Teasing My 2025 Novel

 

Above is the current version of the cover for my 2025 novel, Chateau Clare. If you click on the image you should get a version of the cover large enough to read the back cover blurb. I will leave that to tease the story itself for this post.

I spent all of the summer of 2023 slowly developing this story. I put it aside last fall, to return to, and finish, the half-finished Passage to Jarpara story I had previously started. Besides wanting to finish that story, I didn't want to find myself in the middle of writing this story burned out after having spent so much time thinking about it. I wanted to come back to write it fresh.

As it turned out, that decision worked well. After finishing Jarpara, I was eager to start work on it. I started writing it on 1 March and wrapped up the first 145K word draft in slightly less that 90 days - on the 27th of May. It was the smoothest writing process I've experienced in a long time. Part of this is due to the fact that I had created written bullet-point notes, with a calendar listing of all the scenes in the story. Usually I'm content to just having the story in my head. But having decided to delay the actual writing of it, I didn't trust myself to remember what I'd finally settled on when I returned to it. Writing, at least in my process, involves exploring many scenes and variations of those scenes, many of which end up on the cutting room floor. I feared that I might not remember what I had finally settled on.

Right from the start, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do in this story.  I wanted to write an anti-fantasy fantasy novel, one that was the polar opposite of much of today's fantasy, especially, grimdark fantasy. Not a very commercially sound idea, but that's what I felt like doing.

Below is a possible opening to its blurb:

Have you grown weary of long, dark and grim fantasy epics? Tired of evil priests, ruthless kings, sinister queens, knaves, and scoundrels – intricate palace intrigues and endless wars? Are you jaded by blood-soaked tomes of battle after battle, death after death? Need a break from accounts of disembowelment, torture, rape, and murder? In short, are you looking for a change of pace, a different sort of fantasy? Look no further.

Now, there is a somewhat new fantasy sub-genre that is considered a response to grimdark fantasy called cozy fantasy. However, I don't really consider my story a cozy fantasy - I don't describe every meal in detail, nor are there any fairies, gnomes, dragons, wizards, or fantasy tropes in it. Basically, it's so anti-fantasy, that it's only a fantasy on the technicality that it mentions sorcery, and is not set on Earth, with no big new concepts that might make it science fiction. 

As I said in my writing update, this is a very different book from most of my other efforts. It's longest book I've written since The Lost Star's Sea, and certainly the most boring as well. Deliberately so. Nothing very extraordinary happens in it. It's very much a slice of an ordinary life story, with a twist of mystery folded into it. I figured if literary fiction can get away without much of a plot, so can genre. All in all, it's not a book that I think will appeal to a lot of my readers. But what the heck, I rather like this one.

Though it is officially my 2025 novel, I expect to release it in the fall of 2024. Unlike my last book I'm giving my beta readers time to read this one.

If you are curious to find out if I'm exaggerating just how boring it is, and want to see for yourself before it's official release, either as a beta reader - someone who gives me feedback on it - or simply as an ARC (advanced reader copy) reader who just wants to read it early, drop me an email at cmlitka@gmail.com and tell me what format would best work for you - ePub, PDF or Word.

I'll be talking more about Chateau Clare over the next several months. Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 57)

My book of the week this week was a  suggested read from the library based on The Fox Wife. The ebook was available, so I picked it up.

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 Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng   DNF 20%

I see on the cover that this book was a finalist for the Booker Prize for literature. I can understand why, since you have the main character whipping the "blisters" of rain drops off of her face. There is a lot of that type of creative use of language, and if you are a fan of that type of language, you may well like this book. I'm not, as you can see.

The story opens in the 1980's in Malaysia, with a female judge retiring to the Garden of Evening Mists on account of realizing that she is suffering from dementia that is going to rapidly worsen. Judge Teoh Yun Ling is the sole survivor of a Japanese prison camp that killed her sister, and cost her two of her fingers, which she wears gloves to cover their loss. After this framing chapter or two, the main story is a flashback to a few years after the Second World War, when she, after getting a law degree in England, wants, as a memorial to her sister, to build a Japanese garden, one designed by a Japanese gardener who lives in the hills of Malaysia, despite the fact that she hates the Japanese for how they treated her, her sister, and so many other people in the lands they occupied during the Second World War. It may've been mentioned why this gardener, but I don't remember it. The story seemed to me to be more than a bit contrived.

I found the pace glacial, the writing too ornamental for my taste. And to be honest, I felt that the story was more of a history lesson disguised as a story, rather than a narrative. In the part I read it had people always telling tales of the past, as well as talking about the present political circumstances (of the late 1940's) so that 20% into the book, we only had the framing device of her going back to the garden - it appeared to be hers now, (thus telegraphing the ending) and her account of her first meeting with the Japanese gardener, with lots of description of the garden. A slow and rather disjointed opening that seemed to promise much more of the same.

I don't need a lot of action - in fact, none at all - to enjoy a story. What I do need is clear, engaging writing and a story that does not meander artfully hither and yon, with all sorts of artfully contrived descriptions of commonplace things tossed in to make it literature. 

I guess I'm a barbarian at the gates of literature.

My Summer Project

Since Amazon stopped price matching the free price of my books in other stores, my sales on Amazon have declined to hardly any at all, save for the two remaining free books. I've decided to take advantage of having nothing to lose, by withdrawing The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea and re-releasing the stories in those books as a six book series on Amazon. They will, however, remain in print in the other ebook/audiobook stores. I've several reasons for making this change on Amazon

The first is that I can. The two books are episodic in structure. Indeed, I originally wrote The Bright Black Sea as three 100K novel-length series of episodes, each of which has a fairly well defined story arc, making dividing that book into three equal length novels simple.

The Lost Star's Sea, on the other hand, consists of one long episode, Castaways of the Lost Star, which I'd originally released as a novel the year after The Bright Black Sea. It was as a stop-gap measure until I could come with enough material to make an equally long sequel. The rest of that book, though episodic, does not have novel-length story arcs, but given that the series complete, the readers can simply move on to the final book, so I don't see this as a problem.

The second reason - and this is a big one - is that they are currently too long to be converted into auto-narrated audiobooks on Amazon. By breaking them into six novels, I can offer the stories on Amazon/Audible as a set of six audiobooks.

A third reason - which is a benefit to all readers - is that I'm taking the time to run then through Grammarly and Scribbr's grammar checkers to clean them up and, it seems, add a lot of commas. I will release the improved copy in both The Bright Black Sea, and The Lost Star Sea's, so everyone benefits.

A fourth reason - a minor one - is that in the paperback versions, when I get around to them, I'll be able to increase the print size of the text, which is pretty small in their current paper book form - something like 7 pt. to fit the book size and page count limits.

A fifth reason - inconsequential - is that instead of charging $10 for all the stories in two volumes, I will be able to charge $24 for the complete six volume set, and in doing so, I'll be able to get, rich, rich, Rich!!!

As you can see, I've already worked up tentative covers for all six books. Most of that artwork I already had on hand. The first two covers, Captain and Enemies, use art that I created for The Bright Black Sea cover and used them for a short time. The Ghosts cover is a new painting. Castaways uses the art from the first Castaways of the Lost Star book, though I've tinkered with it, Islands uses a one of the scenes I painted set on an island, with Hissi floating along side Wil, and Secrets was another painting of the Pella that I don't think I ever used for a cover.

I'm currently in the process of running the text, chapter by chapter, through the grammar checkers. Once that is done, I will assemble them into ebooks, write blurbs for each of the volume, and use the Kindle Create program to give them tables of contents, so I'll be able to release them as audiobooks as well as ebooks. The paper back books will follow, as they're just a vanity project. I'm hoping to complete the conversion by the end of July and then release all six books, one per week starting early in August.

I'll post the release dates when I'm set to go. Next week, the first peek at my 2025 novel, including its cover. Stay tuned!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 56)

 

As I mentioned last week, I took the opportunity to actually visit the local library to pick up Bride, by Ali Hazelwood from the new book section. While I was there, I browsed the section, and the book below as displayed cover out. I am familiar with fox spirits in Chinese folk lore, so I picked up the took, and it looked promising, to I checked it out as well on a whim. It was a good whim.

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 Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo   A-

The story is set in Northern China in 1908. It tells two converging stories in alternating chapters, each ending with little cliffhangers. One is a first person narration, the other, a third person narration, so there's never any confusion on what story line you're reading. However, it was this duo structure that earned it the "-" in my grade. I like straight narratives, and found the constant switching back and forth mildly irritating. Both storylines included flashbacks as well, one more than the other, but they worked well with the flow of the story- you're not jumping back an forth willy-nilly, so you always knew where your were in the story. As the story progresses, all the various connections between the two story lines slowly become evident - which, of course, sparks your curiosity as to how they will get tied together in the end - by design. While I'm not a fan of stories as puzzles, but given that both story lines are more or less straight narratives, I'm not complaining too much. And with that, I guess I gotten all my mild criticisms out of the way. 

The first person narrator is the title character, Hu Snow. She is a fox. A special type of fox, a werefox, as it were, a fox spirit. Being somewhat familiar with fox spirts from my interest in Chinese culture, I was intrigued by a story that featured a fox spirit as the main character, which is why I picked this book up. Snow is on a quest for vengeance. A hunter hired by a photographer killed her baby daughter, and she has vowed to kill the photographer, and has been seeking him out for the previous two years. This line of the story follows her quest to find him. As she says, "I exist as either a small canid with thick fur, pointed ears and neat black feet, or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by me." She must navigate that dangerous world to have her revenge. I found her to be a engaging and convincing character. 

The second story line is told in third person. It tells the story of Bao, a retired and widowed scholar and teacher who has the strange power - he is able to tell when people are lying. He hears a buzz when someone says a falsehood. With this strange talent, and nothing better to do, he becomes something of a detective. His story begins with him being hired to discover the name of a young lady found frozen to death in the side doorway of a restaurant. The restaurant owner fears that the death of his unknown lady will cause bad luck for the restaurant, so he hires Bao to find out who she was, so that the proper rituals can be performed to ensure that she does not return as a restless ghost. As we follow Bao in his investigation, we learn about his childhood and how he came to have this special talent. Slowly, step by step, he finds that his investigation seems to be involved with foxes - and though he doesn't believe in fox spirits - he finds things that he can't explain, with one investigation leading to another, which in the end, leads him to cross paths with Snow - as the reader knows will happen eventually - wherein the story lines collapse into one, though still told in alternating chapters.

I found this book to be compelling reading. It has many interesting characters, including a second not particularly good fox spirits and another mysterious one, as well as various Chinese characters in a variety of positions within Chinese society. It is a nice blend of historical fiction, light fantasy, adventure, and romance with two compelling main characters. For me, it was a lucky find, and I highly recommend it, if you intrigued with the premise.

July Writing Update

I guess it's about time for a writing update. So here we go.

Do you remember how much you loved that first album of your favorite band or group? And how, when, several years later they came out with their second album, it was good - it had some good tunes in it - but wasn't quite as great as their first album, the one you fell in love with? And then, when their third album came out, several years after that, you hardly recognized them as the band you fell in love with because it was so different...and it sucked?

Now, after reading at the title of this post, if you're thinking to yourself 'Oh-oh,'  well, you're probably right. Oh-oh, it is. My 2025 novel is likely that third album.

The good news is that I'm making good progress on my 2025 novel. Heck, the fact that I have a new novel in the works is good news in and of itself, at least for me. Everyone seems like my last one. So the fact that there should be at least one more, gives me a nice feeling.

But the bad news is that third album thing. We artists don't like doing the same thing over and over again - unless there's big money in doing it. I don't have that temptation, so I can do something different every time I sit down to write a story. And to one degree or another, I've tried to do something different with all my books. But this one... well, we're now a long way from the rocket ships of the Bright Black Sea, and everything in between. Other than myself, I don't know who this novel will appeal to. And the thing is, I don't care.

I haven't changing my style of writing, my 'authorial voice.' I like it, and well, I likely don't have the talent to write any other way. So, if you like my books for the way I write, you might like this one. But if you're here for the story... Well, I wrote a different one this time. The 2025 novel is not an adventure story. It's not even close. It's not science fiction and will only pass as a fantasy because it is set on an imaginary world. And an imaginary world only because gives me the freedom to do whatever I want in it, without having to do any research at all.

So what is it abut then? Well, it's early and I don't want to let the cat out of the bag in this post. All I care to say now is that I've made good progress, so that the gods willing and the creeks don't rise, there will be a 2025 novel.

What I will add, however, is that after having written the above, is that it suddenly struck me that this story - this third album story - while different from all the others, might be, in fact, something of a return to my first, garage band era stories, so to speak. Read into that as you will.

I'll be teasing it more in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 55)

This book is another book that was recommended by Wanda on the Next 50 blog. You can read her review here. I had put a hold on the ebook version at that time, but being a new book, the wait was going to be months. However, I had to pick up my granddaughter from her job downtown and after checking the library website, I found that this book was available in paper. So I picked up while I was waiting for her to be done working.

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.

Bride by Ali Hazelwood   B-

This is a paranormal romance from a bestselling author. The premise is that the Bride, Misery Lark, is a vampire who is volunteered/volunteers to be the bride/hostage of the Alpha werewolf of the local pack, Lowe Moreland. The backdrop is that the three races - humans, vampires, and werewolves live in close proximity to each other, though each in their own territory, and there has been, and threatens to be once more, conflict and wars between these races. A fragile peace has been maintained by the exchange of hostages. Misery, the daughter of the Vampire leader, had been a child hostage to the humans for ten years, and found that she didn't fit into the Vampire world after having grown up apart from it. She preferred to live amongst the humans, along with her "sister", a human orphan who lived with her during her hostage years as a companion. The story revolves around her friend who has gone missing, and Misery suspecting that Lowe Moreland might be behind it. So, when she offered/ordered to be the bride of Lowe Moreland as a hostage to peace between the vampires and werewolves, she takes it with the idea of trying to find her best, and only friend.

As I said, this is a romance, a slow burn one between Misery and Lowe, along with the mystery of her missing friend, are the driving forces of the story. While I didn't find this plot too convincing, what I really enjoyed and earned this book its grade was the writing. Ali Hazelwood wrote it in first person, with a great deal of wit and cleverness - the qualities of writing I really enjoy. I am not the target audience for this type of book, but I enjoyed it largely on account of how it was written despite not being the target audience, and the so-so story.

Bride earned its "-" simply on account of the lack of world-building. While you have people who are openly  werewolves and vampires, making this some sort of secondary world, the author never bothered to fill out this different world, or explain how this world is different than the one we know. Everything, from cell phones to computers to Cessna airplanes are just lifted straight from our world. I found that rather lazy for what is a fantasy, though I suspect that the target audience - romance readers - don't care much about this.

The bottom line - an entertaining story, my reservations overcome by the breezy, clever writing of Ali Hazelwood.

Reading Blind

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2024/03/05/insights-in-the-eyes-of-mice--men/

The title refers to the fact that I don't have a visual mind. Thus, when I read descriptions of places, people, or intricate actions, I'm blind to them. I can't picture them in my mind. This condition is called aphantasia. I can sort of construct scenes that I am familiar with, piece by piece to get a vague impressions of things, but I don't really see an image of it. I just "know" what it looks like. 

I find this not to be a handicap. Though perhaps it is a case of not missing what you never knew. I've been reading for over 6o years and don't recall ever really noticing it - until recently. However, I don't have a good personal memory either, so it is impossible to say with any certainty that I never noticed this before, but I certainly don't recall bemoaning this lack of pictures in my mind as I read. I do know that there are books whose scenes I still remember - but not so much as pictures, but as moods, or as a sense of place that the authors created in the way they described the scene. I suspect, however, that most descriptions were treated like scenes that I "knew" rather than pictured.

This goes for characters as well. I don't really pay attention to how they are described, though I always get a little bored if the author spends too much time describing them and their clothes, since I can't picture or remember how they look them anyway. In real life, the closest I can get to picturing people is a vague recollection of a photograph of them. I can't picture my wife in my head. Weird, I know. And I do picture things in my dreams, which is even weirder.

However, back on topic.

In my recent reading I've been noticing my inability to picture things a lot more. Perhaps part of it is due to my more recent reading. And it isn't so much the scenery, but the action scenes. I just finished a book on the American Civil War - review coming in a month or so - and it included several scenes set in the midst of battles, in which there is a lot this-and-that going on all around the point of view character. Now, there is simply no way all those words were going to make a "movie" in my head to illustrate the scene. And while perhaps, if I read it carefully, I could understand what was happening - these days I find that I don't care. This is the second aspect of what I have noticed. I simply don't have the patience to read all these little details in order to understand what is going on, because, basically I don't care about the process, all I needed to know is the result. So these days, I just skip over action heavy scenes. I skipped over the entire ninja attack in Shogun and I can remember skipping a battle in the Black Tongued Thief.  I know that I'll find out who wins in the end, so I miss nothing important by skipping it. In fact I skim read and skipped probably the final 30 plus pages of The Book That Wouldn't Burn while the heroes were try fleeing a raging fire and an mob or something, because it was just action for action's sake and by that time in the story, I didn't care anymore.

I know that many authors take a great deal of trouble to choreograph their fight, battle, and action scenes, describing in great detail all the sights, sounds, the movements of the character(s), and everyone and everything around them. And in fantasy, there a whole books that are focused on epic battles. But when I read these passages all I read are a jumble of words and sentences. I just get confused, bored, and annoyed. Now this is, of course, on me. I don't think it's a case of my wits having gotten so dull that I couldn't understand what was going on, if I cared to. I just don't care to. Basically action for the sake of action bores me these days. 

What is interesting to me is that I have the impression that many of the books I read in the past did not make any attempt to script movie action-scenes into their books, like today's authors (and perhaps readers) seem to feel necessary these days. I've read the Captain Aubrey naval novels and the Flashman Victorian military novels, and others as well, all of which have battles in them, but I just have the feeling that they didn't choreographed them at such a movie scene granular level. Maybe back in the day they didn't feel the needed to. Maybe because they didn't feel like they were competing against movies and video games. Or maybe that's now what readers expect these days. Do you?

So, in the end, how does aphantasia affect my enjoyment of books? Thinking about it, I don't think it affects my enjoyment at all. I don't miss anything that I decide to skip, and most of the books I have read, and are reading today, don't have these elaborate movie-inspired action sequences, anyway, so I'm not really skipping all that much in the course of my reading. As for scenery, well, I know a lot about the world these days - one way or another I've seen it- so I don't need a lot of hand-holding to get the idea of the setting, which is all I need. But if they toss it in, fine. Maybe it will create a sense of place that I can feel, if not see.

And maybe in the end, all this is why I value clever writing and witty dialog.