by john | Jul 26, 2011 | Book Spotlight
Why Write Crime Fiction?
(or any other kind of made-up stuff that never happened…)
by Mary Anna Evans
Author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth
The protagonist in my thriller Wounded Earth, Larabeth McLeod, is the kind of woman who changes the world. I love her for that.
She sees a problem—polluted water or soil or air—and she invents a way to fix it. She uses that knowledge to found a company that employs lots of people. The world is a better place because she’s in it, and that’s one of the reasons readers cheer her on. The man who is stalking her, a man so evil that he calls himself Babykiller, is so angry at the world and at humanity that he’s willing to strike back in some terrible ways. Larabeth doesn’t intend to let that happen, despite the fact that fighting back could cost her everything.
Characters like these are a gift from God for a writer like me. They matter, but sometimes I ask myself, “Do I?” Don’t you ever doubt your place in the universe?
Someone please tell me I’m not the only neurotic soul who wonders whether she has earned her spot on the planet on any given day. When undergoing a bout of end-of-the-day emotional accounting, I feel good about having made sure my daughter had a balanced dinner or about recycling the cans that held the Coca-Cola I probably shouldn’t have drunk.
Mopping the kitchen floor and dusting the furniture don’t give the same karma-improving feeling. The floor and furniture will be dirty again tomorrow, so how exactly have I made the world a better place by cleaning them today? And don’t even get me started on laundry…
So where does my profession rate when it comes to making the world a better place? Am I wasting my time and talents by spending my days writing thrillers and mysteries? Should I go back to environmental engineering, where I have the opportunity to help our society learn to clean up its messes?
Really, one could ask these questions about any work of art. Lovely music, pretty pictures, graceful dancing, exciting stories…none of these things put food on the table. Yet art is what makes us human. It is the only tool we can use to communicate the wordless feelings in our hearts. I can’t show you my soul, but I can paint a picture of what’s in it. Even better, I could write you a story.
Human beings have been telling stories for all of time. Before we settled in cities, before we learned to grow our food, before we could even light a fire to cook that food, we told each other tales that shared important knowledge or that beat back the terrors of the night. Crime fiction is simply a descendant of those old, old stories.
I consider crime fiction to be the literature of justice. I introduce my readers to a world of my own design, then I set it askew in a dramatic way. Murder can do that. Then, slowly, I labor with Larabeth (or Faye Longchamp or whoever is my protagonist of the moment) to set that world right.
This isn’t always possible in real life. Crime goes unpunished and murderers do walk free. But in the tightly controlled world of my creation, justice can be served.
Sometimes, I dance along the boundaries of that justice. What is just is not always what is legal, and what is legal is not always what is just. By exploring that gray and murky boundary, I ask my readers to consider how they want their world to be. When they close my books, they go back into that world with ideas that are slightly different than they were before. Maybe they will be gentler with people who are different from them. Maybe they will stand up and say so when something is just not right.
I hope so. Because I think that asking people to think hard about right and wrong is an excellent way for a writer to earn her place in the universe.
Mary Anna is the author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth, as well as the awardwinning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries and Red Adept’s top short story collection of 2010, Offerings. All her work is available in ebook form. Wounded Earth and the Faye Longchamp mysteries are also available in print.
Website: http://www.maryannaevans.com/
Personal blog: http://maryannaevans.blogspot.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527135843
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/maryannaevans
Group blog: http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/
by john | Mar 29, 2011 | Book Spotlight, Writing
So I’ll admit to crushing a little on Kalayna Price just off of her author’s pic. But seriously, go here and tell me she’s not just cute as all get out. I dare you. Then I met her at RoundCon, and found out that she’s just as nice, engaging and smart as she is cute and fashionable (there’s a post coming about convention/signing wear, the writer’s costume and all that, but I think I have to finish formulating my opinion before I can write it. Not that having a half-baked opinion has ever stopped me from writing anything.). Then I got my paws on an electronic copy of Grave Witch, her first Alex Craft novel, and damn if she isn’t the trifecta – gorgeous, nice and a hell of a writer, too!
I only have the ridiculously good-looking and talented parts covered, personally. I’m not really that nice, so I only get two out of three. Oh well, just imagine how insufferable I’d be if I were any cooler? But I digress. Again.
Grave Witch is a novel about Alex Craft, and she sees dead people. More to the point she’s a private investigator that can raise ghosts (shades in the world of the book, as ghosts are different, but world-building isn’t my gig). Alex is a great character in that she’s struggling – she doesn’t have her crap together by any stretch, and I love that real weakness in a character. Alex is broke, has a crap car, is estranged from her family, and doesn’t have a boyfriend. Except for Death, who keeps dropping by and looks better in a pair of jeans than a force of nature really has any right to.
I found Grave Witch to be a quick read, engaging from start to finish, with a good foundation for sequels (one’s coming later this year, as a matter of fact). I cared about the characters and wanted to see more of them, which is great for a first book in a series. I thought Kalayna built an interesting world, with some neat twists on our own society, but still similar enough to our reality to be really familiar. I happily paid the publisher’s retail on the ebook, even though I usually balk at paying more than $5 for a digital edition, and I’ll buy the others as soon as they’re available, too.
So here’s a raging debate in the ebook world – pricing. What’s fair for an ebook? I paid $6.99 for Grave Witch, and just bought Neil Gaiman’s American Gods today for $9.99. Those are pretty steep prices for a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, but certainly not significantly more than I’m accustomed to paying for an album of a dozen songs. So what’s fair? Neil Gaiman will get maybe $2 out of the ten I spent, and Kalayna got maybe $1.50 off her book. When I sell an ebook for $2.99, I get $2.05, but am I still selling too cheap? After all, I don’t write for art, I write to get paid. I know, I’m supposed to love my work and suffer for it, but I’ve got twenty years of theatrical suffering under my belt, I don’t need any more.
I think $5 is a reasonable price for a novel, and it should stay in the “impulse buy” category. So April 1 I’ll be raising the price of my $2.99 novels to $4.95, as an experiment. So if you’ve been planning to buy The Chosen or Back in Black, you should do so before Friday, or you’ll pay more (not that I have a problem with that).
On a related but different note, what do you think about combo packs? A paperback book packaged with a promo card for a free download. Any interest? How about being able to buy a postcard at a book show with a promo code for a download? That way you can still get something signed by the author if you’re into that, but you can stay all-digital in your reading habits. That was something Bobby and I were chatting about at the con last weekend.
by john | Feb 6, 2011 | Book Spotlight
My posting this week will be a bit limited as I bounce from the Great White North back down to Georgia for work travel all week, but I didn’t want to leave you without a Sunday Spotlight. And this one’s super-fresh because I just finished this book on the plane. Jenny Pox by JL Bryan – wow, what a roller coaster ride.
The blurb from Smashwords goes like this – Jenny has a secret. Her touch spreads a deadly supernatural plague. She devotes her life to avoiding contact with people, but her senior year of high school, she falls in love with the one boy she can touch. But he’s under the spell of his devious girlfriend Ashleigh, who secretly wields the most dangerous power of all. Now Jenny must master the “Jenny pox” before Ashleigh can destroy her.
I picked up the book because it had gotten some great responses on a couple of message boards I frequent, but put off getting started because it sounded a little too chick-flick, Lifetime movie for me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. JL Bryan has written a book that runs the gamut from young adult romance to revenge thriller to horror novel to grand fantasy epic love story, and doesn’t miss on any fronts. I was, quite simply, blown away.
I grew up in rural SC, so I’m a little touchy about people writing about rednecks from my home state. Bryan captures the class separation in the rural South beautifully, and paints a totally realistic picture of what life is like when the haves target the have-nots for torment. Throw in the fact that Jenny, the main character, really is a freak of nature with poisonous hands, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster like I haven’t read in years.
Seriously, kids, this book kicks ass. It’s old-school Stephen King good, before he got hit by a car and started thinking too many deep thoughts. This is Pet Sematary and Needful Things kinda good. Jenny Morton is the hero, the kid you love despite all the crap she does that’s not lovable. That’s where Bryan excels – he paints realistic heroes. Jenny steals her dad’s weed when life gets to be too much, and has nasty thoughts of revenge when people do mean things to her. She’s not some wimpy little chickadee that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and that’s what makes the book all the better. The cast of supporting characters is solid, too, but it’s the villain of the piece that gets some of the best attention. She’s as fully realized as Jenny, a nasty little bitch that you hope against hope for most of the book that she gets what’s coming to her.
I’m not going to give away any plotlines, because that’s just shitty, but the climactic confrontation is every bit as scorched-earth badass as anything I’ve read in a long, long time. This is a book that you should all go buy, because it’s a hell of a thrill ride!
by john | Jan 30, 2011 | Book Spotlight
Authors, if you want to be featured on the Sunday Spotlight – write a great book. If I buy it and read it and agree that it’s a great book, it’ll probably end up here. If you wanna send me a copy of your great book, that’s very cool and I appreciate it. But I’m not going to be a review site, and I’m not promising anything except that once a week I’ll try to write up a book from an independent author that I love. But I won’t turn down gifts – email them to johnhartness AT gmail DOT com.
We’re not going to go into the fact that Amanda Hocking came out of nowhere in 2010 to become a monster best-selling author, all without the backing of any big publishing house or press machine. We’re not going to hold her up as some type of gold standard for independent authors and make her our Joan of Arc for self-publishing. Because frankly, none of that matters. All that matters is that this chick from Minnesota has written some kickass books and you should check them out.
Now a bunch of Hocking’s books are in trilogies, but my favorite book of hers so far is a stand-alone zombie novel called Hollowland. The blurb for Hollowland says “This is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.” And from page 1, this book had me by the short hairs and never let go. 19-year-old Remy King only cares about one thing in the world – getting her brother the help he needs. And she will do anything it takes to get Max to safety, from battling hordes of zombies to bands of outlaw scavengers to her own hormones and despair.
Hocking paints a great post-apocalyptic world, with plenty of grit but also the odd ray of hope. Remy tries to be tough as nails, but shows all too often that she’s really a good person underneath. Look, I’m no book critic, I’m just a redneck writer with a fantasy literature itch, and Hollowland scratched that as well as anything I’ve read recently. I loved it as much as I loved The Hunger Games, and it really runs right up the with Ender’s Game, one of my all-time faves. That’s not to say that this book is anything like those, although there are certain dystopian traditions that it shares with The Hunger Games, as well as 1984, We and even the final scenes of E.T.
The plot is tight and fast-paced, and the book kept me up way past my bedtime for more than one night. I even snuck in a little time to read at work, which is a true testament to how much I wanted to know what happened next. The characters are nicely well-rounded, from the shell-shocked rock star to the frightened baby brother to the ass-kicking heroine. I would say this is a great book for teen and preteen girls who are interested in fantasy as horror lit, because it gives them a solid role model instead of the insipid heroines we see in so many TV shows and movies. Remy is definitely more Rambo and Veronica Mars than Bella, and the literary world needs more of that.
Hollowland is a thrill ride of a book, and one that leaves you gasping for breath at the end, feeling fulfilled and still wanting more. I felt like the book ended almost perfectly, but I still wanted a sequel just because I enjoyed the characters so much. So you should go buy it.
For more about Amanda Hocking and her work, go to her blog.
To buy Hollowland for multiple e-readers, including the Kindle, go to Smashwords.
by john | Jan 23, 2011 | Book Spotlight
Okay, so this is NOT going to turn into a book review site. Really.
But I read a lot. And a lot of the stuff I read you’re not going to find in bookstores because it’s written by independent authors like myself, so there aren’t any huge market budgets like for the latest James Patterson & Co. book, or even the latest Richard Castle book (and yeah, I’m kinda dying to know who ghost-writes those, even though I haven’t read them, but I digress).
And in an effort to schedule my life a little better so I can post more regularly, I thought that Sunday seemed like a good time to tell you fine folks about some of the stuff I’ve been reading. And there’s not a much better place to kick it off than with an honest-to-god stereotype-crushing indie author success story like Michael Sullivan. Full disclosure, I don’t know Michael, I’ve exchanged a few comments with his wife/publicist/former agent on a message board, but that’s it. Even fuller disclosure, the links here will take you to Smashwords, and I get an affiliate cut off stuff you buy there. You can also find his stuff on Amazon, his website, and a bunch of other places if you don’t wanna give me a little kickback.
So Michael Sullivan writes a series of books called Riyria Revelations, about a pair of thieves in a fantastical land where elves, dwarves and magic still exist. And this pair of thieves gets tangled up in affairs of state, and mayhem ensues. I can’t give you too much of the plot, because I’m on Book 2 right now, and everything about the world may change by the time I get to Book 6.
Book 1 is called The Crown Conspiracy, and it’s one of the most promising beginnings to a fantasy series I’ve read since The Belgariad. I fell in love with the characters of Royce and Hadrian immediately, and love their witty banter, their mysterious background, their cast of supporting characters, the whole nine yards. It’s pretty easy to see that these characters have a lot more to divulge, and what I enjoy about Sullivan’s writing is that he doesn’t feel the need to just barf it all out in a huge exposition piece, he’s taking the time to reveal bits slowly over the course of all the books. It’s the mark of a very well-planned series, and something I envy, because I can barely keep track enough to foreshadow two chapters ahead, much less reach back to background clues I dropped three books ago and pick them up.
The plot is fairly simple – two thieves are hired to do a job, the job turns out to be a setup, bad things happen, the wrong person ends up dead, and our heroes get blamed for it. Don’t get grumpy, this hardly even counts as a spoiler, it’s all in the bit you can get as a free sample. Then royalty gets involved, and we all know how well that usually goes for common thieves, more subterfuge is unfurled, a deeper conspiracy is uncovered, an even deeper one is hinted at, and a big honking fight ensues. We have betrayal upon betrayal, inter-kingdom politics, a snarky dwark, a magic-user who may be a good guy, the same magic-user who may be super-evil, a brilliantly drawn monk who I desperately hope comes back in a later book (and honestly, would be such a good character to kill off later because nobody would expect it and everyone would howl at the pages when he died, but I’m seriously hoping that doesn’t happen, and like I said, I’m only on Book 2), a conniving princess, and more court/church politics than you can shake a stick at.
Seriously, kids, this series is shaping up to have all the scope of The Lord of the Rings without all the boring descriptions and songs. I know, somebody just burned their John Hartness Voodoo Doll because I slagged Tolkien. Get over it, I’m sure he doesn’t mind. He’s up there sipping tea with C.S. Lewis saying something about how kids these days don’t appreciate dense prose. Because I don’t. That’s what I really love about Sullivan’s work here – it’s epic fantasy without the epic reader workload. These books are fast, engaging reads, perfect for people like me who enjoy David Eddings, Mercedes Lackey and Raymond Feist.
So go buy it already, it’s five bucks for the first book and is well worth it. You can also get his books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and his website, where you can order analog editions autographed right to you, which is kind of a brilliant idea and I will almost certainly steal it.
I’m not going to get all book-reviewer and do some formal star rating, but if I did, this series would absolutely get five stars, and more to the point – it gets my money. I can’t give a higher recommendation than to say this – as soon as I finished Book 1, I immediately bought Books 2 & 3. And the rest are at the top of my Amazon wish list!
