Authors, Bookselling

Going public

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Above, something I’ve never seen before – a clip of John D. MacDonald giving a speech. He reminisces on his struggling years as a writer. The advice here is still good in terms of a writer’s attitude, but happily we don’t have to worry about the condition of returned manuscripts anymore. Say what you like about digital publishing, but you can’t deny the pages are always just as pristine, however many times you send them out. Any blemishes are likely to be grammatical, and your own stinking fault.

One thing I’ve rarely done in my long but obscure career  as a writer is give a public reading of my work. I’ve done a few signings – generally a harrowing and not very rewarding experience, but only a few readings. Which is odd when you think of it, because I’m good at that. Radio and acting experience, as I’ve mentioned more often than necessary.

But I’m going to be doing a reading on Saturday. It’s Homecoming time at Waldorf University, Forest City, Iowa, one of my several alma maters. Waldorf is special to me, because it was the first college I attended. They’re doing an authors’ forum, featuring several Waldorf graduates who write books. I’ll be one of them. I’m supposed to do a 15-minute reading, and then there’ll be a question-and-answer period, and we’ll have the chance to sell our books.

Consequently, I won’t be blogging on Friday, since I’ll be traveling that day. We appreciate your patience, and thank you for flying Brandywine Books.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Good Client,’ by Dan Decker

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Mitch Turner is a criminal defense lawyer, I’m not sure where (either author Dan Decker didn’t say, or I just didn’t notice). His practice is new, but he’s aggressive and doing well for himself.

As The Good Client begins, Mitch gets a call in the middle of the night from his office intern, Timothy Cooper. Mitch hasn’t been impressed with Timothy’s work. He considers him too shy and nerdy to ever succeed in criminal law. But now Timothy is knee deep in a criminal case of his own. His roommate, he says, has been shot to death, and the police are there. He thinks they suspect him of the crime. Mitch instructs him to say nothing more to the cops; he’ll be right over.

He finds that the police have, indeed, already homed in on Timothy as the killer. No one else was in the apartment, and there are no signs of forced entry. It isn’t long before Timothy is arrested, and Mitch has his investigator looking into the young man’s movements that night. This proves harder than expected — Timothy proves to be an uncooperative, and surprisingly temperamental, client. Also, his parents are strangely unsupportive, and they start looking suspicious in their own right. But that makes no sense – would they frame their own son? Mitch discovers evidence the police overlooked, which both surprises him and puts him in an ethical dilemma. The evidence is damaging to his own case, but professional ethics force him to turn it over anyway.

The whole thing is complicated – and somewhat improbable, in my view. Some of the legal and police actions taken strike me as implausible (of course, I’m not a lawyer). The final solution also seemed like a stretch, though the culprit was no big surprise.

The book wasn’t terrible. The writing was okay, with only minor syntax errors compared to most books I see nowadays. But it lacked spark. The characters seemed kind of dull (nobody had a sense of humor).

On the plus side, the occasional mentions of religion were fairly positive. No major cautions are needed for language or sexual content.

I’m on the bubble on this one.

Fiction, Reviews

Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power

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Last month, one of the showrunners for Amazon’s The Rings of Power enthused about the series, saying it wasn’t their story but Tolkien’s. I think that’s how deeply deceived fan-fiction writers feel about their stories. This isn’t Tolkien’s story by a far cry.

I watched the remaining episodes of The Rings of Power yesterday, and all the wind has been taken out of my sails. Reading a bit from the showrunners has depressed me. Hearing from a few critics has soured me. Spoilers ahead.

I wasn’t hoping or expecting the show to become awesome in the last three episodes, but some errors hit you differently than others. You can roll with some lines of dialogue, some character motivations, and with others you can’t. Others just rattle the wheels right off your wagon and leave you on the hillside, wishing Santa would make things that last for a change.

They make up an origin story for Mithril to compel Elrond to push Duran IV to mine for it, because King Duran III believes it’s too dangerous to continue digging for it. They say a tree with the light of a silmaril is fought over by an elf and a balrog, is struck by lightning, and creates mithril by sending all the light into the rocky mountain earth. The elf king pulls out this story in episode 5 to say another tree that’s tied to the life of all elves is dying all of a sudden and if they don’t get that mithril stuff, all elves will be forced to flee to Valinor. It was a point in which the king seemed deceptive and manipulative. And the whole thing was dumb.

At the end of episode 8, they handle the creation of the elfin rings like any other TV drama. A main character, regardless of supposed skill, has to suggest the solution to the master craftsman. They hint that this craftsman is being manipulated, but please. There’s no strategy working here. It’s a line, a plot point, a touch of authenticity to say they know Tolkien’s history and are telling his story. The rings themselves look like trinkets (image via LOTR Fandom).

In episode 7, there’s a battle, and the “good” villagers give up their most defensible position for one that trained solders would have difficulty defending. And in doing so, they give the enemy the freedom to unlock an old plan that would nonsensically ignite Mt. Doom. Which is a big problem, but it doesn’t come before they mop the floor with their enemies because the elves and Númenórean men, whom Galadriel has been attempting to rally for half of the series, finally show up on the horses they brought overseas. How this cavalry knew the Southland village would be under siege at that moment is not important. What is important is that had the villagers stayed in the defensible outpost they fled to days ago, the cavalry would not have been able to charge in like they did.

A Kodak moment, I tell you.

Continue reading Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power →
Publishing, The Press, Uncategorized

For your Spectation

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I have once again gathered up my hubris and sent an essay to The American Spectator. And once again, for unaccountable reasons, they have published it.

Honestly, I’m kind of proud of this one. It’s more upbeat than my usual stuff, and shows the influence of my recent Dave Barry reading.

It’s called “Liberals On the Border.”

Music

Sunday Singing: Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?

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“Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed” sung to a traditional Irish tune

This classic hymn, written by Isaac Watts in 1707, has been printed in over 2000 hymnals with one of a couple tune arrangements. The recording above pairs it with a traditional Irish song that has been called the Banks of Moorlough Shore and Foggy Dew. The mournful quality of this tune fits the words well, though they need to be rearranged.

1 Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
and did my Sov’reign die!
Would he devote that sacred head
for such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I had done
he groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

2 Well might the sun in darkness hide,
and shut his glories in,
when Christ, the mighty Maker, died
for man the creature’s sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
while his dear cross appears;
dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes in tears.

3 But drops of grief can ne’er repay
the debt of love I owe;
here, Lord, I give myself away,
’tis all that I can do. . . .

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reading

The Powerful Rings So Far, Libraries, and Freedom in Commitment

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Someone in our house picked up Amazon Prime, which means we’ve watched five episodes of The Rings of Power. If you remember what Lars said about not watching it, those reasons still stand. After the first two shows, I told the rest of my family it was not a Tolkien’s story, but a good fantasy that leaned heavily on Tolkien’s established world. It could have been independent of Middle Earth, but then it wouldn’t have gotten all of the hype, fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come out of the woodwork to comment, and it wouldn’t have disappointed viewers as badly as it has.

I can’t say I’m in the most disappointed camp yet, though I have my complaints. Straight out of the gate, the writers tell us there was a time without darkness, which I took to mean evil had yet to come into the world, but they follow those words with little Galadriel getting bullied over her toy boat. Then they say, you know why a boat floats and a rock sinks? It’s because a boat has hope and keeps it head up. If the dialogue had maintained that level of inanity for the whole first episode, I would have dropped it, but it improved. Not before arguing that Galadriel, who had bent her life on stamping out Sauron, was in danger of sustaining the evil by seeking it, because if evil isn’t out there, but you think it is, then you could become the very thing you seek.

Those were meta level reasons I said the story wasn’t Tolkienesque, but it still seemed okay as we moved along. Characters weren’t doing stupid things until maybe episode five. A wizard-like character who fell from the sky has not been explained–he’s interesting. The Sylvan elf is the only one fighting at this point and has gotten in some good Legolas moves. The Duran-Elrond storyline is good overall.

But with episode five, things have begun to turn sour. There’s a laughable fighting tutorial that suggests swordmen should fight with their feet, not with their arms. An actor with stage fighting experience has a couple videos in response to this part of the show, in which he explains how actors swing weapons to appear lethally aimed when they aren’t and what the camera must do to make a battle look real.

  1. Fight Scene Autopsy
  2. How Fights Tell a Story

I could say more, but many others have said many things about this show already. I should just move on with blogroll links.

Bookcases: “We’re so enamored of digital technology we often presume its superiority; worse, we sometimes forget its alternatives even qualify as technologies.” Joel Miller recommends a bookcase as the most underrated user interface we have.

Coffee: Artist Alyssa Ennis paints detailed architecture and landmarks of Northeast Ohio using pencils and coffee. Her dad sculpts wildlife models from wood.

Liberty: Peter Mommsen writes about our love of liberty, fear of commitment, and the freedom found in making good vows. “I soon discovered that being bound [by a vow] didn’t feel like a loss of liberty. On the contrary, once the step had been taken, paralyzing daydreams about other possible life paths disappeared . . .”

Libraries: The Palafoxiana Library in Puebla, Mexico is the oldest public library in the Americas. “On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.” (via Arts Journal)

Photo: Springfield Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1984. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Choices,’ by Scott W. Cook

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I finally finished this book. I can’t have enjoyed Scott W. Cook’s Choices a whole lot, because I sure found it easy to put it down. But on the other hand, I kept with it to the end, which must mean something.

Apparently, Scott Jarvis is an established Florida private eye character (there are a lot of those; John D. MacDonald left a great big void in his wake), and Choices is the first book Cook wrote about the character. But it wasn’t published until now (I can see the reasons). Nevertheless, he’s worked it over now and released it as a prequel.

It… still needs work.

Scott Jarvis is a police detective in Orlando, Florida. He has high ideals about making the world a better place (the author goes on an on about this), and is frustrated by the legal limitations the job places on him. Finally, after he’s badly wounded and a vicious gangster gets released, he accepts friends’ advice and goes into business as a private investigator. In time, this gives him the opportunity to go after that same gangster in a big way, from a different angle.

The plot of Choices is pretty far-fetched, in my opinion. Jarvis gets away with a lot of stuff that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t go in the real world (including taking a couple of the classic Hollywood shoulder wounds without being permanently disabled). He carries a “silenced” Colt 1911 .45, which will make gun guys laugh. The text includes a number of textual errors such as mistaken homophones and missing section breaks. And sometimes the author forgets he’s writing in first person and slides into third.

But the biggest problem is a simple beginner’s problem, one most authors make and get over. Cook overwrites. He tells us things multiple times. He explains what he means too much. He likes to say someone “quipped” this or that, when it’s not really a quip, and you shouldn’t have to explain that to the audience anyway. If you want the audience to know it’s a joke, make it a better joke – don’t explain to them how they ought to be amused.

Still, I thought there were signs of good writing here. I might read the next book, to see if the author has learned anything.

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Theodor Kittelsen

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I’m still not making much progress on the book I’m reading, so I have another non-review post tonight.

The video above is just a brief introduction to my favorite Norwegian artist, Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914). Among his famous accomplishments was illustrating Asbjørnsen & Moe’s collection of Norwegian fairy tales, along with Erik Werenskiold. Werenskiold did some excellent work, but I always felt Kittelsen possessed that little extra spark of creative genius. In some ways he was ahead of his time, graphically.

He is generally considered the man who crystalized the Norwegian conception of the troll. As you’ll see in the video.

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Trojan War Mosaic Found

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A 1,300 sq. foot mosaic floor has been uncovered in Syria, depicting figures from the Trojan War–“Remarkably intact artwork that was created 1,600 years ago shows colorful images of Ancient Greek soldiers and Amazons who fought in the epic battle.” They’ve only uncovered 65 feet of it so far.

Fiction, Reviews

The Awakening of Miss Prim, by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

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Herminia was a refined, intelligent, sensitive woman but that was no defense against self-deception. Miss Prim had a theory about self-deception: the female sex seemed particularly and cruelly vulnerable to it.

I read this 2014 novel with friends over the past month. It inspired moderate complaint and, after a bit of reflection, delivered a welcome finish. The Awakening of Miss Prim was originally written in Spanish in 2011, so we read the English translation by Sonia Soto.

The story takes place in the fictional Spanish village of San Ireneo de Arnois, an idyllic community of independent folk making their living by doing what they love. It’s implied that everyone here lives humbly, but you can’t tell from the wealth of flowers, cozy homes, tea cakes, fresh bread, and hot chocolate flowing every other page. Village business is bustling, but shops are only open for as long as they want to be, because people have healthier priorities than making as much money as they can in a day.

Miss Prim comes to San Ireneo to inquire into a job opening as a private librarian to one of the most important men in town. The advertisement states those with many credentials need not apply, and Prim has many credentials, but when asked about that and the possibility that she may be trying to escape a former life, she bristles and almost turns the job down–never mind that she implies she is seeking a refuge.

She accepts the job of organizing the library for six months, and in that time meets the wonderful village folk, the curious children folk, and seems to be unable to have a conversation without being offended. She frequently tells herself how proper and level-headed she is and frequently catches someone’s choice or opinion that clashes with her own. The quote above comes late in the book and it couldn’t be clearer that she’s talking about herself.

But after talking over the whole book in a group, I put my initial complaints aside. It’s possible this novel leans into the idea that beauty is truth and will save the world. Prim awakens to the idea that slowing down, breathing fresh air, meditating on old poetry, rejecting a narcissistic view of everyone around her, and particularly dwelling on the Gregorian chant coming from the crypt at St. Benedict’s is real living. One friend suggested this as a specifically Christian theme. It isn’t explicit in the book, but a few lines point to it.

From this perspective, the novel is worth reading. It can easily come across as the story of a young feminist longing for something better in the world while undermining every effort to take her there. Maybe instead it’s a gentle story of a woman who needs and finds Christ.