The Muse, by Fred Warren, takes the reader into the world of muses, thus the title. Stan is a writer who's having trouble figuring out where to go with his story. His writer's group, consisting of Davos and Jilly, are also struggling. Then along comes Leila, and suddenly they're able to not only get their stories back on track, but find buyers and break into the big time. But how? And more importantly, why?
That's the engine for this story as the seemingly innocent events grow to dangerous proportions. Our trio, along with Stan's wife, Charity, and his daughter, Hannah, are thrown into the world of a Muse intent on destroying them along with many others.
There is a Christian element to the story, but that is due to the characters being Christian, not an attempt to preach. Most anyone would be comfortable reading this, no matter what religion or non-religion they are. But you'll not find an attempt to deliver an overt message or belittle anyone else in these pages.
The strength of the story lies in Mr. Warren's well developed characters. He has a great cast, and they are well written. Their interaction provides much of the story's spark. The only character I felt who could have used more nuance was the antagonist. She starts out interesting enough, but by the end, she evolves into the typical, arrogant villain. But the rest of the cast had depth and interesting interaction, and was what kept the story vibrant.
I read this rather quickly. On my limited schedule, reading a book takes a month or more, but I found myself sitting in the chair, late into the night, with a cup of tea or coffee, reading yet another chapter. I finished it within four days of starting. Would I call it a page turner? Plot wise, not really, but the writing and characters were so well done, I had to find out what would happen to them, and that kept me reading.
Which is good, because for me, it was a slow burn on discovering that there was a danger to confront. Mr. Warren takes his time building to the point where we fully realize the danger Stan and his friends are in. I found myself wanting to "get there" much sooner than we actually did. That coming from a guy who likes fast-paced narrative. Your mileage may vary.
Related to that, I had watched the book's trailer. I knew at some point, our heroes would end up trapped in an alternate reality and have to fight their way out. If I hadn't been looking for it, I may not have felt this way, but the entry into this alternate reality doesn't happen until the last third of the book. I not only grew impatient waiting for them to get there, but wasn't ready to leave when they did. Mr. Warren introduces several characters once in the new world who I would have loved to learn more about. If I had my say, I would have preferred more time in the alternate world and less in the real.
The plot is a mixture of both original concepts and predictable moments. It isn't complicated, and I did feel more could have been done with it. Yet, the world of the Muse held interest, and I can tell Mr. Warren had invested the time in their back story. While the plot had a couple of holes, I had fun reading it. He paints the world, both real and alternate, so you feel you're there. The plot adequately displays his strength: the characters. If you don't need cliff-hanger action on every page, and prefer characters who you find interesting, my bet is you'll enjoy this novel as well as I did.
Can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or other bookstores.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Trite Is As Trite Does
One of the pitfalls writers attempt to avoid is being trite. Being trite, first on the writing level itself, and then being trite in a story plot.
There are, however, some forces that work against that.
First, we should probably define trite. In reality, people tend to think of the term too rigidly. They say if it's been done before, then it's trite. But there is another golden rule contradicting that: there is nothing new under the sun. No matter the phrasing, the story line, etc., most likely you can find someone who has said it or written that story before.
Okay, so some might narrow that down a bit to say, "if it's been done frequently before." That hits closer to home. But still is too formulaic. Here's why I say that.
What is trite is more subjective. What is trite to one person isn't to another. Depends on what they've read and how many times they've read it. So my definition of trite is any writing or plot that makes you say, "Oh, this has been done to death," or "I've seen this a million times."
I ran across that the other night. On the TV was a movie about a ragtag soccer team from a hick town that was formed by a teacher at the school. Of course the kids know nothing about soccer, and the first thing they do is go play against a championship team and get slaughtered. Right then I told my son, "Here's how the rest of this movie is going down. They will practice and get better, and at the end of the movie they will go to the championship game and barely defeat the team that's won it for the past several years.
Predictably, that's how it went. But it gets better. They predictably tie the game at the end, and each team gets five tries to get a ball into the goal, and whoever gets the most in wins as a tie breaker. The last of the five they chose for their team was the runt and least likely to pull it off of the team. So I told my son, which players would miss, and that it would come down to the scrawny runt winning the game. Sure enough, it happened just that way, even those missing the goal that I predicted would miss it.
But despite that and some unbelievable moments both in action and plot, it wasn't all that bad. I watched the whole thing. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. It had its moments. But it had all the predictable elements of the ragtag sports team type story.
Now, if someone had never read or seen one of these type stories, they wouldn't consider it trite. I would. And there have been things I've written that I didn't think were done all that much, that I later found out was.
One such story was my flash fiction The Wheel of Curses which Everyday Fiction accepted and published back in 2008. It is a story of Josh, a young wizard in training, who gets turned into a fly and for a while it is written from the fly's perspective. While they accepted it, they did mention in the comments that "although we get many of these fly perspective stories..." I thought, "What? They get a lot of these? I'd never guessed." But they liked my take on it enough that they accepted mine.
And that is a good segue into the next point. Even if you have a trite story line, if you still can write a good story that captures people's imaginations, it won't matter that the plot line is tired and worn out. A good writer can take a tired and worn out plot line and give it life.
There are two ways to do this. One, is to have some unexpected elements in the plot line itself. This lends itself to trite plot lines because then everyone thinks they know how its going to go down, and when it doesn't go where they expect it to, then suddenly it's not trite any longer.
The other way is to make the characters and their exchanges interesting. Mainstream stories rely upon this, because in mainstream it is much harder to find an original plot line. Practically everything has been done before. Speculative fiction gives you a little more freedom to create original plots, whereas mainstream is more limited to this life in that regard.
The way that most mainstream stories keep from reading trite is the unique and interesting characters they infuse into the story. So say you take the story of the divorced man raising a kid or kids. Predictably the plot centers around one or all of the kids feeling like dad doesn't pay them enough attention. That same plot line appears frequently in marriage situations as well. "The Santa Clause" movie is a good example among many with such a plot line in it. But if you can write good dialog, provide deep characters that the reader can care about, even if they know the dad or mother will come to their senses at the end and become the best dad in the world, it can still be interesting and not so trite if the characters are compelling.
Then there is the final point: sometimes trite sells. When Anne's "Dragon Riders of Pern" came out, it was fairly fresh. It became very popular. So what do publishers do? They want to ride that wave, and so acceptances of dragon rider stories grew. Everyone wanted to write a dragon rider story. So, after a while, the plot became a little trite.
Then along comes Eragon, about a boy who finds a dragon's egg and ends up becoming a dragon rider. The book in literary circles was denounced as too trite and predictable. It had all the cliche elements of such a story in it. But yet, it became a best seller, people loved it. Why? Because it had a good story and interesting characters...even if the writing was a bit "wooden" as I recall on reviewer putting it.
Trite goes in cycles. For instance, it's not like no one had written about wizards and such, but when Harry Potter came on the screen, it was fresh. Likewise, I don't know how many times I've seen sites say they don't want anymore vampire stories. They get too many of them that are apparently pretty bad. Yet, Twilight hits the shelves and sells well. As a matter of fact, I can predict at some point we'll see another story like Lord of the Rings sell well sometime into the future.
In the end, it's much like what the judges often say on American Idol and the like: you've got to put your own stamp on it. That's what really makes it unique, even if the subject matter has been dealt with a thousand times before. If I were to write the Star Wars book, it wouldn't have the same feel as someone else might do it. If Tom Hanks had directed the first Star Wars movie, it wouldn't be the same as what we have now. In the end, if your story sounds like every other story out there, doesn't have your unique voice in it, then it will tend to sound trite.
So, keep writing, keep developing that voice, and eventually you can write the next "we need to destroy the evil object before it falls into the wrong hands so we can save the world" type story, and actually have it sell well.
There are, however, some forces that work against that.
First, we should probably define trite. In reality, people tend to think of the term too rigidly. They say if it's been done before, then it's trite. But there is another golden rule contradicting that: there is nothing new under the sun. No matter the phrasing, the story line, etc., most likely you can find someone who has said it or written that story before.
Okay, so some might narrow that down a bit to say, "if it's been done frequently before." That hits closer to home. But still is too formulaic. Here's why I say that.
What is trite is more subjective. What is trite to one person isn't to another. Depends on what they've read and how many times they've read it. So my definition of trite is any writing or plot that makes you say, "Oh, this has been done to death," or "I've seen this a million times."
I ran across that the other night. On the TV was a movie about a ragtag soccer team from a hick town that was formed by a teacher at the school. Of course the kids know nothing about soccer, and the first thing they do is go play against a championship team and get slaughtered. Right then I told my son, "Here's how the rest of this movie is going down. They will practice and get better, and at the end of the movie they will go to the championship game and barely defeat the team that's won it for the past several years.
Predictably, that's how it went. But it gets better. They predictably tie the game at the end, and each team gets five tries to get a ball into the goal, and whoever gets the most in wins as a tie breaker. The last of the five they chose for their team was the runt and least likely to pull it off of the team. So I told my son, which players would miss, and that it would come down to the scrawny runt winning the game. Sure enough, it happened just that way, even those missing the goal that I predicted would miss it.
But despite that and some unbelievable moments both in action and plot, it wasn't all that bad. I watched the whole thing. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. It had its moments. But it had all the predictable elements of the ragtag sports team type story.
Now, if someone had never read or seen one of these type stories, they wouldn't consider it trite. I would. And there have been things I've written that I didn't think were done all that much, that I later found out was.
One such story was my flash fiction The Wheel of Curses which Everyday Fiction accepted and published back in 2008. It is a story of Josh, a young wizard in training, who gets turned into a fly and for a while it is written from the fly's perspective. While they accepted it, they did mention in the comments that "although we get many of these fly perspective stories..." I thought, "What? They get a lot of these? I'd never guessed." But they liked my take on it enough that they accepted mine.
And that is a good segue into the next point. Even if you have a trite story line, if you still can write a good story that captures people's imaginations, it won't matter that the plot line is tired and worn out. A good writer can take a tired and worn out plot line and give it life.
There are two ways to do this. One, is to have some unexpected elements in the plot line itself. This lends itself to trite plot lines because then everyone thinks they know how its going to go down, and when it doesn't go where they expect it to, then suddenly it's not trite any longer.
The other way is to make the characters and their exchanges interesting. Mainstream stories rely upon this, because in mainstream it is much harder to find an original plot line. Practically everything has been done before. Speculative fiction gives you a little more freedom to create original plots, whereas mainstream is more limited to this life in that regard.
The way that most mainstream stories keep from reading trite is the unique and interesting characters they infuse into the story. So say you take the story of the divorced man raising a kid or kids. Predictably the plot centers around one or all of the kids feeling like dad doesn't pay them enough attention. That same plot line appears frequently in marriage situations as well. "The Santa Clause" movie is a good example among many with such a plot line in it. But if you can write good dialog, provide deep characters that the reader can care about, even if they know the dad or mother will come to their senses at the end and become the best dad in the world, it can still be interesting and not so trite if the characters are compelling.
Then there is the final point: sometimes trite sells. When Anne's "Dragon Riders of Pern" came out, it was fairly fresh. It became very popular. So what do publishers do? They want to ride that wave, and so acceptances of dragon rider stories grew. Everyone wanted to write a dragon rider story. So, after a while, the plot became a little trite.
Then along comes Eragon, about a boy who finds a dragon's egg and ends up becoming a dragon rider. The book in literary circles was denounced as too trite and predictable. It had all the cliche elements of such a story in it. But yet, it became a best seller, people loved it. Why? Because it had a good story and interesting characters...even if the writing was a bit "wooden" as I recall on reviewer putting it.
Trite goes in cycles. For instance, it's not like no one had written about wizards and such, but when Harry Potter came on the screen, it was fresh. Likewise, I don't know how many times I've seen sites say they don't want anymore vampire stories. They get too many of them that are apparently pretty bad. Yet, Twilight hits the shelves and sells well. As a matter of fact, I can predict at some point we'll see another story like Lord of the Rings sell well sometime into the future.
In the end, it's much like what the judges often say on American Idol and the like: you've got to put your own stamp on it. That's what really makes it unique, even if the subject matter has been dealt with a thousand times before. If I were to write the Star Wars book, it wouldn't have the same feel as someone else might do it. If Tom Hanks had directed the first Star Wars movie, it wouldn't be the same as what we have now. In the end, if your story sounds like every other story out there, doesn't have your unique voice in it, then it will tend to sound trite.
So, keep writing, keep developing that voice, and eventually you can write the next "we need to destroy the evil object before it falls into the wrong hands so we can save the world" type story, and actually have it sell well.
Novel Preperation Presentation
That's right. Yours truly will be doing a 30 minute presentation for the Austin region National Novel Writing Month group about how to plan to write a novel. Following that I'll be moderating a panel for another hour.
It is open for anyone to attend, you don't have to participate in the National Novel Writing Month to come. Shoot, you don't even have to be a writer. If you're interested and are in the Austin, TX area, plan on being there!
Here's the info from the Austin region's NaNo calendar:
Novel Planning Presentation
When: Wed, October 21, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Where: Pflugerville Community Library, 102 S. 10th St., Pflugerville
What: Are you a planner or a seat-of-the-pantser? Wrimo RLCopple will present a useful planning technique, and then our panel will discuss the merits of different planning - and not-planning strategies. Panelists are: ballyhoot, NicoleMD, DaShlom, and Lady Eshen.
Who: Suitable for all ages; everyone is invited!
Come if you can. Pray if you can't! Thanks.
It is open for anyone to attend, you don't have to participate in the National Novel Writing Month to come. Shoot, you don't even have to be a writer. If you're interested and are in the Austin, TX area, plan on being there!
Here's the info from the Austin region's NaNo calendar:
Novel Planning Presentation
When: Wed, October 21, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Where: Pflugerville Community Library, 102 S. 10th St., Pflugerville
What: Are you a planner or a seat-of-the-pantser? Wrimo RLCopple will present a useful planning technique, and then our panel will discuss the merits of different planning - and not-planning strategies. Panelists are: ballyhoot, NicoleMD, DaShlom, and Lady Eshen.
Who: Suitable for all ages; everyone is invited!
Come if you can. Pray if you can't! Thanks.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
New story accepted!
I wrote a flash fiction back in 2006 called Life Invaders. After a few attempts, it has finally found a home at Residential Aliens Magazine. Look here for the announcement of when it comes out in the next two to three months. And visit the magazine; they have enjoyable genre fiction.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
SFReader.com Review of TR
Residential Aliens magazine editor, Lyn Perry, has turned in a review of Transforming Realities to SFReader.com. It isn't a five-star review, but it is balanced and honest.
On the one issue he has with the book, I expected some wouldn't care for it. So I'm not surprised I've run across someone who doesn't. It's one of those things you either enjoy or don't. Depends on what type of book you like to read. And interestingly, this is the only novel out of the five I've written that has this specific quality. But in writing it, it fit the plot.
He missed some info I would have liked to get his input on, namely character development--a major part of any story. I can only assume they weren't "cardboard" characters for him, or he would have mentioned it.
That said, the review is fairly positive aside from his one main complaint. I appreciate his view and hope it helps readers to decide if they'd like to read the book or not. If you want to find out what Lyn Perry thought of the book, read it on SFReader.com.
Thanks for reading.
On the one issue he has with the book, I expected some wouldn't care for it. So I'm not surprised I've run across someone who doesn't. It's one of those things you either enjoy or don't. Depends on what type of book you like to read. And interestingly, this is the only novel out of the five I've written that has this specific quality. But in writing it, it fit the plot.
He missed some info I would have liked to get his input on, namely character development--a major part of any story. I can only assume they weren't "cardboard" characters for him, or he would have mentioned it.
That said, the review is fairly positive aside from his one main complaint. I appreciate his view and hope it helps readers to decide if they'd like to read the book or not. If you want to find out what Lyn Perry thought of the book, read it on SFReader.com.
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Storefront Fixed
I discovered that my author's storefront, http://store.rlcopple.com, had experienced some problems from people who tried to order on it or obtain the free ebook. During login as well as some functions of checking out, a blank page would appear, making it difficult to buy anything.
That has now been fixed, site updated, and my test show it operating as one would expect. I apologize for the difficulties in processing orders. You are now free to move about the storefront!
Thank you.
That has now been fixed, site updated, and my test show it operating as one would expect. I apologize for the difficulties in processing orders. You are now free to move about the storefront!
Thank you.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Karina Fabian Interviews Me
Author Karina Fabian is promoting Transforming Realities this week on her blog, and has a good interview with me posted. Please visit her blog and leave a comment. And while there, consider picking up one of her books. Her latest will have you laughing.
Thanks, Karina, for doing this!
Thanks, Karina, for doing this!
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