Rebecca W Foster has a great blog idea called Undiscovered Tomes. Rebecca's project is to support independent books, authors and indie publishing in general. What she is doing is picking an indie book from the B&N site (the Nook is her preferred e-reader) and, if she enjoys it. posting up a review urging other readers to go out in search of little reading gems that, because Big Publishing isn't putting them into bookshelves in W H Smiths or airport lounges, would otherwise go unnoticed. Rebecca is supporting books that currently have no reviews or only one review - stuff that has gone unnoticed so far.
One of Rebecca's neat ideas is a classification system, ranking the best books she finds as Treasured Tomes if they have that magic that sets them apart.
Anyway, I know about this because Rebecca came across Tinderspark in an unloved corner of the B&N site and was drawn to the cover - as well she might, since the photo is by Juliet my daughter and the red head is her pretty friend Imogen and the whole thing has been so beautifully put together by Laura LaRoche at LLPix.
Rebecca gave Tinderspark a glowing review - much thanks! - but withheld her Treasured Tome status because she felt it took too long to get going. You know, I actually think she's right. It owes a lot to the way the book was composed, of course. I wrote the first chapter not knowing I was going to write a second. Then I did write a second and was surprised that it didn't end there. Absolutely no planning went into that book. It was born, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, by pure inspiration and excitement but it has all the flaws associated with that process too.
I also think that. at that time, I was pretty unsure of myself and shied away from emotional drama. I didn't trust myself to deal with the reactions of the kidnapped Quality Durrand so I represented her as traumatised and detached to let myself off the narrative hook. Gradually, as I wrote, I gained confidence and the characters emerged, but they are deliberately suppressed at the start. There are advantages to this. In place of characterization, there's a lot of pastoral description of the woodland realm, dreams, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, etc. But I think it does make the reading experience remote until... until...
There's a scene in Chapter 4 where Quality leaves the house on a winter morning, sees her reflection in the ice and breaks it and has an epiphany. I subtly (too subtly, I think) coded the scene as her first menstrual period, her shift to womanhood, the end of childhood and the end of her traumatic removal from the world. It's also, weirdly, symbolic of the breaking of my imaginative ice. After that, the characters all emerge: Tor with the wolves, the Twins, fierce Finn and charismatic Brandt and Quality starts to love and hate in equal measure.
Looking back, I can see now how I filled Chapter 2 with Quality's dreams of rescue and self-interment. You might interpret them as reflecting the character's own trauma and the repression of her own emotional reactions of grief and fear. Indeed, they were intended as that. Now, it seems to me those passages are as much about me, the writer, repressing an imaginative aspect of the story, but it breaking out in other ways. Coded. Disguised. The dreams say: we are here because something else is missing.
How interesting. So: thanks to Rebecca for FINDING Tinderspark, then reading and reviewing it, praising it and putting her finger on the central problem in its construction. Rebecca, I hope you enjoy Hexenfire. I was becoming a better writer by then.
I had also promised myself and my family that I wouldn't embark on writing a third Burning Times book until I received some feedback, just one piece of feedback, from an impressed stranger: someone who doesn't know me, wasn't invited to read the book by me, someone who just came across it as a book and read it out of interest and liked it enough to talk about it online. Rebecca, you were that person. Book 3 Gallowsflame will be written thanks to you.
One of Rebecca's neat ideas is a classification system, ranking the best books she finds as Treasured Tomes if they have that magic that sets them apart.
Anyway, I know about this because Rebecca came across Tinderspark in an unloved corner of the B&N site and was drawn to the cover - as well she might, since the photo is by Juliet my daughter and the red head is her pretty friend Imogen and the whole thing has been so beautifully put together by Laura LaRoche at LLPix.
Rebecca gave Tinderspark a glowing review - much thanks! - but withheld her Treasured Tome status because she felt it took too long to get going. You know, I actually think she's right. It owes a lot to the way the book was composed, of course. I wrote the first chapter not knowing I was going to write a second. Then I did write a second and was surprised that it didn't end there. Absolutely no planning went into that book. It was born, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, by pure inspiration and excitement but it has all the flaws associated with that process too.
I also think that. at that time, I was pretty unsure of myself and shied away from emotional drama. I didn't trust myself to deal with the reactions of the kidnapped Quality Durrand so I represented her as traumatised and detached to let myself off the narrative hook. Gradually, as I wrote, I gained confidence and the characters emerged, but they are deliberately suppressed at the start. There are advantages to this. In place of characterization, there's a lot of pastoral description of the woodland realm, dreams, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, etc. But I think it does make the reading experience remote until... until...
There's a scene in Chapter 4 where Quality leaves the house on a winter morning, sees her reflection in the ice and breaks it and has an epiphany. I subtly (too subtly, I think) coded the scene as her first menstrual period, her shift to womanhood, the end of childhood and the end of her traumatic removal from the world. It's also, weirdly, symbolic of the breaking of my imaginative ice. After that, the characters all emerge: Tor with the wolves, the Twins, fierce Finn and charismatic Brandt and Quality starts to love and hate in equal measure.
Looking back, I can see now how I filled Chapter 2 with Quality's dreams of rescue and self-interment. You might interpret them as reflecting the character's own trauma and the repression of her own emotional reactions of grief and fear. Indeed, they were intended as that. Now, it seems to me those passages are as much about me, the writer, repressing an imaginative aspect of the story, but it breaking out in other ways. Coded. Disguised. The dreams say: we are here because something else is missing.
How interesting. So: thanks to Rebecca for FINDING Tinderspark, then reading and reviewing it, praising it and putting her finger on the central problem in its construction. Rebecca, I hope you enjoy Hexenfire. I was becoming a better writer by then.
I had also promised myself and my family that I wouldn't embark on writing a third Burning Times book until I received some feedback, just one piece of feedback, from an impressed stranger: someone who doesn't know me, wasn't invited to read the book by me, someone who just came across it as a book and read it out of interest and liked it enough to talk about it online. Rebecca, you were that person. Book 3 Gallowsflame will be written thanks to you.