Let me know what you think about the new posts - both the deals and the format/frequency. There haven't been many comments on them, yet (so far, a couple of thank-you's for a music selection and one person that now hates the blog, complete, it seems).
For all the Georgette Heyer fans out there, Barnes & Noble has just reduced the pre-order price of Toll-Gate ($9.99 Kindle; B&N link) down to $1.99. I've already reported the lower price to Amazon, but the more that do, the better the chance it will drop. If you missed the bit $1.99 sale, by-the-way, there are actually a number of Georgette Heyer's books that have dropped back down to that price range again on Kindle (a couple at B&N are still/again $1.99, as are a handful at KoboBook Description
His exploits were legendary...
Captain John Staple, back from the battlefront, is already bored with his quiet civilian life in the country. When he stumbles upon a mystery involving a disappearing toll-gate keeper, nothing could keep the adventure-loving captain from investigating.
But winning her will be his greatest yet...
The plot thickens when John encounters the enigmatic Lady Nell Stornaway and soon learns that rescuing her from her unsavory relatives makes even the most ferocious cavalry charge look like a particularly tame hand of loo. Between hiding his true identity from Nell and the arrival in the neighborhood of some distinctly shady characters, Captain Staple finds himself embarked on the adventure-and romance-of a lifetime.
Over at Pocket After Dark, you can get a free download of a short story by Sherrilyn Kenyon and Dianna Love, Fire Bound, which runs about 50 pages, plus an excerpt from their upcoming novel, Alterant, the second in their Belador Code series, following Blood TrinityBook Description
A dangerous creature is on the loose. Evalle, Tzader and Quinn take a VIPER team just outside of Atlanta for a sting operation that takes a deadly turn. Killing the half-human creature would be easy, but national security is on the line until the team can discover who created the monster, and whether more like it are waiting in the wings to be unleashed on the human world. The op goes bad with Beladors in the middle of it, and nothing turns out as expected, least of all for Evalle.
Today is the last day to get a free copy of Jack Matthews's A Worker's Writebook: How Language Makes Stories, over on his website, or to take advantage of the 99 cent price at Amazon. Besides being an author himself, he was a distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades, so should have a few good tips for aspiring authors (or even those who are already published).Book Description
Jack Matthews has not only published more than 15 books of fiction, he taught classes in fiction writing to students at Ohio University for over four decades. This 75,000 word book consists of his teachings, insights, ramblings and ruminations about the art of fiction.
Many books have been written about the craft of fiction writing; how is this one different?
First, a Worker's Writebook: How Language Makes Stories consists of essays and dialogue (called interludes). These interludes punch holes in the rules and pronouncements made in the essays; they also help the book avoid seeming too dogmatic. The two voices in the interludes are not exactly "characters" but the author and a contrarian voice within the author. The comparison to Platonic dialogues is apt; Matthews received his undergraduate degree in classical Greek literature and has always found echoes of the classical age in contemporary art and life. Still, the "poetics" of Writebook is grounded less in Aristotle than Aristophanes.
Writebook touches upon some practical aspects of writing fiction (such as naming characters and writing speech cues). But Writebook focuses on helping the writer write more boldly and with more attention to the linguistic vehicles of thought. For Matthews, most stories fail through under-invention, not because the rules of narrative have been disregarded.
Chapter 2 (Taxonomies) and 3 (Structural Matters) cover various paradigms for plot and character development. These are worthy subjects and Matthews has interesting things to say (especially when he tries to analyze his story Funeral Plots with these same paradigms). At the same time Matthews recognizes that there is no magic paradigm or archetype capable of explaining what makes all stories successful – these are just guides. At some point you just have to trust writerly intuition. Writebook helps the potential storyteller to cultivate this intuition and be flexible enough to bend rules when necessary. Matthews writes, "Anything can be done if it's done in the right way: with style, panache and cunning."
Many writing books include a chapter or two listing literary cliches to avoid. For the most part, Writebook doesn't do that. Instead it goes deeper and analyzes why some metaphors succeed and others do not. The funny Parable of the Indifferent Ear provides a good case study about how linguistic inventiveness doesn't always translate into effective writing.
Literary insights from Writebook can be applied to drama, novels and poetry; but they are especially applicable to smaller forms like the short story (though Matthews' claim that a short story of more than 10,000 words rarely succeeds is sure to be controversial). Writebook introduces lots of new ideas and terminology: the non-sequential time opening, the Swamps of Antecedence, pointedness (which, as I understand it, is how stories gain enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull of the author), linguistic vehicles (the actual words which transport the thought) and why flat characters aren't always bad.
Matthews wrote Writebook in the mid 1990s (and distributed it to his creative writing students throughout the years). Since then, Matthews has retired and kept busy with various writing projects (described in greater detail in his 2009 interview in Chapter 7). At 85 years old, Jack Matthews is still writing fiction and teaching occasional writing classes.
One more thing. Writebook is wickedly funny. I won't spoil any of the jokes; suffice to say that one of his former students said Matthews was "so damn witty" in the classroom that he reminded her of Groucho Marx. Writebook has serious and even lofty aims. But this is fun reading. Matthew's style is playful and pedantic; Matthews enjoys inventing characters on the fly to illustrate his points and adding qualities to them until you begin to wonder if Writebook is going to veer into becoming a novel.
