Tag: #writing

Two Verses

Lucifer, and, Terns at Hong Kong Harbour
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These two poems reflect just a little of the awe and joy watching birds has given me over the last forty years.

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Lucifer (Sterna paradisaea)

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Arctic Terns live almost entirely in light for their entire lives. They fly 30,000 km each year, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. Their return – south or north – heralds the light, and spring.

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Land freezes;

Dawn and dusk reach to each other;

Birds flee, or huddle, silent.

Sunset and blood stain the snow:

Ice grows.

Where the world spirals and all northings meet;

And the sun is always or never,

The tern circles, once, twice, three times

Memory and stars beckon.

Light will fail here;

Sunset and blood stain the snow

Before the final dark, before

Ice and silence triumph.

The tern circles, once, twice, three times

And not again; south sings in its bones

And blood; stars set and rise.

Sunrise spirals and stretches; light prevails.

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Terns at Hong Kong Harbour

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Spare black on white, swift to frothing wake

in pewter waters; silver sweep of wing

bright counterpoint to lightning’s rake

rending the heavy hanging cloud; hovering,

holding; plunging to take the shining glide,

the curve and scale, beating upward against

the drag of wave, watching for the gleaming slide

of fish, awareness stretched and tensed and held

to dancing, diving grace.

A Review of Chained by Susanne Valenti

Chained, by Susanne Valenti

A fast-paced, well-plotted young-adult dystopian novel by first-time author Susanne Valenti, Chained is concerned with the familiar theme of teenage protagonists challenging the structures and tenets of their society in a post-apocalyptic world. While this theme is the basis for most dystopian novels, the characters of and the story told in Chained are original enough to keep readers interested. Before I write anything else, let me say this: Chained is worthy of a read if young adult dystopian fiction is a genre of choice. Fans of the Divergent series, The Hunger Games series, and similar works should enjoy this book and look forward to the sequel.

Now, for a few niggles.

The society against which Maya, the heroine, and her companions rebel is imagined and described in enough detail to give the reader a sense of how this world works. The society into which she escapes is less well realized, perhaps because it reflects, more or less, current Western society, and therefore is supposed to be already familiar to the reader. I found I had questions about the functioning of the society outside of the city from which Maya and her companions flee which were not answered in the narrative.

Maya’s thoughts and reactions to situations were not always made clear, and at times she appeared to observe what was happening to her and narrate rather than respond. In one or two cases – especially after a scene in which she is brutally assaulted – her reactions did not to me ring true. Overall, though, this does not impede the action of the narrative, and should not be a barrier to enjoying the the story.

A few production issues were mildly irritating, and perhaps the manuscript could have benefited from one final copy-edit. The author’s use of ‘alright’ rather than ‘all right’; the contraction of ‘going to’ to ‘gunna’ rather than the more familiar ‘gonna’; inconsistent capitalization of City in “Harbour City”, and an unconventional use of quotation marks in multi-paragraph dialogue were all distractions for me, pulling my focus away from the writing – which overall is effective – when they occurred.

But these are niggles only. Let me repeat that Chained, overall, is a well-told story, and I will be reading the sequel when it comes out. My overall rating for Chained? 3 ½ stars out of 5.

Chained by Susanne Valenti is available as an e-book from Amazon.

This is an independent review of a purchased book. The review was not sought by the author nor written for any benefit. The opinions stated here are mine alone.

Divided Desires

I often go walking when I’m working out plot points, conflicts, or scenes, and today was no exception.  I’m reaching a fairly pivotal plot point in Empire’s Hostage, and I needed to think about it.  However, I’m also house-and-cat sitting for my sister this week, and so am close to the birding mecca of Point Pelee National Park.  And those of you who’ve read my bio on various sites know I’m also a birder.

It’s fall, not the intense migration of spring with birds (and birders) in hordes.  So I figured I could walk, look at a few birds and think about plot at the same time. Ha!  Warblers everywhere.  Thrushes everywhere.  Sparrows everywhere and all the Eastern Phoebes in the world, it seemed.  I’d walk a few paces, thinking… “if Lena does this, how will Cillian react?”  and would just start formulating a scene and ‘What’s that?  A black-throated green?  Yes, juvenile male….ok, where was I?  Cillian doesn’t like…..Now what?  Kinglet…which one…golden-crowned, should be a ruby-crowned in this bunch somewhere…”

This went on for my entire two hour walk. I can’t turn my birding brain off; it’s just not possible. I wonder if Margaret Atwood has this problem?  (Canadian writer extraordinaire and also a birder, in case you’re unsure.)

However, at the end of the two hours, I had seen a ruby-crowned kinglet along with a lot of other birds, and had more or less worked out the next couple of scenes, albeit in a very fragmented way. So once I’ve got today’s records entered in e-bird, I’ll go and write for a couple of hours. Away from the window and the bird feeders.

And now for something completely different…

Here’s a short story I wrote a number of years ago for my husband’s birthday party – his birthday is just a couple of days before Hallowe’en, so every few years we do a costume party with a theme.  This particular year it was horror stories.   You can read it on Wattpad  or on my website.

Spider

My Favourite Review

It’s one thing to have your book reviewed by family or friends.  It’s another to have a complete stranger review it.  Over on Kobo.com, this review of Empire’s Daughter appeared:

“A story both hard and beautiful, Empire’s Daughter handles with depth and eloquence the issues of its time. The Empire is so like a past that our culture could hold, and creates a reflection on our decisions and traditions and their impact. For all its insight it still drives a narrative of growth and action.”

It’s written by someone I don’t know at all, who had no reason to be polite or to hold back on what he/she really thought. For that reason, it’s (so far) my favourite review.

Interested in reviewing Empire’s Daughter?  You can download the e-book it for free for a limited time from www.smashwords.com for no cost, using coupon code: ML72W.

A Map of the Empire

MAPTAKE1

Here’s a map of the lands known as ‘The Empire’.  It’s perhaps 800 miles north to south, two hundred and fifty miles across. Two hundred thousand square miles in area – twice the size of the UK, about the same as France, half the size of Ontario, just a bit bigger than the Dakotas.

Note that the villages of Delle, Serra and Tirvan are shown in relation to the Road, but actually are on the coast below the Road.

What did Dickens do? The challenges of publishing-by-installment.

Publishing Empire’s Hostage in installments (www.empireshostage.com) is proving to be an interesting process.  It is reducing my procrastination considerably – the first book in the series took me over a decade to write – ok, I was working at the time, and travelling, and providing a great deal of care to my aging parents – but still!  My goal is to have the book completed by my next birthday – April of 2016 – and knowing nearly 100 people (to date) are following the installments certainly gives me incentive to write.

But I’m not a writer who maps out the entire story in detail and then writes it. While I have the general gist of the story arc in my head, things just happen.  Characters turn out not to be quite the person you expected them to be.  Questions are asked by the protagonist – and you don’t have an answer (and it’s a really important question.)  When you write and publish a book in the traditional way, when these things happen, you go back to the earlier chapters and make sure they contain appropriate foreshadowing, or just plain don’t contradict the later chapters (and rely on your editor to catch anything you didn’t.)

So far, there’s enough space between my posts and what I’m writing now to go back and make the necessary changes before the installments go public.  At some point, that may not be the case.  I haven’t quite decided how to handle it – I could go back and change the earlier installment.  I could leave it alone, or add a postscript to the installment explaining.

Charles Dickens wrote a lot of his books as installments in a monthly magazine.  I wonder how he handled this problem?

Any thoughts or advice from my readers?

thanks,

Marian

Encouraging a fellow writer

I think we all need to do this for each other as much as possible in the indie writing community!  This is a link to Dave Whaley’s site for Z:UK, his newly published book.

https://authorwhaley.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/2015-dave-whaley-the-published-author/comment-page-1/#comment-26

Britain and zombies…what more could I ask?  I’ll be reading it soon!