that have nothing to do with the main storyline, in which I present myself as a character by addressing the audience. Of the seven beta readers, one thought the asides were the best part of the book. The other six found them distracting. So perhaps the book is not finished after all and would benefit from some judicious slicing here and there. To that end, I’m excizing those chapters, one of which I give to you now:
The Bogarts and the Andersons
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that life in Seal Cove is always idyllic. Far from it. Sometimes it resembles a soap opera. Take, for example, the tale of the Bogarts and Andersons. Pete Bogart and Dale Anderson worked for the same high-tech company in Silicon Valley. They lived on the same street in San Carlos, commuted to work together, got together on weekends to barbecue, watched football during football season, and baseball during baseball season. Their wives, Barbara Bogart and Caroline Anderson, were chummy and the couples often got together to play bridge or gin rummy. Their kids, Pamela Bogart and Greg Anderson had known each other from the age of three.
The problem was that Pete’s wife, Barbara Bogart, had her heart set on living on the coast, and in time the Bogarts moved to a quiet street in Seal Cove heights. From the deck on the back of the house the Bogarts had a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean edged with the dark green of cypress on the bluffs.
At work Pete Bogart touted the pleasures of living by the sea, and eventually, the Andersons moved to Seal Cove and settled into a house within hailing distance of their old friends. Soon they were hanging out on the deck every day after work, sharing cocktails, and falling into their comfortable old routines on the weekend. When the kids were eleven, they began spending their vacations camping side by side in the redwoods, sitting around a campfire drinking wine, and twice caravanning up the coast to Mendocino and Oregon.
So it should come as no surprise that such close friends might come to love one another, after a fashion. It all fell apart one weekend in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, when Pete Bogart and Caroline Anderson and the kids, who were sixteen by this time, went on a hike. Dale and Barbara pleaded fatigue and stayed behind to tend the camp. As it transpired, Caroline sprained her ankle. Pete had to carry her piggyback back to the camp, where they discovered Dale and Barbara conjoined in a sleeping bag. Horrified, the cuckolded spouses insisted that they pack up and go back home. For liberal people they had parochial views about marriage.
Back home, Caroline and Pete got together to commiserate and console one another, as wronged spouses might do, and one thing led to another, as things often do.
The Bogarts and Andersons divorced. Barbara Bogart became Mrs. Anderson, Caroline Anderson became Mrs. Bogart, and Pamela and Greg became step-siblings, and moved in with Caroline and Pete at the beginning of their senior year of high school. Whether out of anger and spite, or by dint of mutual attraction, the children soon began emulating their parents, coupling like a pair of bunnies. It wasn’t long before the adults got wind of this and all hell broke loose. The parents were aghast. Greg was sent down the street to live with Dale and Barbara, and Pamela was grounded and kept under strict surveillance, which did nothing to abate the youngsters’ concupiscent inclinations.
Determined to keep the children apart, the newly constituted Bogarts moved to Foster City. In the long run it was a vain move, as the kids had a different agenda. Unbeknownst to their parents, after spending their senior year of high school apart, they both applied to and were accepted to U.C. Riverside, where they secretly continued their torrid affair, and where they are now seniors.
The other inhabitants of Seal Cove were never the wiser for this little drama. Which just goes to show that the stage isn’t nearly as important as the players.
I love it! My review of The Institute was banned by Amazon, because it used offensive language in a paragraph where I was complaining about King’s pathological obsession with shit. That’s just too funny.
Here is the review in full:
Classic King
This isn’t my favorite King, but if page-turning suspense counts for something, it’s very good. King is, after all, a master storyteller. I just had to keep turning the pages. Some of his books are better at evoking small-town life, family dynamics, multifaceted relationships, or just plain creepiness, but in terms of getting the reader to root for the protagonist, Luke, and making the situation as dire as possible, he succeeds admirably with The Institute.
But The Institute also exposes King’s current weaknesses. His editors must be reluctant to cut anything, which leads to some irritating repetition. There are numerous instances where Luke’s inner monologue is presented by an omniscient narrator who qualifies and retracts as he blathers on. It might sound something like this: “The old woman reminded him of a quiet and kindly grandmother, or maybe not a grandmother, more like a nosy neighbor who keeps her mouth shut and her ears wide open in order to glean information. After all, you didn’t learn anything new by talking.” That’s my sentence, not his, but it serves as an example. Half of that sentence is extraneous, and this reader found passages like it, annoying enough to break the flow of the narrative.
One of King’s hallmarks has been a knowledge of cultural touchstones, and how to use them to give a story an immediacy and context. Television shows, music, and historical events are referenced, to ground the narrative in culturally shared experiences, and place the action firmly in a particular decade. Unfortunately, many of his references are no longer relevant or accessible to a younger generation, at whom the book seems to be targeted.
Lastly, if I were his editor, I’d cut some of the scatological references. It’s damn near a pathological obsession, and it gets awfully old when you know it’s coming, as surely it must if it’s a Stephen King novel. I’m not a prude, and a well-placed shit or piss is not going to shock me, but the constant shit sandwiches, crapped pants, wet crotches, and peed beds are just irritating at this point. Or maybe that’s just me.
Nonetheless, here King takes on some big themes — the powerless versus the powerful; injustice; the dangerous mindset of the zealot; the need to question authority. He might have mined these themes in a novel about a Nazi extermination camp, and I’m sure he’d make it terrifying, but by setting it in the U.S. in the present day, he gives himself the latitude to explore our contemporary moral vacuum, the constant struggle of good versus evil, logic versus magical thinking, and the responsibility that comes with real freedom. Kudos to King.
I’ve had a devil of a time finding beta readers for my new novel. You, dear reader, are invited to request a copy, just join my Advance Team on the homepage of this website. I think it’s difficult for most writers to judge their own work. One day I’ll reread a scene and think “how marvelous!” A week later I’ll read the same passage and think, “what drivel.”
To get an unbiased review from a professional reviewer, I submitted the manuscript to the BookLife Prize (a prize awarded by Publishers Weekly to an indie book or unpublished novel). In giving feedback, the BookLife Prize reviewer had this to say:
BookLife Prize – 2019
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society
Plot/Idea: 9 out of 10
Originality: 8 out of 10
Prose: 7 out of 10
Character/Execution: 9 out of 10
Overall: 8.25 out of 10
Assessment:
Plot: The interlocking stories made the book loom large while highlighting the deep connections between the individual characters who reside in the distinctive community of Seal Cove. In a narrative somewhat reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, even diversionary chapters reflecting on the history and intricacies of the small town, ultimately inform the overarching narrative.
Prose/Style: The author writes in clean, concise, and warm prose that evokes the spirit of the quietly eccentric community.
Originality: Clemens succeeds in establishing a unique setting for these interconnected stories, which ultimately act as patchwork pieces in a broader tapestry.
Character Development: Clemens’s care and reverence for his characters is apparent throughout. Each individual is provided with genuine closure that also resonates within the narrative whole.
END OF REVIEW.
I’m encouraged by the reviewer’s reaction. It could be more enthusiastic, but overall I think the review is fair. Nonetheless, it would be helpful to know how a general reader would respond to this book. You may even suggest how to make it even better. To share your insights before the novel is published, please make your request for a review copy by filling out the contact form on the homepage.
I finished my new novel last Monday. It’s called The Seal Cove Theoretical Society, and it’s a gently humorous literary take on my town and its inhabitants. I’m looking for Beta readers to give me some feedback about what works and what doesn’t, so if you’re interested you can download it here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/q3bibtwfpo
A closet novelist. An erstwhile rock star. A retiring wine importer. A crab fisherman. A dot-com millionaire. What do they have in common? They’re all members of a loose affiliation called The Seal Cove Theoretical Society.
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society is told from multiple viewpoints, and features an author/narrator who tells a little of the “history” of the San Mateo coast through a series of vignettes that form a backdrop to the main plot(s). Interweaving the stories through short chapters, the main thrust revolves around a group of neighbors who come to the aid of Tom Birmingham, a man who, on the brink of retirement, has a nearly fatal accident, and literally meets Fate, who sends him back to “tie up loose ends.” While Tom tries to figure out what those loose ends are, his neighbors deal with issues of their own, and find a way forward through the small miracle of friendship.
I visited my hometown after a few decades away. Contrary to popular belief, you can go home again, you just have to step out of the present. It’s all there in your mind, layer upon layer of memories, so that walking around the old town I can close my eyes and remember details of the place in another time, and remember what it was like to be a certain age, when we were all alive and didn’t know how things would turn out. That’s one of the more interesting things about living a long time. When you’re young and the future is a mystery, you can dream, make projections, set goals, hope, and aspire to enrich your life with experiences, while becoming your future self. But walking the old town now is like walking with ghosts. I’m not just in the present, but in the past, and not just one day in the past, but a past made up of all the days, like sedimentary layers, where some of the record lies buried forever, and some connections that were once hidden are now revealed. Past and present are wrapped in an embrace. But I can never see things with the same eyes I had then, the same innocence, the same ignorance, the same hopes and desires. Times change. People change. Our perceptions are filtered by circumstance and experience, and perhaps most of all by attitude, so we never become exactly who we thought we would be. Our future selves are strangers to us. Our past selves are ghosts. I’ve been fortunate. For me most of my ghosts are friendly. Chalk it up to luck, or karma, or attitude.
Books, like food, come in all flavors and not everyone has the same taste. Likewise, a movie critic may not share your sensibilities, and a wine critic may have opposite tastes. So how do you choose what to read? These days we’re lucky, because instead of just one critic, or one best-seller list, we can read dozens of reviews by readers. As an indie writer, it’s easy to become discouraged. Your work doesn’t pass through traditional gatekeepers (agent and editor) who serve to weed out the chaff. So the only way to know if your book is kernel or chaff is to put it out in the marketplace and let readers vet or reject it. It’s easy to doubt yourself.
Then you come upon famously awarded books that are so bad that you can’t help but feel your book is better. At times like these, you realize that the critic who pronounced that book a work of genius, was either drunk or smoking some bad weed. What else could account for such drivel. I’ll give you three examples that I bring to mind whenever I doubt the value of my own work. The first is James Jones’s National Book Award winning From Here to Eternity, which wraps poor writing around the story of a loser who makes all the wrong choices and dies for nothing. Then there’s John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a parody of Victorian hysteria and sexual repression, where the narrator occasionally steps into the picture and reminds you that it’s small make believe and nothing to be excited about. Not to be outdone by Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools which, though well-written, presents a cast of such despicable characters that you can’t help but hope the ship will sink and take all of them to the bottom so you can be rid of them for good.
As a reader, you always have the option of bailing out before the crash, but a lot of us keep reading with the misplaced optimism that a satisfying ending will save an otherwise hollow story.
I don’t think there is a writer in the world who doesn’t cringe at his or her own writing from time to time. It’s easy to get discouraged, which is why I’m heartened by positive reviews. They let me know that I’m on track and delivering what readers want. Even better are negative reviews of other books. They let me know that even well known writers, or well publicized writers don’t always hit the mark. Of course, knowing you’re no worse than some other schmuck is a poor substitute for praise, but we writers will take what we can get. Best of all are the monumental failures, books so bad that they make your worst book look like The Great American Novel.
That said, I’ve usually refrained from gloating over someone else’s poor reviews in public, which is why it was so unusual for me to post a scathing review on my Facebook feed last July. Here it is in total:
“The next time I question my writing, I’ll only have to look at Half Moon Bay again and be assured that writers far worse than I are still published by reputable publishers. Read it aloud and have a good laugh.
“I live just north of Half Moon Bay, so when I saw a new book called Half Moon Bay and set in my own backyard, I had to take a look. I’ve reviewed plenty of books, but I’ve never been tempted to spread the word about a really bad book — until now. Simply call it up on Amazon, click on the Look Inside feature, and read the sample chapter. Then read the reviews, and you’ll wonder how such incoherent, overwrought drivel received any stars at all. The author, Alice LaPlante, taught writing at Stanford, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Stegner must be spinning in his grave. If you want something amusing to show your friends, you can have all 272 hardbound pages for $24.25 (the cover is kind of nice), or the Kindle edition for just $13.99. For the record, Scribner has foisted this gewgaw on the innocent public. I expect the editor (if there was one) has moved on to another line of work.”
I know I’m being mean spirited to call attention to it, but I couldn’t help it; it felt so good to know that I’m not the worst writer on the planet. The book had only been out a week or so at the time, so it was hard to know how the general public would receive it — anything is possible. As it transpired, I’m not alone. Six months after its release, fully 50% of reviewers have given it only one or two stars out of five.
That gave me pause to wonder how books are received by their intended audience. While poorly written books can become bestsellers (Love Story, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull are good examples), at the same time, some beautifully written books receive poor reviews because the subject matter is disturbing (My Absolute Darling), or because the storytelling is deficient (Less, and Infinite Jest, and Ulysses), or the public is not up to the literary challenge (The Sound and the Fury, or Lincoln in the Bardo come to mind). Yet it’s nice to know that a writer can still trust in his or her artistic vision, however quirky, and still find an audience. It gives me hope.
A neighbor retired last year after a thirty-five year career teaching high school English. She’s an avid reader and knows the subject, so I suggested she write a novel.
“Oh, I could never do that,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too difficult,” she said, eyes wide, then shook her head. “Well, you would know.”
The truth is I do, and I don’t. Taken as a whole, the task of embarking on a new novel is daunting. It’s monolithic, intimidating, an act of hubris to think you could do it. On the other hand, writing a scene is easy enough, and rather fun. And in the end, isn’t a novel just a series of interlocking scenes? Looked at that way, it’s not so imposing (as long as there is no deadline with consequences lurking in the future). If you just take it scene by scene, eventually you will come to a logical end. Anne Lamott wrote a book about it called Bird by Bird. You might want to check it out.
Ever since I was fifteen I’ve kept a log of the books I read (over 1,400 to date). The vast majority are fiction. I try to keep up with contemporary authors, and read an occasional classic from the nineteenth-century. I don’t restrict my reading to fine literature, and I touch most of the genres — mystery, thriller, romance, magical realism, science-fiction, fantasy, gothic novels, historical novels, horror, young adult fiction, dystopian fiction, and very rarely a graphic novel. I do not read about vampires (with the exception of Christopher Moore’s spoofs), or werewolves, simply because I have no interest.
These days I read hardbacks, paperbacks, and ebooks, while fully three quarters of my “reading” is through audiobooks.I always reread two or three novels a year. In 2018 I read 52 books, including three non-fiction, and five books that I had read previously. 18 were written by women. Three were translations. 14 of the 52, were by British authors, three were Canadian, one Irish, one Spanish, one Pakistani, and the rest American.
My favorites in the order in which I read them:
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper, by Phaedre Paatrick
I just finished reading Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. Powerfully imagined, beautifully written, it’s a timely reminder of how quickly civilization can fracture, how despots can warp the narrative to turn neighbor against neighbor, and the lasting trauma inflicted on the survivors. At the same time there is compassion and post-traumatic growth, giving a hopeful look to the future. It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel. The writing is vivid and assured.
Are you feeling lucky? Through August 30th I’ll be running a SWEEPSTAKES. The winner, chosen at random, will receive a Kindle Paperwhite eReader ($120 value) pre-loaded with two of my novels.
Why would I give away a Kindle? Because it will give me the opportunity to interact with people who show an interest in reading, and introduce them to my work.
I’ve read 29 books so far this year, and just finished George Saunders’ Man Booker Prize Winner Lincoln in the Bardo. My personal view is that Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t so much a novel as a play in novel-like form. I expect to see it on Broadway in two or three years. It’s really a very short book. George Saunders is a short-story writer, and though this book is 368 pages, it could be formatted to half the number of pages. Imaginative, idiosyncratic, and bold in conception, it incorporates dozens of contemporary historical accounts to build a collage of Lincoln and his middle son Willie. The larger story is narrated by over a hundred inhabitants of the bardo (a sort of purgatory between life and rebirth), each with his or her own concerns and foibles. Saunders’ bardo is suitably creepy. I have only a few reservations. There seemed no purpose to the lack of punctuation, or to the purposeful misspelling of certain words. Also, two foul-mouthed characters seem out-of-character for the time period, while at the same time their foul dialogue is presented with decorously Victorian redaction, as in “The f___ing little s_____! I should kick his G_____n, f___ing nuts!” Despite these reservations, Lincoln in the Bardo is a brave, artistic work, a wild cross-breeding of Waiting for Godot with Our Town, at once full of angst, darkly humorous, and poignant.
I don’t know if the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan so famously declared, but it certainly changes the way the message is composed. I learned cursive in fifth and sixth grade. My handwriting was and is almost unintelligible by anyone but myself. My teachers complained.
During the summer between elementary school and junior high I took typing lessons. At first I wrote longhand and then transcribed onto an old Remington manual typewriter. Later, I switched to a manual Smith Corona, and in college to an electric Smith Corona. In those days I always wrote longhand and revised with interlinear notes and circled passages with arrows showing where to move a sentence or paragraph. But I found I could never compose straight onto the typed page. The loud clack of the typewriter interuptured my thoughts.
It was a tedious process and anytime I made a major revision, removed or added a paragraph, I had to retype the entire manuscript from that point forward. When I finally transcribed onto the typewriter I would use a carbon copy so I’d have two copies. If I made a mistake I used white out and typed over it, and as the technology improved a new type of paper and a typewriter ribbon, half black, half white, we’re developed that allowed you to lift off a letter from the page when you did a strike-over, which did nothing to correct the carbon copy.
I wrote a novel, short stories, wine articles and teleplays in this way. It was a time-consuming process. In the late 70s and early 80s I was writing wine reviews and feature articles for Vintage magazine, and Wine & Spirits Buying Guide, and any typed pages I turned in were then sent to the printer and had to be transcribed into the printer layout.
Then along came the personal computer. In 1982 I bought a suitcase-sized Osborn computer with a 5 inch black-and-white screen, and 5 ¼ inch floppy disks that could hold 64 KB, enough for several articles. All of a sudden I could write three times faster. Corrections could be made instantly without having to retype pages, and I could make as many copies as I wanted. Furthermore, these computers were almost silent. No longer was noise a distraction and I could compose straight to the screen. The word processors even checked my spelling and grammar, and a dictionary and thesaurus were only a click away. Later, with the advent of the Internet I could fact check on the fly.
I’ve owned more then a dozen computers. For the past decade I’ve used various MacBook Pro laptops. Yet for all their advantages computers have always had a major drawback for me. I’ve been lucky enough to live by the ocean for most of my life. In the late 70s I enjoyed writing on my deck while listening to the waves roll in. But laptop screens aren’t bright enough to see outdoors.
I thought this problem would be rectified with the advent of the Kindle Ereader and Eink a decade ago. However no manufacturer has stepped forward to offer a simple word processor with Eink technology. So I remain confined to working indoors, when I’d rather be on the deck or at the beach.
Today’s computers offer beautiful graphics. I appreciate it every time I click on a YouTube video, or sort through photographs, or read an article supported by sharp, colorful graphics. However, all this gadgetry comes at a price. I’m a champion procrastinator, and my little writing machine is now an entertainment center. It comes with access to the news, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, movie reviews, book reviews, webcams, music, games, reminders of appointments, and bills to pay. I can’t tell you how often I’m distracted by the stuff behind the curtain. In a lull between paragraphs I’m likely to say to myself, “Now I’ll just check to see if so-and-so has responded to my email.” An hour later I might get to work, or decide it’s time to take a snack break. The Internet is a bottomless well. It’s easy to spend your day mindlessly web surfing.
I’ve been stuck at about the two thirds mark in writing my new book, Seal Cove. Part of it is caused by the distractions available on the same machine I use to write. Part of it, I suspect, is the posture required to type on the keyboard on my lap. I imagine one composes differently if standing, like Hemingway did, or sitting rigidly at a desk, or lounging in an easy chair, or in bed. It’s said that Dickens composed in his head while walking late at night.
So until someone invents an Eink word processor, I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to compose longhand and dictate into my laptop (Steinbeck dictated the first chapter of Cannery). But direct dictation is another skill and might take some getting used to.
My hope is that composing without online distractions will move this book along. In the meantime, dear reader, my apologies for the delay.
My novel EVELYN MARSH has just been released in audio format, narrated by Susanna Burney and engineered by Eric Eagle in Seattle, Washington. Susanna does a great job of capturing Evelyn’s voice and bringing the story to life.
Why an audiobook? As the saying goes, “So many books, so little time.”
I’ve been a big audiobook fan for more than a decade. I find that I only have time to read a dozen or so physical books (paper or ebook) a year. With audiobooks all the hours I spend driving, shopping, cleaning, cooking, gardening, or exercising can now be spent listening to 50 or 60 audiobooks a year. I’ve managed to get through a long list of classics and have discovered numerous contemporary authors along the way, authors whose books I simply wouldn’t have the time to get to if it weren’t for audiobooks.
I’m currently working on an ensemble piece set in the small coastal town of Seal Cove in Northern California. Seal Cove is a fictionalized version of Moss Beach, where I’ve lived most of my life, combined with neighboring Princeton by the Sea at Pillar Point Harbor, and perhaps a few touches of Del Mar, where I grew up.
I began work on it this summer and was hopeful of getting it done before the end of he year, but I was overly optimistic, and I’m now shooting for March 1st. The first working title was Cypress Cove, but I found that title had already been used for a series. I then settled on Smuggler’s Cove, with he same results. For awhile it was Rum Beach, which is a good title, but gives the expectation of a Caribbean setting, which doesn’t fit. At this moment I’ve settled on Seal Cove, which is an actual cove about a mile from my house.
I’ve lived all but a couple of years in seaside towns and have never used the coastside as a setting for fiction (save for an unpublished novel called Fog Beach). Seal Cove is about life and death and aspirations and disappointments, expectations, surprises, hope and discovery. It’s about the people who live here, or might have lived here. They’re a nice group of people trying to find their way through life.
Reading books allows you to live life through another’s eyes. So does writing books. As a result I’ll never write a story about social injustice, or hopelessness. It would make me too depressed. There are plenty of things in this world that inspire outrage, or anger, or pity, or disgust. If you read a book that centers on any of those themes, you’ll be done with it in a few hours, perhaps unsatisfied, but relatively unscathed. If you write that same book you’ll have to live with those characters and situations for months or years, and that can be very unsettling. My novel With Artistic License is a story about Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. In it the main character is going through a divorce. To write fictional characters you have to put yourself in their place and see the world through their eyes. By the time I’d finished writing the novel I felt like I’d gone through a divorce myself, though I’ve been happily married for 40 years. The characters in my current work-in-progress have their problems, but no one’s situation is hopeless, and there are amusing moments, which keeps this writer happy.
I was hoping to finish by the end of the year, which now seems doubtful, but at least I’ll be spending that time with characters whose company I genuinely enjoy, whose problems are nothing too dire. As usual, I’m covering new ground. To be very successful as a writer (defined by the number of readers one has) it helps to stick to one genre. That way you can build a base of supporters. So far I haven’t covered the same ground twice. With Artistic License is a literary novel leaning toward dark romantic comedy. Time Management, a novel, is part fantasy, part historical adventure. Evelyn Marsh is a novel of psychological suspense. The one thing that ties them together is a wry sense of humor and uplifting endings.
Speaking of Evelyn Marsh, an audible edition will be coming out very soon. More on that in the next post.
In this era of unconstrained publishing, many authors give away their work for free. In principal I’m against the practice. I know of no other profession where the creator is expected to work for free. The average cost of my books runs to less than a penny a page, which I consider a bargain. Nonetheless, when you’re an unknown quantity it’s hard to get anyone to pay attention to creative work; there’s just too much available to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. Brand awareness has become more important than ever.
So in an effort to alert potential readers to my work, in the month of September I’m giving away four copies of Time Management, a novel, and five signed copies of Evelyn Marsh on Goodreads. You can find them here:
The usual question a stranger will ask after finding out I write fiction is, “Where do you get your stories?” There is no singular answer. Each story has its own genesis. I always see the beginning and the ending clearly. The middle part is always nebulous and takes a while to flesh out.
I wrote a failed novel called Fog Beach several years ago. The kernel of the story was planted fifteen years before that, when my brother was auditing a small oil company and found evidence of a scam involving government subsidies. There were a few good scenes in that book, but it was dense and too complicated to follow.
The bare bones concept of With Artistic License came to me in a dream, scene by scene over the course of a night. I dreamed of a six-year-old boy drawing on a wall and woke up laughing (I often laugh out loud in my sleep, which drives my wife crazy). I kept waking up laughing and jotting down notes before falling asleep and dreaming the next scene. By the morning I had the bones of a screenplay, but decided to explore the characters in more depth by telling it as a novel. The actual writing took three and a half years.
The concept of Time Management, a novel had been with me since I was a kid. I began writing it in my forties, abandoned it, picked it up again in my fifties, and finished it in my sixties. It took me a long time to figure out what the internal and external conflicts were, and once I had those in place it again took three and a half years to write.
Determined to work faster, I decided to write a novella next and kicked around a few ideas with my wife. I was just finishing up Time Management and we were driving through an affluent neighborhood of Santa Barbara looking at stately homes with their well-tended gardens, and imagining the occupants I wondered, “What would drive a normal, mild-mannered, well-educated woman to commit murder?” I put that idea on the back burner in May of 2015 and didn’t think of it again until I sat down on January first 2016 and began making notes. Evelyn was a short, sweet affair. I started the actual writing on April first and was finished on September first, a total of nine months from start to finish. There was a little editing and tweaking after that, but for all intents and purposes it was done.
For this new book (working title Rum Beach) I want to write an ensemble piece with several characters whose lives intersect in the small town of Rum Beach. I can’t tell you how or why a character springs to mind. They seem to lurk in the background and then step forward and say, “What about me? Tell my story.” I had several characters in mind and left them to simmer for seven or eight months, letting the story coalesce around them. The goal is to have the first draft written by the end of the year. It’s an ambitious goal, but something to shoot for.
This is my 17th blog entry, and as far as I can tell none of previous 16 have been read by anyone. So I’m going to assume this is a place for my private musings. I’ll imagine a reader coming across these posts after I’m dead, so if you’re that person you’ll be privy to a lot of blather and perhaps an epiphany or two. As of tomorrow EVELYN MARSH will have been out four months. In that time it has sold somewhere around 375 copies. The reviews have been good, which is of course gratifying.
I’m trying to concoct a new story. I want to write an ensemble piece about people in Moss Beach, although I’m calling it Rum Beach and moving the lighthouse to a more scenic location. I’ve come up with a few characters. There’s Emily Abbot, a closet novelist whose greatest strength (loyalty) is also her greatest weakness (as she’s taken for granted). There’s Steve Wexler, the erstwhile bassist for a long defunct band, who is still trying to ride on the crest of a fading celebrity. There is Gary Myron, a simple fisherman. And there is Tom Blankenship, a wine importer who unexpectedly meets Fate. I know how it starts. I know how it ends. But as usual the middle section eludes me. And setting the hook early alludes me. I really don’t know what the unifying concept is. How do all the characters tie together? I’m planning for a 230 page book. My only goal is to make it interesting enough for readers to continue to turn the pages to the end. I don’t know exactly how to pull it off. I’ve been trying to come up with an outline. It’s partly done, but I’m stymied on other parts. I believe in the efficacy of an outline, but I think an outline can be effective even if it’s not detailed. You really only need to know the purpose of a particular scene. I’ll explore the usefulness of an outline tomorrow. I’m tired tonight and want to get to bed.
Taped to the top of my computer monitor are the words: “Storytelling and writing are actually two entirely different skill sets.” I think that quote is attributable to K.M. Weiland. It’s what makes writing a novel so difficult for me, and so seemingly easy for James Patterson. He comes up with so many plots so fast that he has to rely on co-writers to help write all the stories that pour out of his head. Patterson is a storyteller first and a writer second. I wish I had his facility for coming up with compelling “what if” situations and following them through to a finished novel that readers can’t put down. Alas, I’m a writer first and a storyteller second. Some lucky bums are equally good at both (Stephen King comes immediately to mind). So for me storytelling is the hard part.
Hemingway wrote, “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” I respectfully disagree. Had he said “My prose is architecture…” I’d agree wholeheartedly. For me, on the other hand, storytelling is architecture, style is interior design, and prose interior decoration. The first two come before the latter. Story and style are the skeleton, the actual writing adds flesh. And if the writing is to be more than a paint-by-the-numbers knockoff, the process must allow for serendipity, unforeseen juxtapositions and tangents.
I’m currently working on a story set on the San Mateo coast, where I’ve lived for the past 42 years. I’m getting to know the characters, their backstories, their motivations, their voices. I’m not yet quite sure how they all fit together, where their lives intersect, and what tone I want to adopt. Other than notes there isn’t much actual writing being done, and I’m getting antsy to start. But I still need to find that moment when all of the characters find themselves in the same place at the same time, and possibly even in the same pursuit. It’s a puzzle. Being an ensemble piece, I’ll require the assistance of more than one muse working in concert. I hope they’re able to get along.
I just finished reading Gwendy’s Button Box. If you’re a slow reader, this novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar will provide an evening of good entertainment. It’s a fascinating book from an author’s perspective, because it hooks the reader with a slightly creepy instigator and a totem, or magical object, that in the end becomes a perfect metaphor for the writer’s life. There is nothing extraneous in the telling of this story. It’s deceptively simple and compelling. It can also be read on different levels, and will remind some readers of King’s Lisey’s Story.
Of the 25 books I’ve read so far this year, most were at least entertaining, though a few were disappointing given the authors or the reviews. My favorites have been Daphne du Maurier’s haunting My Cousin Rachel; Nora Roberts’ thriller The Witness; Pat Barker’s thoughtful and beautifully written Regeneration; and Alexander McCall Smith’s My Italian Bulldozer.
For you Francophiles, lovers of good food and mysteries out there, the new Martin Walker book, The Templar’s Last Secret is out today. I think this is the tenth in the series. If you’re not yet a fan, you should probably start with the first one, Bruno Chief of Police. Bruno is one of the great characters in modern literature, and the plots and subplots are all refreshingly current and relevant, though the books are set in the ancient landscape of the Périgord. I’m looking forward to reading the new one this summer.
“But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well. You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself” — Garden Party, Rick Nelson
One of the things you learn early on in the fiction game is that you need to lose your ego, because it’s going to be tromped on. You have to learn to take criticism with equanimity, because you’re going to take a lot of abuse. Sometimes the criticism is constructive. In fact, I cut more than 10,000 words from WITH ARTISTIC LICENSE after beta readers all complained about the same thing (belaboring the protagonist’s daily grind at the office). Sometimes a story takes you in a direction the reader doesn’t want to go. TIME MANAGEMENT, A NOVEL, got rave reviews from most readers, but a few objected to the story taking a left turn (essentially changing genres) at the one quarter mark. It was planned, and most readers found that the most compelling aspect of the book. But it wasn’t for everyone. Similarly, I’ve had some wildly enthusiastic and flattering 5-star reviews for EVELYN MARSH. It also received a 1-star review that read as follows: “Offensive. Didn’t make it to chapter five. Used God’s name as a curse word. Returned.” Yes, indeed, one of my characters muttered a goddamn. It’s good she didn’t get beyond chapter five, because there are a couple of fucks in there too, not too mention some sexual content I’m sure she would have found offensive. C’est la vie. I’m not disturbed by her taking offense; I’m amused. But I did click on her name beside the review to see what else she’d reviewed. It turns out she mostly reads books on Christian scripture, which begs the question as to why she would choose a psychological suspense novel for reading material. The point is, no matter what you write, you can’t please everyone. Another reader strongly objected to the trope of the hunky pool boy, and another to Evelyn’s upper middle class lifestyle (“Who cares about rich people?”). Evelyn is who she is. Take her or leave her.
I can only write what is presented to me by the muse, or my subconscious, or the creative ether — whatever it is that sparks the imagination. It’s why I haven’t repeated a genre yet. I can’t please everyone, so I have to please myself. Nonetheless, I’m not here to break new ground, to expand the form, or break the rules. I’ll leave that to someone else. Because to me the purpose of literature is to communicate and entertain. If your prose is formless, or you try writing without punctuation, or write stream-of-consciousness novels with no story behind them, there’s a slim chance of holding a reader’s interest to the last page. There are rare exceptions, and they’re notable for it. In the old days (pre 2010 or so) that manuscript would have been rejected and end up in the bottom drawer of the writer’s desk, where it would languish until the writer’s heirs threw it in the dustbin. Today any writer, talented or not, can self-publish a novel and put it up on Amazon. There is no agent, or editor, publishing house, or literary critic to prevent it. The gatekeepers have all left the building. The final arbiter of a work’s worth is you the reader. If I write a decent book, I’ll have a chance at finding readers. If I disappoint them, I’ll lose readers. Simple as that. The publishing world has become very democratic.
In celebration of their second anniversary, Kindle Press is putting all Kindle Scout winning books on sale for 99c through April 3rd, 2017 (you can find them all at KindleScout.amazon.com). Evelyn Marsh has only been out a week. It normally sells for a modest $2.99. I’m anxious to see how the 99c sale price will affect the number of books sold. And I want to sell lots of books. Like anyone else, I’d like to be remunerated for the many months or years it takes to write a novel and bring it to market. But more importantly, a sale means a reader. It’s also a validation that what you’ve written is entertaining enough to attract readers. I have no use for esoteric books that sit unread on the shelf. I have no interest in being remembered a hundred years from now for experimental prose that no one will read today. I’m writing to connect with readers during my lifetime. Finding readers is no easy task. You’d think with the millions of English speaking readers in the world, it would be easy enough to attract the attention and loyalty of a few thousand. It turns out it isn’t easy at all. It takes craft and art to write the story. It also takes marketing and promotional skills that take time time and effort away from writing.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-published writers today are only too happy to give away their work to attract the attention of readers. My own feeling about this is that the only time it makes sense to give away a book, is if it’s the first in a series, which gets the reader hooked and ready to buy and read more. Otherwise it’s disrespectful and a disservice to the writer. Ebooks are so cheap that a 350 page novel sells for about a penny a page, or less. I don’t know of any other product or art form that is valued so cheaply.
Evelyn Marsh launched this week. In preparation for Kindle Press’s 2nd anniversary sale, they’ve revamped my cover. The old cover, on the left, had a noir feel to it, due to the old house, font etc., but it didn’t tell the reader much about the content. The new cover has a more modern feel, though still in the noir tradition, and the house, the pool and the stiletto heels don’t reflect the descriptions in the book, but it does clue the reader into the genre, and Kindle Press feels the new cover will spur sales. Your comments?
Evelyn Marsh is a Kindle Scout winner! As a Kindle Scout selection, Kindle Press has acquired the ebook and audible rights and will promote the book on Amazon.com. It’s currently undergoing editorial review and should be available around March, 2017.
In June I wrote a blog entry regarding Evelyn Marsh.Let me tell you a little about Evelyn. The concept arose a couple of years ago when my wife and I were vacationing in Santa Barbara. I was getting toward the end of writing Time Management: a novel. I said I’d kind of like to write a mystery, but I’ve neither been a policeman nor a private detective. I’d have to take a different tack. Furthermore, I wanted to show how thin the veneer of civilization is when your loved ones are threatened. What would turn a mild-mannered woman of privileged means into a cold-blooded murderer? I suspect we all have the capacity to commit murder, given the right circumstances.
I put the idea of Evelyn on the back burner as I finished and worked on marketing Time Management.With Artistic License, and Time Management, each took more than three years to write (many more, if you count false starts), and were both around 130,000 words (370 – 400 pages, depending on the font, etc.). That’s a long time to live with the same characters and story. I thought it would be a fun exercise to attempt a novella instead, to see if I was capable of writing at a faster pace. I planned to write 51,000 words, which, at 300 words per page, works out to 170 pages. I began planning on February 1st, 2016, started writing on April 1st, and was finished on September 1st. It came in at 51,161 words, right on target. So as an exercise it was entirely successful.
It’s probably not a good business model to write in different genres, because your readers may not follow where you choose to lead. With Artistic License is my take on a Romantic Comedy, which may or may not appeal to fans of Time Management, a time travel fantasy. Evelyn Marsh is, I suppose, a psychological thriller. A blurb for Evelyn Marsh might read something like this: “Everyone agreed Evelyn wouldn’t hurt a fly, but they didn’t count on a mother’s ferocity, nor the fury of a woman scorned.”
Written in the spirit of Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train; The Talented Mr. Ripley), Evelyn Marsh begins with the provocative statement that “Evelyn’s first murder was an accident.” It’s only a mystery in the sense that the rest of the book exists to explain the implication embedded in the first line. It’s a why-done-it and how-done-it, instead of a who-done-it. I don’t know if it will appeal to fans of With Artistic License, or Time Management, but Evelyn demanded I write her story, and I couldn’t very well refuse.
I really enjoyed my time with her. I had an outline to point me in the general direction, but most days Evelyn presented a nice surprise I hadn’t counted on. I feel privileged to be allowed to tell her story. I hope you enjoy your time with her as well.
I decided to submit Evelyn Marsh to the Kindle Scout program (www.kindlescout.com), where authors have ONE MONTH to present excerpts of unpublished works, and readers vote on which books they’d like to see published. The advantage of the program for authors is that books that are selected receive promotion on Amazon.com, which means thousands of readers. My campaign runs through October 17th. I hope you’ll pay it a visit and register your vote. In any case, whether selected by Kindle Scout or not, the ebook version of Evelyn Marsh should be published around December 1st.
Three weeks after the ebook publication of Time Management, I prepared the manuscript for print. The electronic version scales itself automatically depending on whether you’re reading it on a computer, a tablet, or a phone. The print version, on the other hand, is set in stone. The chapter headings begin about a third of the way down the page, which serves a couple of purposes. First, it simply looks less crowded. More importantly, it allows for minor adjustments, so you don’t end up with a chapter ending with just a line or two on the last page.
In addition, the font makes a big difference in the appearance of the text. For instance, the font in this blog is “sans serif” (without serif), which is a little cleaner and simpler to read electronically, but I prefer a serif font in print. What’s the difference?
Unfortunately, this website is preformatted and I can't show you the nuances, but this particular paragraph is presented in a seriffed font (albeit not one that I like).
I played around with a number of different fonts. The classic is Times New Roman. I used a variation on that called Caslon. Another form of spacing is called leading, which is the space between the lines. As you can imagine, the space between the lines has a great effect on the number of pages in the printed book. One version was 327 pages, but I found the type looked a little cramped. In the end I decided to use Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (a highly recommended novel) as a template for both font and leading, making the book 370 pages, which is much more pleasing to my eye, though the 43 extra pages did bump the cost of production up a dollar fifty.
Reviewing the novel for print, I found one more typo, which astounds me, as this book has been read by several editors and a couple dozen people from my Advance Team. I also added one phrase on the last page for clarification, which I subsequently changed in the ebook version as well.
Lastly, for both the ebook and print versions I opted for the Goodfellow font for the title, which was also used for a first edition of Samuel Langhorn Clemens’s The Innocents Abroad, first published in 1867 and playing a minor role in this story.
I’m currently working on a novelette (I’m hoping to bring it in at less than 200 pages) called Evelyn Marsh, in the spirit of Patricia Highsmith. It’s only a mystery in the sense that the rest of the book exists to explain the implication embedded in the first line: “Evelyn’s first murder was an accident.”
Evelyn Marsh is a character study. I don’t know if it will appeal to readers of my other books, but I’m enjoying my time with Evelyn. She’s an interesting lady. She’s a mild mannered artist, mother and wife. Some think she’s too timid. But don’t underestimate her. As the author, I might say I’m just getting to know her and what makes her tick. You’ll meet her for yourself next fall, if not sooner.
You can consider this an addendum to my previous post on covers, where I asked for opinions and received none.
When I was close to finishing Time Management I set about designing a cover. I took a photo of some of my watches and manipulated that photo in Photoshop to come up with a gold bas relief (it would make a great embossed cover). I thought it looked really nice. I wanted the font to look like something from the 19th century, and I found a first edition of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (published in 1867), which used a font I later identified as Goodfellow (also used in several of novelist Christopher Moore’s covers). The result was this:
This is the cover I submitted with for my Kindle Scout campaign. I still like this cover; it’s elegant. But sandwiched between 3D covers on Kindle Scout, it looked a little flat. So I hired a designer, Perry Kirkpatrick (www.perryelisabethdesign.com), who had designed the cover of my previous book, With Artistic License. I gave her some watch photos and she came up with three different designs. They were all good, but not what I was looking for. She was very patient with me and worked on an hourly basis as I asked her to try first one thing then another. It was a long process as I kept asking for more design elements, and after many iterations I was somewhat pleased with this one:
I still like it. It looks very professional and intriguing, but there was still something lacking. Part of the problem, I realized was the uppercase treatment of the title (I prefer the Title Case). But Perry suggested it might be too busy. I thought about that, and realized that sometimes simpler is better, particularly when viewing thumbnail covers on a computer screen or phone. So I went back to designing the cover myself, with the goal of finding something that worked well on a tablet or phone. I won’t bore you with the many subtle iterations of that cover. The one I finally settled on was this:
I preferred another version with the watches shrunk to a smaller size, but a poll of more than 160 potential readers preferred this cover by a margin of over almost 4 to 1. So there you have it — the evolution of a cover design. Is one better than another? I’ll leave that to you.
When searching online for a new book to read, readers have only three things with which to make a judgement: The excerpt, the blurb, and the cover. For Time Management, I’m reasonably confident the excerpt is sufficiently compelling. The blurb may need work (I’m not an ad man). But one’s first impression will always be of the cover (we really do judge a book by its cover). So I’ve decided to try out two cover designs and I’m asking for your opinion. Please email me at mossbeach@comcast.net (or double clicking on the title of this post to bring up the comment bar) to cast your vote for 1. The gold cover, or 2. The farmhouse cover.
My neighbor, friend and occasional traveling companion of many decades is Grammy nominated and Emmy award-winning composer, Christopher Hedge. Over the years we’ve had a number of conversations about the best way to nurture creativity. If he were a writer, he’d be a “pantser,” which is to say someone who flies by the seat of his pants, progressing intuitively forward from one idea to another, (more…)
In the old days, before the publishing industry fell apart, writers had to pass two gatekeepers before they could hold a book in their hands. A writer would submit a novel to an agent. Once accepted by an agent, the writer would then give 10% of any profits to the agent in return for a first edit and advice, and to be introduced to the publishers with whom the agent worked. Once accepted by a publisher, an (more…)
My mother made a pact with me when I was three: If I didn’t beg for a treat when we went marketing, she would buy me a book. So as she marketed, I perused the children’s books, bringing home Mr. Wishing Went Fishing; Bobby and His Airplanes; The Pokey Little Puppy; The Saggy Baggy Elephant; From Timbuktu to Kalamazoo; The Little Red Caboose; Fuzzy Dan, etc. My parents and siblings read those books to me. My classmates and I learned to read in first grade by way of “Dick & Jane” books. (more…)
This blog will be the place where I discuss the creative process. It’s also a place where I’ll occasionally solicit advice from my readers. However, as the love of reading inspired me to spend my life writing, I’ll also blog about reading in general, books I’ve read and books I’m currently reading. I’m hoping that you, dear reader, will participate with your comments. Let’s start off with a few of my favorite books, just off the top of my head and in no particular order: (more…)
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