Developing and promoting independent authors, artists, and artisans.
February 6, 2012 Leave a comment
Fans of Ren Garcia’s Temple of the Exploding Head Saga can now download a Kindle eBook for $3.99 of the first two books in the series; The Dead Held Hands, and The Machine. EPUB versions will be available soon.
February 4, 2012 Leave a comment
NOW IN PRINT! EXPOSE ROCKS SOCIETY HOUSEWIVES!
Long before the “Real Housewives” became a franchise and even before “Desperate Housewives,” hit the airwaves, Sandra Gurvis, author of 14 nonfiction books and one novel, was working on her second novel, COUNTRY CLUB WIVES, a satire about women, money, and homeless animals set in “New Albany, oops, New Wellington, Ohio.”
February, 2012, COUNTRY CLUB WIVES will be both a print book and an ebook under the Loconeal imprint.
A portion from each book sold will go to various local and national no-kill animal shelters, with $1 from each sale to be donated to HSDC (Humane Society of Delaware County) until March 1. Readers can even download the book in any e-format on Smashwords.com, type in code GL93P, and receive an additional 10 percent off the $4.99 list price with $1.50 going to HSDC through February.
In addition to books such as DAY TRIPS FROM COLUMBUS (3rd ed), OHIO CURIOSITIES (2nd ed), and WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWER CHILDREN GONE? Sandra has published humorous essays, a novel THE PIPE DREAMERS, and hundreds of magazine articles and short stories. For more information on COUNTRY CLUB WIVES and her other books, go to www.sgurvis.com or email sgurvis@sgurvis.com.
Print copies may be purchased at www.amazon.com or on the Loconeal Publishing website, at www.loconeal.com .
January 28, 2012 Leave a comment
Loconeal Publishing is now accepting submissions for the 2012 Loco-Thology: Anthology of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
via Anthology Submission.
December 21, 2011 7 Comments
The classics were commercial genre in their day. I’m imagining myself pretty out there with such a claim, but I’m hunting for the exception. For example, Melville was Van Gogh’s literature. He wrote about working stiffs, in a day when more institutionally respected writers wrote about God and king. There probably are exceptions to my observation, but I’m guessing those exceptions are modern anomalies.
This brings us to the form ordained for greatness, literary. One’s book cannot become a classic without being literary, can it? And yet, I repeat, I can’t think of many classics that weren’t pushing back the favorite literary forms of their day, and that thought goes all the way back to the bawdy houses of Shakespeare. My assertion that yesterday’s commercial genre is how the classics were made, seems to confront all the assumptions that literary is superior. I kind of like banging that drum, not because of what it says about pipe-smoking professors wearing cardigan sweaters, but because of what it says about the potential within genre literature; more on that later.
Let’s look at a common definition of this thing called literary: ‘Literary fiction is a term that came into common usage during the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish “serious fiction” which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, compared to genre fiction and popular fiction. In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more upon style, psychological depth, and character. This is in contrast to mainstream commercial fiction (what I’m loosely calling genre in this post), which focuses more on narrative and plot. Literary fiction may also be characterized as lasting fiction (destined to be the source of future classics).’
Now, let’s just take a moment to look at all the assumptions in that definition. First, the definition starts off with circular reasoning. Literary is serious fiction and has merit. Why? Well, because the way it is written has more merit than any other way of working, and therefore is serious. This means genre fiction is not serious and has no merit, or at least by comparison. Those who are serious, and who have merit, claim it so from the bell towers.
We are also told that literary fiction can be identified as having style, psychological depth and focus on characters. Oh, and if it has significant plot, that’s a big no-no.
As a writer, this kind of pompous crap just blows me away because it has been a very long time since I’ve thought it optional to neglect the very basics of good story. You should have great style, internal depth and vivid characters in every story. It isn’t optional.
There are two silly positions born from this claptrap. One is the assertion that one writing form holds ownership over style, psychological depth and characterization. Some on the other side suggest that, as a genre writer, there’s a pass on these concerns if the external plot is interesting. The latter I hate even worse than the former because it dumbs down our work and gives the critics all the excuse they need to continue with the claims that literary is “serious fiction” worthy of “classic status,” someday, and by comparison, our work isn’t, in spite of the fact that nearly everything ever declared a classic was genre in its day.
I’m reminded of a very nice lady in one of my writers groups several years back. I told her, “You know, you need to decide what your story is about, given it is leaning several directions. I suggest a romance, considering the type of relationships you are spending all your time building in the first fifty pages.”
Her response was an aghast, “Oh no! I’m writing literary.”
This sort of assumed superiority of form leaves me feeling a little insulted, but we genre writers are used to that, and the lady didn’t have a mean bone in her body.
If you put a couple of romantic scenes in a book that obviously screams for them, you’ve somehow reduced yourself to the slag-heap of poor writers by writing a romance and joining half the bookstore’s inferior commercial offerings. In the minds of some, that’s unconscionable. But I ask: what about a couple of romantic scenes automatically make it trivial literature lacking in style, depth and characterization, even though everything else in the work is supposedly literary? God forbid I should have suggested making a main character a vampire. That would have doomed it, regardless of the style, depth and characterization. Give it a better plot, and off with her head. Let’s be real, a moment, here. Did Moby Dick have a plot? It did? Oh, never mind.
November 30, 2011 Leave a comment
NaNoWriMo is almost over for another year.
For many it’s been a mad rush of creativity that catapaulted them well over the 50k mark early on. For others, well, let’s just say that it hasn’t been quite that easy.
I’ve accepted that I’m not going to make it to 50k by Wednesday. I’m actually more okay with that than I thought I would be.
Don’t get me wrong, I loathe not reaching a goal that I’ve set for myself; I’m definitely an overachiever. However, I’ve learned a lot from this experience. Some of the things that I mentioned last time, like just writing and not worrying about little details. But there’s a lot more that I’ve learned.
DO
Write everyday. No matter what. I would skip days, because I was busy or tired from the other things that I had going on. Now, I know better and next year I will sit down and write something every single day, even if it’s only a paragraph or two.
Write what is in your head. Sure, you have an outline and a general idea where the story should go. Let’s face it though, that isn’t always the way that it works. Be flexible about it. This one was a tough one for me to learn, as I tend to be very orderly, but I’ve already told you folks how that turned out!
Be comfortable. If you need to have a ton of noise to tune out so you can write, crank up the music or have a movie marathon. If you need it quiet, shoo everyone out the door and drag something heavy in front of it until you’re finished for the day. I discovered that I can write just about anywhere, but that the noise level was a mood thing. There were some days when having a movie playing and animals wrestling under my feet didn’t phase me. Other days, though, every little noise threw me off my groove.
DON’T
Sweat the small stuff. The NaNo folks tell you this over and over again. Don’t worry if you’ve misspelled a word or dropped a semi-colon in the wrong place.
Think too hard about your word count. The theory is that if you write 1,667 words a day, you will hit the 50k mark on time. Ordinarily 1,667 words is a piece of cake. I can manage it in about an hour. Unless I’m thinking about it. I found that the more I worried about how many words I was getting down, the harder it was for me to write. My best day, I wrote about five thousand words. Because I stopped thinking.
Kick yourself for not finishing. I know that I’m not going to, but I’m going to keep writing up until the last minute. At that point, even though I won’t have won NaNoWriMo for the year, I will have definitely logged a personal win. I’ll have written more of a novel than I ever have before! More importantly, I’ll keep plugging away at it, until it really is finished.
That, is perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this. Don’t quit. Or, if you’re a Galaxy Quest fan: Never give up. Never surrender!
PS. I’ll put my final word count in the comments on Thursday, just in case anyone is curious about how far I made it! I’d love to know how everyone else did, too.
November 7, 2011 Leave a comment
[Adam "Ferrel" Trzonkowski is a guild leader, professional raider, freelance writer, and a long-time blogger. For over fifteen years he has immersed himself in the world of MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) raiding and leadership. After writing extensively on EpicSlant.com about guild management and raiding he published his first book, The Guild Leader's Companion, to share experiences with other organizational leaders and aid them in achieving their goals.]
As a long time raider and guild leader I’ve always been fascinated with the psychology and science behind MMORPGs. It astounds me how saying the same thing in two different ways can mean the difference between winning an encounter and losing horribly. I’m enthralled with how one tweak to a loot system can motivate everyone to work harder. Over the years I’ve collected all sorts of experiences such as these (almost all based on real events that happened in the course of running Iniquity) and I’ve started to reflect heavily on what works and what doesn’t. It is in The Raider’s Companion that I collected this information so that it could be shared with others and hopefully aid them in achieving their goals.
I really wanted to share those experiences with as many people as possible. When it comes to my free time I can’t see anything more fun than raiding. Getting together with a bunch of friends to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge is great. That is why it made sense to do what I can to help others have some of the same successes that I have had. By giving players a leg up in their raiding you can start to build a better community around the play style. As the community grows and changes the new players will need to be properly trained and if that is done then everyone benefits. That is very important to me! The larger the raiding play style is the more content we’ll see.
My first book, The Guild Leader’s Companion, was aimed at a very small segment of MMORPG players. When I set out to do a new manuscript I knew I wanted to go after a broader audience. I also knew I had to remain in a discipline that I’m extremely familiar with. I’ve been raiding for over ten years at a very high level and I know how to take what seems to be a mysterious encounter and turn it into an easy “loot farm.” Writing a book about raiding made the most sense and it really shows in the manuscript. It took a lot less time to do a whole lot more this time around. I’m extremely proud of the product and can’t wait to see it in book form.
The majority of my time as a raider has been spent in pretty hardcore environments and I wanted to be sure I didn’t let that dominate the whole book. These days not everyone wants to take on a second job in their raiding. The vast majority of players that raid may only do so one or two nights a week. That is who I wanted to write for primarily. I start from the very beginning and cover the basics like what a main assist is and how to prepare each week for your raids. From there I start to work deeply into the hardcore environment. I discuss what you should watch for and how to take a raid apart so that you can understand what is necessary to defeat it. That will be very helpful to players that are attempting new content where there isn’t a guide out yet. Regardless of whether you’re new or have been raiding since EverQuest you’ll find something you can use to achieving your raiding goals, whether they be casual, hardcore, or competitive.
October 17, 2011 3 Comments
(Gloria Oliver is a Spec Fic author living in Texas and bowing to the never ending wishes of her feline and canine masters. She’s the author of “In the Service of Samurai”, “Vassal of El”, “Cross-eyed Dragon Troubles”, “Willing Sacrifice”, and her latest “The Price of Mercy.” For sample chapters, free reads and more, visit www.gloriaoliver.com)
Blogging has become a very important part of an author’s career. It’s a way to put a little of ourselves out there so we can connect with readers, other authors and industry peeps.
I don’t think of myself as all that interesting, so coming up with blog posts and figuring out a way to do so consistently made me nuts for a while. After much thought, and reading a lot of blogs, especially the wisdom of Kristen Lamb and others, I’ve finally reached a happy, workable solution that works for ME over at my main blog. I do a Mashups on Mondays (Mind Sieve), photos on Wednesday (Picture Kaleidoscope), movie reviews on Fridays, and throw in the occasional extra post.
One thing I’ve noticed by the doing the mashups (since it means I need to go out there and read a lot of entries) is a pitfall of the social media push for us to blog – mainly posts that rattle out a topic but don’t actually tell you anything. No, I’m not going to point any virtual fingers. I’m sure you’ve probably run across some of these yourself, out there. (I’m also not trying to make everyone paranoid, just aware!)
The worst thing about these posts, in my opinion, is that rather than help the authors build their brand and gain followers, they become off putting and actually get an opposite reaction than intended. If the blog posts don’t have substance, why would any readers then believe that the stories or novels by this same author would have it?
If we’re going to put ourselves out there, let’s do it right. So rather than post every day or just blast the bloggosphere with a half thought, make sure if you bring up a problem, try to throw in a solution or suggestion or two. If you bring up a question, try to give an answer. Like any story, a blog post should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Dredge up those memories of having to write short papers for school.) Don’t leave the readers hanging. They need some meat to chew on. They won’t come back if they leave dissatisfied. And what better way to intrigue them than to get their synapses firing.
Let’s put some care into our blogs and stimulate those brains!
What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced what I’m talking about? Do you think I’m full of it? How about sharing any hints and tips you use when creating your own posts?
Let’s get blogging!
