New Blog Features

Hello, everyone! Once again, thanks for reading my blog, for commenting, for emailing, and, well, for just showing me a little bit of attention! Isn't that really what all writers want--besides money, and maybe expressing some thoughts and themes so we can sleep?

Anyway, there are a few new tidbits to the blog, so here we go:

--I've been reviewing books for a long time now, both here and at Goodreads. I also review short stories and short story collections, so if you write those, please feel free to send one along for review. Writers, agents and publicists have been sending me emails--through this blog and through the Horror Writers Association--to review their books for years. At least 75% of the time I accept the book for review (in fact, I say Yes a great percentage of the time), but sometimes I can't.  There are reasons for this:

1. If I'm swamped at work (which I always am, but some swampings are more bearable than others), I sometimes feel that I can't guarantee a punctual review post. If the writer / agent / publicist asks for a quick turnaround, I often cannot oblige. This is only fair to them. Sometimes they say for me to take my time, that a positive review will benefit them even a week or two after the release--but sometimes they don't. If it's a demand I feel I can't definitely honor, I say No.

2. At my job, I have to read and write a lot, so I often don't have any words left in the tank for anyone else, especially if I'm neglecting my own writing as well. So, again, if time is an issue for the writer / agent / publicist or for me, I have to decline.

3. Though I much prefer physical copies, I sometimes accept an e-book for review. But, because of all the computer screen time I put in for my job, and for my own writing (especially the business side of it), I sometimes insist that I recieve a printed copy to review. If this is not possible, I sometimes have to decline. This is especially true on those days when my screen seems brighter than I know it to be--like right now. That's eye strain, which leads to headaches, and...Please, everyone: Send physical copies if you can.

4. Physical copies are also great because I tend to give them away (when permitted) to blog readers, or to someone at my job, etc. So the word of mouth is better with printed copies. Because of copyright laws, internet and email courtesy, etc., I always delete the e-book after I've reviewed it, so I can't pass it along.

5. If the book in question is not appropriate for whatever reason, I have to decline. One of those reasons, besides the obvious of content, is if the book is a in a genre I simply never read. This is only fair to the writer, as I won't be able to give a quality review. Examples of genres I never read include Romance and Westerns. I'm iffy about sci-fi and fantasy, but I've read LotR and Game of Thrones, and I like sci-fi movies--movies by Ridley Scott, or those based on stories by Philip K. Dick, like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall (the original, of course), etc.

6. Some self-published authors are professional authors, but most are not. I say Yes to authors who have been published by the major houses in the past, and who are now doing it on their own. Their quality of writing hasn't changed; they've just decided that the economics are better for them if they take charge of their own publishing. (Steven Pressfield, who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance and Turning Pro, is an example.) I also say Yes to professional authors who have always self-published, but whom have a track record of quality writing and / or sales. But most self-published authors simply don't fit either category. I know, because I've reviewed a great many God-awful books that were beyond amateurish. If I feel that there is no way at all that I could give a positive review--or say anything positive at all--I decline.

Having said all that, I actually say Yes at least 75% of the time, so please consider me for a book review if you (or your writer) fit the criteria above. Please send me an email (off to the side of this blog somewhere) or send it to me at NetGalley--or, better yet, sending it to me at NetGalley and then send me an email saying you've done so! And I think only once in my reviewing career did I publish a scathing review--and that's because I was working for a website at the time, and I was told to review the work no matter what. So I did. Yikes! Frankly, I weed out requests of books that I feel I'd slam, so when I agree to review a book, I'm basically saying I'll almost definitely say something very favorable. If I can't, I simply don't post the review at all. (This is common amongst most bloggers.)

So, please read some of the book reviews posted here, and if you feel like sending one along to me, please do so. Thanks! And, again, as always, thanks for reading!

P.S.--As you can see on the right of the blog, I'm available for book review tours. Also, I moved my Blogger Friends icon up to the top, and I've offered an option for you to recieve new posts in your email (Don't know why I never had that before here), so please join up! I also put the NetGalley icon at the very top for your book- or story-sending convenience.

It's A Different Time: Today's Disrespect of Intelligence

Concord Days is an interesting little book, if you're interested in the Alcott family, or the Transcendentalists, or about how an intellectual thought in New England circa 1870, and a little before. It was originally published in 1872. The one I read is a reprint of the original, and therefore a little hard on the eyes, since the original wasn't perfectly printed to begin with. It's got pages that were unnecessarily bolded and overinked, and other pages where the print is slim, and under-inked. Some pages were in the middle. Alcott was not as heavily published as were his popular daughters, and this shows. He was highly influential, especially in education, and highly respected by his Transcendentalist peers, but this does not necessarily translate into sales.

You would probably have to have an interest in one of the above things to get something out of this, but it's a quaint little hardcover book, and it's an honest writing of the thoughts of a smart, influential guy in Concord, MA and environs, including Harvard, southern to central NH, and...well, that's about it.

Amos Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. They had an interesting family and a curious dynamic. The family lived in poverty for a long time, until Louisa May started writing every single thing she could think of and the money started pouring in. (She wrote a lot more than Little Women. She wrote under many different names, fiction and nonfiction, and her first big successes were with novels of passion and of heaving bosoms, and the like. Picture a woman writing Harlequin Romances who one day wrote a classic about smart, independent young women and a quaint family life, and that's her.) Even after that, the family was more than happy to have their patriarch remain essentially unemployed, which allowed him to become a man of letters and thought, and to be respected as such. As I mentioned, this does not always translate to books sold, or to profitable lectures. But this was an altruistic family, and the mother and daughters were seriously happy to be the breadwinners as the father wrote letters in his study, and education tracts to pop-up education and lifestyle start-ups, all of which failed.

Maybe it was the time. In his journal you would see a lot of ideas about Pliny, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Goethe, Greeley, Plato and others. He writes about people you may not know, such as Phillips, Berkeley, Boehme, Carlyle, Landor, Pythagoras and Plutarch, and Swedenborg. He was known amongst his contemporaries, so his portrait of Hawthorne is correct. (He was as nervous and depressed as others say he was. Hawthorne would literally run away from a conversation.) He was spot on about Thoreau, who was apparently a bit of a respected drifter who didn't actually drift, but looked and acted like he did. Thoreau tested his friends, but he was not short of them. He seems to have been the type of guy who you respected for being so independent, so non-9 to 5, but whom you also wanted to tell to stop being such a bum and to get a damn job.

Alcott had the ability (and the time) to just read and write and think, without anyone telling him to get a damn job you bum, which makes me jealous as hell, though I wouldn't necessarily want to write about what he wrote about. He was amongst the last of the wave of privileged guys who would write about Ideas, with a capital I. He wrote about Morality, Virtue, Ideals, and the importance of one to be able to lecture well, and to be talented at smart conversation. This simply doesn't happen anymore, and it got me to wondering why.

I decided it was because my generation, and certainly the one after mine, has grown up with the idea that something is how it seems to me, but I understand it may not have the same seeming to someone else. In other words, we don't believe in universals anymore. (I know that's a universal, but let's accept the paradox and move on.) It also seems to me that nobody is renowned or respected for his intelligence anymore. Outside of luminaries like Hawking and Spielberg, who are extremely well-respected, if you are an extremely intelligent and intellectual person, but work 9-5, you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, lest people roll their eyes about you and say out loud that they don't have as much time to be smart as you do--the insinuation being that you're apparently smarter, but still somehow lesser, than they. Pointing out their latent insecurity does not help the matter any.

Sounds like personal, bitter experience, doesn't it?

Alcott was apparently one of those guys, but was well-respected, sought after, and appreciated for it. Such is simply not the case anymore. Period. He would not be so treated today; I guarantee it.

But I would also feel uncomfortable writing about Virtue and Morality these days. It is a different time. It's not the fault of political-correctness, exactly, as much as it is an ingrained understanding of the fallacy of universals. Morality for me, in suburban-hell New England, and Morality for the poverty-stricken of Ferguson, Missouri, for example, are probably two different things. Or, in other words, Yes, it's wrong to steal, but when you're starving and nobody's hiring you, you break a few universal rules every now and then. What's more Moral: to watch your children starve, or to steal some food for them?

And, yes, you have to be a man of leisure to have the time to contemplate Morality and Virtue and to write about it. I'd love to have that time, and I don't fault those who have it. For me, when I come home from work, I'm exhausted, mentally and psychologically, if not physically, and it's all I can do to write my short stories and novels and to send them out. I don't have a household of daughters supporting me financially and emotionally, and I'm not sure I'd let them if I did.

It's a different time.

Does it have to be? I don't know. I'm assuming I have more time (though it sure as hell doesn't seem it) to simply read as often as I do, and to write as many book reviews and blog entries as I do, and to write everything else that I do, and I've been told more than once (always with bitterness) that it's because I don't have a large family to support. I acknowledge this, as it's not wrong, though I could do without the tone that often comes with it. Not having a huge family is of course a choice as well.

And here we come back to Alcott. It's a different time. For the better, or not, I don't know.

The Restorer by Amanda Stevens

photo: Book cover from the author's website, www.amandastevens.com

So I'm standing in Stop & Shop, where I buy many of my books these days--which is an issue I'll probably take up with my blog--when I saw this book.  Quick to judge a book by its cover, literally and metaphorically, I saw the image of a seemingly-weeping stone angel, its wings drooped and its face under its right arm, its left arm hanging loosely over a cemetery mausoleum.  The caption reads, "Every cemetery has a story.  Every grave, its secrets."  And Publishers Weekly said it was a "creepy, atmospheric tale."  On the back, Heather Graham (I read this quote because I thought it was the super-sexy actress commenting, but alas...) said that the author "...has managed the difficult feat of combining charms and chills..."  Now, I've been doing research about graveyards and gravestones for my novel, The Gravediggers.  And I admit to a morbid fascination of this stuff.  (For example, I can look at the front of a New England gravestone and tell you the approximate year of construction without looking at the dates.  It's all in the skulls, angels or urns on the front, or the flat or rounded shoulders, or the rock used--thin black slate is much older...I can do the same with the backs of baseball cards, but I digress.)  As this all had some slight bearing on The Gravediggers, I thought I'd see how someone else handled a few things I have to work with.

After buying it, I realized it was a Harlequin book, and I became slightly ashamed of myself.  As I'd already spent the money--and as I've been sniffling with a sore throat and blocked ears the past few days--I thought I'd try it anyway, and I would breeze past the sultry scenes.

Much to my surprise--and bias--I have to say that it was a very good, quick, and, indeed, a chilly and atmospheric read.  Most of it does take place in graveyards, which can get old pretty quick, but the author manages to describe the same things in different ways--or, in some cases, repeating creepy things to good effect.  The doom and gloom never gets old.  There is no actual bodice-ripping to speak of, thank God, and the romance is kept to a minimum--much of it one-sided until the end.  The mysteries are mysterious enough, though the book focuses more on the atmosphere than on the mystery.  It's solved very quickly, and perhaps abruptly, at the end, and the revelation probably won't surprise you.  (I have to admit that I nailed the villain right away.  But that's me.)  The ending was satisfying for me despite this, and the author carefully and wisely ends it with an open door to the sequel--though in an author-intrusion/speaking to the reader way that was consistent throughout the book, and which I could have done without.

The characters are (mostly) believable, as are the plot points and situations.  The main character, also the 1st person narrator, is a graveyard restorer (hence the title).  This is apparently not a well-paying job, though there's obviously plenty of old graveyards in the south and in New England that need tending.  I was always under the impression that local historical societies took care of this sort of thing themselves, but I suppose it's plausible that they may seek contract help.  Since these societies are vastly underfunded with local tax dollars and count heavily on volunteers--even in the administration--I wonder if this part is very plausible, but whatever.  You've got to get her in there.  (I volunteer a tiny bit for a local historical society, and the woman in charge of it is a volunteer who goes into the office only on Mondays.)  Of course, there aren't any symbologists, either, but Dan Brown got away with it.  (And this book mentions that very term, and is heavy, but not dependent, on symbols, and secret societies, etc.)  Anyway, the focus isn't on the main character's job, but is instead on her ability to see spirits--and the dangers they present.  Her father had also had the gift (or curse) and was also a graveyard restorer, and he gave her a set of rules to live by, because otherwise the spirits will latch on to you, forever.  As in, even after death.  The Harlequin focus, if you will, is on how she throws all those rules away when the haunted and brooding police detective enters her life.  The number one rule: Don't acknowledge the ghosts.  Don't even look at them.  If you do, they'll latch on to you.  She never dates, either, because of how often she sees ghosts, and their haunted hosts.  And, besides, who wants to date someone who smells like death all the time?

Of course, why someone who insists she needs to stay away from all these ghosts continues to take jobs working in cemeteries is never addressed.  I mean, where else would you run into more ghosts than a cemetery?  But, whatever, suspension of disbelief, and all that.  The main character is likeable and the minor characters are passable (though not fleshed out and a little interchangeable), so if you're appreciably creeped out by Gothic things, and if you can remember your teenage and college years when you walked alone in graveyards at times, pick this up and read it.  I'm going back to Stop & Shop to pick up the sequel now.

And, about buying books at Stop & Shop now that there's only one bookstore outlet in the state...

My Interview, Part 1

Following is the beginning of my interview at a cool website for newbie and professional writers, The Writer's Block, at Raychelle-Writes.blogspot.com.  Specifically, you can find my interview here.  But it's an interesting site, so look around!

Welcome to The Writer’s Block! 

1)      Tell us a bit about yourself and where you live and work.

Thanks for having me here at The Writer’s Block, Raychelle.  I have a job I love that pays The Man, and I'm a novelist, short story writer—and so-so poet.  I live in the Northeast, in a quiet area of a loud suburb.  It’s sort of rural where I am, but I’m half a mile from suburban and seven miles from urban.  Also just half an hour to the good beaches, forty minutes to an hour to good walking/biking/hiking trails, an hour and a half from Fenway Park, two hours to the peaks and streams, and five hours from Manhattan—all of which I love and go to as often as possible.

2)      Describe your journey to becoming a writer/author.

Oh, boy.  How much time have ya got?  Well, the short of it is that, when I was about six or so, I wrote a short story in a birthday card for my mother, whose name was Carole.  The story was called something like, “A Christmas Carole, by Charles Dickens, but re-written by Steve Belanger.”  (The misspelling of her name was intentional.  I still have the card somewhere, since she’s passed.)  It made her smile, and I was hooked.  Throw in some slacking, finishing a novel, getting ripped off by an “agent” who scammed me for about a year (she’s still under indictment in NY State after many other victims came forward), and not writing a single creative word for nine years, and then being rescued (creatively and perhaps literally) by a great woman who convinced me to write again.  “Hide the Weird” was the first thing I finished and sent out, and it’s in Space and Time Magazine right now.  I feel I have those nine years to make up for, so I’m full speed ahead with many projects.

3)      Do you gravitate toward specific genres in your writing?

Well, I don’t know.  “Hide the Weird” is speculative fiction, I guess, though I’m not happy with that label.  I just sold a very short nonfiction piece about how adopting a greyhound changed my life.  I also finished a much longer nonfiction piece about managing anxiety in ten easy steps, with examples, anecdotes and short summaries.  I’ll be sending that out soon.  I’ve written (and am now re-writing) a zombie story that has quite a bit of the feel of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”  And a tiny bit of the Sox collapsing last year.  Cuz they just rolled over and died, get it?  (Sorry.)  My edited and re-edited, finished and re-finished (knock on wood) novel is a mystery titled Cursing the Darkness.  A draft of a sequel (or maybe a prequel, we’ll see) titled Remembering James is about half done.  My novel The Gravediggers is a historical fiction horror novel, which I guess is what Dan Simmons’ The Terror was.  It’s about the TB epidemic in 1880s and 1890s New England (specifically RI and NH) and how a creature really could have hidden in the shadows of the hysteria and walked in the footsteps of the disease—suspected, but never seen.  Or was it?  The Mercy Brown folklore of Rhode Island plays a part, as does the unbelievable sacrifice of the village of Eyam, England during the Plague (look both of those up).  Modern-day, hysteria-inducing diseases, like 1980s AIDS, does, too, at least in the draft so far.  I’m writing a memoir as well, and even my poems are of differing subjects and themes.  Oh, yeah, and a book of my existentialist philosophy, titled Faith & Reality: Jumping Realities.  And I’m about 100 pages into a semi-autobiographical novel, The Observer.  And a collection of essays and articles about my experience in education, titled When No Child Gets Ahead, No Child Gets Left Behind: Adventures and Lessons in Education.  And a concentration camp novel, about a camp the Nazis used as a sort of positive advertising to the world’s cameras (the prisoners were shown performing whatever talent they had, like singing; they ate only for the cameras, and were told to smile or be shot after the cameras were shut off).  A small group of courageous adults try to save the life of a young boy who has no obvious talent whatsoever, at first by hiding him in a chorus.  And a novel about a different sort of Armageddon, titled Apocalypse.  So, no, actually I’d have to say I’m all over the place!  I guess there are two different theories for not-yet-firmly established writers: write what’s selling (Do we really need another teenage paranormal romance?) or write what you want and work your butt off trying to sell it.  I do the latter.

(Me again.)  There are 10 total questions, so there'll be more to come.  Thanks for reading.  Try out her site!