#cause i need to give the YA novel back to the editor and then do full read-through edits of both

[lordsardine]

😩😩😩

screaming, crying, throwing up, etc.

I only have three chapters left now 😩

[astrovian]

Richard Armitage interviews Harlan Coben for the Win audiobook (released 18/03/21)

Full transcript under cut

RA: Hi, I’m Richard Armitage. I played Adam Price in the Netflix series The Stranger, which was adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. With me is the man himself, Harlan Coben, number one New York Times bestseller, the author of over thirty novels, including the one you’ve just listened to. I’m delighted to be talking to Harlan about his book, Win.

Okay Harlan, thanks for taking the time to chat about your audiobook and thanks for sending me a copy of the book. Um, it was so nice I ended up wrapping it up and giving it to my brother for Christmas.

HC: *laugh* You’re supposed to read it first, but okay, thanks Richard.

RA: No, I got the electronic version so uh, so I’ve had a good read. Congratulations, a great story. Brilliant, brilliant central character. I mean the first question I’m gonna ask is – because people listening to this have just been listening to the audiobook – are you, um, a big audiobook listener yourself?

HC: I – I go through stages, um, because my mind wanders, I sometimes have trouble focusing. But when I’m in a car, um, that’s most of the time that I’m- that I really love to use the audiobooks because it does make the ride just fly by. However, I’ve set up my life that I don’t have to commute to work every day, so I don’t have it steadily – it’s usually when I’m doing a nice long ride, I get a really good audiobook and time just flies by.

RA: And have you- have you got any favourite audiobooks that you’ve listened to recently, or any podcasts or what is it that floats your boat?

HC: You know, it’s funny. I still remember when I was a working man, way back when, when audiobooks were really first starting out and we had them on cassette tapes, I listened to the entire Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, um, it was about thirty hours long, going back and forth to work for almost a month. And I still have memories of that experience, and it’s probably, well god, it’s probably 1990 I did that, 1989, something like that.

RA: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I’ve got a- I’ve got a few journeys up and back from Manchester this year, we’re about to start working on Stay Close, so I’ll happily – I’m happy to take any recommendations of any good books, so maybe I’ll listen to Bonfire of the Vanitites.

HC: Well I tell ya, a lot of people – first of all, it’s a brilliant book, it’s maybe a bit dated, but I doubt that, um. I think Richard, I get more people telling me to listen to any book that you read.

RA: *laugh*

HC: I said, “Hey, I spend a lot of time with this guy, I’m about to do my second television show that stars Richard Armitage. No one I think has starred in two shows that I’ve done ever, so I get a lot of him anyway.” *laugh*

RA: You don’t need my voice in your head when you’re driving, that’s – that’s torture.

HC: That’s right, I’ll be hearing notes on, on scripts in my head if I hear you going. For those who don’t know who are listening, y’know, Richard starred in The Stranger, um, and now is going to be starring in Stay Close, uh, based off two of my novels which I’m sure you can get on audiobook.

RA: And on that note, what um, you’ve had so many adaptations now that have moved from page to screen – what is it like when you go through that process? When you’re – ‘cause you’re very hands on in the way that you kind of collaborate with not just the actors, but with the producers and y’know, the writers. I mean, you’re – you’re writing it yourself. Um, what is it like through, through that whole process, from starting to developing to seeing it kind of realised on screen?

HC: I think the key for me is not to be slavishly devoted to the novel. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people who are trying to make an adaptation make. So, I go into it, ‘what is the best TV series we can make?’, if it’s true to the book, great. If it’s not true to the book, also great. Um, so I move my stories to various countries, we’ve changed characters around, we’ve changed motivations. Because they’re two very different mediums – a book is a book, and a TV series is a TV series. They should not be the same. One is a visual medium, one is not. Even, even um, audiobooks are slightly different um, than what you read. And they should be. Um, y’know, there’s a performance involved. 

Also, because I’ve spent most of my life alone in a room coming up with writing a book, um, where I am just everything – I’m writer, director, actor, key grip. I don’t even know what a key grip is, but I’m that. Um, it’s really nice to collaborate. So um, you’ve worked with me, I hope you agree – I like to collaborate, I like to hear the opinions of other people and um, I really enjoy that aspect of it. I look at it like I’m – like I get to be captain of a World Cup football team, rather than being a tennis player where I’m standing there on my own, which is what happens with a novel.

RA: Yeah, and actually it’s the same when I get to narrate an audiobook, like you say – you get to be director, you get to be the cinematographer to an extent ‘cause you’re setting the scene, but one thing that I’ve – I really appreciated about working with you was having read your, your books and sometimes you’ll pass by a character that is useful to the, to the narrative that you’re telling, but when that comes to developed for TV or film you’ll take a bit more time to investigate that character, and you’re very open to treading those paths, which makes for a very kind of dense narrative with the screenwriter.

HC: Well that’s what I think we’re trying to do. If you think about The Stranger, um, y’know in the book the Stranger is a sort of nerdy teenage male.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And that just – we even tried out some people, and that just didn’t work. And it was really my idea – and I don’t say it in a bragging way, I say it as a way to show how open we all are – to change the character from being male to being female. And once I saw Hannah John-Kamen do it, then I pictured her in a room with you in that first great scene in the bar, um, or at the club when she tells you the big secret, it just worked. Um, you have to be willing to, to sort of stretch your imagination all over again and re-think your story. Which is also fun.

RA: Yeah, and also I suppose because y’know, as much as we love a faithful adaptation of a novel, um what you don’t wanna do is just deliver the novel in screenplay. You want to, for everyone that has read it it’s a new and exciting surprise, and for everyone that hasn’t it’s, y’know, it’s gonna be the same. So, um, it’s nice to kind of have a, to have your audience ready for people who have read a lot of your work, and there were, y’know, a guaranteed audience of people that had, had looked at The Stranger but what you gave them was something really surprising.

HC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And Stay Close, there’s a change in the ending to that which will hopefully shock everybody but especially the people who have already read the book, who will smugly think they know exactly what’s going on.

RA: *laugh* And me, probably. I haven’t read it yet. Um, so when you’re writing – I’m gonna double up on this question now, so when you’re writing, do you write in silence? Do you have any music playing in the background or are you – do you have like a, a kind of sacred writing space?

HC: Um, my routine is not to have a routine. Uh I, I do whatever works until it stops working and then I change up. It’s like I’m riding a horse really fast, and then the horse dies so I gotta find a new horse. So most writers will tell you ‘yes, I use this space, I do it at this time’. Um in the days before Covid, I would go to different coffee shops all the time, I would try out different… any place. Y’know, my favourite example is the end of – when I was writing The Stranger, um with about three weeks left to finish it, I had to take an Uber for the first time. This was a number of years ago. I had to take an Uber in New York City, and I felt really guilty about spending the money on an Uber and trying to justify it, so I was sitting in the back of the Uber and I was writing down notes, and I start writing really well. So for three weeks, I took Ubers wherever I went just so I could finish the book *laugh*

RA: ‘Cause that was the magic formula.

HC: Yeah, that worked! Then that stops working and then I have to find the new, a new place. So my routine is not to have a routine. If you’re trying to write out there, the key to anything is ‘does it make me write more?’ – if the answer is yes, it’s good. If the answer is no, it’s bad. It really is that simple.

RA: I’m gonna make a note of that for when I start writing myself. Um, do you – do you speak any of your characters out loud, your dialogue or your prose passages, do you say it out loud?

HC: The very last stage um, of editing. Okay first of all, no writer gets it right the first time. I know a million writers, I don’t know any writer who doesn’t re-write and re-write a lot. Well, I know one but he’s the guy none of us wanna hang out with, you know what I mean?

RA: *laugh*

HC: So um, the last stage that I do, and it’s usually after I’ve done all the editing with my editor and everything like that, we’re ready to go. I will sit in a room and I read the entire novel out loud to myself. Um, because what happens is, it’s a little bit like a musical score. Where you can – if you read it out loud, I can detect false notes that I may have missed along the way. Um, I can hear them. So the last step is that. I rarely y’know, I’m not – I’m not crazy, I’m not sitting there maybe talking out loud to myself, I’m maybe testing out lines by doing that, and I do that a lot when I’m helping with the screenplays on our shows. But um, for the most part that’s how I do it.

RA: So, in that case, would you ever narrate one of your own audiobooks?

HC: I did narrate one, uh, many years ago called Promise Me. What had happened is we had -  my Myron Bolitar series we did seven with the same reader and he retired. I hadn’t written um, I didn’t write Myron for about five or six years it was. And so they said, ‘hey, why don’t you do it?’ which was a huge mistake in many ways. One, I’m not a professional. But two, the people who were fans of Myron Bolitar liked the first guy, and it felt to them liked they had tuned into their favourite TV show and every actor had changed.

RA: *laugh*

HC: It’s really difficult to re-do or start a series, uh, when people know the- the old reader. So um, I also figure- it was also, Richard you know this of course, so for people who don’t know, it’s a lot of work. I’m a guy from New Jersey. I speak very quickly, which does not go over well in audio. I don’t do voices. I would have to sit with a pillow on my stomach because uh, my stomach would sometimes grumble and that would be picked up- *laugh*

RA: Oh, yeah!

HC: By the microphone. And it took me um, a week to record it because – and I don’t know if this is still the case – but back then, the abridged version wasn’t just a cut up version of the unabridged, I had to do a whole different reading for it. So um, it was – it was a lot of work. Um, and it’s a skill that I’m not sure I’m best to do.

RA: Yeah, it does take a lot of stamina. I mean what’s interesting is, having gotten to know you, and when I, when I now read your work, I can hear your delivery, I can hear your voice. And there’s humour in the dialogue, and there’s humour in the as well, and I – it’s an instant ‘in’ for me, so I – ‘cause, ‘cause often I read and I speak aloud when I’m reading alone in the dark, I say things out loud but I think people approach it differently. But I definitely hear your voice in, in these characters. And I think particularly in Windsor Horne Lockwood.

HC: That’s so interesting because Win, I think of my heroes that I’ve had, Win is probably the least like me. I mean um, when you think about Adam-

RA: *laughing* You have to say that! You have to say that because he’s such a badly behaved person, isn’t he?

HC: *laughing* Yeah! ‘Cause I usually like to think of myself as more of like Adam in The Stranger, who you played, or some of the other characters that – the ‘I’m a father or four’ or those kind of guys. What I love about getting into Win of course is that Win is something of an anti-hero. Um, he sort of says and does things that are not necessarily prudent or appropriate, and he can get away with that. Um, so I really loved – I loved getting in his head, it was really an interesting experience. But on the surface anyway, he’s probably the least like me of any uh, main character that I’ve ever written.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I relate to that totally. It’s a little bit like- it’s probably a side of you, you daren’t investigate, but- but when you get the chance to do it in a fiction um, you can tap into those things that we’re not allowed to do or say in your, in your regular day. But um, where did that character spring from? What was the seed that germinated into his story do you think?

HC: Rarely is this the case, but um, Win is actually – y’know, he’s the sidekick in my Myron Bolitar series but um, when I first created him I based him off my best friend in college roommate, who has a name equally obnoxious as Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third-

RA: *laugh*

HC: Very good looking, blonde guy who used to say before he would go out to parties when we were in college, he would look in the mirror and say, “It must suck to be ugly”. And so I took him and I tweaked him and made him more dangerous, uh and that’s how I, I kind of came up with Win.

RA: And does this person know that you’ve based this character on him?

HC: Oh yes! In fact, some people know who he is, he uses it. He’s still a-

RA: Oh, really?

HC: Owner of all these fancy golf clubs, he’s president of one of the most famous golf clubs, um, in the world right now. He looks the part. In fact, he one time came to one of my books signings years ago and um, he’s sitting in the back, and I tell people the story of how I created Win, and I say, “I’m not gonna tell you who, but Win is actually in this room right now”. It took the crowd about four seconds to figure out who he was, and he had a longer line to sign books that I did *laugh*

RA: Amazing. I mean I have to say, it’s- you, you start reading the story and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like this guy’ but he really grows on you, warts and all. I wonder how many people are gonna go into Saks on Fifth Avenue and go looking for the vault.

HC: *laugh* Yeah, no, I made that up. But there is place in Saks-

RA: I know, so brilliant!

HC: -but the rest of it is completely made up, this involves an app that you’ll read about when you- hopefully when you, when you read book. But yeah, it was fun to do an anti-hero where he makes decisions and does things that you don’t like, and yet you still wanna hang around with him. I always think the key to a fascinating character is not um, that he’s likeable necessarily, but that you wanna spend time with him. Not that he’s a nice guy, but if you were at a bar and you could sit with somebody and have a conversation with them and learn about their life, would this be a person you’d wanna do that with? And that’s sort of the test whenever I do a character. And Win, I think, passes that with flying colours. There are people who love Win and wanna be just like him and there are people who loathe him! But everybody, or I hope many people, are fascinated by him and his life.

RA: Well, also you’ve given him such an incredible kind of tool kit, like a skill set. I mean, I think everybody would look at that character and wish they could do the things he does, maybe not in the way that he does them, but I mean he’s- he’s exactly the kind of character that you’d hone in on, certainly from an acting point of view. I look at that and if I was, y’know, like fifteen years younger, I’d be leaping on that character to play. Which is, it means – it means he’s sort of relatable or aspirational in a kind of anti-hero way.

HC: I’ve heard this a lot, and I think it’s one of the most flattering things that I hear from my actor friends – I think everybody would want to play Win. I mean, I think the- it’s an interesting challenge, um, for a lot of actors. More so than even Myron Bolitar who is my lead series character. Um, everybody kind of wants to play win and kind of wonders who would play Win. Uh, and I take that as a – as a compliment.

RA: Are we gonna see more of him? Is he ge- are you writing more stories for him?

HC: My guess is the answer’s yes. I plan each book as it comes, so I never know until I’ve started. Is it gonna be a stand alone? Is it going to be a Myron Bolitar? Is it gonna be a young adult? Mickey Bolitar is now going to be a Win, and I don’t know until I – each book, y’know when I finish a book, I’m like a boxer who’s just gone fifteen rounds and can’t even lift my, my arms anymore, I gave it everything I had, I can’t even imagine fighting again or writing another novel. So I don’t know is the answer. Probably? I do wanna see Win again, separately or at least back with Myron, so I do think we will see Win again. But the book I’m writing right now is a sequel to The Boy From the Woods, which is the book that came out in 2020, so that’s what I’m writing now. Will I return to Win? Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see how- we’ll also see how people react. Not that I would work necessarily off of commercial interest, but it people really love this book, y’know, we don’t live in vacuum, that would probably somewhat influence what I do.

RA: Right. I mean, because so many of your- your books are being developed and being snapped up to be turned into film or television – I mean, Myron Bolitar is, is a recurring series waiting to happen, and then you’ve got your spin off of Win – I, I- I wonder if, y’know when your first ever, uh novel, did you write with kind of cinema television in your head? Is that something that as modern storytellers we can even avoid? Um, did you ever dream that these would ever turn into sort of film and TV?

HC: Well, everybody dreams, but there’s sort of two answers to it. The first answer is when I’m writing a book, I never ever, ever, not for one second do I think ‘Ooh, this would make a really good movie’ or ‘Ooh, this would make a really good TV series’ because that’s the kiss of death for a book. It really is. It’s, it’s- it’s just a disastrous thought, and if you’re out there writing really don’t try it, because it’s, it’s a big mistake. At the same time, to be realistic and honest, I grew up watching TV. Who didn’t? That’s my – I mean this is what we grew up with. To pretend you’re only influences – y’know you ask a writer ‘What’s your influences?’ “Oh, Shakespeare and Proust and Yeats” – come on. You watched TV growing up. And so that’s an influence on how you tell a story. To deny that is silly. So writers today do think in terms of cinema more just because they grew up with it. Where writers of a different generation did not, so they wouldn’t have that influence.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I think this all the time – it’s impossible to even de-program your brain not to imagine scenarios in terms of cinema. I mean I- I often think about sort of Victorian novelists that didn’t have y’know TV, and their trying to describe something that they’ve never seen or experienced. And we have references for so many things – I mean it’s almost impossible not to, we’re- we are and will always be influenced by one or the other, especially in the written word. But I- I find that it means that you can kind of uh, put aside the investigation and just get on with the storytelling. And maybe go even a little bit further. It’s like instant access. Y’know, I know exactly the world that you’re talking about when you’re y’know at the beginning of Win, but- but y’know at the same time I felt there was something very Agatha Christie like about the um, the backstory of uh, of this book, I really liked the fact that there was a historic event that was really informing what was happening right now.

HC: Well, y’know when I start a book, there’s- I’m always- I have a bunch of ideas and I’m trying to think which ones are going to go in the story, and it ends up being several. So for example, in this book, I wanted – I’ve always wanted to do an art heist. Y’know, like the Gardner Museum Heist, where they still haven’t found the paintings that were stolen, the Vermeers and the Picassos that were stolen in that particular – I can’t remember if it’s Picasso now, I know it was a Vermeer – um, stolen in that- that, heist in Boston years ago, I wanted to write a book about 60’s radicals – the Weather Underground and what would happen to people who were involved in that so many years later. I also wanted to write something about a kind of Patty Hearst-type character who was a famous kidnapping here in the 70s. So those were like three of the things that I wanted to like – to delve into. And I ended up delving into all three *laugh* which sometimes happens. 

Oh, and the last one I wanted to do – I always wanted to do um, a hoarder that was actually someone famous. There was actually um, something of a case of this in New York City where somebody died who was living in a top floor of an Upper West Side building, and it ended up being the missing son – not really missing, but had just kind of gone off the rails – of a very famous American war hero. And so, I took all of these aspects, which would seem to make three or four different novels, and I make it into one novel if I can. It’s not that different from – again, I’m referencing um, um – The Stranger y’know, because you’re here and provably a number of the people listening to us have seen The Stranger on Netflix, but it’s the same thing with The Stranger a little bit, where I had a lot of ideas for secrets that could be revealed by the Stranger, and each one could have been a separate novel. And instead, the challenge is put them all in one story and find a way to hook them together.

RA: Yeah. I mean, it’s rich in a way that when I- I’m reading it and the producer head in me is saying ‘gosh, this is gonna be a great TV show’ ‘cause you know, you’ve got the present day, you’ve got the near-past and the um, the heist story, which uh, is kind of crying out for – you just want more of it, which is brilliant in a book. When you’re – you’re leaving the reader wanting to know more and wanting to, to know more about that family and what happens to them. It’s – it’s the perfect recipe, really.

HC: And so much of it does come from your life in ways that you don’t expect – right now, maybe a lot of people are watching this uh, the Aaron Sorkin movie about the Chicago Trials from the 70s, Abbie Hoffman, who is played by uh, I think Sacha Baron Cohen played him in, in the movie. When I was in college at Amherst, Abbie Hoffman was on the run, um, but he still showed up one day at our college and gave a speech, then disappeared again. And boy, that stuck in my head always. Man, I’d love to write a character that’s kind of like Abbie Hoffman. ‘Cause he had that charisma even then, y’know on stage he was funny as heck, I must have been eighteen or nineteen um, when I – when I heard him speak. And so that – I never consciously back then, I didn’t think that, but every once in a while those experiences come to head and you wanna write about it.

RA: Mm-hmm. You’ve been writing for quite a few years now-

HC: *Laugh*

RA: -you’re – I don’t know if you can even remember what it was like when you first stated your very first book. Um, and some people have said that books are like children in a way, you sort of rear them and then the more you do, the more familiar you are with that process. But would you – I mean, it’s difficult for you to answer this, but would you say you have a favourite book that you’ve written?

HC: I don’t have a favourite book that I’ve written. Um, this – this sounds self-serving, but it’s usually the book, the most recent book, that I like the best. Um, it’s a little bit like – and the way I try to explain this is – maybe you wrote a paper, an essay when you were in college which you thought was brilliant. You remember that moment in school and you wrote a paper and you thought it was brilliant and you find it now and you re-read it and you go, ‘wow, this wasn’t good after all’. It’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just that you have sort of moved on and you’re not that sort of person and so you see all the flaws. So in the older books, which I don’t re-read, I see all of the flaws. I always think, y’know even if you think of yourself, what you thought ten or fifteen years ago – you sort of go ‘ugh, what did I know back then, I’m so much smarter now’. So the same thing a little bit with books, where I think I’m learning more and the current book is better. One of the interesting experiences of working on these adaptation is having to go back and read a book – in some cases we’re doing one, the next one I think uh comes out in France for example, is Gone for Good, which I think was released in 2002! Or 2003. So I wrote it twenty years ago. And to have to go back and read it now, I’m always kind of cringing at some of the stuff-

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: -some of the stuff I’m kind of thrilled with, like ‘wow, that’s an interesting twist. You don’t have that kind of ending anymore’ and some of it I’m like, ‘wow, why’d you go there?’ so it’s an interesting experience.

RA: Yeah, I feel the same. I very – I, uh, very early on in my career I would watch my work back in quite a lot of detail, thinking ‘I’m gonna learn something’ and then as I got older it was – it was almost unbearable to just do that. And I actually haven’t been able to do that, but it’s because when you’re – when you’re first starting out you throw everything you’ve got into that first breakout role that you do, and then your realise that you’re always in danger of repeating yourself and you think – ‘gosh, people are gonna suss me out that I’m only capable of doing one or two things’, but you live in hope that you can, y’know, find that one thing that you can completely reinvent. Y’know I still hope for that.

HC: I still think that everyone who I’ve ever met who is successful at what they do has imposter syndrome. If you don’t um, you’re prob- you have a false bravado and you’re in trouble. I always say, “only bad writers think they’re good”. The rest of us really suffer with that, and really questioning and always think we’re gonna be sussed out. And I can tell you, um, Stephen King sent me a book not that long ago because he’d nicely put my name in it and wanted my reaction. But even Steve, after all his success and whatever else, he still worries about the reaction, that he’s as good as he used to be, that people will still like it, he’s – I know him. He still worries about it. And when you stop, that’s when you’re in trouble I think as an artist, when you’re starting to doubt what it- when you don’t have the doubts, you start having an overconfidence that you sort of got this. It’s a little bit like my golf game, frankly.

RA: *laugh*

HC: There’s moment’s when I’m about to swing, y’know, I’m gonna be okay and then you get out there and you stink all over again. So-

RA: Yep

HC: -you’re constantly trying to get better and so I imagine it must be difficult to look at your old roles and you – you’re kinda cringing, right? You see all the mistakes you’re making. You see through you so to speak, right?

RA: Yep. Absolutely.

HC: And then someone will come up to you, right, and they’ll say, “Oh, my favourite thing you ever did was-“ and then they’ll list something you did twenty years ago, and you want them to pay attention to what you’re doing now *laugh*

RA: Yep. Yep. Seeing through you is, is one of the things that is quite haunting because I do, I see through me. I can’t shake myself off, if you know what I mean.

HC: Well, you are very cool, you don’t watch any of it until it’s all over. Uh, that’s correct right? You never watched any of our rushes or I remember trying to tell you that you’re doing great and all that-

RA: No, I watched, I watched the first shot-

HC: -and you had not seen any of it and I watch you every day when you’re on set working on our shows and I’ll comment if I see something or whatever, to either you directly or the director, uh, and most of the time I’m – I’m complimenting you, but you don’t – you don’t know either, because you’re not watching, you’re not getting lost in that.

RA: Yeah, I don’t like to watch or be somebody that studies myself to much, I don’t think that’s my job. I think my job is to be inside the character looking out, rather than the other way around. I leave that to the experts like you and the director.

HC: Also, I think it’s- I think if you start worrying about what – you’re right – and also you don’t have the distance. This is always an issue when I – I first start watching the cuts of the first episodes, and I read the book while I’m editing it, while I try to take time between my writing it and then seeing it, I have to sort of put myself in the position of being somebody who knows nothing about this, and doesn’t come in knowing the story already that I’ve already read or seen a thousand time. How do I keep it fresh in my head when I’m trying to be objective and watching it so we can make edits. Uh, both on the screen or on the page.

RA: Mm-hmm. What draws you to crime/thriller? What – I mean is that – I, I can’t often imagine you writing a romantic novel, but what is it that draws you to this particular genre?

HC: Well, y’know to me it’s uh, not really a genre. It’s more like – it’s a form. It’s more like saying it’s a haiku or a sonata.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And within that form I can, and hopefully have, done everything. Um, I think The Stranger for example is more a story about family, uh, and the secrets we try to hide, rather than it is about who killed who – y’know, the mystery angle of it.

RA: Yeah.

HC: One of my most, uh well-known books, my first bestseller, was a book called Tell No One which was made into a French film starring François Cluze, and that’s really a love story, it’s about a man who’s madly in love with his wife and eight years earlier, she was murdered. And then eight years passed, he gets an email, he clicks the hyperlink, he sees a webcam and his dead wife walks by, still alive., And the pursuit, the wanting to get back, the hope for full redemption is really what drives the story more than ‘who killed who’.

RA: Mmm-hmm.

HC: So different stories do different things. But the great thing about the form of crime fiction is that it compels me to tell a story. I’m not getting lost in the beauty of my own genius, my own kind of navel-gazing. I have to continue to tell a story and entertain you. So any of the themes that I wanna tell, any of the things I wanna discuss, has to be slave to that story. And I think that’s probably a rich tradition. If you think about Dumas really, wasn’t that all crime fiction? Even Shakespeare is mostly crime fiction.

RA: Yeah.

HC: Most great stories, if I ask you to name a favourite novel that’s over a hundred years old, Dostoevsky, whoever, you will find that there’s almost always a crime in it. There’s almost always a crime story.

RA: I mean it’s one of the things that I get very excited about, um, I mean obviously I haven’t read your entire canon but I – there’s a signature, or a theme that you love to play on which is this idea that – that um, the people you know aren’t telling you everything about themselves, or that there’s something to hide and that in our modern world, with technology, we have this sort of ability to – to sort of lead multiple lives of truths or lies. And it’s something which I think we immediately recognise. ‘Cause I think we – we’re living that, that reality, and it’s a theme that I really enjoy about your writing.

HC: Well, first of all, thanks. Second, um, there’s a lot of things we’ve heard about the human condition. One of my favourites about the human condition that I used to write, is that we all believe that we are uniquely complex and no one knows the inside of us. And yet we think we read everybody else pretty well. We all think we are uniquely complex and the person across from us, we can kind of figure out. They’re not quite like us. Um, and that’s something I love to play with when I write. Because you’ve gotta remember that everybody is uniquely complex and on a humanity level, and on an empathy level, I raise my kids and I’m always teaching them that every person you see, the richest, the poorest, the happiest, the saddest – everybody has hopes and dreams. Just think that, when you see a stranger on the street, when you’re going to interact with somebody, when you’re getting angry at somebody, whatever it is – just remember, they have hope and dreams. Um, small little thought, but it helps me create a character as well.

RA: There’s also a- a kind of very strong level of self-deception involved, which I think can be quite surprising. Because you always read a character and go, ‘I’m not like that’ or ‘I would never do that’ and then if you really think about it, we – there’s a truth we tell ourselves about ourselves which isn’t always honest.

HC: Well, exactly. It’s really come to fruition in the world the last few years, where I kind of joked that I’ve been working too hard on making my villains sympathetic, the villains in today’s world don’t seem to be very – very complex at all.

RA: *laugh*

HC: But for the most part, people don’t think they’re bad guys. Even the bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys.

RA: Yeah.

HC: They have some way of, of justifying. It’s one of the great things about human beings, or one of the most prevailing thing about a human being, is we all have the ability to self-rationalise, to self-justify. Um, and so I’ve always tried with my villains, and I hope that I did it in everything that we’ve done together, to try to make even the villain – you may not like the villain, but you get them. I don’t really write books – I don’t write books where the serial killer is hacking up people for no reason, that doesn’t really interest me. I prefer the crimes where you can say, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have done it maybe, but I can see why that happened. I can see if I was put in that position, um, where I may have done something similar’. That to me is a much more interesting villain than somebody who’s just cruel and evil.

RA: Yeah. Um, final question actually, is – I mean, as a listener/reader yourself – are there any other authors whose books you love and just go back – I mean, you’ve mentioned Stephen King, um I’m with you on that one – but are there any other authors who really kind of inspire you and, and y’know, like a little guilty pleasure reading for yourself and not for work?

HC: Yeah, well the problem always is that I start listing authors, and then someone will say, ‘well, what about so-and-so who’s a friend of mine’, and then I say ‘oh shoot, I forgot – I forgot that one’.

RA: *laugh*

HC: Y’know I saw recently that it’s the eleventh anniversary of the death of Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spencer novels, if by any chance you haven’t found the Spencer novels, and I don’t know how popular they are overseas – they’re fantastic, wonderful detective series. Um, so that’s one guy I would go back in time and try to find for audio. But I actually like Philip Roth a lot on audio, even though he doesn’t do crime fiction. I’m a big Michael Connelly fan and I like Lee Child, um and Laura Lippman. Y’know, I could sit here just naming um, people all day. I’m always curious also – who is reading – who does it because of the reader and who does it because of the writer. I know there’s a number of people who will listen to anything you read, Richard, because it’s you. Um, which is really quite nice, but it’s interesting the combination of the audio reader. I have Steven Weber, he’s been reading most of my novels, though I’ve had a female lead – a woman named January LaVoy who’s fantastic – and I think Weber captures my voice. He sounds a little bit like me, we both have a similar background, similar sense of humour, so part of it with the audio is also the match you end up making.

RA: Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I certainly find I don’t often get to read something which is purely my choice, I have a stack of things that are work-related, or that I’m about to record. So I don’t think I’ve – I’ve chosen a book recently which is just been- I don’t know how I would pick something, it’s usually a recommendation, so I’ll certainly have a look at the Spencer novels, they sound – they sound brilliant.

HC: Yeah, and they’re fun – there was a TV series in America for a while called ‘Spencer for Hire’ – this is s or going back to the, I guess the 70s or 80s I think. Um, those were not great, but the novels themselves were sort of – Raymond Chandler to Robert B. Parker to the guys who are working now. So he’s a huge – he was a tremendous influence on most of your favourite crime writers. I said in his obituary eleven years ago, I said, “90% of writers admit that Robert B. Parker was an influence and 10% lie about it”. So um, if you can find Robert B. Parker Spencer novels that would be a good clue for everybody out there.

RA: Brilliant. Well, that just about wraps it up. And uh, thanks for talking to me. I really enjoyed the book and no doubt it will be another best-seller and fingers crossed it ends up as a TV series.

HC: Well, thanks Richard, and I look forward to seeing you work on uh, Stay Close. I know that uh, Armitage Army out there *laugh* that – your, your loud uh supporters and fans who just adore you are going to go gaga cause you get to play somebody quite different from Adam in The Stranger. Um, it’s-

RA: Yeah. Looking forward to it.

HC: Yeah, it’ll be a lot of fun. Thanks very much.

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

Ya know what these self-indulgent Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow posts need? Self-indulgent banner art, that’s what.

Spoilers for issue #4!

Let’s start this off right with CREATOR CREDITS. Issue 4 of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is titled “Restraint, Endurance, and Passion.” Written by Tom King, Art by Bilquis Evely, Colors by Matheus Lopes, Letters by Clayton Cowles, and Edited by Brittany Holzherr. (w/ Assist. Editor: Bixie Mathieu & Senior Editor Mike Cotton)

THE STORY: 

Right, so this? This issue? Best one yet.

Also the bleakest of the bunch thus far; even though we don’t always see the brutality of the space pirates that Kara and Ruthye are following, there’s...the suggestion of it. The aftermath. And how Kara responds to it.

Okay, getting a little ahead of myself. BASIC PLOT SUMMARY: Ruthye and Kara continue their pursuit of Krem, who has taken up with Barbond’s Brigands.

The Brigands basically just. Murder and terrorize people, for profit.

Each planet they visit brings new horrors, as well as people who need Supergirl’s help.

And help she does.

KARA-CTERIZATION:

I yell a lot about the art on this book, and have, in fact, openly admitted that I’m primarily here for Evely and Lopes.

Well, that wily son-of-a-gun King went and wrote some of the best ‘Super’ stuff I’ve ever read and dang it, dang it, now I gotta yell about the words too. XD

Specifically, I wanna yell (in a good way!) about some words that occur towards the very end of the book.

Kara and Ruthye have Seen Some Things; things like genocide and mass grave sites and horrible violence, and upon reaching a planet where peaceful monks were slaughtered, Kara’s had enough, and needs to leave because if she screams, she’ll destroy what little is left of the monks’ monastery.

Here’s the text in full, because my gosh. It’s so good:

“What I write next I write based on my observations in those long-ago days at the side of the greatest warrior in the history of this august reality we all call home. It is important to note that my assertions do not rely on anything Supergirl said. It was not a subject we ever discussed or even approached, but nonetheless I believe it to be as true as the turning of worlds. You see, what is not well understood about the daughter of Krypton is that her power was not one of action but one of restraint, endurance, and passion. She did not choose to fire a beam from her eyes, or have breath of ice, or run faster than a speeding bullet. Or any of her other well-documented miracles. No, she held back her heat vision to look you in the face. She warmed her breath to converse with you. She slowed herself to walk by your side. Ever moment of every day, she suppressed the forces churning inside of her. All of the energy of a dead world that strained against her many barriers, eternally demanded to be released. I believe this effort hurt her. I believe she lived her life in pain. But I reiterate again, for I think it important enough to repeat--These beliefs are based on my time at her side, watching her as she moved through strife and sorrow. If you were to have asked her, I have little doubt she would have claimed that such as assertion was absurd. She would say she felt fine and well and then she’d as you if you needed any help.”

A long chunk of words, I know (this comic is DENSE!) but like. This is it. This is one of the defining attributes of the Supers--all that raw power at their disposal and they choose to help people, to be kind, to suppress that power for the benefit and safety of others.

HNNNNNNNG.

Hope, Help, and Compassion for All.

Whole lotta folks claimed at the outset of this book that King did not understand Kara, that he was a bad fit. And that may be so, I suppose--there’s a whole other discussion about like. The violence and swearing and ‘does that belong in a Supergirl book?’ But the characterization? Getting that Kara and Clark are just good people? 

King gets it. He got it in Superman: Up in the Sky and he gets it here, in Woman of Tomorrow.

Other things King gets! Kara is stubborn! Kara is passionate! Kara is going to fix things, even if the effort of doing so hurts her, physically, emotionally, and mentally!

(Fuuuuuuun fact for the crowd saying that Woman of Tomorrow is vastly superior to the CW show: TV Kara is ALSO all of those things! King isn’t pulling this stuff out of thin air. It’s almost like...gosh. I don’t know! Both the show and Tom King are pulling from the character’s comic history, or something!!!! HOW NOVEL.) 

Like, seriously. There’s a lot of overlap. Stop pitting Karas against each other!

Anyways!

I promised art, so here is art!

Oh, right, forgot to mention, Kara literally THROWS HERSELF INTO THE SUN to express her grief and anger, so as to not cause that unnecessary destruction. She gives new meaning to the phrase: Set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. 

More art yelling: GOTTDAMN, the way Evely draws Kara just colliding with the surface of the sun and then the way Kara’s hair like...becomes the flames...

I am FEELING FEELINGS. HOW DARE.

Also, props to King and Cowles; King for deciding to have that initial scream, Cowles for the way the letters burst forth from the point of impact on the sun, and then back to King who decided that it would just be...devastating silent screaming from Kara, for the remainder of the scene. 

Back to the characterization, I just wanted to highlight something I mentioned...earlier on, I think? In these posts? But haven’t brought up recently, and that is how this book has not once brought up Zor-El, and I think Superman only got a quick mention in issue 2.

Honestly, I think that’s gotta be some kind of record.

It’s so refreshing. Not because I think there should never be mentions of Clark, or anything--I love that boy--but because so much of modern Supergirl comic drama is mined from the same like, angsting over her place compared to Clark, or her crazy sometimes-a-supervillain dad. 

There is no Clark and Kara drama here, no manufactured friction, because it’s just. A cool Supergirl story! 

Gonna keep going, but let’s do it with some more...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT!!!!

Once again, Mat Lopes is all over the dang place with his palettes, it’s marvelous.

Each new planet gives Evely the opportunity to go hog wild on the worldbuilding and design, and similarly! Each new locale is an opportunity for Lopes to set the tone with colors. Like, here, towards the beginning of the book, we’ve got a planet bathed in this warm, pale yellow/orange light. 

(Quick note: “Sure, yeah, I get it. We all have our duties. And it’s mine as a neighbor to do what I can to help you with yours. Please.” A+ Kara content. We love to see it. And then locating the remains of the alien’s daughter, so that they can go visit the grave site and have some emotional closure???? It’s just. So. Touching.)

Anyways, back to colors.

Like!!!! LOOK AT THAT JUMP. From the soft, almost pastoral feel of the delicate oranges and yellows to HARD GREEN, PINK, AND PURPLE. (Difficult colors to pull off in print, I might add.) 

(This is also an interesting scene, character-wise, because I think it helps re-contextualize some earlier stuff with Kara. Like, I’m mostly thinking that incident on the bus, where she was swearing at the passengers as the space dragon was about to destroy them. Here, we see Kara kind of...goad this alien woman into releasing her pent up emotions by yelling at her/getting her to fight, and you can clearly see at the end of it that Kara did not mean the things she said, because check this out:

She goes and gives her a hug once the woman is able to finally cry.

It’s not ‘Kara is being mean, Kara is swearing at her’, it’s, ‘Kara has an unorthodox solution to a problem, and she’s gonna FIX that problem, NO MATTER WHAT.’

Circling back to the bus thing--again, that could be an instance of ‘unorthodox approach to a weird situation that Kara is going to handle because lives are at stake.’)

But also, DIG THAT KIRBY KRACKLE, BAY-BEEEEE!

And a little Strange Adventures easter egg! The Pykkts! 

(I think those guys are unique to the Black Label series, rather than deep Adam Strange lore, but don’t quote me on that.)

Moving on to YET ANOTHER PALETTE, one I’ve dubbed, ‘Treasure Planet Purple/Grey’

Love Ruthye’s snoozing against the door, waiting for Kara.

Also, just as striking as the colors of the environment, are the colors used on Kara. 

If you compare this page with the previous one, Kara’s eyes are a paler shade of blue, and the red-rimmed look on her eyes here is not as intense as the red-rimmed look we saw back in issue one, when she was confronting Krem. 

All of which to say! There’s a pale, haunted quality to both the linework and the colors. Like. We know Kara has Seen Some Things. But she’s shoving all that stuff down to protect Ruthye, to save Krypto, and to stop these monsters, and you get all of that WITH COLORS AND LINES ON A PAGE.

I love it, I love it so much.

OTHER BOOKS WISH THEY HAD THIS LEVEL OF CHARACTER ACTING, I TELL YA! THEY WISH THEY HAD THIS BEAUTIFUL ALCHEMY OF INKER, COLORIST, AND WRITER WORKING IN SUCH TIGHT TANDEM!

Ahem. XD

Alright, last bit of art, lest I just. Post the whole issue in here. (Which I’m honestly always tempted to do but Strong Feelings about Piracy hold me back.)

JUST HECKIN’ LOOK AT THAT BLUE, MAN. JUST LOOK AT IT. S’BEAUTIFUL.

And more stunning character acting from Evely. Like. Bottom middle panel. The expression, the tilt of her head and the shadows on her eyes...

*insert silent flailing here*

Oh, also, KRYPTO LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVESSSS (for now). 

I’m never right about these things, so I’m glad the one time I’ve correctly read a thing is when it involves Krypto not, ya know. Being dead. XD

Also absolutely love that Kara’s instinct is to send Ruthye home to protect her--once more leaning into that whole, ‘I’m going to protect you, even at great cost to myself’, though of course we know that she can’t send her home, not here, not now, just halfway through our journey. 

ERRRRRRGH, so mad we’re not getting twelve issues of this! CURSE YOU, POOR SUPERGIRL TRADE SALES! CURSE YOOOOOOU!

That said, King’s pacing? Has been phenomenal. I feel like Strange Adventures and even Mr. Miracle kinda...I’m not gonna say dragged, that’s not quite right. But it is more build up, I guess. Takes a while to get to the payoff.

Here, I think King is pushing things steadily along as he doesn’t have the benefit of an additional four issues, so he has to get to the point, so to speak. Keeps everything moving.

SOME FINAL, MISC. STUFF:

I’ve sort of glossed over the darker stuff from this issue, and I just wanna note that like. This is a book that features a bad guy getting stoned (in the death sentence way, not the drug way) on panel. Like. I can’t recommend this to children.

I can’t even really recommend it to some other Supergirl fans, because I know that the King elements will be too off-putting. 

It never feels like the book is going too far, though. At least in like an...exploitative way? If that makes sense?

The violence is handled with discretion, I guess is what I’m trying to convey. This could very easily tip over into like, gross shock factor territory, if not handled well, but I think the creative team pulls it off.

...Still wouldn’t hand this book to kids, though. XD

As mentioned, we’re halfway through this series! Can’t wait to see where it goes--every time I think I have this book figured out, it surprises me. So, like. Bring on the Dinosaur planet! With no sunlight! I wanna see how Lopes handles THAT. XD

(But Oh, OooooOOooh, we gotta wait until NOVEMBER.)

(Hhhnnnnng!)

(Then again, maybe that’s good; we’ve got the TV show in the meantime, and then once it ends we can pick right up with new Supergirl content just a few weeks later.)

(...Aw. Made myself a little sad, thinking about the TV show coming to an end.)

:C

So as not to end on that sad note, here once again is tiny, smushed Kara:

Give ‘em the ol razzle dazzle.

[kinghoranshit]

Tell Me a Lie (NH) Ch 3

Word Count: 2,065

Warnings: Swearing

I snapped a pretzel in half and munched on it. I dipped the other half into the small jar of peanut butter and popped it into my mouth before I flipped the piece of paper to the other side. I was deep in editing mode for Stone Cold. 

I had talked to my manager about the upcoming events since there were red carpet dates already locked down for later that year, and she approved them, along with congratulations on the romance. But I was not able to get any definitive days off to truly work on Stone Cold, so I was still back to my weird schedule to get it finished on time. 

Out of bad habit, I clicked my power button on my phone and looked at the screen for anything to distract me for a short second. There was a message from Niall. 

N: Yoo, it’s go time . 

L: Really? What about publicity photos?

N: This is gonna work better . I’m gonna use one of our old selfies . 

L: Haha You mean from backstage in Chicago? That was like 6 months ago... 

N: It’s the only recent once we’ve got , Kelly . 

It’ll work 

L: I guess you’re right.

N: I am (: 

Be ready for it . 

Now, an Instagram notification came up and I already knew who it was from. I pulled down my notifications bar to see it and tapped it. I swear my heart stopped at the caption. 

@NiallOfficial: You know I don’t like lying to you all, but I’ve kept this a secret . For the sake of wanting our first few months to be only us . Well , those few months turned into a full year . I couldn’t be happier with this woman ! She makes me feel like I’m on cloud 9 . She even makes the golf losses better haha

He’d also tagged me. It was another requirement for social media; all posts had to be tagged. I was suddenly super nervous. This was actually it. There were so many new follows, likes, and comments on my account, and people were commenting congrats underneath Niall’s; though it wasn’t hard to miss a few of the mean wishes. 

K: So…. this is really it?

N: Yup . You got this , Kelly !   

K: There weren’t that many restrictions to the socials, surprisingly…

Do I have to follow people back? 

N: Haha no ! Follow who ya want 

K: Cool

A Twitter notification popped up on my top bar. I pulled it down to see Niall had tagged me in a photo there as well, and it was similarly worded to Instagram. At least it wasn’t a total copy and paste, that wasn’t necessarily Niall’s style. The Twitter notifications also started to flow in and I knew there had to be some way to filter them or this was going to be overwhelming.

K: Please tell me there’s a way to filter the notifications 

N: Absolutely , under your settings there should be a way to just get ones of people you follow 

If you get verified , I’ll help you with those 

K: Who said anything about me getting verified? 

N: Kelly , don’t act so cavalier love . It’ll happen eventually . 

I’ll walk you through it , I had Modest to help me and you’ve got me to help you

K: Duh duh DUHHHH

N: Okay , if you don’t want it I won ‘t give it to ya 

K: You know you will anyway

You loooove me 

N: Augh

You’re right 

***

I finally gathered the courage to thoroughly go through my Twitter notifications. I figured that the most recent ones may not be necessarily nice since I had been MIA for a few days after Niall’s initial post. But could they really blame me? I didn’t think so. 

My Twitter followers went from literally 450 to 38K. Just cause I was Niall’s “girlfriend”? That’s just… I couldn’t lie, I never followed the boys’ girlfriends or PR girlfriends, whatever they were to them. I didn’t have much to say to this. 

I decided to make a tweet first before doing anything else. 

@kellygarden: Sorry I’ve been MIA y’all. About to get interactive though! How about a Q&A? Hashtag #AskKelly :) 

I used the time of people asking questions to go through some of those following me and follow a few. And when I say a few, I mean a few. I might do a follow spree at some point and do a hundred or a couple hundred people. 

I about shit my pants seeing some of those who were following me that I was already following. Like Tom Holland, all the 5SOS boys, the other lads from One Direction, and Selena Gomez. Holy shit. What? Why? I was having a hard time believing this, but I couldn’t stop a smile from crossing my lips. So unreal. 

I searched my hashtag now and looked at some of the questions, replying to some. 

@Fuckmeniall: @KellyGarden Was it love at first sight? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Fuckmeniall First off, love your @ . It was more like love at first coffee - we met at a cafe in London :)

@DamagedQueen: @KellyGarden Hw old r u? Wt do u do? #AskKely PS luv ur layout<3

@KellyGarden: Aww thanks so much! I’m 24 and a novel editor for a publishing house in London. 

@Jocylnbitch: @KellyGarden I don’t really like you, but I have a question about Niall. What’s he like in bed? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Jocylnbitch: Glad to hear your opinion about me. And I don’t think that’s any of your business. 

@Rylanroll: @KellyGarden R u a virgin? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Rylanroll Are you old enough to be asking this question? But no, I’m not.

@Hannable: @KellyGarden If you could clone yourself, would you? Why? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Hannable I would. As selfish as this is, I’d have my clone to do my work so I could go see the world and be with Nialler.

@Uplousass: @KellyGarden Have you met the other boys yet? Freddie? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Uplousass Props for the @, I’m dying! *laugh crying face emoji* I haven’t... and I’m not going to force any of them to meet me if they choose not to. 

@NiallOfficial: @KellyGarden How far are you up my ass? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @NiallOfficial I would be Hella far up if you weren’t so far up mine already :P

@Michael5SOS: @KellyGarden CAN I MEET YOU?! ASDLFKAS #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Michael5SOS DLKASLGA YEAH IF YA WANT 

@lukecummings: @KellyGarden Have you ever written fanfiction? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @lukecummings I have, but they’re cringy af. I’m not kidding on that. They will never resurface the web. 

@Astheticnolan: @KellyGarden What are you favorite smells on earth? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Astheticnolan COFFEE, books, rain, You&I perfume, flowers, Niall’s cologne

@Haywire: @KellyGarden What’s your music taste? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Haywire My music library is on crack. I could be listening to 1D, then it could go to Skillet, Ed, Counting Crows, M83, etc. It’s a wide range, except no Country.

@Luke5SOS: @KellyGarden Is that lame band 5SOS not in your music library? :(

@KellyGarden: @Luke5SOS Pft yes, yes they are in my music library. It’s full of lame bands lmfao

@Daylight5SOS: @KellyGarden Have you talked with the other boys? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Daylight5SOS Yeah, Louis. 

@Louis_Tomlinson: @KellyGarden Do look forward to officially meeting you. Freddie son says hi.

@KellyGarden: @Louis_Tomlinson I look forward to it as well. Stay safe you two x.

@Penofhope: @KellyGarden Favorite genre to write? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Penofhope Fiction. YA. Mainly Fantasy and Sci-fi. 

@Clotheswhore: @KellyGarden What's your aesthetic? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Clotheswhore By your @ I’m going to assume you mean my clothes aesthetic? I’d say it’s a little bit of everything - I can’t stick to one thing lol

@Niallsride: @KellyGarden Do you drive? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Niallsride I do. Both car and motorcycle/bikes.

@Monaymaker: @KellyGarden Do you drink? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Monaymaker I do socially.

@Harry_Styles: @KellyGarden I look forward to meeting you. Niall is a lucky guy. All the love. H. #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Harry_Styles Thank you so much, H! Soon I hope x.

@Horanyass: @KellyGarden How many kids do you want? Gender ? Would you like to have them with Niall? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Horanyass 2 or 3, any gender, and if I happen to have my kids with Niall then I’d be happy about it :)

@Styleskid: @Kellyiebabes Fave bromances of 1D and 5SOS? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Styleskid All the ones with Luke and Niall, Cashton, and Lilo. 

@5Saucelove: @KellyGarden Pancakes or waffles? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @5Saucelove Waffles all the way! X.

@Horanhasmyheart: @KellyGarden Have you heard any songs off Niall’s upcoming album? #AskKelly

@KellyGarden: @Horanhasmyheart Nope, he’s super secretive about it. I’m gonna be just as shook as all of you! Looking forward to it! 

I looked at all the ones I answered, smiling a bit at a few of them. I didn’t realize how many I answered or how much time had passed. I had to be on a work call soon, which could go until midnight because of the time difference. 

@KellyGarden: Gotta get back to work. Thank you all for the questions! I’ll be doing another one of these soon, yeah?

I didn’t wait for any of the replies before I locked my phone and set my laptop up for Zoom. 

***

I huffed, observing the cherry patterned and floral dresses in my hands, and the pile of other choices I thought about taking to LA. I was so indecisive right now. How many outfits did I really need? Five days worth, but on top of some clothes for clubbing possibly, and pjs. But if I packed something I didn’t want to wear, I didn’t really want to wear the same thing. Why was I like this?

I huffed once again and flopped down onto the mass. I leave tomorrow and need to get this sorted out. After another half hour of stalling, I willed myself to get back up and actually pack. I decided on six solid outfits, on top of one clubbing fit and pjs. It seemed like the safest route.

N: Get in loser , we’re going to see Paps 

K: Hah hah like oh my god they don’t even go here 

I finally just packed. How’s LA? 

N: Kelly, you’re such a procrastinator 

LA is ready for you 

K: But I don’t know if I’m ready for LA 

N: Ooo so cliche , you’re both ready. 

See you tomorrow x

K: See you tomorrow xo

***

As much as I’d love to say I could handle getting myself to my flight on my own, I couldn’t. I hadn’t flown in a few years and that had been with a group of others. I was flying by myself now, and I have to do all the checking in and such as well. 

I took a deep breath as I approached the security check line. I set my purse and backpack in one bin and my duffel in another before setting them on the metal rods that would take it through a detecting machine. I waited for the woman to wave me through the detecting machine, and I went through fine. I mean, I didn’t have anything that would set it off. 

Once my stuff came through the other end of the metal rods line, I grabbed it and put the bins in the pile that was started. When I started walking away to find my gate, I realized I was stupid to be so nervous about going through the line. 

Finding my gate wasn’t hard. It helped that the Cedar Rapids Airport was small. There’s like eight gates. I settled myself in a seat to wait until boarding was called. I took my phone out and busied myself with Instagram and Tumblr; I just scrolled through my feed, liking and reblogging stuff. 

“Gate B is now boarding. If you are first class, you have a separate line. If you are G1 for the coach cabin, you can now board.”

That was me. 

I took another deep breath, grabbing my three bags, and I walked over to the woman. She took my ticket, ripping off the part she needed, and then handed it back to me. “Enjoy your flight.”

“Thanks,” I replied. 

I walked through the terminal and onto the fairly small plane. It was more of a jet. I found my seat and settled everything. I followed the directions given by the fly attendant as I waited for the plane to actually take off, and finally, we moved to be on the runway and ascended into the air. 

Next: Ch 4

[Masterlist]

[lilyharvord]

Some new bookish asks for you all

Hi I didn’t get tagged to do this, but I’m bored and I’ve got some hot takes. I’m going to start the chain. Imma tag some peeps too. Do the whole thing if you want or not at all. @scxrletguardsdawn @evangelineartemiasamos @cptdanvxrs

1. Which book would you consider the best book you’ve ever read and why? 

Honeslty a hard tie between The Red Queen Series and Elsewhere. Okay, so while RQ does have it’s flaws, it was a book series I started my sophomore year of high school when I was starting to reach the bottom of the barrel mentally and was realizing that maybe I wasn’t as happy as I thought I was. That book got me through high school, along with Glass Sword. When I say I weeped reading Mare Barrow’s internal dialogue in GS I was actually sitting under my covers junior/senior year WEEPING with a flashlight because on one hand I had never felt closer to a character, and on the other had never felt so understood in a book before. As for Elsewhere... that book (while being a young readers book) profoundly affected how I view life, death, and everything in between. I highly recommend it. You have to have a little patience with it as an older reader, because it is probably meant for middle school readers, but some of the things said in that book are definitely meant for older readers to ponder.

2. Are you an Austen person or a Bronte person?

Haut take. Both. (P&P holds a very special place in my heart)

3. Are there any genres you will not read?

Contemporary romance and Contemporary/non-fiction books (i’ve tried. I really have to read these and I just cant do it.) 

4. Are you a fast or slow reader?

Depends on your definition of slow/fast. I’d say I’m fast, I can read 500-600 page books in a day, but that’s going morning until almost 2 the next morning. 

5. What was your relationship with books like as a child?

They were my escape. I was heavily bullied in elementary/middle school so I would read 2-3 in a week to just escape. I think this is why I can’t read contemporary stuff, I need the fantasy. 

6. Are you the type of person who will read a book to the end whether you like it or not, or will you put it down straight away if you’re not feeling into it?

Honestly, normally I’ll push through. I think the only one I physically put down because I couldn’t take it was ACOWAR. My friend made me finish it two years or so ago so that she could complain without having to explain everything before she did. 

7. Have you ever despised something you have read?

*side eyes the entirety of Throne of Glass and A Court of Wings and Ruin* 

8. Do you prefer to read first person or third person?

Nope. But I do prefer to write in 1st person (it’s cheating, I know.)

9. Are you for or against multiple narrators in the same book?

Give me all the POVs please. 

10. Bookmarks, dog ears or leaving the novel open and face down to keep your spot?

All the above. I’ll use my dog if I have to mark my place if I have nothing nearby XD

11. Do you prefer to read at a certain time of day?

Nope. If I’ve got a book that I’m reading, I’ll read at anytime.

12. Do you need to finish a book before you can move on to the next one, or will you have multiple books going at once?

I feel called out, because right now I have like three books that I’m trying to read at the same time, but I normally like to finish a book before starting another

13. How do you chose which book to read next?

The wand chooses the wizard. Lol normally I find a book that has a good premise that I like and normally I’ll read that. Although I do take suggestions from people.

14. What is your favourite children’s book?

This is very hard but The Tale of Despereaux, or The Wrinkle In Time series. Does the Book Thief count? Cause if so that books on this list too. If we’re talking really really young: The Original Velveteen Rabbit or Goodnight Moon (my mom used to read both to me when I was little and i have vivid memories of that). 

15. Do you agree that Jane Eyre should be considered a feminist novel?

Young high school me vehemently says yes. But older wiser me squints and says: hmmmmnnnnnnnn maybe. 

16. What’s your favourite of Shakespeare’s plays?

Hamlet, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, and Macbeth

17. Do you know any poetry by heart?

Sadly no. 

18. Did you enjoy the Hunger Games?

I’m unashamed to say I still do. 

19. E-reader or traditional book?

I like traditional books, but the older I get the more I like E-readers because it makes it so much easier to transport all my babies. 

20. Do you read in the bathroom?

not really. 

21. Ideal reading position?

Curled up somewhere with a drink. 

22. Hardcover or paperback?

Which ever has the prettier cover XD

23. Nicest edition or cheapest edition?

Which ever has the prettier cover XD

24. Do you prefer happy endings or sad endings?

OOOOOOOo haut take, I prefer the ending that the book calls for. Whether it be happy or sad. 

25. Do you enjoy concepts in books to be concrete or abstract?

Depends on what I’m reading. Sometimes, I like a book that calls me to think about the world around me and question things. Other times I like to have a book I can just dive into and tear through without having to think too much. But I think all books call for us to think about abstract concepts of the universe on some level. 

26. A book you studied in school and ended up loving?

Jane Eyre, and Brave New World, Tuck Everlasting 

27. Classics or modern literature?

Is it not enough to love both equally? XD

28. Thoughts on adults reading YA?

I am an adult reading YA. I dont know if I will ever stop either. 

29. Have you ever read a book in another language?

I’ve read some easy books in spanish back when I was in high school. 

30. Have you ever written your own book?

Tee hee hee, she’s been sent to an editor and Im await his first thoughts. ((((: 

[sol1056]

Okay so i'm really confused. Who pitched the idea for the Voltron reboot? Did they write the original story or was that someone else? Who's writing the story now? Like i get that there is more than one person working on the story but like to take someone's vision of their story and to just throw it in the trash is just kinda fucked up ya know? I wouldn't want to work with a network if they're gonna screw over something I came up with.

It’s not a simple picture since there’s a lot of history. There’s three parts, behind the cut: who wrote the original story (vs the original-original), who pitched the idea for a voltron reboot, who’s writing the story now, and the issue of revisions. 

I must have at least three pages of asks that talk about Hedrick’s story and how the EPs butchered it… and I recently stumbled over something that made a few pieces click together. So, if you sent me an ask about Hedrick’s story and what he’d planned, you might want to read, ‘cause this answers a lot of your questions.

who created voltron

Back in the early 80s, the Koplar brothers purchased a license from Toei’s back catalog, and adapted/cut/rearranged the original GoLion into an American-only version called Voltron. GoLion hadn’t been much of a hit in Japan; it was kinda behind the curve. When the Koplars adapted it, Voltron was a huge enough hit in the US to warrant a second season, requiring new footage from scratch (mixed in with re-used stuff from the original season). 

The sequel (using a completely different anime from Toei’s back catalog) didn’t do anywhere as well. The planned third part was never made. Since then, there’s been reboots, comic books, idk what else. 

who pitched the idea

Long story short, Universal purchased a bundled archive of licenses. These are collected existing properties they could redevelop – anything from some no-name, one-season, failed cartoons to ones that were popular once and since forgotten. Voltron was one of those properties.

I doubt anyone pitched the idea, formally. More like, the execs saw Voltron in the pack and chose it for a reboot/remake. All they needed was staff to do it, so they interviewed potential showrunners. Around that time, JDS had pitched his idea for a Streetfighter cartoon. DW TV passed on JDS’ pitch, and instead offered him the position as EP of what would become the VLD reboot. 

(An aside: JDS and LM both talk up how much they loved Voltron as kids, but in early interviews they admit neither could remember for certain who Voltron’s ‘real’ leader was — Keith or Sven — all the way up to starting their interview with the execs.) 

who wrote the version we have now 

I’ve been operating under the assumption that as the story editor, Hedrick had a major influence on the story. I’ve also noted in several different posts that S1/S2 feels like a completely different story, in more ways than one:

As the story moved into the split-seasons, it’s clear that whomever lent that guiding hand in S1/S2 was no longer present. Someone else’s fingerprints are on S3, and my guess is it’s mostly Hedrick, at least on the script-level. The word choices change, the cadences change, the beats change. From S3 on, VLD has all the hallmarks of a muddy vision. 

A few days ago, I was researching for another ask and came across this:

On-screen, a “producer” credit for a TV series will generally be given to each member of the writing staff who made a demonstrable contribution to the final script. The actual producer of the show (in the traditional sense) is listed under the credit “produced by”.

According to IMDB, these are VLD’s  executive producers:

Joaquim Dos Santos  (63 episodes, 2016-2018)Lauren Montgomery (63 episodes, 2016-2018)Jae-Myung Yoo (24 episodes, 2016-2017)Robert Koplar (23 episodes, 2016-2017)Ted Koplar (23 episodes, 2016-2017)

We’ve been assuming Hedrick steered a large part of the story. If that were so, though, Hedrick should also have EP credits. He doesn’t. The Koplars have EP credit ‘cause they created the original Voltron. JDS and LM are on there, as showrunners. 

And then there’s this guy Jae-Myung Yoo. He’s done key animation, directing, and storyboards. He has a handful of executive producer credits, mostly for single episodes. Yoo left VLD in 2016, and joined Big Fish & Begonia as a co-producer. 

I think we just found the voice that steered the first two seasons, and whose departure left the story without a clear vision. 

Yoo doesn’t have any writing credentials, but his resume goes all the way back to Gargoyles in 1995. He doesn’t have to be a writer to be a storyteller, after all; there are different ways and methods of telling stories. My guess is Yoo’s a respected directorial voice around Studio Mir, understands how a story flows, and most importantly was probably a trusted voice after working with Ryu, JDS, and LM on AtLA and LoK. 

We’re left with one of two options: Hedrick stuck to the Yoo-created outline, rewriting and rearranging as the EPs shifted tracks, and the majority of the story’s direction since S2 has been from JDS and LM. Or Hedrick did have a substantial impact from S3 on, and JDS/LM refused to grant Hedrick the proper credit for that level of contribution.  

the issue of revisions

Television’s a wacky environment. It’s somewhere between collaboration and sheer hell, especially if you don’t come with major credentials (ie, your name is not Guillermo del Toro). 

Here’s how it starts: the showrunners, any other EPs, the writers, the senior writer/head editor/story editor (title depends on seniority), production assistants, writing assistants, and other producers will gather and brainstorm the story, and come up with a synopsis for the story’s outline. When the execs approve the synopsis (after probably a round or two of feedback), the expands the synopsis into a full outline of the entire story. 

The writers set about writing the script, which are sent to various execs for their feedback. The execs send their feedback — called ‘notes’ — to the showrunner. These are usually a jumble of responses (and a lot apparently tends to be personal taste, too), and also often contradictory. It’s the EP’s job to relay the exec response to the writers’ room, and make sure things get changed so the execs are happy. 

The EP (and the writers) must do a delicate balancing act, between budget, story, and sheer insanity like one exec demanding a scene be cut and another exec thinking the scene should not only stay, but be expanded. Or insisting on specific pairing endgames (or lack thereof). Or — as seems to have plagued VLD — saying the story is too dark and ‘needs more humor,’ which the EPs appear to have interpreted as ‘do more filler episodes that have no plot relevance.’ 

The first thing to remember is that most execs are not intentionally malicious. They will ask for too much, and they often have their own agendas, but their goal is a hit, not wasting a bazillion dollars for no gain. If you look at the credentials for decision-level execs at Dreamworks, every single one came up through the ranks: they’ve directed, produced, some were also animators, and at least one did either acting or voice acting. They’ve been doing this for awhile. My advice to any wannabe-EPs (or writers) would be that when an exec says, “kids are going to be bored stiff with this scene,” listen. I’m not saying automatically change it, just give it a fair listen. 

Collaboration is hard. It takes patience and good listening skills and empathy for the people on the other side of the table. It takes a willingness to bargain and enough strength to be vulnerable, and a whole lot of honesty about your own reasonings for wanting one thing or another. 

Stories created in the high-pressure hot-house environment of a collaborative group are a very different critter than one-author novels: no one person owns the story. Not everyone wants to sign up for sharing that creative process, and that’s fine, too. We do need books with good stories as much as we need shows and movies with good stories. 

Just color me seriously unimpressed when someone in a collaborative storytelling process constantly snarks about exec meddling. I have no sympathy: they signed up for this. If their creativity is so fragile it’s threatened by feedback, they need to find a different medium, ‘cause the collaborative world of television production is probably not the best fit.  

[ayearofpike]

Christopher Pike’s Tales of Terror #2

Pocket Books, 1998 207 pages, 5 stories ISBN 0-671-55076-4 LOC: CPB Box no. 1462 vol. 11 OCLC: 40117246 Released December 1, 1998 (via B&N)

Five more short stories, but they’re all kinda longer this time. I knew it was too good to be true. One of these is 75 pages, and the others (with one exception, maybe two) smack of a big idea that he needed to get out but didn’t have the pages to do it justice. It seems like maybe he knows his contract is coming up and that he’s not going to be retained? See also the dedication page: the book is dedicated to the longtime YA editor at Simon & Schuster, because she “has always supported my writing.” I can’t find any evidence of turnover or retirement through a cursory Googling, but this seems very much like a veiled shot at changing leadership that sees new trends in YA and doesn’t feel that Christopher Pike will be a part of it.

The Burning Witch

Pike jumps back into short stories with the longest one in this book, and with a return to Marvin Summer’s side, who he says is “a thrill” to write as, considering Marvin has “ten times the talent” Pike does. Which ... I don’t know about that. Obviously we can’t see anything Marvin has written, and whatever he spurts out is going to be via Pike’s brain anyway, so I guess we just have to imagine it.

But anyway, there’s this old friend from high school who needs Marvin’s help to extricate herself from a cult. Because when you’re in trouble with a cult, of course you go to the horror writer, which now that I say it actually makes a little sense. They go to the ritual, because the old friend has a feeling that they already have her in their magical clutches and to no-show would be worse than sticking it out. Of course Marvin is immediately in over his head, feeling drugged and soporific, unable to stop the three witches in charge from treating his picture of his girlfriend in such a way that she drowns in the hot tub the next day.

By chance, Marvin is writing a novel about a young woman who channels through typing, and slowly comes to realize that a future self is giving her warnings through her present self about some changes attempting to be made to her past self. Yep, we’re back on that whole contiguous timeline thing again. But he came up with the idea after a fan letter suggested telling a past self something, and as the witches want him to bring the manuscript to the next session he’s now suspicious. He breaks into Old Friend’s apartment and learns she’s been using hypnosis to regress into past lives, and then he tracks down the hypnotist and tries a session himself, upon which he suddenly realizes that not only did he and Old Friend have a dalliance sometime in the past, but that sometime was 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. 

I didn’t mention that Old Friend was known for having terrible scars on her face from a childhood bout with antivaxxer parents smallpox. But when she reappeared in Marvin’s life, the scars were almost gone. She claimed it was plastic surgery a year ago, but everyone he talks to who she’s worked with in the last couple of months noticed a sudden change, right around the time Old Friend said she was sucked in to the cult. Marvin realizes that maybe she started it, solely in order to get back at him for what his past self did to her; i.e. outing her as a witch. But she hasn’t counted on his work on plots to come up with a devious one for himself. See, she was looking for a clue in his manuscript about a way to change the past, one that would make him the witch instead of her. Of course he beat her to the punch and gave a false clue, which swiftly and suddenly reverses her facial healing. And then he pulls out a Molotov cocktail and says they’re both done.

So she panics and runs out to the balcony, where he’s loosened the railing, and she falls off fifteen stories to her death because that’s what happens in a Pike story. But then the woman Marvin thought of as the head witch shows up and offers him a deal to serve the Dark Side or whatever. Marvin says OK and that his payment is to be Shelly alive again. Sure, the witch says, just go to sleep and in the morning she’ll be next to you and neither of you will remember any of this. Of course Marvin feels like he’s smart enough to get out of anything, and goes to take some notes for a “future story” about escaping a deal with the devil ... only he has writer’s block.

The Tomb of Time

This story works on an almost identical conceit as “The Burning Witch,” in that past and future timeline selves are showing up to help Shannon White change the course of the world through positive and negative vibrations. The difference is that they’re physically manifesting, rather than using fireside witch chants to pass information back and forth.

Basically, it’s the last day of school, and Shannon wants Senpai to notice her. She’s encouraged by the random appearances of women who claim to be this dude’s aunt and niece, who say he talks about her a lot and not to tell him because he’d be embarrassed. She’s discouraged by this blonde chick who smooches all over Senpai and writes a phone number and a time on his notebook. Weirdly, immediately after all three of these encounters, there’s an earthquake, and they grow stronger each time, so that after the last one school is finally canceled and Shannon goes home.

The blonde is there, though, and suddenly she realizes that she’s looking in a mirror except for the hair. Blonde Shannon explains that yes, of course I’m you; alien beings of a negative vibration got hold of some of your DNA and sent me to now, where I could affect the world in such a way to make it explode through enhanced negativity. The positive ones are trying to meddle, though, and they also have Shannon’s DNA and are showing up as different-age versions of herself so that she’ll go through with asking Senpai to notice her and create more love and affection in the world, which will reduce the tension that is currently threatening to literally tear it apart.

It’s too late, though: Blonde Shannon has given Senpai Now Shannon’s phone number and is going to shoot her and then answer the phone and be rude, which will cause the earth to blow up. (Now we see why I never called girls in high school ... too much responsibility.) Too bad for her, Good Future Shannon plugged the barrel of the gun before Blonde Shannon ever showed, so it explodes in her hands, and Now Shannon is able to answer the phone and apologize for weirdness and get a date for ice cream, thus saving the world. Yay!

Bamboo

This story is certainly not what we expect from Pike. It’s a lot closer to Sati than any of his other work, in that there’s a narrative about a group of friends trying to find the right path in life with some guidance from a teacher who leaves too soon. It’s more about mood than visceral grossness, and so I think it works. This is my “maybe” caveat for a story that was conceived as a short story — yes, he says he wrote it “in a few hours,” but there’s potentially room here to make this a novel.

We start with three friends that embody the good, the bad, and the neutral, much like the soul concept from The Lost Mind. They go to meet a new man who’s just moved into town, an Indian who had lost his whole family to circumstances of poverty, and who has a story for them about lost souls being trapped in shafts of bamboo and the possibility of saving them through cleansing fire. The kids are eight or so at the beginning of the story, and they stay friends with the old man through high school graduation, at which time he gives them gifts symbolic of hope and protection of their souls. And then he dies, because he’s old.

Two of the friends follow quickly: the bad soul in military action in the Middle East, the good soul (who had married the bad one and was pregnant with his child) of an overdose. She doesn’t die right away, though, and the neutral one (our narrator) understands that hey, her soul is trapped in the bamboo because of the severity of her action in trying to end her life. So he goes to the old man’s house, which by now is overgrown with giant stalks of bamboo, and starts a fire in the yard. And sure enough, by morning she’s gone.

Again, this story is really reliant on mood. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot here, and I think Pike could have done a whole bunch with who these kids are and how they interact with each other and the rest of the town to make it into something bigger. But what came out is pretty and poetic and reasonably good.

The Thin Line

A disgruntled injured ex-basketball player shows up at his school with guns, intending to kill the coach and the whole team and maybe the cheerleaders, which include his ex-girlfriend. He gets cold feet at the last minute and turns the whole deal into a terrorist situation, for which he steals money and a plane and jumps with it and a parachute and his ex-now-on-again girlfriend. But then she feels upset about the one kid who got shot in the leg and the pilot who died jumping out of the plane, and kills herself by walking in front of a bus. So even if the injured kid won, he has now lost.

I really don’t have a lot to say about school shooting stories, and so I am not going to unpack this any more. However, it is important to note that Pike references the school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas and Springfield, Oregon, which seem to have stayed his hand in fleshing this out and making it into a full novel. (Columbine happened five months later, too.) It pisses me off that we had what seemed like a flash point in school shootings and that it felt like enough to mobilize us, but twenty years later we’re still having the same fucking conversation.

The Tears of Teresa

This one is the most on-brand Pike story we’ve seen in years, It’s also the shortest, just seventeen pages. It’s so solid and strong that I hate to sully it by trying to write a recap, because the storytelling is so reliant on the intercuts between past and present that we don’t realize are happening until the last couple of pages.

It starts with a middle-aged couple coming home from a date to find that there is an intruder in their house. He forces them at gunpoint to drive to a house in Las Vegas, and then announces his intent to cripple them, to take away their mobility just like Max. 

Who is Max? This is the past intercutting part. Max was a young man who worked for his father, a successful business owner, but didn’t have any wealth of his own. He’d recently gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and knew that it wasn’t possible to support a child, so he paid for her to have an abortion. She’s torn up about it, but when he offers to take her away for a weekend to help settle her mind, she agrees and asks to go to Vegas. So they get a nice hotel room, and when he steps out on the balcony he unexpectedly gets thrown over it, because Pike.

(That’s a tweet for the thread: “Submitted for your approval, The Kid Who Got Flung Off a Balcony.”)

Max wakes up in the emergency room in pain, and overhears his girlfriend talking with some other dude — no, shit, it’s his BEST FRIEND — about their plot to kill him and give birth to his child and go after his rich dad for money. There’s a baby crying nearby too, obviously in distress, and after Max gains enough consciousness to let the schemers know they’re caught, he dies. But the baby survives, and eighteen years later he is getting Max’s revenge.

Like, fuck yeah. I don’t know that this was worth pushing through fifty pages of a school shooting, but I’m glad I didn’t put the book down before I read this story. We’re back at the blend of the evils that people are capable of with a little bit of supernatural magic that made me love Pike and be excited for this project back at Spellbound in February. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

Two more Archway Paperbacks, and Pike will be done with a certain era of writing for teenagers. Surprising? Not so much, and it really does feel like he sees the writing on the wall with this collection. Still, we close on a very solid and satisfying note here. If Simon & Schuster wanted to reprint the Fucking With Teresa trilogy (Road to Nowhere, “Revenge,” and “The Tears of Teresa”) it could have been a strong mover. I bet Pike would have no problem with it, seeing as he apparently continues to hold a grudge and keeps naming these victims after her.

[fortheloveofholland]

Vices & Virtues | 0.1 | SP

A/N: Hi, I know this lowkey sucks and its short but things will get a lot better as the chapters go on and I have more to work with. I’m gonna be posting side stuff to go along with the story (if you think of something that goes along with the book lmk, i’d love to hear it) so stay tuned, kids. I’m excited to see where the book goes and I hope you love it just as much as I do! 

ALSO I MADE A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST FOR THE BOOK THAT I’LL CONSTANTLY BE ADDING TO WHICH YOU CAN LISTEN TO HERE OR CLICK ON ONE OF THE SIDEBAR LINKS ON MY PAGE! 

XOXO

It was one of those obscure moments, you know? One of those situations that only happens in a shitty teen coming of age movie or in literally every YA novel you’d read in middle school. The room that once was my own little oasis was tainted with the scent of cigarettes, liquor and mint. And the cause of the unlikely mixture sat in front of me. All he’s done in the 20 minutes since he walked into the classroom was eat 10 mints that were left out on the desk, stuffing the wrappers into his jacket pocket and stare me down with those big brown eyes that could make God uncomfortable. 

Avoiding his gaze, I skimmed through the drafts of the Homecoming spread one last time to see if any other edits needed to be made to it before it was typed and sent to the printers.Tap! Tap! Tap! — His black boot hit the bottom of the desk. I looked up at him, narrowing my eyes. “Stop.” He ceased his actions. “Thank you.” With one last tap I looked up at him abruptly. I’m done. “Look, emo Hercules. I get that you were moved in here because you still need some sort of an arts credit, but some people are actually trying to produce a quality yearbook and we’d really appreciate it if you’d stop.” I leaned forward in my seat. “Look for the rest of the year just come in here, sit down, shut up and I’ll make sure you get the credit. You don’t have to do any work, just don’t get on my nerves. Are we clear?”

He sat up, elbows rested on his knees, learning forward to get closer to me. “Crystal.”

I sat back, gathering the papers, only to set them down and begin going through another pile. “Good.”

He began to hum the tune of an unfamiliar song, as he unwrapped another mint he managed to snatch out of the little bowl that was left on the edge of the desk. Sitting back in his seat again, he asked. “Why isn’t there a teacher?”

Looking back up from him, my lips turned down into an unamused frown. “You know you don’t have to sit here the entire class period, there’s plenty of open seats.” I motioned the pen around to the 8 empty chairs scattered across the room.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“Maternity leave.”

“So you’re just gonna go the rest of the year without one?”

“Yes and no. And I thought I told you to stop talking.”

“I’ve never been one to follow rules.”

“Wonderful.” I sat back in my chair, crossing both my arms and legs. This gave me time to actually take in his features. He was tall, very tall. He had insanely greasy, raven black hair that could use a wash or two. He wore layers, first a white Henley, on top of that a green flannel and then to top off the outfit he wore the signature black leather jacket with a double ended snake etched in to the back.

“So.” He shrugged.

“So, what?”

“You gonna tell me why theres no teacher?”

“She had her baby a couple weeks ago and until then i’ve sort of been left in charge of the class.”

“And why you?”He began rubbing the bags under his eyes.

“I mean I have yet to miss a day of school, plus, I’m editor in chief so I’m basically in charge of the class already. The only difference is now I have to do attendance and I get to sit in a better desk.” I motioned to the smaller desk that was set up next to the one I currently possessed. He looked over and then back at me, I had began tapping the pen in my hand in-between my thumb and pointer finger, a habit I had since I was younger. “Now please, for all that is good in the world, please go sit somewhere else.” He remained seated. “Look I’ll give you ten bucks if you just go away. I’m terribly close to a deadline and I need to get these done.” I held up the stack of unedited articles. With that he stood up and walked across the room and to the corner where three empty seats were placed right next to each other. He sat down in the middle and turned to face the wall with his arms crossed.

The rest of the class period was spent in silence except for the typing of students on computers and the occasional question about spreads. I looked down at my phone, the clock reading 2:08pm. Two more minutes and I was home free for the day. I began packing up my bag and taking the classroom key out of my bag to lock up. I grabbed a ten dollar bill out of my wallet and stood up. Walking over to him, I held out the bill. “Here.” I wiggled the piece of paper, his eyes cautiously watching me. A couple seconds later he took the bill, shoving it into the back pocket of his jeans.

The end of the day was different than any other. As  people exited their classrooms and flooded out into the hall, it became a mad house. Opposite sides screaming at each other, papers flying everywhere. It was like that scene from Mean Girls where the burn book was released and than an all out war broke out, except this was worse.

I turned around, quickly turning the room light off and locking the door. As I turned again I saw emo Hercules join the masses. If only this student body could learn how to take a xanax and eat cookie we’d be doing just fine. Well maybe just fine, but a whole lot better than Mean Girls post burn book. The Serpents had been here for one class period, under one hour, and it was already hell.

Stuffing the keys back into my pocket, I maneuvered my way around the chaos and out a side door, silently praising myself for opting for senior release. The parking lot, usually lined with clean cut trucks and little sports cars, was now intertwined with motorcycles and old, beat up trucks. I kept walking, occasionally nodding or waving at a classmate as I passed them until I got to my car, Quinn. He was a gem, a black 1969 Chevy Impala that my dad and uncle had fixed up for my 17th birthday and of some sorts, an apology gift for making us move to Riverdale. Unlocking the door, I threw my bag into the passengers side and slid in. Pulling out of the parking lot, I turned down the street that ran in front of the school, emo Hercules stood outside with the group he had run towards when class let out, a cigarette hanging from his lips, permanently lined with an underlying smirk.

I slowed dow the car to a stop, ignoring the fact that a line of pissed off, newly licensed sophomores sat in line behind me. “Hercules, you shouldn’t smoke on school grounds.”

He took the cigarette, holding it between his thumb and pointer finger, blowing the smoke out. “I’m doing a lot of things I shouldn’t do, princess. And it’s Sweet Pea, not Hercules.”

“I’d stick to Hercules, sounds a lot tougher.”

“So what’s yours?” He stuck the cig back in his mouth. The Serpents gaze going back and forth between the two of us.

“My name?” He nodded. “Fallon.”

[illbefinealonereads]

Blog tour! I’m offering you information and an excerpt from Out Now by Saundra Mitchell.

Out Now: Queer We Go Again! By Saundra Mitchell On Sale: May 26, 2020 Inkyard Press YOUNG ADULT FICTION/Diversity & Multicultural | YOUNG ADULT FICTION/Romance/LGBT 9781335018267; 1335018263 $18.99 USD 416 pages

A follow-up to the critically acclaimed All Out anthology, Out Now features seventeen new short stories from amazing queer YA authors. Vampires crash prom…aliens run from the government…a president’s daughter comes into her own…a true romantic tries to soften the heart of a cynical social media influencer…a selkie and the sea call out to a lost soul. Teapots and barbershops…skateboards and VW vans…Street Fighter and Ares’s sword: Out Now has a story for every reader and surprises with each turn of the page! This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Now-Queer-We-Again/dp/1335018263 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/out-now-saundra-mitchell/1133810272 IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781335018267 Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Out-Now/Saundra-Mitchell/9781335018267?id=4861510030088 AppleBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/out-now/id1481649552 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Saundra_Mitchell_Out_Now?id=0SeyDwAAQBAJ

Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture deliverer and a layout waxer. She's dodged trains, endured basic training and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children and makes paper for fun. She is the author of Shadowed Summer and The Vespertine series, the upcoming novelization of The Prom musical, and the editor of Defy the Dark. She always picks truth; dare is too easy. Visit her online at www.saundramitchell.com.

Author website: wwww.saundramitchell.com Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saundra-Mitchell/164136390442617 Twitter: @saundramitchell Instagram: @smitchellbooks Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52172088-out-now

Excerpt:

KICK. PUSH. COAST. By Candice Montgomery

Excerpted from OUT NOW: Queer We Go Again! Edited by Saundra Mitchell, used with permission by Inkyard Press, © 2020 by Inkyard Press.

 Every day, same time, same place, she appears and doesn’t say a word.

Well, she doesn’t just appear. She takes a bus. You know she takes a bus because you see her get off the bus right in front of 56th Street, just in front of the park where you skate.

You know she takes a bus and gets off right in front of the park at 56th Street because you are always at the park, wait-ing to catch a glance of her.

She—her appearance—is a constant. Unlike your sexuality, all bendy like the way your bones got after yesterday’s failed backside carve.

Bisexualpansexualdemisexualpanromanticenby all bleeding bleeding-bleeding…into one another.

That drum of an organ inside your chest tells you to just be patient. But now, here you are and there she is and you can’t help yourself.

She’s beautiful.

And so far out of your league.

You’re not even sure what she does here every day, but you probably shouldn’t continue to watch her while trying to nail a Caballerial for the first time. Losing focus there is the kind of thing that lends itself to unforgiving injuries, like that time you broke your leg in six places on the half-pipe or the time you bit clean through your bottom lip trying to take down a 360 Pop Shove It.

You’re still tasting blood to this very day. So’s your skate-board. That one got split clean in half.

She looks up at you from underneath light brown lashes that seem too long to be real. She reminds you of a Heelflip. You don’t know her well but you imagine that, at first, she’s a pretty complicated girl, before you get good enough to really know her. You assume this just given the way her hair hangs down her back in a thick, beachy plait, the way yours never could.

Not since you chopped it all off.

That’s not a look for a lady, your mom says repeatedly. But you’ve never been very femme and a few extra inches of hair plus that pink dress Mom bought you won’t change that.

You hate that dress. That dress makes you look like fondant. Someone nails a Laserflip right near where you’re standing and almost wipes out.

Stop staring. You could just go introduce yourself to her.

But what would you say?

Hi, I’m Dustyn and I really want to kiss you but I’m so confused about who I am and how am I supposed to introduce myself to you if I can’t even get my label right, oh, and also, you make me forget my own name.

And in a perfect world, she would make eyes at you. She’d make those eyes at you and melt your entire fucking world in the way only girls ever can.

Hi, Dustyn, I’m in love with you. Eyelashes. All batting eye-lashes.

No. No, the conversation probably wouldn’t go that way. Be nice if it did though. Be nice if anything at all could go your way when it comes to romance.

You push into a 360 ollie while riding fakie and biff it so bad, you wish you possessed whatever brain cells are the ones that tell you when to quit.

If that conversation did go your way, on a realistic scale, she’d watch you right back. You would nail that Caballerial.

Take a break. Breathe. Breathe breathe breathe. Try some-thing else for a sec.

Varial Heelflip. Wipe out.

Inward Heelflip. Gnarly spill.

Backside 180 Heelflip. Game, set, match—you’re finished. That third fail happens right in front of her and you play it off cool. Get up. Don’t even give a second thought to your battle wounds. You’re at the skate park on 56th Street because there’s more to get into. Which means, you’re not the only idiot limping with a little drug called determination giving you momentum.

Falling is the point. Failing is the point. Getting better and changing your game as a skater is the point. Change.

But what if things were on your side? What if you’d stuck with that first label? What if Bisexual felt like a good fit and never changed?

Well, then you’d probably be landing all these 180s.

If bisexual just fit, you’d probably have been able to hold on to your spot in that Walk-In Closet. But it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit which kind of sucks because at Thanksgiving din-ner two years ago, your cousin Damita just had to open her big mouth and tell the family you “mess with girls.” Just had to tell the family, a forkful of homemade mac and cheese headed into said mouth, that you are “half a gay.”

That went over well. Grams wouldn’t let you sit on her plastic-lined couches for the rest of the night. Your great-uncle Damian told her gay is contagious. She took it to heart.

No offense, baby. Can’t have all that on my good couches. You glance up and across the park, memories knocking

things through your head like a good stiff wind, and you find her taking a seat.

Oh.

Oh, she never does this. She never gets comfortable. She’s changing things up. You’re not the only one.

Maybe she plans to stay a while.

You love that she’s changing things up. You think it feels like a sign. It’s like she’s riding Goofy-Foot today. Riding with her right foot as dominant.

The first time you changed things up that way, you ended up behind the bleachers, teeth checking with a trans boy named Aaron. It felt so right that you needed to give it a name.

Google called it pansexual. That one stuck. You didn’t bother to explain that one to the family, though. They were just starting to learn bisexual didn’t mean you were gay for only half the year.

You pop your board and give the Caballerial another go.

It does not want you. You don’t stick this one either.

If pansexual had stuck, you’d introduce yourself to the beautiful girl with a smaller apology on your tongue. Hi, I’m Dustyn, I’ve only changed my label the one time, just slightly, but I’m still me and I’d really love to take you out.

And the beautiful girl would glance at your scraped elbows and the bruised-up skin showing through the knee holes in your ripped black skinny jeans. She’d see you and say, Hi, small, slight changes are my favorite. And then she’d lace her bubble-gum-nail-polished hand with yours.

But you changed your label after that, too. It was fine for a while. Your best friend, Hollis, talked you through the symp-toms of demisexuality.

No wonder holding the beautiful girl’s hand seems so much more heart-palpitating than anything else. A handhold. So simple. Just like an ollie.

You take a fast running start, throwing your board down, and end up on a vert skate, all empty bowl-shaped pools that are so smooth, your wheels only make a small whisper against them.

A whisper is what you got that first time you realized sex was not for you. Not with just anyone. This was…mmm, probably your biggest revelation.

It was like you’d been feeding your body Big Macs three times a day and suddenly—a vegetable!

Tic-tacking is when you use your entire body to turn the board from one side to the other. It’s a game of lower body strength, but also a game of knowing your weight and know-ing your board. You are not a tic-tac kind of girl.

You are not a girl at all. You are just…you.

That.

That one’s sticking forever. You know it all the way through to your gut.

You make one more attempt, which probably isn’t super wise because you are so close to the spot where she’s sitting that not only will she see you bite the dust, but she’ll hear that nasty grunt you make when you meet the ground.

You coast by.

The friction vibrates up through your bearings and you know you’re going too fast because you start to feel a little bit of a speed-wobble, that lovely, untimely, oscillatory behavior that means bro, you are about to lose control.

And you hate that word. Control. You hate that word be-cause it is so very rare that you have any. Over your life, your sexuality, your gender, your pronouns, your heartbeat when you’re around your beautiful girl.

But then you do.

You gain control. And you nail that Caballerial.

And the three guys who’ve been watching you make an ass of yourself all afternoon pop their boards up, hold them over their heads and let out wolf shouts.

And you’re smiling so hard. You get like that when you nail a particularly difficult one. You’re smiling so hard you don’t notice the someone standing behind you.

Beautiful girl. You don’t even want to control your smile here.

“You did it,” she says.

[blackcomicschat]

Kickstarter Highlight: Fight of the Century

We recently had the opportunity to interview Troy-Jeffery Allen and Nick Allen, two of the creators of Fight Of the Century, an exciting new project which is currently featured on Kickstarter. You can view their trailer above and support the campaign HERE. Enjoy the interview.

________

Welcome to BlackComicsChat. Please introduce yourself and tell us where are you from?

Troy: We’re from the DC-Maryland-Virginia trifecta. I hesitate to say “DMV”, but that’s a thing. I’ll quickly represent DC despite no longer living there. Nick will always strongly rep Baltimore.

Nick: Always.

Tell us about your earliest memory of comic books, and the moment when you first decided that you wanted to be involved in the creation of comics.

Nick: It was a late uncle’s comic collection. Lots of old school Marvel.

Troy: Yeah, I definitely remember randomly finding that Spider-Man, Power Man, Storm anti-smoking issue. At that age, I don’t think it really connected to me that these were comic characters until later. It also failed at teaching me not to smoke.

Nick:  I think we were both hard-headed children.

Troy: Oh, for sure.

Nick: The one I grabbed was X-Factor #4 with Frenzy on the cover.

Troy: Look at that. Both comics had black people on the cover. I just realized that. Nick: Right?

Troy: As far as deciding to create comics, that came in the late 2000s. Nick was in video game school and I was the questionable one still working at a comic book store letting my film schooling collect dust. I think we both realized that comics – this thing that seemed impossible to do before digital – might be attainable. That’s all it took: Ease of access and stupid assumptions.

Let’s discuss the comic that you are Kickstarting. What is your story about? A cyberpunk, underdog sports tale about Performance Enhancing Drugs in the future is a premise that I haven't seen before in comics. How did you come up with the concept, and what made you want to tell this particular story?

Troy: Well, it’s called FIGHT OF THE CENTURY. It takes place in Brazil in the not-so distant future where everyone is linked to a pharmaceutical company. Our focus is in the Mixed Martial Arts world, where everyone undergoes a Dr. Frankenstein-like experiment to compete. We’re talking full metamorphoses.

Our afro-Brazilian main character, Rex Punga, gets in the octagon while totally juiced up and he has a “hulk out” moment that causes an in-ring incident. The company behind the drugs – BrawnPharm – buries him with a public smear campaign and ends his career. But this is a sports story. So, Rex has to make a comeback and he’s going to do it by going all-natural. It’s very David and Goliath that way.

Nick: I'm a huge sports fan, and a few years back I noticed how athletes were being busted for doping.  However, I thought for every athlete that's being busted, there are probably ten that aren't.  And what does it mean for sports in general when we pick and choose losers that way.  So, I asked well what if I could tell a story about a society where athletes got to openly use these drugs.  What would happen?  I approached Troy, because he's a really good writer, and thought he would be great to work with.  From there we started hammering out some plausibility details (who, what, where); and what social commentary could we add.

Troy: I was already doing a wrestling comic over in my corner somewhere. FIGHT OF THE CENTURY kind of seemed like the obvious thing to do. I agreed to it so quickly. We just found so many ideas based on that nugget of a concept.

Also, Nick hit me up about this right around the time that I’d watched Food, Inc.--that documentary about Monsanto. My mind was already in a place where I was thinking a lot about genetic modification and how a lot of what we consume is unnatural. That led to us talking about multinational corporations that essentially have no borders. That’s when we knew who the real bad guy of our story was. We started down this track of looking at a future where everyone is chained to a pharmaceutical company. Then we came back to the present and went, “Shit…this is happening now!”

Nick: Troy and I also have experience in combat sports (myself with martial arts and Troy with wrestling), so we thought MMA could be a great vehicle for telling this type of story.  And life has imitated art as more and more MMA guys are being busted for P.E.D.s.  Also, who doesn't love watching a good bloody fight?

Troy: That’s kind of the crazy thing. Life kept supplying material for us to riff off of.  From Ray Lewis’ deer antler spray to students using Ritalin to pass – the story just kept writing itself.

Tell us about the creative team behind this project.

Troy: We wanted an international squad. Like, one of the biggest hooks for MMA are these cultural connections: Conor McGregor is proud to be an Irish fighter, the Gracies gave us the designation of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instead of judo -- styles of fighting and fighters are very much tied to culture. We wanted that baked into the story.

Nick: Shawn Alleyne reps Barbados and he started the artwork by providing many of the original character designs.  I don't think Shawn needs much introducing to your audience.  I knew him from attending shows and seeing his artwork online.  He's a phenomenal designer and brought a lot of the initial style ideas.

Troy: If I had to credit anyone with injecting cyberpunk into our initial concept it would be Shawn. I don’t think it was intentional, but his concepts just screamed “cyberpunk”. We just kept thinking of it in those terms from there on.

Artist Mervyn McKoy also added a lot of style and a pinch of dystopia to some of the early concepts. Especially to Karla Punga, Rex’s wife and manager. He’s been a frequent collaborator of Nick’s.

Nick: From there, we scoured the internet in order to find some amazing talent. Julius Abrera  was the first guy we found thanks to Instagram.  He lives in the Philippines, so we had to cold contact him, but, fortunately, he was an MMA fan and loved the idea. He was all on board.

Then, we wanted to add some homegrown talent from Brazil, so we looked for a Brazilian based inker and once again Instagram showed us Thiago De Costa.  We thought they would make an amazing pairing for the line art team.

Troy: Thiago has been indispensable. He got Thiago Ribeiro on board and Netho Diaz. All from Brazil. He’s also been our Portuguese voice on Facebook.

Nick: Absolutely. Also, Bryan, our colorist, was a referral from Julius. So we got the Filipino connect too. And that only left lettering which I take responsibility for.

What was the creative process like on this book?

Nick: Amazing.  Everyone adds something different and special to the book.  We've been fortunate to work across 3 continents with ease -- that's to the internet.  Dropbox and Facebook are our primary tools for collaboration.  

We’ve also found a new graffiti artist that we hope to incorporate into the mix. Troy: And Dana Brand, who has become our story editor recently. Her passion for story is great motivation to work through the sometimes rough terrain of plot. She also loves baseball, so I think the PED angle made sense to her pretty quickly.  

Nick: Yeah, the core team is always batting around ideas and helping each other when challenges arise.

What made you choose Kickstarter as a funding method?

Nick: Well, we've completed an entire issue and thought it would be worth pursuing to fund a graphic novel.  Troy and I are fully committed to the book, but totally self-funding would be much slower.  Also, Kickstarter is an amazing place to find like-minded individuals that might love a book like this.  

Troy: I was all sorts of skeptical. I’ll admit that that’s why this project took a couple of years. Nick had been funding his book, C-LISTERS out of pocket and I’d been doing the same for my comic BAMN, but Nick had done some Kickstarter campaigning for Visionary Studios before. He saw the value in crowd-funding a lot quicker than I did.

What are some of the incentives that backers can receive when they support your campaign?

Nick: Well, we're offering digital and physical copies of the books; a special thank you page with your name and MMA handle; cameos; original artwork… Troy: We really wanted to give people incentives that enhanced the story instead of just loading them up with junk. That was important to us. That’s why we worked with Drive Radio to lace certain incentives with a soundtrack. We want you to feel the story at every possible level. We make sure to do our part in the action and drama department, but then you can be IN the story as well as hear how dangerous the future is.

What are your future plans for the series?

Nick: Well, it's a limited series, but I think it's an extremely fertile universe to tell other stories in.  Maybe some one-shots with the characters would be fun.  Or explore another sport in our cyberpunk paradise.

Troy: This really is the maiden launch of our imprint Rex Co., so we’re going to set up shop here and unleash a lot of other ideas. Nick is working on a YA title for Rex Co. that I’m actually really excited about. I’m still doing BamnComics.com, and the plan is to start printing that story through Rex Co. A nap would be nice too.  

We’re looking forward to seeing the finished product. Anything else you’d like to share?

I will correct one mistake we made early on: We’ve been calling FIGHT OF THE CENTURY “cyberpunk”, but I discovered that there is a subgenre that fits more specifically for what we are doing. It’s called “biopunk”. There is cyberpunk in the story too, but the larger part of it is definitely biopunk.

Sorry, but nerds can be particular. That would have bugged me forever.

Where can people find you and your work on the internet?

Nick: Currently, the best place to shift blame is Facebook.com/FotcComic. We’ll be there throughout all this. And, of course, our Kickstarter Page.

Thanks for joining us. Everyone, be sure to check out this campaign!

[academiablogs]

On Novel Length - A Joint-Blog

The Genre of Length

by Dr. Joshua Grasso

If you placed two novels beside a prospective reader, one being a slim volume of around 200 pages, and the other a weighty tome of closer to 800, which would the reader choose? Assume, too, that the reader couldn’t examine the covers, the blurbs, or even skim the text itself. If both were the same price, I imagine most readers would choose the longer volume—more bang for their buck, perhaps—but also because it conforms to our expectations of what a novel is supposed to deliver: length and depth. While a 200-page novel might be just as deep and profound, most assume it will be breezy and finished all-too-quickly. And after all, how much can you really say in a mere 200 pages? Where are the elaborate back stories? The extensive subplots? The gratuitous sex scenes? In 200 pages you get a plot, a few characters, and a resolution—if that. After all, it takes many novels a mere 200 pages to warm up to the story, to throw all the characters together, and to make us actually care about finishing the rest of the story.

So is length, by itself, a genre? Most would say ‘yes,’ since a quick glance of most modern novels clock in at around 400 pages or more, or at least 100,000 words. Granted, other categories of novels, such as Young Adult, or Romance, might generally run shorter, but for mainstream fiction, and even many subgenres, length is the golden mean. There is historical precedent for this assumption: many of the earliest novels were quite long, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748, around 1,200 pages) to Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794, around 800 pages), not to mention the double-decker novels of Dickens and Trollope. A novel has always been an immersive experience, one that makes you lose your bearings and sink into the fictional fabric of an author’s imagination. Once you relinquish control to the writer—which often takes a few hundred pages—you’re lost, ready to believe anything and go wherever the plot takes you.

But to be honest, many of these early novels aren’t particularly deep—nor do many of them require 800+ pages to tell their story. Since many of them were serialized (especially the case with Dickens), the author got paid by the word, which required him or her to spin out the story as long as possible. Also, too, in an age without modern amusements of television, the internet, etc., books were the only thing standing between you and endless hours of boredom. Thus, the longer, the better (like many of our TV series that have 30+ episodes a season—one day people will complain about these, too!). Yet, for all the humor and cleverness of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1837), it’s a daunting book to read or re-read considering the amount of time necessary to wade through it all. Now that serialization is behind us, do we really need excessive length? Is it merely a hold-over from the page-counting Victorians?

While I love drowning in a long, juicy novel (Dune and Tom Jones are two of my favorites), I think there is a danger inherent in the idea of big books. Namely, that not many people can write them. Sure, anyone can be trained to write a long book—just keep writing and turn off the internal editor! But what does it really require to maintain a book that runs over 100K words or more? Plot alone isn’t enough, since a satisfying, substantial plot can be offered in 10 pages—Boccaccio did it throughout The Decameron (1353). Good characters help, but we really don’t need to spend that much time with even the best (we only spend about 300 pages with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, after all!). And philosophy can be dispatched in a paragraph—look what Kafka and Camus did with their short novels. So what does go into a longer book? Chiefly, incident and adventure. But even these can get old, particularly in less practiced hands.

If long books are the industry standard, it behooves beginning writers to write them. Why write a novella when no one buys them? Why collect a book of short stories when the market is dried up? If a writer want to make his or her mark on the world, they write a novel...and more precisely, they write a long and thick one. Yet to be frank, not many of us have that much to say. Even a long classic like Don Quixote (1605) tends to take us through one scenario after another simply for the sake of doing so (though some, admittedly, are sublime). More people would read and adore that work if it were half its length. The same is true for my favorite novel, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1745), which goes on and on in an endless stream of wit and incident. While it would cause me physical pain to prune it, my students would gladly provide the knife. And I’ve often had just as much fun discussing a mere 100 pages of it than the entire 800.

So I would suggest that we should resist assuming novels are long, or need to be long, or are supposed to be long. Some of the greatest novels are short—tiny, even. Candide (1759), The Time Machine (1895), Heart of Darkness (1899), 1984 (1949). Yet these books speak of the deepest and most timeless dramas of human existence—so much so that, we can’t stop reading them. A shorter book also gives us the divine pleasure of re-reading it, which might be discouraged from a longer one unless we really, really love it. As a writer, a shorter book also lends itself more to editing, which will result in a leaner, more concise, more thoughtful debut novel. So while it might sound reductive to say “shorter is better” (and that’s not my intention), I think we should consider how many great books are getting buried by the genre of length. Indeed, I wonder if every long book doesn’t have a little gem of a novel inside it, like a block of wood waiting to be whittled into a priceless objet d’art.

Of Novel Voice and Length

by Caitlin E. Jones

“Well, that’s too long to be published traditionally.”

This was the first thing I heard when I started talking about how long my first YA novel’s draft was. 158,000 words, for the morbidly curious- and still very editable at the time. This was a little disheartening for me though, still unsure how to edit my book baby and if I even wanted to edit it.

A long story short; I did continue and cut down the book from its monstrous length. Still, my last edit landed the book’s length just over 130,000; no matter what I do, this story will always be too long.

But is bigger better in some cases?

We are entering a different era of writing style. Gone are the ages of the Victorian serial, the slim stylings of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the 80′s rise of the mega-fantasy novel. Long stories are out, according to every agent and blogger. The overarching trends for YA (of all genres) is to stay under 100,000 words, and many books fit neatly into that corner.  Article after article suggesting what the accurate length is for every genre, and why you absolutely must meet that criteria, otherwise prepare for the rejections. And yet, many don’t: The Lunar Chronicles books are each over 100,000, Inkheart by Cornelia Funke is a whopping 140,000 words, almost unheard of in children’s fiction. Eragon by Christopher Paolini is likewise around 150,000, and none of these are all that surprising if you’ve read these books; these stories are large enough that they need such a word count.

In the blog, Word Count Anxiety, there is a line I adore: “Before you stress over what’s publishable, finish the book. Write the story as it wants to be told.” A fine reminder for most writers, who can suffer from a “cart before the horse” mentality on making the book work for an audience or a market. During my early work on my novel, I focused too much on what I had heard and edited everything out of the novel. Success: I brought the novel down to 115,0000. it was a mess. My fervor only landed me in further problems when I  almost edited the book to death.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence in publishing, especially for more marketable YA, fantasy, and science fiction: books that read as though they should be a 100 pages longer. Books that deserve more world-building and time on their universes. 

In all fairness too, I have read equally as many books that would benefit from 100 less pages (and then some). The key is knowing your story, and how to make every single vote.

Which is probably the best rule to follow when writing, or revising and cutting things out: every word and scene has to count. They are all steps toward an ending and pieces in the plot, even if the reader will blow through them in a matter of seconds. 

Recommended length is, if anything, a more simplistic call for the finely-tuned spot between good editing and necessary length. Masterful storytelling does mean knowing what and what not to tell, and mostly importantly, what kind of room your story truly needs.

[christiluv]

Dear President Trump

The Democrats keep blocking me from writing you at Whitehouse.gov, because they have essentially ruined my life, so now I must write this open public letter to you, because it is the only way to reach out to you.

......................... ABOUT YOU .........................

Dear Mr. President,

First and foremost, I'd just like to say that my family and I voted for you in 2016, and you are the 1st GOP presidential candidate that I myself have ever cast my vote for at the ballot box. We have GREAT respect for you, your WONDERFUL family and your PHENOMENAL empire, which you have created.

We admire your strength and intelligence, The First Lady's beauty and style, and your kids' grace and poise, following in your footsteps of greatness. We are very proud of you and all the amazing things you have accomplished. We think you're doing a FANTASTIC job!

We also hope that your party falls in line and works with you to get more done, so that you can win again in 2020 as well as in the midterms, and do more good work for "We The People".

You are most certainly-- a "winner"!!! --And we LIKE your tweets!

..................... ABOUT US ....................

~ ME ~

I'm a writer, who's been writing since childhood, won awards for both singing, songwriting, poetry and essays, and I beat out hundreds of teens, chosen to write for The Orlando Sentinel Newspaper as teen journalist and music / concert reviewer.

I studied writing and film in college, wrote, produced and directed the film short, "A Babysitter's Nightmare", and also collaborated with my writing partner / Mom, to write, produce and direct the music video "Love Dance". I've been a church youth leader, who wrote several newsletters and an advice column, and I have a strong social media presence, writing blogs, Youtube "TV" videos, audio books, and a soap opera, "The Young and The Powerful".

Between Facebook, Youtube and Twitter,  I have gained over 10K fans, with songs trending at #1 on ReverbNation for over a year now, and my video / audiobook, "@VirginLoveTV presents The Top 3 Reasons Why I Stopped Dating-- A #VirginSecrets #RealTalk Chat with Christi Luv", and GarageBand album, "@GirlPowerTV presents #CrowdfundThis Til We #RevivePOPmusic!" --An Original Song Sampler CD & MP3, out on Soundcloud and ReverbNation, and soon to be on Amazon.

Some of the novels I've authored include The Book Club Elite acclaimed YA paranormal romance mystery adventure, "Chris Taylor's Hunting Love: The Curse of The Blood Red Seductress", the MG superhero fantasy action adventure, "Chris Taylor's Angel Wars: Comet & Lady Phantom Rise", and the YA murder mystery conspiracy thriller, "The Killer Secrets of Skyler Stone: My Funny Valentine", as well as many screenplays, titles, and a catalog of hit blockbuster commercial concepts, including the inspirational YA paranormal romance mystery drama, "Love Me Tender: The Existence of Sound".

~ MOM ~

My Mom is a veteran performer of stage, tours (Marvelettes, Platters), TV, Broadway, Film ("Hair!", U. A.), and recording (Motown, CBS), with songs published ("Maybe, Maybe Not", "Smile", E.M.I. Italy), and a studio singer on film soundtracks ("The Point", "Lion King"). She's written poems, stories, and stage plays since youth, later wrote, produced, and directed many summer youth productions, and has received awards from The Orlando Bureau of Recreation, Young Adults Progressive Club, NY Chamber of Commerce & Ohio Mayor's Office Recognition Awards for her work, presented by S.T.A.A (Support The Artists of America).

She wrote, produced and directed a PBS TV documentary, "Did You Know? Well You Should!", which won wide acclaim, was a journalist and theatre / film critic columnist for 5 years with The Orlando Times Newspaper. Affiliations include ASCAP, SAG - AFTRA, WGA, and FMPTA, with her PBS broadcasted TV special, "@BlackHeroesTV presents #HEROisTheNewBLACK!"--a positive documentary film series pilot, and "@GirlPowerTV presents #SupportHiddenLegends 2 #SaveMusicLegacies" Blog Journal, coming soon to Amazon.com.

Some of the novels TP has authored include The Book Club Elite acclaimed YA psychological drama suspense mystery, "T.D. Perkins' The Boy Next Door", and the YA social human interest drama, "T.D. Perkins' In His Shoes", as well as many screenplay scripts, titles, and a catalog of hit blockbuster commercial concepts, including the YA romantic horror mystery comedy, "Bite Me!".

Together, we write both fiction and nonfiction, in multiple genres, with an eye for promoting better positive role model characters of more diverse colors, heroes, and the spiritual power and beauty of God. We also write our novels as screenplays, with the end goal of producing them as blockbuster films. We have also written and compiled over 20 blog-journals together, including, "@MySoulFireTV presents The Hi-5-IQ Homeschooler's Guide To Critical Thinking ~ An Educational Textbook Series Overview & Notebook", which will be out soon on Amazon.

......................................... ABOUT OUR FAMILY .........................................

We are The Perkins Family. We've volunteered, donated, and hosted fund-raisers for other peoples' noble causes, and given to many charities, regularly over decades. On the creative front, we have conscientiously woven important social and moral causes into all of our written works, music and productions, and seek to educate and enlighten as well as entertain. We live in a racially mixed middle class neighborhood in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Born into a blended melting pot of Native American, Black and German blood in our ancestry, we come from a great family legacy of American History.

I spring from a noted genius musician and arranger dad, who graduated from a military academy.My grandpa was a military Veteran and former Sergeant, who fought for our country in World War 2, and lost his left hand. My great grandfather William Warley-- a Black Newspaper Owner / Editor / Publisher and NAACP Leader-- fought in 1917 to racially desegregate the housing communities in Louisville, Kentucky, with the historic U.S. Supreme Court case of Buchanan vs Warley-- and WON-- which is why he named her grandma "Victoria"-- for their/our "VICTORY". My uncle served in The Air Force, and other family members have served in various positions, or are currently serving our country and faith in other powerful ways. So the work we and our family have done and still do has given back to others in multiple ways. We look forward to giving back even more in creative ways.

.......................................... ABOUT THIS LETTER ..........................................

The reason why I'm writing you this letter is because some (and perhaps many) of us over in The I-4 Corridor purple swing state of Florida are being persecuted by at least 1 of 3 organized entities-- Utilities, Inc, Duke Energy, and an unidentified biological engineering agency that has been abusing their power in our home.

Utilities Inc and Duke Energy have cut off our-- and other peoples'-- water and power, over stupid technicalities and errors that were their fault or their orchestration, and there has been no compensation for all the business, health, and sanity that was lost from it.

We have consulted lawyers and are considering our lawsuit options to sue them. But what we need from you is your attention to the fact that these companies have no competition-- and that is why they get away with murder, hurting millions of seniors, veterans, and shut-ins all over the state and country.

Many people have worked hard but are still living paycheck to paycheck because the fields that they are good at or have expertise in do not pay them well, or no one will give them a better gig than what they have-- or they're too old or too sick to matriculate in the rough and tumble job market. These people need protection from vulture monopolies-- and competitive capitalism is the answer.

Won't you stand up for healthy competition for the monopolies that control peoples' lives?

We are literally starving artists, as there is no food in our fridge right now, but we are hungry for more than just physical tangible food--

We are hungry for change.

We are hungry for truth.

We are hungry for triumph.

We're also hungry for food--

But right now, we are passionately hungry for justice.

Will you help us fight back against the tyranny of the greedy monopolies that dominate our daily lives?

Before we file an official lawsuit against these companies, preferably this month, we are asking you or your people to step in and make an example of our utilities company and power company, using our situation to show why Free Market Capitalism-- the realm that you MASTER like a KING-- and the competition that makes it work-- are all so important to our society-- and to show that people-- especially those who have health problems, disabilities, and/or are aging seniors, who've worked all their lives and deserve a break now-- should not live and die on computer glitches and stupid procedural technicalities-- or company error.

It would also prove to all the ridiculously dumb haters and lying traitors out there that you really do care about people of color too, cause you're not racist like they try to slander you as, and it also shows everyone that you're so likable and winning that you got a socially conservative Independent (me) and Democrat (mom) to vote for you in 2016-- simply because--

--you just got it like that.

Either way, you would be doing good for good people, all over Central Florida, as well as doing good for a family that just so happens to come from a historic legacy of noble American History, honorable military veteran service, and uniquely creative giftedness.

We are suffering terribly-- constantly hungry and stressed out-- and I do believe that The Agency directing such negative things in our lives is savage, vicious, inhumane, abusive, haughty and vile. The evil way they torment us is cruel and unusual punishment-- and it needs to stop, like yesterday.

Please use your power to make them STOP doing bad things to us. Please rescue us. We put our hopes in Obama and he let us down. So now it's your turn. Please be our hero and show our old liberal friends-- and new conservative ones-- why we voted for you.

We are desperate for relief-- as ANY relief is GOOD relief at this point, and if things don't let up, I will have to hitchhike at night on the highway, to the ocean-- just to escape the pain and torture of it all.

We believe in you.

And I believe that as soon as this letter meets your eyes-- or your reader's eyes-- you'll come to our rescue and save our day, like The Big Man On Campus that you are. Because you are The Leader of our FREE World, The Head of our State, The Commander In Chief who WE voted for and supported the candidacy of, from jump street. We knew you were gonna win as soon as you said you were running!

That's how much faith we had in you!

So whether you get personally involved or you delegate someone on a lower level to get involved with this case, I know in my heart, soul, and gut that somehow you will help to fix this mess-- cause God put you in power to fight for the PEOPLE and make RIGHT what all the incompetent apathetic LOSERS do WRONG.

Because THAT'S who you ARE.

We are on your side, we have always been on your side during this election cycle, and we will remain standing by your side-- if we have any legs left to stand on by the end of this summer, month and week. Cause we're falling apart at the seams and when I prayed to God to deliver us, He told me to go directly to you, surpass all others, and reach out to the one in the highest office--

--and that's you.

Our last remaining hope...

Thank you. God Bless you. And if you see fit, we also welcome you to help support our efforts to help seniors, veterans and shut-ins in our Christian, faith-based Angel Hearts Art Club crowdfund project to raise funds to help the community at Patreon.com/SoulFireTV, and our effort to cure painful issues like my medical matters at Patreon.com/CureMeTV.

Thank you for reading this. We hope to hear from you or your people soon. We know you're busy dealing with crazy psycho dictators and whatnot... Hope all is well! :) And thanks so much for saving us all from this indecent hell!

God Bless!

Sincerely, Christi Luv AKA Chris Taylor 407-227-3710 / 407-788-8986 / MyTopShelfEditing@Gmail.com ReverbNation.com/ChristiLuv / MyArtHaven.WixSite.com/Shop

OUR URGENT CAUSE CAMPAIGNS:

Patreon.com/CureMeTV (To Pay For My Medicine)

Patreon.com/ChristiLuv (To Support Other Causes Including: Angel Hearts Art Club for Seniors, Vets & Shut-Ins & Crowdfund To Turn Our Positive, Original, Inspirational Teen and Young Adult Reading Novels Into Graphic Novels)

[aion-rsa]

Cemetery Boys: A Conversation with YA Author Aiden Thomas

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Aiden Thomas’ upcoming YA debut, Cemetery Boys, is not only breaking new ground when it comes to explorations of trans identity and Latinx culture, it’s also a riveting, romantic read filled with paranormal wonder. The #OwnVoices novel follows Yadriel, a trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family, who all happen to be brujx, with the ability to see spirits. When Yadriel’s cousin is murdered, Yadriel decides to solve the mystery of what happened as a way to convince his family to accept his identity as a brujo. But when, instead of summoning the ghost of his cousin, Yadriel accidentally summons the ghost of (very cute) school “bad boy” Julian, who refuses to leave, Yadriel’s mission becomes much more complicated… especially once he realizes he might not want Julian to go.

We had the chance to talk with Thomas to find out what it was like to build the world of Cemetery Boys and its characters, the novel’s ambitions as “empowering escapism for marginalized readers,” and what it’s like writing during 2020.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Den of Geek: This is a very broad, generic question, but do you remember where the idea for this story first started? Was it a character? Was it a scene? Was it a feeling? Can you think back to that moment of inspiration?

Aiden Thomas: I know the exact moment of inspiration for the book itself. On Tumblr I follow a lot of writing prompt blogs, and one of the blogs posted just a sentence prompt, and the prompt was, “What would you do if you summoned a ghost and you couldn’t get rid of it?” And you see people commenting and stuff and they’re like, “Oh, this super spooky, scary thing.” And I was like, “Okay, but what if he was cute?” And so that’s where the idea came from.

And then I was like, “OK, well, if we’re talking about death and magic, what does that mean to me?” And, as a Latinx person, death and magic is Día de Muertos, right? Day of the Dead. So from there I was like, “Okay, yeah. This could totally work.”

The real inspiration for how the magic system works and the rules and everything that’s laid out is intrinsically related to Día de Muertos. All of the magic stuff that happens in Cemetery Boys revolves around our actual beliefs about how the afterlife works and what Día de Muertos means and bringing our ancestors back. So it was kind of just taking all of this magic around Día de Muertos and just making it literal magic.

So you have this initial idea. (Thank you, Tumblr.) How long ago was that, and what did the process, the evolution of that idea look like? Was it fast? Was it slow?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Technically Cemetery Boys was actually my option book. The first book that I wrote and sold is Lost in the Never Woods, which is coming out in 2021. So I got all the way through two copy edits for Lost in the Never Woods and then I started bugging my editor. I was like, “Option books, what do you think about that? When do we start talking about that?” And she was like, “Okay, Aiden. There’s no rush. If you want to kick me some ideas, go ahead.” And I was like, “Okay!” And so it was really funny because I believe I sent her five ideas. One of them was like, here’s a full outline, I have 50 pages written, and here’s a synopsis. And then as the ideas went they just kind of got smaller and less detailed. And Cemetery Boys was the last one. And it was, I think, a paragraph, maybe a paragraph and a half. And most of them ended in question marks, the sentences. Because I was like, “Well, maybe it could be this.” And the other thing is that I was really nervous about pitching a book with a trans character and that was entirely Latinx.

The whole book is an entirely Latinx cast. So I always find that kind of funny looking back on it that I was asking permission, to like, “Can I write this? Is this okay? Am I allowed to do this? Seriously, not a big deal. Just maybe.” And then so when she replied, she was like, “Yeah, that’s the one that we want!” And I was like, “Really! Okay.” And then so they needed it fast-drafted. So this is kind of a crazy story. Not last November, but the November before that is when I pitched the idea, and then we got the contract signed. And so it was January where I actually started writing it. It was sold on, what is it called? It was sold with just the synopsis and I think 25 pages or whatever. So I had to actually write the book. I had to write it in six weeks.

Wow.

Yeah. I wrote the rough draft in six weeks. And pretty quickly after my editor got that first draft she was like, “We think that this should be your debut instead.” And I was like, “Ugh, God!” I was like, “Okay.” Even though I went through all this work with the other book. So it was super fast tracked. And, gosh, when did I send it off to copy edits? Everything was done super quickly in like six months or something, which was a crazy turnaround time compared to Lost in the Never Woods, which I wrote during grad school, so it was like three years and then a year of doing edits with my editor. So it was super crazy. It was a very quick turnaround.

Well, you did it!

You mentioned when you were sending those initial pitches that you were already kind of not even totally allowing yourself permission to lead with this even. For a variety of reasons. And I’m curious, during the process of writing it, did you feel yourself having to push back against that? I don’t know, feeling like you have to reel it back in from the story you truly want to tell because you’re afraid it won’t ever make it to readers? Did that continue as you were writing?

Not so much in the terms of like, “How queer could I make this? How brown can I make this?” I kind of just went full into it as soon as they gave me permission. Then I was like, “Okay, well you already paid me, so here I go!” You know? I think where I got the most anxiety around it was I was really concerned about writing a depiction of whether it’s of someone who’s gay, of someone who’s trans, and/or someone who’s Latinx was that some kind of my internalized “isms” and phobias would come out onto the page and be harmful to young readers. That is what held me up the most and caused me a lot of anxiety. So that was really difficult, and when it came time to start going to copy edits, I emailed my editor and I was like, “I really feel like I need authenticity readers.” I was like, “I know that I’m literally every part of this character’s identity, but I’m really worried about me writing something that’s accidentally problematic. And they were super receptive, and I think I got three sensitivity readers for the main parts that I wanted to hit.

And they did catch a couple of things. Nothing major, but small things that you just don’t realize. And I think sometimes marginalized creators, they’re like, “Well, this is my truth, so I can write it. I don’t need anyone else to double check me,” or whatever. But for me, that was really important, because I was really, really worried about it.

I was going to ask you about authenticity readers. What was the process like for finding people?

The people I found were on Twitter. So, Twitter’s been a huge resource. I didn’t join Twitter until I sold my first book. And then all of a sudden I was like, “Oh, there’s an entire writing community here. Go figure.” So what I did was that I was basically scrolling through Twitter and people that I follow. I found one person, and I was like, “Great, that fills this one section.” But I still had these other two, so I actually put out a call on my Twitter, and I was like, “Hey, I’m looking for some authenticity readers in these sections, and this is the experience that I’m looking at.” Instead of just having random people being like, “Oh, well I’m brown, so I can read it.” And then I found people super quick, and I sent them to my editor, and then my editor reached out to them. So it was actually pretty easy, especially on Twitter. The community is so responsive and those LinkedIn type connections almost really, really helped find those authenticity readers. It was awesome.

Your characters and your community that you’re mostly featuring here are bilingual. But you’re also writing this book in part for people who don’t speak Spanish. I’m curious what it was like balancing that. And again, making sure it maybe is marketable to a certain extent versus staying true to the experience of these characters and for those readers who also live in a bilingual, in their community. Making sure they see some sort of authenticity on that as well.

Yeah, it’s almost about accessibility, is what we’re talking about. Having those experiences and those words even being accessible to people who speak Spanish and people who speak English and people who do both. And for me, I pretty unapologetically use a lot of Spanish in a way that I thought was realistic to when I was growing up and living around families and how the younger generations tend to use more English and then use more Spanish around their families. And so for me, it was more of a challenge in craft. What I did is that I very unapologetically used Spanish, but when I do that I am hopefully careful to give enough context clues so that even if you have no idea what those words mean, you understand the meaning and the thought behind it. So even if you don’t know explicitly what a sentence means, judging by the character’s reactions or internal monologue, that point gets across either way. So you can absolutely go ahead and Google it if you want to, but it’s also there. That was something very conscious I did going through the process being like, “Okay, I need to make sure that I’m writing this in a way that it’s accessible from all kinds of readers.”

I’m curious about the decision to set the book in east L.A. Was it always set there?

Yes, it was always in east L.A. I was born and raised in Oakland, California, so I spent pretty much my whole life in California. I moved up here three and a half years ago. And what I love so much about east L.A. is that it reminds me a lot of Oakland in terms of socioeconomic status and definitely in community. It’s super diverse, and east L.A. is kind of like a central hub that a lot of Latinx communities gravitate towards to. And it’s not necessarily just one Latinx community. And for me, it was really important that the brujx were this conglomeration of multiple different Latinx identities. I didn’t want it to be just one, because I wanted this whole myth and this magic to supersede the creation of countries. It’s very much just Mesoamerican.

So east L.A. is really the perfect place for that, and I wanted to touch base on things like kids who are living on the poverty line and kids who are living on the streets. And for me all of those things, it just screamed east L.A. and I love east L.A. is the other thing, is that it’s a very dear place to me in my heart. So I was like, “Yeah, let me write this little love letter to east L.A. and show others.” That city can be so stereotyped by people and I really wanted to break down some of those barriers and show how really beautiful it is. And the community there is just so incredible.

I’m curious if your experiences as an EMT informed this story at all.

Yeah, that’s really funny. Being an EMT in Oakland, it was a crash course in a lot of things. And a big part of it was what it means to serve your community and what your community looks like. Especially in times of dire stress. So, yeah that definitely informed it. I feel like anytime I tell EMT stories I just traumatize my family. So I’m trying to think, “Well, how can I?” But I had a lot of experiences as an EMT, when you show up on scene, especially when there’s kids involved, that you really see the bad things. Like the panic and stuff like that, but also the coming together of a community. I’m a pretty literal, logical person, but there’s some things that I saw that happened when I was an EMT when there was just like a miracle, but I know that those aren’t a thing. But it’s like, well some kind of magic happened there, because that’s crazy! One time I had a child who was going, basically, and the grandmother pushed through and put her hand on him and started praying and then he came back. And I was like, “What the heck is happening!”

So it’s like that kind of magic, you know what I mean? So stuff like that definitely inspired it. And I’ve always been very community focused. That’s why I liked being an EMT so much. And so again, it kind of comes back to that love of the community, which is what Cemetery Boys is for me.

Yeah, it’s nice to get these stories that, I don’t know, there’s so many “chosen one” stories in our mainstream culture. And that’s not normally how positive change seems to happen in the world.

Cemetery Boys features a Latinx, gay, trans boy protagonist. A first in the YA space. And I think a lot of people have already noted or assumed that this is going to be a story that for a lot of different people, they see parts of their identity reflected back for the first time maybe in a mainstream cultural space. And I’m curious if you can remember the first time you felt that in any way, one of your identities reflected back in a mainstream story for maybe the first time in either a big or small way.

Yeah. It’s funny because I get that question a lot. And when I first started answering, it was kind of like, “When was the first time you saw yourself represented in media?” And for a very long time I was like, “Ugh, I just got to come up with something.” Like, “I’ll just pull this one, I don’t know!” And then I was like, “Well, Aiden, you know what? That’s actually a valid thing to discuss.” So I have never seen myself reflected in media. My whole self, rather. And so when I wrote Cemetery Boys, I was like, “Yeah, let’s have it be all of me.” For me, I was like, “I’m writing this because I haven’t seen myself. So now I’m going to see myself.” And then other people can see themselves who are like me. I didn’t really think of it as, “Oh, this is going to be the first of that.” Until ARCs started going out, and then people were like, “Oh, the first one.” And I was like, “Oh no, I didn’t want that!” I was like, “Wait, no! It’s far too much stress. Too much pressure.” So that was challenging and terrifying.

But as far as parts of my identity goes, Anna-Marie McLemore, their books have absolutely spoken to me. I actually have a stack of them right next to me with all my other books. When the Moon Was Ours in particular, that one was the first time, was definitely the first time I’d ever seen a trans boy in a book, and that was really cool, and it was by a Latinx author, so that was the closest I’ve gotten to and it was life changing, of course. And that’s a pretty recent book. So it’s not like I was a teenager being like, “Oh, finally. Here I am.” I was like, “No, I’m a grown ass adult looking at this teenager in a book.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, finally!” It does feel important to have that answer, create that space for being like, “I haven’t seen myself fully.”

Did you always know this was a love story?

Oh, yeah. I guessed that as soon as I saw that prompt. And I was like, “But then what if you fell in love with the ghost and he was really cute?” So, yeah, it was definitely always a love story. That maybe even came before I figured out what the plot was. And Julian’s character has been a character that I’ve played with in short stories and stuff for 15 years. So that was very easy, coming up with the love interest. I was like, “I already know who he is.” I need to meet Yadriel, though.

Yeah, so that’s always interesting. Especially when it’s your main character. I feel like they’re the hardest to get into their heads and really understand who they are, because you’re not just thinking about what they’re projecting as in a love interest or secondary characters. You’re in their head. So it’s a lot more complicated.

Okay, well I want to talk about the book cover, because it’s amazing. Can you talk about the process of having it happen?

Yeah, totally. When it came time for figuring out the book covers, at that point, sorry I just did something weird. It was like shaking at me. For the cover, I think it was around where we started going to copy edits. They were like, “Oh, we’re going to kick you some artists.” And I was like, “Okay.” I was kind of stressed out about the cover, because I’ve heard so many horror stories from people being like, “Oh my God, it went so wrong. And I hate my cover.” And for Swoon Reads, typically the public gets to vote on the cover, so you really don’t have any say. But for Cemetery Boys, they decided that they weren’t going to do the cover voting, that they just wanted to create a cover and they were really cool about letting me be part of that process. And so the first thing that they did that surprised me was that they emailed me and they were like, “Hey Aiden, we’re moving towards working on the cover. Here’s some cover artists, can you tell us who you’d most like to work with?” And I was like, “Okay, cool.”

So even before I opened it, when I very first started drafting Cemetery Boys, I found Mars Lauderbaugh on Tumblr, and I followed them because I was obsessed with their fan art of Haikyuu and Voltron. And so I had actually commissioned them to do character art back when Cemetery Boys wasn’t even a thing. So I was emailing Mars, I was like, “Hello, I’m a writer, and can you draw my [original characters] for me?” And Mars was like, “Sure, yeah. Here you go.” And then it kind of progressed and I was like, “Hey, it’s getting turned into a book, could you do my character art for me?” And they were like, “Oh, yeah.” And then when I got this list of artists, the first thing that I noticed, which was so cool, was that Macmillan/Swoon had only picked artists who were artists of color and/or trans. And that was amazing and blew my mind. And then I saw that they had included Mars on the list because they had seen the character art, and so I was like, “Yes, yes! Please, Mars, Mars, Mars!” And then so they reached out to Mars, and Mars became my cover artist, and now all of my swag and stuff matches and it just blew my mind. There was three original versions of the cover, so I got to see what those looked like. And they picked my favorite one. Yeah, it was so cool.

And I was nerding out so bad. And being in publishing, I’m very much of the mind of as I’m entering this space, I’m trying to wedge open the door and sneak in as many other people as I can. So being able to take Mars, who is doing commissions for fan art, and being able to get them a book cover deal was really important to me. And that was definitely a highlight. I have the best cover ever. It could not be better.

So had they never done a book cover before?

No, they hadn’t.

Wow.

And they recently got an agent. It’s all very exciting.

Do you think there are other stories you’d like to tell in this world?

Definitely, yeah. When I come up with ideas and stuff, my brain just explodes and splinters out. So there’s definitely other stories that I would like to tell in this world. There’s a couple of side characters that I’m particularly attached to that I would like to explore more. I can’t say any spoilers, but I would definitely like to do a book focused on Julian even. Because, at the end of Cemetery Boys, he goes through some stuff, and it’d be really interesting to see what happens after that. So yeah, there’s always ideas. Definitely. For sure.

I think most of us are aware that a lot of things are hitting differently right now because the world’s different than it was six months ago. Do you think Cemetery Boys is going to hit differently in the world it’s coming into than the one that maybe you imagined it would be released into?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Yeah, it’s been kind of strange. In terms of hitting different and what the market is being for, or even what readers would like, I think Cemetery Boys is definitely… It’s funny, because it deals with death and murder and stuff like that, but it’s also very lighthearted. And I would hope funny. So I’m hoping that even with all of this going on, I wrote Cemetery Boys to begin with to be a bit of empowering escapism for marginalized readers. Because even before all this, those readers have it so rough and deal with so much hate on a near constant basis. Now multiply, what, times 10, times 100. So what I am hoping is that now Cemetery Boys is even more important in terms of providing some escapism, some release. But also giving those marginalized readers a story where they see themselves as being incredibly powerful, supported, but very importantly, being loved. Even if isn’t necessarily by people who are supposed to be there for them all the time. So even if it’s not their family, found family is important, your friends are still important. So I really hope that Cemetery Boys will be able to provide some comfort, honestly. And I think now more than ever that’s especially important for young readers, for sure.

I’m curious how your writing is going right now during this strange and often upsetting time. Has that made you want to write more? Has it led to you writing less? Has it changed the kind of things you’re writing, or how you write?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when I’m on Tumblr, not Tumblr, oh now I’m just talking about Tumblr all the time! When I’m on Twitter I get a weird sense of guilt or like I’m not responding the way that everyone else is, because I feel like on Twitter a lot of authors like, “I can’t write anything. How could you possibly write anything right now?” And for me, I drafted a whole other book during quarantine, or finished drafting it anyways. And so I felt weird while I was doing that, because I was like, “Oh, am I not doing this correctly? Am I being an asshole or something?” Because I’m not being super impacted by everything that’s going on. That was kind of stressful, but I finished that draft and to preface, I work in tech. My company shut down, or switched to working from home in mid March, and we’re not opening up for several months as of yesterday. So I’ve been kind of sequestered. This is my entire apartment. I live in a studio. It’s 500 square feet.

Yeah, I’ve just been here. And once I finished drafting that book, I was like “Okay!” And then off it goes to my CPs. And it was like the next day where I realized that writing that book and having that focus had my energies. A lot of other stuff wasn’t getting through, because I was hyper focused. And then as soon as I sent it off and I didn’t have that project to work on, I had three days of just really bad anxiety. And I was like, “Why do I feel so terrible? Why do I feel like I’m stuck in my fight or flight response?” And then I realized, it’s because being so focused on that book was protecting me and distracting me. And then once that was gone, then I was being hit by all these feels that everyone else has been hit by. So that’s been wild. And then so I was like, “Okay, I can recognize that this is what’s happening.” So I started picking up other projects. So I was like, “Okay! Time to distract myself.” Yeah, totally. Right. So it’s definitely had an impact, but as far as impacting my writing, my writing has actually been helping me get through it.

And I’m a really intense outliner. For my project I just finished the rough draft of, the outline was over 100 pages. So having that really strict structure of being like, “This is what’s happening next.” It’s not turning my brain off, but it’s like I don’t have to get lost. I can follow this path, I can stay on track and be focused. So that’s actually helped me during all of this.

And what are you a fan of right now? Or what are you escaping into, if anything? Other than your work.

Animal Crossing has been a big one!

Popular one.

Yeah. Animal Crossing‘s been great. I’ve got a couple of ARCs that I need to read. So those are on the docket. Those are next to my bed right now. And I have been binging a lot of Netflix. I am on the third season of Hannibal and I just started it maybe a month ago and I’m obsessed.

So good.

So good!

Have you watched Killing Eve?

I have! Yeah, I’ve watched, I think maybe the first season. And I need to pick it back up. I just randomly fell off.

I’m also obsessed with Hill House on Netflix. I love it so much. But how my friend talked me into watching Hannibal is they were like, “It’s very similar to Hill House. They’re both really stunning and really creepy.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, when you put it that way, I’ll try it.” And now I’m super obsessed with Hannibal.

Thank you so much for talking with me. This has been a lot of fun.

Yeah, this was super awesome!

I’m excited to finish the book. It’s already brought joy into my life, so thank you for writing it.

Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you!

Cemetery Boys will be out on September 1st, but is now available for pre-order (which are super important). You can find out more about the book here. And find out more about Aiden Thomas’ work here. If you’d like to hear more from Aiden Thomas’ about Cemetery Boys, I recommend this expansive, insightful interview with Adriana on YouTube channel Perpetual Pages.

The post Cemetery Boys: A Conversation with YA Author Aiden Thomas appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[preserving-ferretbrain]

Who Gives a F**k About Charlie Keeper

by Wardog

Tuesday, 09 June 2009

Wardog painfully reviews the self-published Who Is Charlie Keeper.~

I’ve had a busy few weeks. I’ve alphabetised all my socks, de-weeded the back garden and taken a vacation in Vienna but it’s finally got to the point of no return: I think I’m going to have to bring myself to review Who Is Charlie Keeper. I really don’t want Ferretbrain to become the place self-published books come to die, but thus far every self-published book I've read has only renewed my faith in the publishing industry. WICK, as you may have gathered, is a self-published young adult fantasy novel, and it’s, uhh, well...

Come back Jim. All is forgiven.

WICK is borderline unreadable and almost uncertainly unreviewable. Basically, imagine someone came up to you and said “Hey there, I’ve got you a car, come check it out.” And then it turned out the car had no wheels. Yes, maybe, the colour is rather nice, and its fitted with a CD player and sunroof, and the engine might be basically functional but ultimately what you’ve still got there is a car with no wheels.

So, Charlie Keeper is a

mysterious

sassy 12 year old girl who lives in a mysterious house with her amnesiac grandmother because her parents have mysteriously disappeared. Between having her inheritance stolen by the evil lawyer Mr Crow and buying a puppy with her best friend, she is chased into the alternative world of Bellania by the malignant Lord Bane. In which it becomes quickly apparent that Bad Shit Is Going Down and the fate of the world rests upon Charlie Keeper’s reluctant, 12 year old shoulders. There are good guys, bad guys, dragons, adventures,

Quidditch

K’changa, etc etc.

Putting aside for the moment, the fact that WICK is a car without wheels (and I will contextualise this metaphor in a moment), let me try to come up with something positive to say about it. Well, the original artwork that accompanies it is genuinely fabulous. In fact, if the book was even half as good as the art, we’d be laughing. Also Marcus Alexander has a remarkably good ear for dialogue, somehow navigating the spiked pit of accent and dialect without looking like a fool or reducing his characters to offensive stereotype. He’s a sample from Jensen the (Jamaican?) Treman: “Ah’s a Treman. Sweetheart, Ah’ can see yer education is sorely lacking. Who’s yer teacher? Whoever he is, he ain’t doing a proper job. Tell me, little Hippotomai, an’ don’t stomp yer feetsies at me, do ya know wot a Stoman is, or a Human? Eh?” You’d think it would get grating but, somehow, it never does. Overall, WICK romps along at a reasonable pace, and there’s lot of incident, danger and adventure. It’s certainly a colourful book, and it seems to be revelling in its own over-the-top exuberance. You know you’re dealing with a Proper villain when he massacres his own minions and gets all caps-locky about setbacks.

Unfortunately, all this counts for absolutely nothing because there are too many basic problems with the book. Firstly the style itself. I don’t know to what extent we’re dealing with a major slew of typos or if Marcus Alexander genuinely hates commas and wants them to suffer and die at his hands, but the grammar and the syntax through WICK are irregular at best and downright wrong at worst. I’ve skimmed about the internet looking for other responses to it and most of them are positive: “The author's odd use of justification adds extra weight and punctuation on actions, emotive points and speech patterns bringing not just the story but also the characters very much to life. Indeed the book is quite unusual as a whole entity but I would be the first to point out that it connects with today's ambience, fashion and prosetic style.” Hmmmm. Possibly I’m just hideously hidebound but the style is simply neither controlled nor consistent enough to support this interpretation. Here’s a sample:

Powerful muscles bunched and tensed. With long smooth bounds the creature took off. As it ran past the eerily silent columns it realized, with a sinking feeling that it would never reach this mysterious family member in time, the distance was too great. It sensed days of travels lay between the two and it could sense that whatever danger threatened it’s [sic] sibling, was already perilously close.

Or another:

Charlie answering his call, hurried to the lawyer’s study, she knew better than to keep him waiting. Walking straight up to the large leather bound desk she took up a pen and without needing to be asked signed the papers offered by Mr. Crow. She knew she should at least ask what she was signing but she remembered the first time she had plucked up courage to query him; Crow had fallen into such rage, striking her and screaming, that now she dared not question.

And the punctuation lightly and seemingly randomly scattered around the dialogue is enough to bring tears to my eyes:

“Fool! Grab her!” roared the giant, Crow made a lunge for her but tripped over his braces, “Idiot! Dogs come to me, come, your Master commands it.”

It’s more than commas where they shouldn’t be and conspicuous by their absence where they should. Although Alexander occasionally gets off a vivid description or a well-turned phrase, it seems more by luck than judgement a lot of the time and his writing often bogs down in repetition, cliché and an over-reliance on adjectives. Seriously, no noun connected to Mr Crow is allowed out of doors unprefaced by a “skinny”. So Mr Crow is thin, right? I get it. I get it. Please have mercy on me.

I’m no editor but there are equally fundamental issues with the structure of the book itself. The pacing is wobbly to say the least with the narrative either practically thrown into reverse while Charlie eats some spiced bread or we are forced to witness yet another interminable game of K’changa (I hate you JK Rowling, I hate you so much. I yearn for those halcyon days in which children’s books were allowed to exist that did not contain detailed descriptions of spurious sporting activities) and then speeding so rapidly through a succession of incidents that it’s enough to make you get motion sickness. The POV, equally, veers around all over the place and, dialogue aside, the characterisation – especially of Charlie – wavers too. She seems to be scared when the narrative prefers that she’s scared, and feisty when it’s time for her to be feisty. Furthermore, her famed “big mouth” barely lives up to its reputation for causing trouble. Maybe it’s just because she doesn’t have an accent but she seems like a complete void for most of the narrative. We’re told about her qualities (and, of course, her undeniable specialness) but we rarely seem them in action in a way that could make us care about her, or even be remotely interested in her. Alexander’s descriptions of scenery and action are at least nudging towards competence, but the emotional side of it all is completely flat:

Charlie, cheeks blushing uncontrollably, stared into the eyes of the woman who was supposed to be her guardian. Never had she felt such a hate so complete, never had such an anger awoken within her heart. Charlie, that very instant felt something deep within her move and change, something within her soul sickened and died and in its place something darker was born. This was a moment that would be etched eternally into her mind.

She gets over it. She kind of like de Sade’s Justine that way – ill-defined, unchanging and unaffected.

I can’t even in good conscience say that WICK has promise: until it gets some wheels, it ain’t going nowhere. I found it a real struggle to read, partially because I was mourning every tortured comma but also because whatever is good about it is completely eclipsed by its major and fundamental problems.Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Young Adult / Children

,

Self-Published

~

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~Comments (

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)

Rami

at 12:51 on 2009-06-09Ouch. From those excerpts, it seems like a pretty painful read -- but then, I like my grammar to be in more or less the right place. There's a place for bending the rules, but ignoring them like that just makes me wonder if they know the rules in the first place. And looking like you don't know how to write is not, IMHO, a good way to be taken seriously as a writer.

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Arthur B

at 13:12 on 2009-06-09Not only does the author have a strange way with commas, he also seems to urgently need to be introduced to a semicolon or two. Harsh as I was about Jim Bernheimer, but for the most part (aside from the odd "victim's fund" gaffe) his prose was readable, at least in the sense that it was capable of being read without getting a headache.

Maybe it's just because I'm a lawgeek, but does anyone else find it odd that Charlie is asked to sign contract when she's well below the age where she can actually enter binding agreements in the first place, and when there's a grandmother handy who is presumably legally capable of doing all that for her? Mr Crow seems to be as incompetent as he is corrupt.

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Sonia Mitchell

at 23:15 on 2009-06-09I love this review. And feel pity for everyone involved.

It actually sounds a bit Neil Gaiman-ey in intention, though I'm obviously not going to read it and see.

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Wardog

at 14:52 on 2009-06-18Actually this review makes me feel guilty as hell - panning something is never fun, but really, it was all in good conscience I could do.

[jjspina]

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR TERI POLEN!

Teri Polen

Please help me welcome author Teri Polen to Jemsbooks.blog Segment of Interview and Author. 

Hi Teri, it’s so nice to have you here today. Please feel free to begin. The spotlight is on you!

Please tell us about yourself.

I’m a young adult writer of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.  My first book, Sarah, a YA horror/thriller, was released in December 2016, and my second, The Gemini Connection, a YA sci-fi/thriller was published in June 2018.

jjspina: I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy but have never read all three in one book. Sounds intriguing!

What is your target audience for your book?

As a YA writer, my target audience is readers from age 12-years-old and up.  YA books aren’t only for teens–a large percentage of YA readers are over the age of eighteen.  One of the book clubs I’m in, Pardon My Youth, is for readers of YA books age 18 and over, and our members ages range from 18 to over 70.  Being the mother of sons, the audience I’d love to snag is teen boys, as they seem to read much less than teen girls.  Both of my books, as well as the one I’m currently working on, are written from a teen male perspective.  That may sound odd, but having sons and being around their friends, it’s what I know.

jjspina: Ooh, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy is quite a combination that is sure to grip teens.

What hobbies do you have when you are not writing?

Like most writers, I read, read, and read.  My happy place is on a beach under an umbrella, book in hand, and I’m totally content to stay there all day.  I also love movies (especially Marvel), yoga, rock/alt-rock music, and weight-lifting.

jjspina: That scenario sounds heavenly to me too but give me some sunscreen, plenty of water and a good book! Love movies, Marvel too!

What would you do if you were not a writer?

I’m convinced I’d be involved with books somehow, whether as an agent, editor, or librarian.  Books are my passion.

jjspina: I guess we authors all have books in our blood!

What process do you need in order to write?

Compared to other authors, I feel like I’m on the slow side when it comes to writing.  I only work on one project as a time, and don’t have a trunk full of ideas stashed away.  After wrapping up one book, it generally takes a few months for another idea to marinate and take hold.  I get to know my characters, and usually interview them to get a feel for their likes and dislikes, make a playlist, and spend time on world-building.

jjspina: Whatever works for you, Teri. It sounds like you have a good plan.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Italy is a place I’ve always wanted to visit–not so much the touristy locations, but maybe rent a villa in a smaller town.  I have a friend who’s doing exactly that for a month, and the pictures she’s sharing are just beautiful.

jjspina: Now that is the way to learn more about a country – live with the natives, so to speak. I hope you get to do that one day.

What projects are you currently working on?

My current WIP is a young adult sci-fi novel involving genetic engineering, something that’s always fascinated me.  I’d never planned to write a series, but I could see this one becoming a duology.  I’ll have to see where the characters lead me.  Recently, a reader of my first book, Sarah, asked if there would be a sequel.  I’d never planned on writing one, but know the direction I’d take it if it becomes a reality.  It’s something I’m keeping in mind.

jjspina: This sounds like a fascinating subject to write about, Teri. Best of luck with it and a sequel. 

Author’s Bio:

Teri Polen reads and watches horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.  The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, and anything Marvel-related are likely to cause fangirl delirium.  She lives in Bowling Green, KY with her husband, sons, and black cat.  Her first novel, Sarah, a YA horror/thriller, was a horror finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.  Visit her online at www.teripolen.com

Buy Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Teri-Polen/e/B01MYOUA6V

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-gemini-connection-teri-polen/1128081066

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sarah-teri-polen/1125171739

http://www.blackrosewriting.com/childrens-booksya/thegeminiconnection

http://www.blackrosewriting.com/childrens-booksya/sarah

Contact Links:

Website:  https://teripolen.com/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/TeriPolenAuthor/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/TPolen6

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16114393.Teri_Polen

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/tpolen6/

Pinterest:  https://www.pinterest.com/teripolen/

BookBub:  https://www.bookbub.com/profile/teri-polen

Thanks again for the interview, Janice!

It was my pleasure, Teri, to get to know you better and your books. I wish you much success with your books and any future endeavors. Please feel free to come back again to share new projects now that you are part of Jemsbooks Blog family.

Thank you, Readers, for stopping by to learn more about this creative author. I hope you will take some time and peruse her books and links above.

REMEMBER: READING GIVES YOU WINGS TO FLY! SOAR WITH JEMSBOOKS ALL YEAR THROUGH! HAPPY READING! READING IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH!

Please remember to give some love to authors by reading and reviewing their books wherever you purchased them. We authors will love you back!

Blessings & Hugs!

Janice

Interview with Author Teri Polen! INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR TERI POLEN! Teri Polen Please help me welcome author Teri Polen to Jemsbooks.blog Segment of Interview and Author. 

[danithebookaholic-blog]

A Book You Picked Solely Because of the Cover

The Fallen: The Fallen and Leviathan

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

This week’s suggestion on the Pinterest Reading Challenge is to pick a book solely based on its cover. So, I looked through my collection of books that I’ve gathered up through the years and thought to myself, “Hum… what looks good?”

With this week’s suggestion, I didn’t have the full pleasure of “judging a book based on its cover”—because I am trying to go through the hundreds of books that I already have—I’ve read all the synopses on their covers before. But I did make myself pick through a selection of books based on a few guidelines: the book couldn’t be a movie or TV show, it couldn’t be a classic that everyone knows the gist of the story line, and it couldn’t be one that I’ve been itching to get my hands on. I made myself look through the ones that I haven’t looked at for a while, the ones that were bought on a whim, written by someone I’ve never heard of before, or given to me from someone who reads genres that I’m not that into. This week I was going to make sure it was something different for me… Or so I thought.

Looking solely at the covers of the books I had collected—a couple fantasy, several YA and children’s chapter books (I don’t know why I gravitate to these so much!), a mystery, and a memoir—I kept coming back to the same one over and over. A black and white photograph of a lone figure with the title written in red. The lighting in the photograph had the lone figure highlighted in all the right places—the contours of his face and muscular arm—this alone will have you thinking to yourself that this must be some kind of romance novel, a spinoff of a harlequin perhaps and this will catch the females of the audience and make them want to pick it up. But romance novels are not my thing, so that is not what caught my attention. It was the dark angelic wing protruding from his back, and with a title of The Fallen, I couldn’t help myself but to pick it.

Some History:

The Fallen: The Fallen and Leviathan is a Young Adult read. It was originally published in 2003 and reprinted in 2010 with the new above picture on the cover. It is book one of five in The Fallen series, and it turns out it was also made into an ABC Family movie, Fallen, in 2006. (Oops! So much for those guidelines I made for myself!)

The Synopsis:

***SPOILER ALERT***

I wrote this review a little different than usual. I’m not sure why, other than this is how it came out, and I apologize that it 1) reads a bit like a school book report, and 2) does give away some of the ending.

 Aaron Corbet is a child of the foster care system and has finally found a foster family who he regards as his mom, dad and his brother, Stevie. On his eighteenth birthday he can suddenly understand and speak languages of all kinds even though he’s had no education in them. On top of that, he comes across a “homeless” man who begins following Aaron, telling him about his troubled past and the future that is to come: Aaron is Nephilim—the son of a mortal and an angel—and he has been chosen to redeem the Fallen.

The angel Verchiel is the master of the Powers and a Messenger of God. His duty is to cleanse the earth of the filth that the Fallen have produced upon the earth: Nephilim. Using his human hounds and divine senses he tracks down Nephilim and purges them from the earth. The Nephilim he’s currently hunting is Aaron Corbet.

With the help of Zeke, the Grigori, Camael of the Fallen, and his best friend Gabriel, Aaron transforms into the Nephilim he is, and not a minute too late: Verchiel has finally found him and is ready to purge his filth from the earth. A battle ensues and Aaron turns out to be more powerful than Verchiel originally thought. Aaron injures Verchiel, who flees, taking Stevie with him. Now Aaron must not only fulfil the prophecy, but find his brother before Verchiel turns him into one of his human hounds.

Aaron and his posse begin a road trip in search of Stevie, with a powerful pull toward Blythe, Maine. Along the way they encounter a group of Orishas, another product the Fallen have created. However, the Orishas are ruled by Verchiel, who has bestowed the mission of killing Aaron upon them, but they don’t succeed. Only one Orishas remains, and before fleeing it gets a small revenge and bites Gabriel.

Arriving in Blythe, they find Gabriel a doctor to treat the infected Orishas bite, but the townsfolk here are a little strange: they look suspicious of everyone and act as if they’re being controlled. That is everyone but Dr. Katie McGovern, who later tells Aaron that she, too, is an outsider, new to town. She came to town because her ex-boyfriend, Dr. Kevin Wessell, had e-mailed her with a strange request that she visit, but when she got to town he was missing and hadn’t been in to see his patients for days.

Katie enlists the help of Aaron around the office until Kevin hopefully returns, but after finding several strangely mutated animals in Kevin’s freezer, she begins to think that Kevin may have dug up some dirt on the town that someone didn’t want him finding out.  Katie and Aaron agree that they need to find out what’s going on around the town and try to find Kevin, but the mission is doomed from the beginning when Katie turns up missing herself. Aaron begins the mission alone, only to find himself in the lair of Leviathan, “that spark of uncertainty in the Creator’s thoughts as He forged the world—that brief moment of chaos—before Genesis.”

Leviathan, a great sea monster, entraps its victims by making their mind’s eye see whatever paradise it wishes to see, then swallows them whole and lives off the life force stored inside them. Aaron finds that both Camael and Gabriel are in Leviathan’s stomachs, and knows that in order to save them he must overcome his fear of letting the Nephilim power within him out and do the one thing the Archangel Gabriel could not: destroy Leviathan.

Aaron defeats Leviathan and frees all those within Leviathan’s stomachs including his friends and the Archangel Gabriel. Aaron then fulfills the prophecy and forgives the Fallen who are found within Leviathan’s many stomachs and sends them to their Heavenly home. But before The Archangel Gabriel ascends he gives Aaron another hint about the prophecy he is fulfilling and a wink of information about who his real father is.

The Fallen concludes with the townspeople of Blythe, Maine being released from their captor’s control, Katie and Kevin reunited, and Aaron with a lot of questions: Who is his real father? What does his father have to do with the prophecy? And where is Stevie?

The Review:

The Pros:

Of course, I liked The Fallen, it’s right up my alley (so much for breaking out of my habits and trying something new!) First, it’s a YA read, so you know I’m hooked there.

Second, it’s a present-day mythology just like the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan or The Mortal Instruments and Shadowhunter series by Cassandra Clare, both of which I’m a big fan of. To take a myth—and I use this word to group together the whole, so please you Christians out there don’t hate on me for using this word, I’m a Christian, too! —but to take a myth such as angels or Greek gods and to create a new story for them is awesome! You’re taking those classics that a lot of people don’t read any more because they find them boring or too difficult to understand and are making them readily available to today’s societies so that Genesis, Matthew, Luke, Homer and Sophocles are getting a new—and usually younger—generation to ignite and share their stories again.

Third, something that I found that set The Fallen apart from most YA books was the language. I, myself, don’t have the best vocabulary by any means (I should have listened to my mother and studied for those vocabulary tests!), but I have grown my knowledge and understanding over the years, and this book still had me looking up words in the dictionary (or rather dictionary.com, yay technology!) I like that about a book! I like that while I’m reading for pleasure I’m still learning things. I don’t think that everything should be dumbed down so everyone in the general population can understand it. I think you should always be learning something and improving on yourself, and if that means you must get a dictionary out to understand what’s happening in the storyline then that’s great! You learned something in the process; you made yourself better and had a better experience because of it!

The Cons:

Aaron Corbet is a little fake. He’s too good and not moody enough to be a teenage boy and a child of the foster system who has just found out that he’s this mythological creature. In the beginning, you’re told that he has a troubled past, that he was moved from foster home to foster home, but the person sitting in front of you is polite, never causes a stir, and when he does have an emotional outbreak of some kind its abbreviated and almost void of emotion. Almost like his outburst were an afterthought, like Thomas Sniegoski’s editor said, “Hey, don’t you think he would be a little upset that this is happening?” The lack of emotion he shows when someone he loves is hurt or killed is the biggest one for me. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t get angry and yell, he just tells himself that he can’t believe that they are hurt or dead. I understand shellshock, but I think this is a bit more than just that. Aaron is not fleshed out enough to be a real person, but then again, I guess he really isn’t, after all he is Nephilim.

My other qualm with The Fallen is defeat is too easy. With each battle scene—if you can really call them that—the fight was ended really before it began. These are some big monsters he’s going up against, and yet I saw how the end of each battle was going to play out from the moment they started. There was no adrenaline rush of “is he going to make it?” in any of the battle scenes. From the beginning, you knew he was going to be just fine and good would prevail over evil once again.

The Wrap-Up:

Overall, I enjoyed The Fallen. I thought it was a great storyline with a good mystery: I want to know who Aaron’s father is myself! Who is this—as Camael puts it— “angel of formidable power to have sired one like [Aaron]?" ? And does he ever find Stevie? All the questions Aaron has at the end of the book are questions I have too, which is a sign of a good story. The author has you hooked to make you want to pick up that next book. Which I plan on doing just that!

 From one wine-loving bookaholic to another, I hope I’ve helped you find your next fix. —Dani

 Love this book? Check out The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare or one of her many other Shadowhunter series.

Pair it with: Lost Angel’s 2016 Mischief—Fruit-forward and jammy, with hints of cocoa.

Not all good wines are expensive, and this one is just that: good, easy on the wallet and fits with the trouble that Aaron gets himself into.

Start a conversation: What book have you chosen based solely on its cover and why? Was it worth the gamble?

Have a book you’d like to suggest or one you’d like me to review? Please feel free to leave your comments down below.