Books By C. LItka

Books By C. LItka

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Saturday Morning Post (No.39)

 


With the last two massive books dealt with, one way or another, I found that my TBR list was blank. I had nothing to read. So I went to the bookshelf and pulled out volume three of the Brother Cadfael series, and read the next story in that series.

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 Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters  B+

In this story we meet a young, traveling juggler and musician who is fleeing an angry mob of towns people who are accusing him of murder and robbery. He makes it to the Monastery and into the church, which, by law, gives him sanctuary for 40 days, or as long as he stays in the church. The person he is accused of murdering, does not, in fact, die, so only the theft charge hangs over him. Still, might be enough to hang him in this time period. Bother Cadfael is called on to dresses the wounds the juggler received from the mob, and in questioning him, believes his claim to be innocent of both crimes. But that impression must be proven and Cadfael, along with his friend, the under sheriff, set out to find the true facts in the affair.

The crime took place on the night of a wedding celebration in the house of a wealthy, and miserly goldsmith, and in the course of the story we get to know the inhabitants of that house. As customary with Ellis Peter's Cadfael stories, the person in trouble is a young man, and there is an element of (an unconvincing) romance involving him as well. 

Like always, this is an interesting tale, with a lot of time spent finely drawing the characters involved in the mystery, with some detective work mixed in here and there. Like the previous story, The Virgin in the Ice, it has a very dramatic closing scene which, I must confess, I'm not overly fond of. In some ways I think these dramatic climatic scenes are not only unnecessary, but seem out of place with the general tone of these stories, with their focus on the everyday life of the 12th century monastery, the city, and surrounding countryside, then on the extraordinary event - the mystery to be solved. And I think that's best solved in the classic murderer mystery style of some sort of review of the evidence, and the unmasking of the criminal. But as always, that's just me, though in this case I was also unconvinced that the who in the whodunit had sufficient motive to do it. Even so, it was an enjoyable read, though not quite top tier installment of this excellent series. I think that you can't go wrong with a Cadfael mystery.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Proofreading


Any long time reader of mine is well aware that the first editions of my early books had too many typos. While I was well aware that I couldn't spell English to save my soul, I didn't realize how blind I was to my typing mistakes. I read what I expect to read, whether the word(s) is(are) actually on the page or not. As a result, I often miss in both typing and reading the little words that aren't there but should be. As well as the double words that arise either out of stopping to think of the next phrase, or from moving lines about in editing, and the use of the wrong words that look similar to the right ones. 

Proofreading is a very specialized skill, and though my wife, unlike me, knows the rules of grammar, spelling, and was a high school teacher for decades, she only finds 95+% of my mistakes, so that some of my mistakes inevitably through. Thankfully, over the years, some very kind readers have taken the time to point out the errors they come across to me that I then correct. Some of these kind people have since become my beta readers, and with their generous help I've been able to slowly improve all my books over the years.

I'd like to believe that having been at this writing thing most of my life, I've gotten better at it. And while I think I have, I'm still far from perfect. I have, however, started using several programs in addition to LibreOffice to process my work. Three years ago I discovered that Google Docs has a much more robust grammar checker than LibreOffice, so I ran all my published books through it, and now upload all of my new books to proofread my stories before handing the story off to my wife. It finds many of the double words and some of the wrong and missing words. But not all. My wife still had to do her proofreading, and my beta readers still find some typos that had escaped both Google Docs and my wife.

For Passage to Jarpara, I decided to add a second layer of automated grammar checking, and ran the story through the free version of Grammarly, after running it through Google Docs. It found a number of double words and wrong words that Google Docs had missed. I had hoped that between the two programs, I'd be able to hand my wife a clean copy that all she'd need to do was read it. Alas, this was not the case.

Spelling wise, few words escaped detection. There were several missing little words, mostly "to" that were missed by both programs. Grammarly liked hyphenated words, i.e. "white-painted house" and having no opinion one way or the other, I went along with Grammarly on that. However, something like 75% of Grammarly's suggestions involved the elimination or insertion of commas. I may not know the "rules" about comma placement, but place them where I think a speaker would pause, which, given that my books are now auto-generated audiobooks, is pretty important. Still, I made the lazy decision just to go with Grammarly on commas. My wife, however, quickly complained about the lack of commas where commas ought to be. I also found them missing where I would've, and maybe did, place them, so I spent a lot of time adding commas back in. Another point was that for some crazy reason, I decided to use semi-colons instead of my usual dashes. Grammarly didn't complain about them at all, but my wife has very strong  and narrow opinions on the use of semi-colons/colons, and so I had to go back to dashes to please her. I'll never use a semi-colon again.

Both these programs tend to ignore words that make no sense, so that they usually don't try to correct my made-up words. This simplifies things greatly. However, LibreOffice will underline them. And unfortunately I will misspell my own made-up words, and since they are all underlined, I never realize that I have. I could tell the program to ignore those words as I write them, but it seems to lose those instructions as soon as I close the program, so they're all underlined again the following morning. This time around, I spent several hours working on the final proofread draft, telling the program to ignore the correctly spelled made-up words, so that I could find my misspelled ones. I found maybe 20 of them. So frustrating.

I haven't given up hope of finding a completely reliable, and free, grammar checker, or perhaps use three or four of them in succession to see if I can eliminate all the errors that one or two programs seem to miss. But that will be for the next novel. This time around, I'm hoping that my beta readers don't find too many errors, none being too much to hope for. In any event, Passage to Jarpara should be a close to perfect as a C. Litka book in this world will ever be.






Saturday, March 9, 2024

The Saturday Morning Post ( No. 38)

 


This week another long book with a page count coming in at 843 pages. It is a book by one of America's favorite authors, an author I hadn't read yet. So, without further ado, let's open up this can of worms.

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.



11/22/63 by Stephen King  DNF (pg 131)

The eagle eyed reader will already discovered that Stephen King and his time travel story about an effort to prevent President Kennedy from being killed in Dallas on 11 Nov 1963 did not prove to be my cup of tea. King is one of the most popular authors still writing today, and he seems to be a favorite author of several of the booktubers that I look in on. I'm not a horror fan, so he never was going to be one of mine, but I thought that this might be the book to sample his work without delving into the horror genre. And well, my wife liked it, so I thought, why not give it a try? I did, and now I'm here to talk about why it wasn't for me, since I'm certain you're curious to know why. Spoilers for the first 131 pages and the premise below.

Let's start with King's writing style. This is a first person narrative, which is my favorite story style. However, right from the beginning King's style just didn't sit well with me. While I have nothing against slow starts, I use them myself, I thought the start of this book was, if not too slow, too scattered; too many things tossed about rather haphazardly in order to set the scene and character. And perhaps more importantly, he has the reader more in the head of the narrator than I like. In short, I found the narration to be too granule, with too many thoughts on too many inconsequential matter, all of which prevented me from connecting with the narrator and the story.

And then we have the pet peeve of mine. I want the author to stay hidden behind the characters of the story. One thing that, for me, brings the author out from behind the characters is when he starts sprinkling the story with all sorts of trivia, and then explains it for our education. To me this smacks of an author showing off how much research he's done, how adept he is at using Wikipedia. I'm sure this is justified in the author's mind as "world building, scene setting." but too much of it just becomes trivia. As I said last week I like learning history within well researched historical fiction, but there is a difference between setting a story within a historical context, and just sprinkling it with all sorts of trivial, which I think is what King did here. Do we need to know who's on a pre-1958 $20 bill? Or that a motel was called a motor court, or a V8 was a Y-block, or modern dimes would not work in a pay phone, or how everyone smoked and the brands they smoked, the obsolete soft drinks, the songs on the 1958 radio, the lack of air conditioning and three channels on a b&w TV? It struck me as King went out of his way to highlight all the differences between 2010 and 1958 by having the narrator notice and comment on all these trivial things, as if he had been actually hatched in 2010 and all this past was brand new to him, even though the narrator was 40 years old, so that some of these things would've been hardly new to him at all. I've complained about this before, but boy, did it bug me here, as it seemed to be a major focus of the story up to the time I gave up on it.

Next, let's talk about the story. A time travel story is always going to be a hard sell for me. They never make sense, no matter how much handwaving is employed to make it seem like it does. I was, however, willing to suspend my disbelief for this story, and since my wife liked it, I thought I'd give it a try. I had, however the idea that it would involve some sort of organization sending someone back in time to stop Oswald. This proved not to be the case. It's just a fellow who has a fissure in time, with steps, in the pantry of this silver trailer hamburger joint and who thinks the country would be in a better place if Kennedy wasn't killed. However, he as a problem; he's dying of cancer and can't stop Oswald himself, so he talks the narrator into doing it instead. I found the baseline premise rather lame with lots of little problems overlooked.

The way the time travel works in this book is that the restaurant owner has discovered an invisible fissure in time, with invisible steps in his pantry, which takes a person to one, and only one day in the past; Tuesday September 9th 1958. After arriving in the past you can stay there as long you want, and when you find the fissure and climb back up the steps to the pantry, you will have been gone exactly two minutes in 2010. The hamburger joint is (in)famous for the cheapness of its hamburgers, made possible by the fact that the owner simply goes back to 1958 to buy his hamburger meat at $.50 a pound.

(An example of the types of problems I had with this story: The restaurant owner needs to pay for the hamburger meat with pre-1958 currency. How hard and expensive would it be to acquire that currency in 2010 in the volume needed? So how would it pay to do so?)

The restaurant owner discovered that he could change the future while in the past, but as soon as he went back again, the future was reset to what it had been when the last time he visited. Every time he goes back, everything is almost the same as it was the first time he visited the past. I can hear you thinking; Groundhog Day. And you'd think King with his emphasis on trivia, or one of the characters in the story, would be thinking that too, but there's never a mention of the movie in the story, at least in the part that I read, even though the concept is an extension of Groundhog Day's basic premise, with the major difference being the day is not repeated like it is in the movie, time just keeps going on just as long as you stay in the past. 

In any event, if one is going to prevent Kennedy from being killed, a person would have to spend over 5 years in the past, and if he returns to 2010, he can never go back again, for that would reset the future  and erase what he did. In this story, time travel is really just magic, with steps. As you can tell, those steps really bugged me. Why would any sort of fissure in time have steps? Not to mention why are they there? And is this fissure attached to the trailer, or the place it's parked, and why has no one in the past tripped over the invisible steps and found themselves in the pantry of a hamburger joint in 2010? Who knows? My wife couldn't help me, she forgets details like that. I didn't care enough to find out.

At the point where I bailed on the story, our narrator has gone back to the past in order to prevent the gruesome murder of a mother and three children, in which one of his GED students survived, just to test if you can really change time and change it back again. To do so, he has to spend several months in the past to get to the date in 1958 when the murder happened, as well as to the city in which it happened. The story, set in Maine, which I gather is usual for King, and the city, Derry, is a dirty, gloomy, city with a Lovecraftian air about it. We learn that there has been a serial killer of children loose, and something about the sewers - so many of them, built in the depression... and then a light went on in my head. What King horror story was this describing? I think it is It. Having watched these booktube videos that mention King, I gathered that he likes to link all his stories together with references to his other stories, all of which take place in a multiverse known as the Macroverse, and this is an example of it. At this point, I was out.

As I said at the beginning, I'm not a fan of horror so this would likely be the only book I would've read of his. However for all the reasons I've talked about above, and because this story is at least tinged with horror, this story simply wasn't for me. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Passage to Jarpara Release Date

 


The ebook and audiobook versions of Passage to Jarpara will be released on 21 March 2024 and shortly after for the audiobook. It will be priced for free on Google for both the ebook and audiobook, as well as on Apple, B & N, Kobo, Smashwords, and in various other European ebook stores. The Amazon version will be priced at $3.99. I am looking into bringing audiobooks to Amazon as well, and if that works out, it will be priced at $3.99 as well - Amazon's minimum.

Look for the paperback version of the title to be released a week or two ahead of the ebook release, as I will publish that version once I hear back from my beta readers. I'm always eager I to get my hands on the paper copies of my book so that I can send off to my beta readers. Hey, if I didn't buy them, no one would.

Speaking of Amazon's audiobooks - they have introduced a Beta program where they are offering to convert ebooks to audiobooks, I assume for free, since no price is quoted. However, to qualify, the ebook must have a table of contents, which I've not included in my ebooks. I see no useful purpose of a table of contents in an ebook of fiction as they always open where you left off, and searching back is a pain table of contents or not. I am, however, looking to add a table of contents, and this title will likely be the test bed for that. If it works, look for my audiobooks on Audible in the near future.

In the past Amazon has price match most of my free books in the US store, but starting this year, only two of my books are free on Amazon. Last year, with the release of The Girl on the Kerb, I launched it at $3.99 on Amazon and Amazon, all on its own, dropped its price to free a week after release. Amazon is a mystery box, so if you are an Amazon customer, you can wait to see what they do this time. As I have long said, I'm not publishing books to make money, but to entertain readers, so free is my preferred price.



Saturday, March 2, 2024

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 37)

 


We have a modern classic to talk about today. With its own old, and now new, TV miniseries. So without further ado...

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.


Shogun by James Clavell  C+

I never watched the old miniseries, but the impression I had about the book was that it was about a western seaman shipwrecked in Japan and becoming enmeshed in Japanese culture of the 16th century. Which is an element of it, and while it may've been the focus of the original miniseries, it is not really the focus of the book. Blackthorne, the English pilot of a Dutch ship is merely the hook to draw in western readers of this novel, and the window into 17th century Japanese culture that Clavell illuminates in the story; its culture, philosophies, and politics. The main character of the book is a historical Japanese noble, Lord Toranaga, who at this point in history has designs on becoming the ruler of all of Japan, the Shogun of the title, though he denies it. Being an almost 1,200 page novel, with an intricately plotted semi-fictional story grafted into known history, it is impossible to do the plot any justice by attempting to summarizing it. So I won't. I will say that it is a very impressive work of research and storytelling which earns it the "+" I gave for it. Ultimately however, it only earned a C grade from me for three main reasons.

First, and one I can't blame the author for, is that the story desperately needs a map of 17th century Japan to give the reader some idea of what was going on politically. I read a library copy of the mass market paperback (with tiny 6pt. type) so other editions have one. But if they don't, it's a glaring fault. Much of the meanings of the political actions that take up most of the story is lost without such a map. And while you could probably find that backstory, perhaps with maps on the internet these days, those sources would also spoil the story, since this is a historical novel, not a novel of alternate or counterfactual history. At least that is what I feared. And if you do look up sources to supply things like maps, and perhaps character background, you'll discover how the main story ends (though off screen in the book). 

By the same token, since Clavell had to fit his story within known history, without altering it, if you know anything about Japanese history, you will have a clue as to the fate of Blackthorne, who I gather is based on a real historical person, as well as Lord  Toranaga. Strangely enough, if you even know a little about Japan, Clavell spoils the ending himself simply because he can't keep himself from educating the reader on Japanese culture by introducing the invention of the role of the geisha girl in Japanese society.

The second, and more significant reason for my C grade is it's length and complexity. I found it simply too long, and too politically intricate, for me with little knowledge of Japan going into this book. That said, I generally like long books, and love learning history from a fictional book, George MacDonald Frazer's Flashman books are a perfect example of a mix of real history and fiction. And I certainly enjoyed learning about Japanese culture from this book and how it compared to the European society of the period. So much so that by the time I reached the last 200-300 pages of the story, I was quite Japanese. But more on that in a bit. However, after a week of reading it, I was feeling the fatigue of all the intricacies of Japan and period history that Cavell was spoon feeding me. It delved too deeply into the weeds with too many point of view characters, some of whom seemed to be brought in merely to introduce us to one or another aspects of either European or Japanese society or history. I also grew weary of all the endless schemes and ploys of both Blackthorn and Lord Toranaga, many of which come to naught, over and over again. In short, for me, there was too much information for the plot to carry.

And thirdly, as I said above, I had become very Japanese by the time I reached the last third of the book. How so? Well, in this period in Japan, life was cheap. The samurai class could chop up anyone, other than a samurai, on a whim. They solved a lot of problems that way; killing people, including their parents, wives, children, and when honor or a casual order from their superiors demanded it, themselves. In this story many of the characters were simply waiting for the opportunity and excuse to kill a rival in order to advance, or to kill themselves in order to escape this vale of tears. Death was an escape. And many characters escaped, like it or not, that way. But, you see, that's just karma. So by the time I was reaching the last third of this book, I no longer cared what happened to any of the characters, including Blackthorne, Whatever happens, happens, it's just karma, eh? Whatever... And well, Japanese mind-frame or not, when I'm that indifferent to the fate of the main characters in a story, an average grade is about all the story can expect to get from me.

All that said, give it a try. Don't let my objections keep you from giving this book a try if you are one of the few who haven't read it already and are interested in Japan and undaunted by its length. You may well like it, and like it a lot. Millions have. You will certainly find yourself immersed in a very strange and fascinating world, engaged in an interesting, if by the end wearisome narrative, and learn a great deal in the process. Who needs dragons and magic to live in a strange and magical world, when you have history?

There is a new miniseries just starting on I believe Hulu in the states, Disney + outside of it. I only watched the trailer and thought it looked far too dark and gloomy. I guess that's how they film things now days. I would've filmed the story in rich colors; the greens of the land, the blues of the sea, the rich colors and intricacies of the clothing and housing -- in short, a very pleasing landscape to emphasize the fact that only its characters are vile.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Passage to Jarpara Update

 


I've finished the second and the final third draft of Passage to Jarpara. The third draft is where I read it on an ebook reader, and hopefully just find things to tweak in the text. That was the case this time, so now the story is what it is. With those drafts behind me, I've shifted to the proofreading process. The first step is uploading the LibreOffice document to Google Drive and then opening it in Google Docs. While I write it in LibreOffice, that program does not have a very robust grammar checking function. Google Docs does, so opening it in Google Docs and making most of the corrections it suggests saves a lot of work for my wife and other beta readers. And trust me, it is discouraging to see all the little words that I seemed to have read in the three to six times I've read parts of the story that aren't really there. I guess I read what I expect to read, even if the words aren't actually there.

This year, for the first time ever, I'm also going to run the book through the Grammarly. I did one chapter last night, and Grammarly did find things to change as well. It likes hyphenated words, like white-painted, instead of white painted, and has its opinion on comas. Seeing that these are things that I have no strong opinion on, I'm going along with these changes. There are a few things that I like and will keep, despite neither Google Docs or Grammarly liking it, chief among them is the use of "to" instead of "at" as in  "I looked to Lessie" instead of the AI proofreaders' "I looked at Lessie." 

After all this automated proofreading is done, I usually turn it over to my wife to proofread, and then, after she has found more mistakes, it is off to my volunteer beta readers. However, I'm thinking that with the addition of Grammarly's proofreading skills, I might be able to send the story off to my beta readers in good conscious before my wife has completed her read through. That will depend how clean of a copy she finds after reading a chapter or two. If she finds no errors, off it goes.

In any event, I'm looking to release the book on either 21 March or 28 March 2024, unless something unexpected crops up. I should be able to give you a definite date next week. Stay tuned.



Saturday, February 24, 2024

The Saturday Morning Post (No.36)

 


This week we have a book that my sister-in-law gave to my wife. Since she wasn't going to get around to reading it just yet, 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.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt   DNF 12%

This is almost certainly the case where I'm not the author nor the publisher's target audience, so that when I say that I utterly failed to connect with the story, it should come as no surprise. I thought that after enjoying Lessons in Chemistry, I might find another rather female reader orientated book enjoyable. But this one, well... 45 pages into it she was still introducing her cast of characters, one of which is an octopus, without a discernable plot. I decided to bail. 

The beginning of this novel reads very much like some of those cozy mysteries I tried last year; a recital of everyday events and lots of people. The main point of view character - but not the only one - is Tova, a widow whose 18 year old son mysteriously disappeared 30 years before. The blurb on the cover flap says that Marcellus, an octopus, becomes a friend of Tova and helps her solve the mystery of her son's disappearance. So it's a cozy mystery? Reads like one. But...

Now I'm a fan of leisurely paced books. I actively dislike slam-bang openings, so I shouldn't be complaining about the opening. But, there is slow, and then there is slow and cluttered, and this opening is so very cluttered. Not only did almost all of characters we're introduced to seem to be minor ones, but all the everyday incidents that are intermingled with a collection of seemingly unimportant background stories buried the narrative line of the story, at least for me, with trivia. Except for one random scene with a seemingly minor character who is apparently unconnected to Tova. This character is a guy who doesn't know who is father was/is. Given the blub on the cover... it struck me as suspicious; for once there seemed to be rather obvious reason for his inclusion, but of course I could be wrong, not having read the book. Just say'n;)

The most significant character after Tova is the octopus, Marcellus, who has his own first person narration chapters. After a dog as a character in Lessons in Chemistry, I thought this might be interesting. I was wrong. I found the octopus to be far too human to be even remotely believable as an octopus. Somehow I was supposed to believe that this octopus had learned to read and understand spoken English, while living underwater in an aquarium tank. Not only did I find that I could not suspend my disbelief that this was even remotely impossible, but it seems to me that if you're going to have a first person octopus in your story, you should come up with a clever way to make the octopus seem more than just a human in a fish tank. The octopus needs to be at least a little bit alien in its thought process. Not so here. Other than describing its actions as an octopus in an tank, it just think and sounds like a human.

Add to this the fact that since I read to escape the everyday life of the world around me, I really don't care for stories set in contemporary times. This book only reinforced my disinclination to read anything set in our time and/or place.

This is, however, a best selling debut novel, so obviously, once again, it's me, not the book. Next up, two very long books from the library. We'll see how they fare.