The Saturday Morning Post (No. 191)

 

Once more to Holland yet again! Originally I was going lump these last two or three book reports from this series into one entry, but then, I had a week or two when I didn't read any book at all, which made me nervous. I like to have a cushion of book reports, and it was getting thinner...

In the book world amongst book people, this would be considered a "reading slump" or a symptom of reading burnout. At least amongst "content creators" this is a issue of some concern. If you are producing "content" about books, not reading is something to be concerned about. This concern, and my reaction to reading less than a book a week was the subtle hand of "content creating" at work. In the back of my mind, I'm not just reading, I'm producing content for this blog. Not deliberately, but still, having already written 200 of these posts, at the time I'm writing this one, producing a blog post in this spot every week is now a part of my life.

I've since found more books to read, so the crisis is averted, for now and the next ten weeks. What I'm up against is not a lack of books, but a lack of alluring books. I have narrow tastes in books, and well, I've struggled to finding books that I want to read, even when I had access to 10 million books on Kindle Unlimited. These Mercurius mysteries were a godsend, but now, I think I can move on confidently, as my usual suspects on booktube have recently come through for me. In the coming weeks I'll be offering a wider variety of books to report on, with a ten week cushion. 

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 Noose's Shadow by Graham Brack  B+

This time the wife of a farmer who has been accused of murdering his neighbor named Wolf, a man who everyone disliked, as well as his wandering pig, arrives at the University on a winter's night to ask Mercurius to save her husband from hanging for a murder he didn't do. Mercurius, has a document William gave him in a previous story as a reward for his services, one that required officials to give him any aid he desires, so he uses it to talk the mayor into letting him investigate the murder, in order to ascertain that justice is truly being served.

With lower stakes, and a fairly straightforward investigation, i.e. talking to the neighbors, there is a lot less intrigue to the mystery this time around. But, as always, it is the character of the narrator, plus the characters and locale of the setting that, for me, elevate this series beyond a mere mystery story. That said, it is still be weakest of the lot so far in terms of engagement.

There are five more books in this series, but I will wait until my next visit to Kindle Unlimited on the cheap... It's June and I haven't looked on my Amazon page under Kindle Unlimited to see what deal, if any, they're offering. However, right now I'm halving no problem finding enough books to read from the YouTube channels I'm watching, so it will be a while yet. 

Producing My Books, Part 2 - Publishing

 

Writing a story is only half of a book. Turning the manuscript into a book and publishing it is the other half. Writing takes more time but putting together a book and getting it into stores is the essential second step. So what is my process of producing a book?

Let's start with the cover. I create my own covers by painting a picture with actual paint on hardboard, ideally, specifically for the story. I have, however, repurposed digital copies of paintings I painted years ago for some of my covers. The current covers for Tzasritsa Moon, Valsummer House, and Iron Kingdom are all repurposed art. I initially released them with original art, but wasn't happy with those covers, and so swapped in better art, even if its connections to the stories are a bit of a stretch. Other examples of re-purposed art include the current cover for The Lost Star's Sea and A Night on Isvalar, though, Isvalar's cover is a scene from an old comic book version of that story I did.

The original Tzaritsa Moon cover art

In any event I use hand-paint original art for all my books. Not being an illustrator, I settle for trying to capture the story's mood by using scenes that I, as an impressionist landscape artist, feel comfortable attempting. 

I paint each cover to use as a wraparound cover. This means that the main action is on the right side of the painting, i.e. the front cover. Having to fit the key elements in half of the painting usually makes for an awkward painting. However, I'm never too concerned about the painting, knowing that I can work with it "in post" i.e. once I take a photo of it and upload it to my computer where I use the free Photoshop-like app, Gimp, to correct its shortcomings. This may include cropping the original painting for fit and focus, and altering the color balance and contrast. I usually add a "cartoon" effect, i.e. black outline to the image as well, to sharpen it up. Some covers I do this more than others, and some, probably too much, at least for the paper version. 

The photo of the original art for The Red Wine Dossiers

Except for a brief period, I've given all my books a uniform cover design. These days I use a title box in the same position on every cover, and a blurb box on the back of the paperback. This design serves as my brand.

To produce the paperback cover, I discover number of book-sized pages once I  copy and pasted the text into the proper page size for the book. To save time I then select the cover art file from a similarly long book, as a template. I rename and save it to the new folder for the new book. Then, because every element of the cover - the painting, text boxes, and the text itself, have their own layer, I can delete the elements I don't need and then add new elements of the new cover, i.e. the new artwork, change the color of the title box, spine and back blurb box, and add new text over these sections. Using this method I can produce a cover in an hour or two. I also create a square version of the cover for the audiobooks. 

The wrap around cover done

For ebooks I use the old Smashwords style guide for the text, and then upload that file and the single page ebook cover to Draft2Digital. I let D2D format the epub version, using their minimalist style. I then download their epub version and use that version for Amazon, Kobo, and Google (usually), since they all accept epub files, plus it comes with a table of content, which I can't produce on my own. This way, I really don't have to format the ebook myself.

As for the paperback version, well, I grew up reading mass market paperbacks, and that's the standard I adhere to. While there are those who view books as works of art, and I give them the joy of it, I view books as storytelling tools. I don't bother with headers. If you don't know what book you're reading, by whom, I don't think the header is going to help you very much. I don't use doddles and do-dads to decorate chapter headings. I don't cater to the typeface-fanatics. One typeface is pretty much as good as another. I generally use 11 pt. Liberation Serif, which is likely a Times New Roman clone. I have also used 12 pt. Goudy Old Style in some of my books, and 9 Pt Liberation Serif on my two 350K word books.

I create the text of the paper book using LibreOffice with a page size that matches the paper book and set it up as mirrored pages. I set the margins and the size of the footer. I use a larger than the minimum inside gutter so that the reader doesn't have to peer around the inside fold to read each line. I place the page numbers in the footer. I either then copy and paste the ebook text on to this page, or start by creating the title pages, and copying and pasting the complete text after I've created the set of title pages - which is probably the best way, because as you're messing around with the title pages, every page down stream can be affected as well.

I have all chapters start on a righthanded page. I do this by spacing rather than using page breaks. This can be a headache, but since you really need to go through the whole book several times to make sure any little change you've made hasn't had ramifications twenty pages or more into the book, doing this manually kills two birds with one stone.

In LibreOffice you can specify how many pages are title pages, and they should be separate from the text. Actual pages numbers should start with the first page of Chapter One. This I can do. However, I always have trouble getting the title pages not to have their own page numbers, though it seems possible in the settings. Very frustrating. I usually give up and end up adding a small white graphics over the page number to cover them up.

I use at least six pages for the title pages. Books with the title page on page one scream "Self-Published!" to me.  No professionally published book, even all those cheap mass market paperbacks, have the title page on page one. I use page one for an illustration and a short blurb. Page two has my list of books, then the title on page three. Page four is the copyright page. I like books with maps, so if I have a map, I use page five for the "Thank You" to my beta readers and a dedication if I have one, and then use page six for the map. If I have more maps or other graphic elements, I will add more pages, and perhaps perhaps place the thank you and dedication on the copyright page, if need be. Every book has its little issues that have to be worked out. 

When I have the final page count, I need to go to Amazon to find the exact size of the cover I'll need for the specific page count, and then slightly adjust both the cover size, and the width of the spine in Gimp. Luckily every element you add in Gimp loads to the exact center of the image, so the spine always is in the right place when you add it to the file. 

Once everything is in place, I "flatten" all the layers on the cover art in Gimp and export it as a jpg. I then create a LibreOffice document in the size of the cover, and insert the cover art onto it. I then export this as a PDF. Once the text is right, I export it as a PDF as well. 

I only publish my paperback books with Amazon, as it is cheaper, and the only place I'll even bother trying to sell my paper books. So I upload the PDF of the cover and interior text to Amazon, and let them do their magic. I go through the entire book again in their review, and if everything is okay, I choose a price and publish. I keep the price low. I may make a dollar and change on a $13 book, since I ain't in this for the money.

Audiobooks use the ebook text to create an auto-narrated book, which I think is an essential tool for small self-publishing authors to reach a wider audience and who's business can not justify a human narrator. Writing speculative fiction, I make up a lot of words, so it pays to go though the text to get them to sound sort of like I want them to. In Google I can go through a list of questionable words to check how they are being pronounced. For example, my "Mz" Google pronounces as m -z, instead of "mizz" but I can correct that. Apple gives me no option. Apple knows best. With Amazon you need to listen to the text to hear questionable words, though they can be corrected. Apple and Google require square covers, Amazon does not.

This may seem like a lot of work, but I've probably spent more time writing and revising this post than producing and publishing a book, not counting painting the cover. LibreOffice is a lot like Word, so it should be easy to use to produce the text for a paper book. Because I used Photoshop back when I was working for a small daily newspaper, working with Gimp is fairly familiar, for what little I need it for. But it is not for everyone. However, I know it is possible to produce good covers using the free version of Canva, or going all in for a month to get better options when the book is ready. Of course not everyone is an artist, or has an eye for design, but anyone can study the covers of best selling books in their genre, and then find similar artwork in Canva or some other source, and arrange it, and the title text, onto a book cover template that mimics the covers readers expect. 

I feel strongly that self-publishing authors should embrace the "self" part of publishing. We should learn how to produce our own books, including covers. My work experiences gave me a leg up when it came to producing paperback books. But I think that learning how to use an app like Canva that includes resources for making covers is a viable option for everyone. The idea of hiring editors, cover artists, and formatters is foreign to the ideal of self-publishing, and often a scam at one level or another, as well as an approach that rarely pays off.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 190)

 

We return once more to Holland...

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.

Dishonour and Obey by Graham Brack  A

William of Orange (later to be come King William of England) sends for Mercurius, as a Protestant minister, and asks (i.e. commands) him to travel to England to interview his cousin, Mary, the eldest (15 years old) daughter of James, the brother of King Charles ll of England. He is part of a delegation exploring the possibility of Mary marrying William to hopefully cement an anti-French alliance with England. He is to evaluate just how Protestant Mary is, since her father is a Catholic, and Catholics are just barely tolerated in the Netherlands, as in England, for that matter. And William feels that, as the nominal leader of the Dutch nation, he could not marry a Catholic. However, there is a pro-France faction in England, and the court of Charles, who are attempting to shove a stick into the wheels of this plan. On arrival in England, not a day goes by before one of the Dutch delegation is found murdered. King Charles, having heard of Mercurius' past success in solving mysteries, asks (i.e. commands) him to solve this murder as well. 

This story takes us to London and the court of Charles ll, where we get to meet various historical figures of that place and time. Again, it is an elaborate mystery told with wit and humor. If you enjoyed the first two, you'll like this one as well.

The Poison-Pill Will and The Pawns' Game Now Available

 

The Amazon version will be released early on the 18th of June. I will be uploading the free versions today, the 17th, on Draft2Dgtial. It will take a few days for those versions to filter down to all the various stores listed below. I will post links to those stores when they offer the book. 

This novella and short story are the last of the prequel stories to the fictional Red Wine Agency Series that play a role in my novel Chateau Clare. I had no intention of writing an actual Red Wine Agency story, but now... maybe. But that's a bird deep in the bush, and whether or not it ever comes to hand is a very open question. For now, these are the last Red Hu stories, as he is drawn into the affairs of the Great Houses of Lorria.

The Poison-Pill Will, along with a companion short story, The Pawns’ Game, is a 40K word novella and a bonus short story installment in the saga of Redinal Hu’s slow evolution into the title character in the fictional Red Wine Agency books that play a role in the novel Chateau Clare. It is a direct sequel to The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again taking place just several weeks after Nine Again.

In the novella, The Poison-Pill Will, Constance Darma, the new Head of the House of Darma has rivals within the House of Darma; a pair of ruthless uncles and an equally ruthless aunt. Mz Darma’s grandfather, the old Head of the House, died under unlikely circumstances, and now she’s now being pressured by each of her uncles and aunt to cede her inheritance to them. The Great Houses of Lorria can hide dark deeds, so her murder may not be out of the question. Kelta Versay, a friend of Constance, fears for her life, even if Constance doesn’t. She does manage to convince her to hire Red to draft a so-called poison-pill will that would end the House of Darma should she die, which hopefully, will make murder too counter-productive for even her ruthless relatives to contemplate. Plus, Red is to guard her until this will can be filed and put into effect. Red discovers Kelta’s fears were not unfounded.

And finally, in The Pawns’ Game, Red, facing an uncertain future, decides what his role will be in the Great Game, that struggle to control the fate of Lorria that is being waged between the Great Houses of Lorria. In this short story he learns how that game is played by the playing pieces of the game; the disposable pawns.

Links to the ebook and audiobook here:

Amazon ebook $2.99 HERE

Amazon audiobook $3.99 HERE

Apple ebook FREE HERE

Apple audiobook FREE HERE

Google ebook FREE HERE

Google audiobook FREE HERE

Smashwords ebook FREE HERE

B & N ebook FREE HERE

Kobo ebook FREE HERE

Bookshop Org. FREE HERE

Everand Subscription HERE

Fable ebook FREE HERE

The complete collection of Red Wine/Hu novellas and short stories - The Founders' Tribunal, The Isle House Ghost, Nine Again, The Poison-Pill Will, and The Pawns' Game - in a paperback omnibus are available from Amazon for $12.99 HERE

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 189)

 

This week we have something different. Once again we can blame it on YouTube. This time it wasn't a booktude video, but a video about art. No doubt it was served up to me because I watch all the Peter Beard videos on illustrators. In any event, I had to order this book, used, from Britain, but even with $21 shipping, it was affordable, and proved well worth it.

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.

Landscapes Under the Luggage Rack  Great Paintings of Britain by Greg Norden  A

I came across these paintings on a YouTube video series "When Trains Were Traveling Art Galleries" which I think was based on this book, as reading this book I had a definite sense of deja vu. The presenters might have been reading out of this book, and well may've been involved with its production as well. This book seemed right up my alley, art-wise, as I am a great fan of landscape/travel poster art from the 30's into the 50's. These painting, commissioned by the various railroad companies needed to be long an narrow in order to fit above the seat and under the luggage rack in compartments, or above the seats in pullman cars. In this case most of them are water color paintings rather than the flatter and brighter gouache paint used for the larger and brighter-colored travel posters. They were painted by some of the most recognized water color artists of Britain.

Kelso  by S R Badmin

The book has something like 200 paintings, all in color on nearly 200 pages. Some of the paintings are displayed in double page spreads like the one above, while many other pages have smaller. but multiple paintings like the page below. Each painting has a description of the scene and its connection to the railroad that commissioned it.

The book talks about how these paintings evolved from earlier photographs to illustrate the places the train company hoped to lure tourist to. Paintings allowed the artist to do a little artistic editing to make the scene a little prettier, as opposed to photographs. And they were in color as well. It profiles three of these artists, and includes the work of many other artists as well. It tells how these artist were recruited, and assigned to paint scenes, with travel and lodging supplied by the railroad as a perk, in addition to being paid for the art. It also talks a lot about the railroads and the places painted, with their connection to the railroad. Stuff for the true train enthusiast. I came for the art, and was very pleasantly surprised at just how well produced the paintings were, and just how many of them there are. I was buying this more or less blind, so it was a gamble that paid off handsomely.

Whitby Yorkshire, by Rowland Hilder

As for the art itself, I love landscapes, and I love Britain, so I really enjoyed discovering these paintings, and enjoying them on paper for as long as I want instead of briefly on a computer screen. Not all of them I liked, of course, but seeing what can be done with water color paints is pretty awe-inspiring, and humbling, says an old water color painter. 

Producing My Books, Part 1 - Writing

 

As I said in a previous post, one of the purposes of this blog is to talk about myself, and try to make it interesting. Which is a task. However, buckle in, we've got an thrill packed entry this week. The subject is; how I write my stories.

Disclaimer; For every statement I make, attach an "ideally" to it. I'm going to describe how, ideally, I write my stories. Things can, and do go south, but rather than elaborate in all the ways they can and do, just use your imagination. Today we're writing in an ideal world.

First off, I spend upwards of three months daydreaming story, a minute here, another minute there, throughout the day; imagining scenes, building a plot from opening to the final scene. I may do a little handwaving in the middle, which I then have to invent when I come to it, but generally it is only after I have the story in my head to tell, that I start setting it down in words.

In my more recent books I've been writing down chapters as bullet points and noting them on a calendar in my notes to keep everything straight in my mind. This was not always the case. And even when I do, not all the chapters are set out in advance. 

I write my stories using LibreOffice on a Windows machine. LibreOffice is a free suite of applications similar to MS Word. I can save my files as Word documents when required, and export them as PDFs or ePubs. It offers all I need to both write and produce a book. I write my stories from beginning to end, so I don't need one of those fancy writing programs like Scrivener.

I start by naming the manuscript file with the project name, month and date, and then save it to the "First Draft" folder on both my computer's hard drive and a microSD card. The following morning I open it and immediately save it using that day's date. Thus, every day's work is on a new file saved in two places, ensuring that I'll never lose more than a day's work if I screw something up. Every so often I upload the current copy to my Google Drive as an extra precaution. 

I work to time rather than word count. I write the first thing every morning, every morning until nine, when I have breakfast. This time may be up to two hours, and almost certainly one hour each day. Sometimes, when writing is going well, I return to work in the evening adding another hour or two to the day's total. The great advantage to me is that hours just fly by unnoticed when I'm writing.

LibreOffice underlines misspellings (or what it thinks are misspellings) the extra spaces between words, double words (maybe), and "a"s before words starting with vowels. Pretty basic. A lot of room for errors to go unmarked.

One of the things, of many, I've learned over the years is to add all my invented names and words to LibreOffice's dictionary as I invent them. This prevents them from being underlined in red in the text. This is very helpful when, ten or a hundred pages later, I write Teaf and it gets underlined, letting me know that it should be Taef. I read words as shapes and so these slight variations go unnoticed by me. This simple precaution saves my poor beta readers a lot of grief.

The first draft of a full length novel takes me between three and four months to complete. The happiest day of the whole process is the day I finish the first draft. Putting words on a blank screen is the hardest part of writing for me. Once I have words on screen to tinker with, I'm happy a happy camper. 

At this point, I believe a lot of writers might ship the ms off to their beta readers. But I don't. I'm old fashion. I didn't have access to beta readers back in the '70's. More over I view it as a painting in words, a work of art which I feel should be a personal reflection of my art rather than a product. Some people will like it, others won't. I accept that. A more practical reason is that this version is so riddled with typos, I haven't the heart to make anyone but myself, who is blind to typos, read it. For me, beta readers come at the end of the process to polish up the nearly finished work.

I usually start my second draft the day after I finish the first one. I don't, as some suggest, put it aside for a while. Those first chapters are already three or more months ago; enough time has past to get back to them again. I usually add about 10% more words with the second draft; mostly by fleshing out conversations and scene settings. I rarely do extensive revisions in the second draft. My focus is on making the text read better, by, for example, moving phases from the end of sentences to the beginning, where they belong, I blame my German ancestors for this tendency to tack phrases on at the end, as an after thought. I also try to eliminate as many "and"s as possible, and break up run-on sentences. In general, I try to come up with a more clever way of saying what I've written on the page. But I generally follow what I've written, so I try to be careful to get what I want right in the first draft. This second draft may take only a couple of weeks to complete.

After the second draft, I upload the file to Google Drive for the third draft. Hopefully this involves just minor tweaks to phrases and such. Drive has a grammar checker of sorts, so it finds some of the correctly spelled wrong words, i.e. "its" vs "it's", "where" vs "were", etc., which LibreOffice doesn't. And because the text looks different, it makes reading the third draft different enough to highlight any issues. With the third draft done, I should feel confident enough to say "done." If I have an uneasy feeling that I can't, I'll go over it again until I can.

Every story is a little different, and each had a slightly different path. For example, when I get stuck in the middle, I'll go back to the start and treat it like the second draft, so that the first half of some of my books might have four or five drafts. Because I queried The Girl on the Kerb to agents, I had six months to revisit it before I published it myself, so it is probably the most revised book of mine.

Altogether the second and third draft will take only about a month plus. Next comes the proofing. I hate the proofing process. Such a pain. It is a four step process.

First, I download the Google Doc final version to Libre Office as a word document. 

Second, I then upload it, chapter by chapter, to the free web version of Grammarly. I ignore all the grammar advice - you have to pay for most of it anyway - I just correct all the wrong words it finds that Google Drive overlooked, and put in commas where Grammarly thinks they should be, and maybe, take one or two out where it thinks they shouldn't be. Because I'm writing this not only as a book, but as the script for the auto-narrated audiobook, I will put commas in where I think a narrator might pause when speaking the line, whether or not it's grammatically correct. After making the indicated corrections, I download the corrected chapters to their own folder on my computer.

Third, I then copy and paste these corrected chapters, one by one, into the free online version of Scribbr's grammar app, where I correct the wrong words Google and Grammarly missed, and consider where it thinks commas should go. I then copy and past the corrected version into a single document on my computer, chapter by chapter. 

And finally, I re-format the downloaded chapters into my standard format, a completed story once more. Once done, I print out a paper copy of the story using 1 1/2 spacing for my first human proofreader, my wife, to look over. Between Google, Grammarly, and Scribbr, her job is a whole lot easier these days. Once I've made her corrections, and listen to, and usually act, on her story suggestions, I offer the story to my kind beta readers in their preferred format to find all the remaining errors and offer any suggestions.

And with that, my author's job is done and I have to put on my publisher's hat, to get the story out the door. In the next installment, I'll take you through how I make a book out of the manuscript, and publish it.  I know you can't wait, but it will have to be at least two week because:

THE POISON-PILL AND THE PAWNS' GAME WILL BE RELEASE ON AMAZON ON JUNE 18TH AS AN EBOOK, FOR  $2.99 AND SHORTLY AFTERWORDS AS AN $3.99 AUDIO BOOK.

THE FREE VERSION OF BOTH THE EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK SHOULD BEGIN TO APPEAR IN YOUR FAVORITE NON-AMAZON ONLINE BOOKSHOP BEGINNING ON JUNE 17TH WHEN I UPLOAD IT TO DRAFT2DIGITAL AND THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE. OTHER RETAILERS WILL ADD IT IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING. I WILL POST LINKS TO THOSE SITES AFTER PUBLICATION.

Stay tuned!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 188)

 

This week we have a book by an author author/blogger who Audrey Driscoll talked about having read on her blog some time back. She read a large collection of this author's horror stories. I, however, don't do horror, so I chose one of his many other non-horror novels to sample.

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 Education of Uncle Paul by Algeron Blackwood  C

The story begins with Paul Rivers, age 45, returning home to England after having spent twenty years in America as a "Wood Cruiser," which is to say someone employed by a logging company to survey, judge, mark, and report on the vast lots of timber owned by the company that could be profitably harvested. He traveled and lived year round very close to nature in his almost solitary life within the virgin forests from Minnesota to Hudson's Bay, far removed from civilization. Having inherited some money from an aunt, he is returning to live for a year with his decade younger sister, who he barely knew in his youth. She had married his best friend of his youth, but he died leaving her a widow, with three children, his nieces and nephew, as well as the children of his best friend.

Paul's great fear is that he knows that he never grew up. He never had to, living his life far from the conventions of grownup society. In his heart, he's still very much a child. He fears that people will discover it, and almost certainly his nieces and nephew will sense that he is a kindred spirit. They, of course, do. His other problem is that he has all these deep and impossible yearnings that he, being very shy, he can't express, though they've been building up within him, without a "safety-valve" for years.

Eldest amongst these children in Nixie, and elf-like child wise beyond her years, who with the help of her younger brother, sister, a couple of cats, dogs, and other animals who inhabit his sister's house see through him right off, and eventually, lead him on many "adventures" that unleash all his pent up yearnings.

I have remarked in a previous how strange some of these old books are, and this 1909 book is another example. It is very lyrically written, delving deep into the thoughts of Uncle Paul as he discovers this new life in the country home of his widowed sister and her children. I enjoyed the first third of the book, that covered his introduction to the household, and the household. 

But then the book takes a turn to the lyrical supernatural fantasy, with Uncle Paul being led to these fantasy realms by Nixie. Places like where the winds sleep at night, so that he could see them "awake" in the morning, or "The Crack" through which, when the church clock chimes midnight, you could enter into a timeless land where you meet all the things you might've broken, all the pets that died, all sorts of things. Nothing happens, they are just lyrical descriptions, and it is deliberately unclear if we are to take them as actually happening, just Nixie's children's imagination or dreams. 

I have a problem with fantasy elements that do not seem grounded in reality. When, as in this case, they are untethered to the story or the reality within the story, I find them simply exercises in creative writing. Fine, but.. I want a story. In any event, Uncle Paul is designated to write down these fantasy "adventures" and then read them to the children, eventually writing them as a book that he sells and gets published.

But the book keeps getting more and more lyrically philosophical, and weird, with a ghost, life after death, and exploring the author's ideas of real reality, ties to nature, all of which lost me completely. My eyes glazed over with all the rambling mumbo-jumbo philosophy Blackwood carries on about in the final chapters, burying any semblance of a story. As usual, the fault is mine. I'm just a simple fellow, a clod, with no interest in philosophy, nor the afterlife. And I appreciate distinctness... I graded it as a "C" because I more or less finished it, and it had its points, but unless you are deeply into nature, the supernatural, and philosophy, you can probably give this book a miss. But if you are, pick it up.