You won a free e-copy of Troll Valley by suggesting the subtitle we used on the cover. Please contact me by e-mail to get your file.
Profits Are Up
Earning money from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
In other news, I have joined Lars in becoming a Kindle Fire owner. It’s nice, though I haven’t used it a lot yet. I need to install wi-fi at home. I see there are a number of classic books on Kindle for free. I pulled down Thoughts on Art and Life, some Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, and several Wodehouse novels. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Troll Valley on sale (Kindle)
As promised, for you Kindle owners, Troll Valley is now available in that sacred format at Amazon.com.
As a side note, I e-mailed Andrew Klavan himself today, offering him a review copy, and he actually wrote back and said he’d like one. (Apparently I won his favor with my favorable review of Agnes Mallory.)
So you might say it’s a good day.
And now you know what to do with that Amazon gift card you got for Christmas!
Troll Valley on sale (Nook)
I’m going to try to do a splashier announcement when the Kindle version is available too, but for now Troll Valley is available for your Nook (plus a couple odd formats for phones and things, as I understand it) from Lulu.
I’m a Kindle guy myself, and strongly object to this discrimination in favor of Nook owners. I shall send myself a stiff letter of protest without delay.
Tips for Your Writing Routine
Writer’s Digest has six tips on reviving your writing routine. It’s essentially making a plan and pursuing it. Don’t wing it. You were made to fly like that.
Books as Source Material
Transfer of Power, by Vince Flynn
Good writing and good storytelling are two distinct qualities, and don’t necessarily reside in the same practitioner. Bestselling Minnesota author Vince Flynn is a classic case in point.
In terms of storytelling, his performance is flawless. Transfer of Power begins, after some brief preliminaries, with super-secret operative Mitch Rapp leading a commando raid into Iran (this is before 9/11) to kidnap a terrorist ringleader. Then the focus shifts to one of that ringleader’s proteges, Rafique Aziz, who is planning an audacious attack on the White House itself, intended both to kidnap the president and to humiliate the United States. Information the CIA extracts from its prisoner (through torture; Flynn makes no bones about it) allows enough warning to enable the Secret Service to get the president into a safe bunker before the terrorists take possession of the building. But the terrorists have a drill and a weak vice president with whom to negotiate.
The tension never lets up. Hero Mitch Rapp employs all his formidable commando skills, and often defies his superiors, in a dangerous operation to infiltrate the White House and impose summary justice on the attackers. He is ruthless and his actions are viscerally satisfying. Also he gets the girl.
As a piece of prose writing, the book is less successful. The force of the narrative pulls the reader along so quickly that he barely notices frequent infelicities, like “Warch, who was more entrusted with the president’s life than any other person in the Secret Service…,” and “…he wondered if he wasn’t being overly paranoid,” and my personal favorite— “the two junior officers fell in astride their senior.” Best to just move along and not inquire too closely into these careless turns of phrase.
As an entertainment, Transfer of Power is a great success. As a statement of a viewpoint on how the War On Terror should be fought, it deserves respectful attention. As a piece of literature, it’s… a successful entertainment.
Cautions for language, violence and adult themes.
The Joy of Books
Rejection: ‘Thank You for Submitting This Post; However…’
Thomas Lee writes about being rejected and imagines there are multiple tiers of rejection letters from literary journals like Ploughshares. “In what other field can someone brag about the quality of one’s rejection?”
One for Dale, one from
Our friend Dale Nelson is a fan of the long literary sentence–at least longer than is currently fashionable. He’ll appreciate this article from the LA Times, by way of Mirabilis: The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).
Dale sent me this link, from the English Government Archives: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Army Commission Application.
