Fields and Fence Lines (Part Three)

This is the third of a currently unknown number of posts in which I consider my limits as a writer.

"Consider" being the operative word. I'm neither bemoaning my limits, nor glorify them. I'm just noting them, since for the most part, they are what they are.

In my first post, I explained that I learned to write organically, by reading and writing, rather than formally, and that may have limited my writing. And in the second one, I talked about how I'm not much of an intellectual with no interest in questions without answers, in philosophy, phycology, politics, in short, in "themes" readers often find in great literature.  

These personal limits can be seen as fences that enclose my abilities as a writer.

Another of the fences that limits my ability as a writer, a box unchecked when it comes to writing popular and/or great literature, is that I'm not a passionate fellow. Drama isn't my thing. Not in real life, nor in my writing.

Most people love drama.

It seems that one of the chief characteristics of the great classics, and in all sorts of popular fiction as well, is that it stirs the emotions of the reader. It creates within the reader deep, heartfelt emotions via the experiences of the characters in the story, or at least, a usually safe facsimile of those emotions. They can be made to experience them, while at the same time, knowing that the emotions are not caused by real life events. They're emotions that have been created artificially, by their imagination, and empathy for imaginary characters, that in the end, are just that; imaginary. They are safe emotions.

People want to experience safe emotions. They want to feel. It's the reason sports exist. Sports are an artificially constructed struggles that participants and fans can take a part in to experience the range of emotions that real life struggles evoke, within a struggle that doesn't really matter.

In the same way, readers can experience emotions they otherwise would not - or hope not - experience in their real life, along with the characters in a book, if the story is well written. Again, these emotions are created by something that doesn't matter.

In short, books can supply real emotions without real causes and real consequences. Ones that can be laid aside at will, though often, they may linger like real experiences.

Unlike most people, I don't like drama. I like a simple, uneventful life. I'm an "Ordinary Man. " 

I'm an ordinary man
Who desires nothing more
Than just an ordinary chance to live exactly as he likes
And do precisely what he wants
An average man am I, of no eccentric whim
Who likes to live his life, free of strife
Doing whatever he thinks is best for him
Well, just an ordinary man

I'm a quiet living man
Who prefers to spend the evenings
In the silence of his room
Who likes an atmosphere as restful
As an undiscovered tomb
A pensive man am I, of philosophic joys
Who likes to meditate, contemplate
Free from humanity's mad inhuman noise
Quiet living man

-- An extract of the lyrics of I'm An Ordinary Man, from My Fair Lady.

I suspect that great writes are very passionate about a lot of things. Great writers use their passions to write stories. But they can do more than just write about themselves and what they have experienced. Their limits are the limits of their imaginations. However, while I certainly write stories beyond my personal limits - all my characters are far braver and bolder than me, for example, But passions and powerful emotions are beyond the fence line for me, as a person, and as a writer, the result of a combination of nature and personal preference. 

And this goes for my reading as well. I write the book I want to read, and in reading I'm not looking for powerful emotions, be it passionate love or terror, grief, grimness, tragedy, and despair. I'm looking for interesting places and spending time with cheerful, entertaining characters, presented with clever, witty writing. And that's also my goal in writing. 

As a side note, I'm currently reading an old book with a number of emotional romantic scenes and musings that seem to go on and on. I'm just skipping over most of them.

And something along those lines are what my loyal readers expect from my stories, so meeting those expectations are another reason I stay on my side of the fence.

But there is a more personal and practical reason I avoid heavy stories, and that is the fact that I usually spend six or more months dreaming them up and writing them down. Unlike readers who may only spend six or seven hours in the book, the story lives within my head for months at a time. And to some extent or another, I live my stories, or at least, they live in my imagination throughout the day. Thus, writing a grim, dark, depressing story would certainly seep into and darken my everyday life, and that's a price I'm unwilling to pay. I don't know how authors of dark stories do it, unless they are simply a reflection of past experiences, everyday live, or they have the ability to compartmentalize their stories, keep it separate from their everyday life.

Could I venture beyond this fence line? Sure. It's only words, and I know words. But will I? No. Even though I recognize that in settling for light, escapist, stories, I am taking greatness off the table, but oh, well. Greatness demands a steep price, a price I am unwilling to pay.

There is, however, one plus to my muted emotional range; auto-narration audiobooks work well with my style, since the artificial reading voice is not required to reproduce extreme human emotions. Steady as she goes works well for auto-generated audiobooks.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No.124)

 

In this my Sunday Extra! we have a book by a fairly local author. A neighbor, knowing that my wife likes to read, suggested she might be interested in reading this author. Since my wife was busy with another book or two - she has a long list of ebooks on her library hold list that usually become available in clumps, I decided, since I didn't have any other books to read, to give one of the author's books a try.  

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Dark Coulee by Mary Logue   C

Dark Coulee is the second book in a mystery series featuring deputy sheriff Claire Watkins as a police detective set  in rural Wisconsin along the Mississippi river, circa 2000. Though the town in which the story takes place is fictional, real towns within a hour's drive from home are mentioned, giving it a local flavor.

It is a murder mystery. Or rather it has a murder and a murder investigation woven through it to give it some structure.

It is more than a murder mystery. It is a slice of life story of small town life. The murder is the device that allows the author to tell of the lives and backstories of a number of characters in this small town. It is the type of story that will spend a page describing the making of pancake batter, quilt making, or glaucoma, just to mention a few things you might learn reading this mystery.

It is also a romance, of sorts. Plus, Watkins also has to deal with demons from her past as a police woman in a larger city.

The mystery involves a man murdered during a street dance in a small town, a dance that our hero, Claire Watkins, was attending with her new boyfriend. Who stabbed the victim, without anyone seeing the act - or at least admitting to seeing the act, is the central mystery. It turns out that the victim was not a popular man, and as Watkins finds out during her investigation, and that there are a number of people who with a iffy past, the motive, and the opportunity to do so. These are revealed as the story progresses, keeping you guessing - who's the least obvious, and thus, the most likely?

Since it is my policy not to spoil stories, especially mysteries, I won't say anything more about the story itself.

Having lived in a small Wisconsin towns for 40 years, I am far from sure they are quite as rotten with sordid secrets as writers would have you believe. Still, small towns are very closed societies, and since my grandparents were not born in those towns, we were always outsiders, and thus, I was never in the know; not privy to all the sordid secret that where floating around.  Not, mind you, that I minded. My indifference to local society matched theirs to me.  However, like all the mystery stories, cozy and otherwise, this story depends on those sordid secrets, which are revealed, one by one, as the story progresses. 

What sets this story apart from a pure mystery is that Logue fills the pages with all sorts of everyday life events in the lives of half a dozen or more minor characters, far beyond what I think would be necessary for color and background. Written in 2000, this isn't quite a cozy mystery, but it still has all the trappings of one.

I have a feeling that the author used the murder mystery plot as mere scaffolding to hang the little, everyday stories of small town life she wanted to tell. I found that all these diversions from the mystery story line, crossed the line of character and background building to get in the way of spinning a good mystery story. I'd say at least half of the words weren't necessary to the mystery story. Only my desire to see who she would finger as the killer kept me reading the story. And I must confess, I did a whole lot of that reading skimming and skipping to reach the end.  

So my takeaway is that if you're looking for a murder mystery, you might want to give this book a miss. If, for some reason, you are looking for a book of character studies of small town Midwesterners, then you may've come to the right shop. The murder is just the cherry on the top. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 123)

One of my booktube channels devoted to the classics had a video on ten summer reads. I picked one of those ten, one old enough to be in the public domain and available on Gutenberg. I should mention that I watched and read this book in May... We'll have to see if I try any other other nine summer reading suggestions.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Kim  By Rudyard Kipling  B+

As you can see from its score, I enjoyed Kim. It probably just missed an A- because I thought it ending was slightly unsatisfying. I guess Kipling did wrap things up, and it is one of those life goes on endings, but still, I would've liked to know a little more at the ending point. The other slight ding, in my view, was that his descriptions were often very colorful, but dense. Being written in 1901, it was written in the style of the period. Still, as I recently wrote about the yin and yang of writing, and how important I thought visual white space was, the long dense blocks of description might have read better for me, it they had been strung out and flowed like a stream rather than a lake to make them a little less tiring to push through.

Seeing that it is a well known story, I won't say more than that Kim, an orphan of an English soldier grows up in the streets of Lahore India. Clever, daring, cheerful, resourceful, well liked by all, he becomes an aide and disciple of a Tibetan abbot on a pilgrimage, and then a trainee in the intelligence department of the British Army. The story ends after his first assignment as a new, novice agent. We are introduced to many colorful characters along the way.

I find stories set in India of the 19th century captivating. No fantasy novel can be more colorful or fantastic than India of any period, with it mix of peoples, cultures, religions, and kingdoms. Born in India, and spending years there, Kipling knew of what he wrote about and could paint each scene in the book with authentic details and color. 

I have, however, read a number of other Rudyard Kipling stories. I have a 627 page one volume edition The Works of Rudyard Kipling that includes short stories and verses all I believe set in India. as well as and 1898 edition of The Day's Work, of 12 short stories. I will have to investigate them more closely, as I am certain I did not read either cover to cover, or if I did, they are out of memory.

The Darval-Mers Dossier Available as an Apple Audiobook

Boy, they weren't kidding when they say that it can take two months to make an audiobook on Apple. Two months almost to the day, the audiobook version of The Darval Mers Dossier is now available as an audiobook on Apple Books.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We live in an age of miracles. 

The Darval-Mers Dossier Apple Audiobook can be downloaded for Free! Here

I shouldn't look gift horses in the mouth. I just don't understand why something that takes Google and Amazon a couple of hours - with far more options - takes D2D and Apple two months. (Or longer. Much longer.)

In an unrelated note, I release version 2 of Chateau Clare. In addition to correcting several typos, I realized that I did not have a "hook" in my opening. Every book needs a hook in its opening paragraph in order to reel readers in. I am told. So I added a hook to my opening. No need to download a new copy, just add this to the first paragraph:

Gran’s orders were always terse.

She expected them to be obeyed.

Promptly.

Without discussion.

And so I joined... the rest is unaltered

And yes, I am having a bit of fun here. But I did add those lines for the reason I stated. I don't know if it would make any different, but I usually do make some effort to have some sort of "hook" in the first paragraph, even if it is tongue in cheek. But not really in the case of Chateau Clare. Perhaps I was thinking the chapter title would be intriguing enough. But the lack of anything clever bugged me so I whipped up the new opening. I expect great results.

A Book Nomad

                  

Over the last four years, I have become something of a book nomad, reading a variety of books, but calling no genre home. This has both pluses and minuses. 

Ever since I started reading the Tom Swift Jr books in the 5th grade, I've considered myself a fan of science fiction. By my late teens and early 20's I had branched out into detective and mystery stories, old adventure stories, and then sea stories and various types of stories set in England. Most of these stories were written before I was born; in the first half of the twentieth century, or a few decades earlier. Used book stores and rummage sales with books were a delight to find. And yet, despite reading all these other types of books, I still would've said I was a science fiction fan.

So it is no surprise that when I started writing my own stories, they were some flavor of science fiction.

For the better part of four decades, I collected books. All sorts of books, eventually acquiring more than 1500 books by the turn of this century. Then , knowing that I would, some day, have to move all of them, decided that I had enough of them, and pretty much stopped buying books. I was quite content to read library books. And once I started writing my own books, I didn't even do much of that. 

However, some five years ago, I realized by reading blogs devoted to science fiction, that I was an edge case reader when it came to science fiction. To illustrate this; after almost fifty years of considering myself a fan of it, in any list of the hundred most influential sf books, I might have read, or at least tried, sixteen or so books. Indeed, I just recently came across another 100 best SF books, and could only claim to have read seven. The fact of the matter was that I wasn't reading sf for what most sf fans were reading it for. I wasn't looking for stories about some strange, mind-blowing science fiction concept. I was in fact, a fan of romances, romances in the old definition of the term; adventures in exotic lands. Science fiction just provided the exotic lands, and the sf books I enjoyed were mostly just adventure stories in space or on alien worlds. Moreover, I wasn't finding contemporary science fiction appealing, so I turned in my science fiction membership card, and walked away.

But then I had no place to call home. What type of reader was I?

I set out to find the answer to that question.

Though, as I said, I've always been reading a variety of books, three years ago, I decided to seek out a new genre to call home, and downloaded a bunch of free books from Amazon in a variety of genres to see if I could find something to love. While some were fine, I generally found that traditionally published books, written decades ago, where still the ones that appealed to me the most.

I also started watching YouTube videos with people talking about books. In the beginning they were ones featuring science fiction books, and then I gradually shifted to ones talking about fantasy, event though I was never much of a fantasy reader. The thing is, I enjoy hearing people talk about books, and learning about books, even ones I know I never have any interest in reading. Still, over the years, I've read a number of books they praised, some fantasy, but others included such titles as Lonesome Dove, Shogun, and Under the Greenwood Tree. However, for the most part, they talk about books I've no interest in ever reading; epic, grimdark, or romantic fantasy, so I'm not watching them primarily to find new books to read. I'm left to find those books myself. So far I have been trying this and that, but given my preferences, they are almost always old books.

The issue is that I'm hard to please. My taste in subject matter and writing style are rather narrow. I don't like the way they write books these days. And while I enjoy being a nomad and the search for books to discover and delight in, I must admit that it would be nice to be able to say that I am a fan of - fill in the blank. 

Thinking about it, maybe I can answer that question. The most likely candidate for that blank is the broad category of historical fiction, including both (relatively) contemporary fiction about the past, and fiction written eighty to a hundred or more years ago about then contemporary times.

This issue with this is that historical fiction is hardly a genre at all. It is too broad to be a single one. There are so many sub-genres within the term that, applying  my broad definition of historical fiction, the term "historical fiction" becomes rather meaningless. The fact is that all you have to do is take any genre  fiction -adventure stories, nautical tales, mysteries, westerns, war stories, fantasies, horror, or romances - set the the story somewhere in a past historical time, and you have historical fiction. 

It seems to me that historical fiction is more of an open range, than a home on the range of fiction. I really doubt I will be able to find a cozy literary home. A reading life of roaming on the range looks likely to be my home going forward.

 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 122) EXTRA! EXTRA!

 

Once again we have something different to talk in this extra edition; a beta version of a novel by Chris Fox. I have talked about Chris Fox a number of times in this blog, as he was one of the authors who where open about how much money they make and spent self-publishing, in his case on YouTube. He stopped doing so, four or five years ago, and his output dwindled as well. I suspected that both he and his readership had become burned out by the pace of his releases. Well, he's back on YouTube and has recovered his mojo. He talks about his struggles (life with a baby who didn't like to sleep) and losing the fun in writing. But now, he's made changes in his life and is back to writing with a new series. He made a beta version of the first book available on Bookfunnel for free. I decided to give it a try.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Not the cover of the book, but I couldn't resist including this illustration from Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat, as mentioned in my review below.

The Heirs of Atlantis (beta version) by Chris Fox  DNF 30%

I have previously read a partial beta version of another of his stories, so I had no illusions that this would be a story that would appeal to me, and  my expectations were met. This story is pure pulp. That is not in any way, a value judgement. It's just stating the style of story. Pulp stories have always had a large audience, and it happens to be the most popular style of fiction in self-published ebooks. I am sure that 90+% of the best selling self-published ebooks are pulp stories, no matter what genre. And by pulp stories, I mean stories that are driven, and driven hard and fast by plot, rather than characters or atmosphere. I've read and enjoyed many pulp stories in my day. I've now grown to like more character and atmospheric stories, so that while this book isn't what I am looking for to read these days, it is what his target audience is looking for. Though we'll have to see. It will be released early in August 2025.

In brief; the plot has a first person narrator, an "influencer" on YouTube whose channel is focused on lost civilizations. Somehow he determines that there is a harbor dating back to the lost age of Atlantis in the waters off of Cadiz Spain, likely with ships sunk in that sunken harbor. He hires a local boat owner to take him out to this spot in the ocean where he has determined the harbor to be. They dive and indeed, find the wreck of a ship, which they uncover and explore the next day, taking off some tablets and a jewel encrusted device. 

Unbeknownst to them a secret society has been following his activity, and when they learn he has discovered something, they swing into action, preventing further explorations of the wreck and its cargo. But never mind, our hero has other places to investigate, and the boat owner, now his partner, is willing to take him there, for half of the profits. The device he found allows him to experience the mind of writer of the tables, a scholar of some sort from Atlantis, just before the twin meteors hit the earth, melting a lot of ice, raising the sea levels and washing over Atlantis and the other civilizations, some 12,000 years ago. It was at this point where I decided I'd read enough.

One of the big problems for me with this story is that I found it to be unbelievable from the get-go. Our YouTuber not only goes almost directly to the location of the wreck, but goes scuba diving down to it without any training in scuba diving. They excavate the wreck in over the course of three dives the following day, with trowels after a long swim to get there. You have this beautiful woman, Yvette, of course, an agent of this secret society, who sort of likes our nerdy hero even as she steals his discoveries and works to discredit him. You have the magic device to give the reader a background of Atlantis as it was, all of which is told in the first 70, double spaced pages, so you can imagine the pace of the story.

The first person narrator breaks the fourth wall to talk to the reader, or rather his YouTube views as if on a video, which is an interesting choice, but he's such a thin character that it makes him even more silly. He might well resonate with the target audience, as by and large, this reads like a YA book, including sharks and a near attack by squids when exploring the wreck that comes straight out of Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat. Except that the Tom Swift books put more effort into fleshing out the story. 

I guess what surprised me the most was the speed of the story telling, whatever effort was put into creating any sense of place and atmosphere or for that matter, believability, was perfunctory, at best. And though you had a first person narrator, you also had chapters with Yvette's point of view, so that the reader knows far more about what is going on than the narrator of the story. In my opinion, not knowing just what is going on raises the stakes and keeps the reader guessing. This story takes the other approach; the reader knows far more than the hero, and so worries about him.  But this story is tell all, including that nor only does Atlantis really did exist, but using he magical device, we get to go back in time and experience it. Where's the mystery?

As a writer, I see so many missed opportunities to create a deep mystery; a story filled with mysterious happenings and danger. Friendship with the boat owner is almost instantaneously, another opportunity to create tension and mystery. And the uncertainty of Atlantis was real it quickly given away. Everything is there on the surface, merely sketched out, just to keep the story moving.

As I said at the top. It's not a story for me. I'm not its target audience, so my reaction takes nothing away from the story for the readers it is targeted at. I am truly disappointed, if not surprised, that I didn't find any satisfaction in reading it. I just think it could've been so much more if it just slowed down. All in all, a lesson in what sells in the world of Kindle Unlimited. Thankfully, I know of eight rare exceptions.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 121)

 

With the unexpected DNF'ing of Pride and Prejudice, I was left without anything to read, nor any idea what I wanted to read. Since I had Pride and Prejudice on my ebook reader and it was in hand, I looked to see what else I had downloaded that I might want to read, having downloaded more than a hundred public domain books from authors whose books I've read in the past. However, I haven't had a great deal of luck finding ones I liked, even from authors whose works I had liked. But I did settle on one...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Borough Treasurer  by J S Fletcher  C 

J S Fletcher was a prolific writer of detective stories; writing over a hundred of them beginning in 1914. His stories are more like the Sherlock Holmes stories rather than the Agatha Christie type. I had read several of his books prior to reading this one (which is why it was on my ebook reader.)

This story involves blackmail. Two gentlemen embezzled money from a building society, were caught, spent two years in jail, and then disappeared, eventually settling in the north of England. They then started a successful building business on the money they had embezzled, becoming respected members of the community; the mayor and treasurer in the process. Thirty years later, a retired detective stumbles upon them, and attempts to blackmail them. That very night, the blackmailer is strangled in the woods, and neither of the partners have a good alibi...

The story is told from multiple points of view, including the two ex-cons, though we aren't told who murdered the blackmailer. (Though I guessed correctly.) Another man was out that night and also has no alibi, or rather he refuses to provide one, for some reason, even to his lawyers. We then follow the court proceedings, never quite knowing who did what, as the situation gets more and more out of hand for the two suspects, even with the innocent suspect in jail and set for trial.

The fact that we do not follow any one person made it hard for me to get all that invested in the story. It has plenty of twists and turns, and lots of, well unlikely actions by the various characters. And I found myself skim reading various descriptive passages, a sure sign that the story didn't engage me and went on too long. 

A melodramatic ending ties up all the threads.

Fletcher wrote a series of books featuring a private detective, Ronald Chamberwell, which might be more to my taste, as well as some historical novels. We'll have to see if I give him another chance.