Tag Archives: novels

Bookselling, Fiction

Review a Lars Walker E-book, Win Another One!

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When I reviewed Troll Valley after its first release as an e-book, I said it was an entertaining story about what we can and cannot control. A young man grows up with a deformed arm and a fairy godmother who doesn’t stand around granting wishes with a smile. It’s a little dark and not at all shmaltzy. It’s my favorite of Lars’s novels.

Troll Valley is now in audio, narrated by the author himself. You can get it with an Audible subscription or purchase it for your digital library. In honor of that technological accomplishment, we’re running a promotion. It’s a favor to you really. We’re doing you a solid.

Review one of Lars’s novels on Amazon or Goodreads, send us proof of that review, and we’ll send you another e-book of your choice. It has to be a new review. If you posted a review earlier this month or last month, we’ll accept that too. Just share a link in the comments of this post and we can email you another of Lars’s e-books to enjoy (and review, of course, like, please).

For example, you could post a review of Hailstone Mountain, and we could send you the e-book for The Elder King. Let us know which e-book you would like when you post your review in the comments.

Buy the books via any of our affiliate links. You don’t have to have bought the novel recently. It could be the one in your TBR pile. Only the review has to be new.

Post your review by Jan. 7, 2026 to get a free e-book in exchange, and let us know what you think of the new Troll Valley audiobook when you a chance to listen.

(Photo by Veroniki Thetis Chelioti on Unsplash)

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry, Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

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What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Writing

Writing report, 2/1/17

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Today was an unusual day, but not a bad one (which was fairly surprising. To me, it’s an axiom that Change is Bad).

I had to take a half vacation day, because it was the seasonal feast of the Sacred HVAC Inspection. The spirit of Natural Gas must be appeased, lest he smite the firstborn (that’s me) with carbon monoxide poisoning. Because this solemnity requires carving out a whole afternoon for the sake of about a half an hour of actual service, I figured I could do some writing. Somewhat to my surprise, I did.

My latest book is a challenge. I don’t know if I just got out of the habit of novel writing during my 2 ½ year detour Through the Looking Glass (i.e., in academia), or if I’m just getting old, my eye dimmed and my natural force abated.

But this week has been good. I’m facing one of those plot intervals that I hate. You’ve got a Big Event coming up (in this case an actual historical event that I can’t move around), and a space of time to fill leading up to it. Various plot threads need to be developed in that space, but it’s like building a bridge across a broad canyon – there’s a big space to fill and not a whole lot of attachment points.

But I’ve been working manfully on bridging that space this week, and – not easily, but steadily – I’ve been making progress. “Having once got my method by the end,” as John Bunyan said, “then ever as I pulled, it came.” The pulling can be hard, but the story is coming. And I think some of the stuff isn’t bad.

I’ve got a long way to go, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Afon,’ by Robert Partridge

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Afon

He had forgotten, too, the pain of this [writing] – the pain of dragging this thing out of oneself, the birth of a reluctant child that would much rather go on growing inside than be forced out screaming into the light of day and the fear of examination. He had forgotten the monstrous ego that was needed to push the creation out into the world, with all its mess and suffering. He had forgotten.

I’ve been praising Peter Grainger’s DC Smith novels in this space. On noodling around for further information about the author (who seems to wish to be a man of mystery), I discovered that “Peter Grainger” is a pen name. More than that, the author had earlier written (under the name Robert Partridge) some literary novels, one of which – Afon – starred a character named Peter Grainger, who was a novelist.

Messing with our heads, in other words.

So I bought Afon. It’s pretty good. Not my cuppa tea, but a well-written novel.

Peter Grainger is in his 40s. Long ago he wrote a first novel that got a lot of recognition, and then he lost his nerve and wrote no more. Now he’s quit a teaching job, which he hated. He has some money left from a divorce settlement, so he decides to take a lease on a cottage on an estate called Afon, in a remote valley in Wales. He will try and write another novel. If he fails, at least he’ll know he made the attempt.

He meets the elderly landowner and his much younger wife. He learns to fly fish. He makes an enemy of the estate’s brutal gamekeeper, agonizes over his feelings for two different women (both married), and after a struggle produces a new book.

Afon abounds in lovely descriptions of the natural beauty of Wales, and in perceptive dramatizations of the writing process. The ending is kind of ambiguous, the sort of thing you expect in a literary novel – which is one of the reasons I generally avoid literary novels.

But it’s pretty good. Not much obscenity here, though the bonds of marriage take a beating. Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.

Bookselling, Publishing

The Girl with the Bestselling Novel

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Why do so many bestselling novels have “girl” in their title? Maybe it was inspired by Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and such. But author Emily St. John Mandel says the trend in titles started before Larsson’s books were released. Perhaps it’s a natural phenomenon. Mandel notes this interesting data point:

The “girl” in the title is much more likely to be a woman than an actual girl, and the author of the book is more likely to be a woman. But if a book with “girl” in the title was written by a man, the girl is significantly more likely to end up dead.