Author Archives: florencewitkop

First Visions by H.T. Wood

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First Visions (Second Sight, #1)  Book Review:  First Visions by H.T. Wood

I’m a sucker for stories about people with psychic abilities but I have a caveat.  That psychic should be otherwise normal.  The heroine in this book was perfectly normal until an accident left her with second sight.

It’s a fairly common theme for stories and one that Ms. Wood handles well.  She also does a good job of another rather common theme in novels and that’s the fact that the heroine wishes she didn’t have the gift of second sight.  And she wishes she’d shut her mouth years ago when her gift helped the police find a missing child because the publicity sent her running into hiding where she’s been ever since.  And she definitely doesn’t want to help them again when another child goes missing, even though the detective in charge of the case is a great guy she can’t help falling for.  All elements of this story ring true both in real life and in this story and they are handled in a competent manner so I enjoyed reading this book.

Whether or not I’ll read another in the series will depend on my mood at the moment.  The element of surprise is missing and sometimes I like surprises.  But surprise isn’t what this writer is aiming for so some day in the future if I’m looking for a book that I know will turn out the way I want it to, I just might choose another book by this author.

Now for the rating.  I should mention that I hate using stars to rate books.  Hate!  Hate!  Hate!  In fact I hate rating books in any way at all.  I’d much rather just tell what I think and let the reader take away from my review what they wish.  But most reviewers do give stars so I’ll so the same, with the caveat that I’ll never give only 1 or 2 stars because I don’t finish books I don’t like so there’d be nothing to review.  I’ll also almost never give 5 stars because I have really, really, really high standards.  Shakespeare would make it and a few others.  Most won’t.  So we’re talking 3 or 4 stars here for the books I read on a daily basis, a range that I suspect most readers look for, a range that provides enjoyable reads without knocking a reader’s socks off.

I’m also going to start reviewing for English usage and grammar and for typos and for lazy editing and anything else in the writing itself that has the potential to take the reader away from the story.  This rating will be separate from the rating for the book as a whole.  Don’t know exactly how this part will work but I think it should be included because some people want to pass on books that are poorly edited while others wish rating systems wouldn’t give a poor rating to a wonderful story just because of poor editing.  This rating will use the full range of 1 to 5 stars because good stories can come in all kinds of packages.

So I’m giving this book a solid 3 stars for the story and a very, very solid 4 stars for good English, grammar and typos.  It’s nice to read a book that was written by a professional author who did her homework, told a decent story and spent the time to make sure her book was edited before putting it online.

Grammar for Indie Books

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Grammar has been on my mind a lot lately because a group I belong to has been discussing the bad grammar and typos that are so common in indie published books.  A rating system might come out of the discussion or it might not.  Either way, the subject of grammar in independently published work is a valid one.  Perhaps it’s hugely important because so many writers who are also indie publishers don’t vet their work carefully.

I doubt that anyone minds a stray typo or a bad sentence.  But when an entire book is so filled with mistakes, some of which must be due to carelessness rather than a lack of knowledge of proper English usage, then that book gives all of indie publishing a bad name.  It speaks to how lazy some writers are.

There are readers out there who refuse to buy or to read a book unless it’s been published by a publishing house simply because publishers make sure their books have been edited for grammar.  Books with a publisher’s imprint on them tell potential readers that bad grammar won’t pull them away from the story.

That’s a sad statement about the grammar found in many indie written and published books.

I’ll continue following the discussion about grammar until it either peters out or turns into a system for vetting indie published work.  I’ll let you know if a system results.  If so, I’ll do my best to advertise it because anything that validates an indie author’s work so readers will know what they will be getting is a good thing.

I don’t want to see a future in which indie authors lose credibility.

How to Date an Alien by Magan Vernon

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Product DetailsReview:  How to Date an Alien by Magan Vernon

I like science fiction if a romance is in there somewhere and I like an occasional young adult book so I took a chance on this story.  I’m glad I did.  There’s nothing particular to place it higher than a number of other similar books but I liked the characters, I like the premise and I liked the conclusion.  My only negative is the same thing I find lacking in many books and that’s the fact that it’s part of a series so the story isn’t completely told in this one book.  I like beginnings, middles, and endings.  Still, this book qualified more than most.  It was complete in itself and I’d not have known that there was more if the author hadn’t shown previews of future books.  So I guess that’s not a negative after all.

It’s the story of a service brat whose parents divorced so she doesn’t see her dad all that much.  But when she needs a summer internship to make her college application look good she turns to good old dad and asks if she can intern wherever he works because, though she doesn’t know a lot about his job she does know it’s secret so it must be the stuff colleges like to see on applications.

Her dad agrees and she discovers he works with aliens at a secret base in the southwestern desert.  More importantly, she falls for one of the aliens and that’s frowned upon.  The fact that the alien is a prince and his  mother doesn’t like the romance any more than base personnel do makes it even worse.  But they persist and become a couple.

It’s a fun read.  Lots of action, the right amount of smooching and friends who are both supportive and those who are not.  Mostly, though, is the action.  Like I said, it’s a fun read.  I give it 3 stars, maybe 4.

Who Decides Genres?

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I’m in a thoughtful mood  today so I decided to talk about something I’ve always wondered.

Who decides what defines a genre and which books fit in that genre?

I’ve always suspected that it’s the same people who accept or reject a writer’s work.  The editors.  Maybe my thinking is tainted by all the notes I’ve read on the margins of some of those hundreds of manuscripts I’ve sent to editors over the years.  Maybe I’m prejudiced.

But I’m all too well aware of the way many of those rejections read.  ’Doesn’t quite fit what we are looking for.’  ’Like your writing but this piece isn’t right for us at this time.’ ‘Love the story but it’s wrong for this issue.’

The takeaway from those notes is that editors are powerful people who choose what to present to a particular market.  They know what their readers are looking for and that their continued employment depends on placing the right story in their publication.  So they are fanatical about properly categorizing whatever comes across their desks.  Right category means acceptance and their continued employment.  Wrong category means rejection and unemployment for them.

Over the years, readers have come to accept those categorizations and extend them to all publications and that’s how the categorizations editors created for their own uses have become genres that now dictate how and where almost all publications are marketed.  Or so I believe.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Anything that quickly identifies a manuscript helps readers identify stories they want to read.  But I wonder as I sit at my desk far from any editor’s office, if the concept of genres should be widened now that readers can choose from a large variety of fiction that can be sold electronically to such a wide readership.

I don’t know how such a thing could be done, but I suspect it would be good and helpful for all those readers out there who’d like to choose for themselves what they read.

 

Second Draft

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I read somewhere that most novels go through ten re-writes before being published.  When I read that statistic, I almost quit writing for a more lucrative field, like greeting people at Walmart.

Ten re-writes?  Really?  I still think that’s a bit extreme but that number worked its way around my psyche until I figured something out.  If a story might be re-written ten times, more or less, why not use that fact to my advantage?  So I tried something and I’ve been doing it ever since.

I write the story.  The story.  Not the characters, not the background.  Just the story.  Only when I’m done do I consider what kind of story I’m writing.  Romance?  Mystery?  Thriller?  Mainstream?  After remembering what kind of story I started out to write, I re-read the whole thing and insert what’s needed to make it become the kind of story it should be.

If it’s a romance, then every so often I’ll insert a sentence or two to add a bit of romantic interest.  Occasionally that sentence or two becomes a whole new scene.  Sometimes not.  Whatever the result, those re-written sentences add a subtle something that reminds the reader that this is not just a story, it’s a particular kind of story. This becomes especially true if what you are adding doesn’t contribute to the flow of the story.  Sex scenes.  Car chases. Descriptions without action. Soliloquies.  Background information.

I’ve since learned that many writers do this.  And here I thought I was unique!  I’m not, I’m just one of many writers who learned how to write by writing.

The only caveat to doing this is to not let it take over the book.  Remember that you’re fleshing out a situation, not stopping the action completely.  Usually a sentence or two will do the trick.  If you find you are writing an entire scene, then go back later and make sure you didn’t add too much.

And guess what?  Reading the story that third time to make sure your re-writes were appropriate becomes re-write number three.  And so on, until you stop because if you read it one more time you’ll puke.  And you realize that you’ve gone through the whole thing more times than you’d have thought possible when you put that first sentence on the page and ten re-writes begins to look almost normal.

Stardust Miracle by Edie Ramer

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Stardust Miracle (Miracle Interrupted, #2)   Review:  Stardust Miracle by Edie Ramer

A nice read.  I admit that the only thing that drew me to this book was the fact that it appeared to be a contemporary romance with a supernatural element.  And that’s exactly what it was.  Since that’s what I enjoy writing, I wanted to see how other authors handle the same thing.  And I liked the cover.  It was colorful and, as anyone who reads my posts regularly knows, I like covers that are colorful in some way.  Bright or subtle, I prefer color over black and white.

It’s the story of a pastor’s wife trapped in a tepid, childless marriage who leaves when she finds him having sex with another woman and eventually finds love and a child with another man.

The story, in fact the whole book, is froth and sometimes that’s a good thing.  Not every book should convey emotionally deep, angst-filled messages.  The closest it comes is when it delves into the fact that the heroine has been told she will have a difficult time conceiving a child and may never become a mother.  She manages motherhood because she takes things into her own hands and deals with her situation.  But even with that issue, the author doesn’t delve deeply into the subject or emotions but lets it become a part of the story that she brings to a logical conclusion.

I like logical conclusions and I read this book while my husband watched his favorite CSI team pore over still another mangled body.  He’s not a romance junkie and I’d seen enough disconnected body parts on TV to last me a long time.  So I got out my Kindle and went looking for something to read.   As far as I’m concerned, even though I do like CSI, this romance hugely trumped mangled bodies. I appreciated this nice story with a happy ending.

Fated by Carolyn McCray

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Review of Fated by Carolyn McCray

(Sorry about the picture copied from Amazon.  I wanted to show the cover and am still working on the technical details of how to get just the cover and a buy link up.)

I must admit that I didn’t read every word.  This doesn’t mean it was too long or wordy, it just means that I often skip parts of books when I become more interested in the story line than the depth of the characters.  I liked the story because I find the period of history it is set in to be rather intriguing.

It takes place in the era when Caesar ruled Rome and Brutus was a part of the patrician elite.  It follows the love affair of Brutus and one of his slaves, Torvus.  The two were drawn to each other and fated to meet but after that they were held apart by convention and politics.  Carolyn McCray tries to be historically accurate so what happens in the novel is dictated by what happened in reality. Okay, she doesn’t succeed in that historical accuracy but she’s in the ball park and, for a fictional novel, that’s close enough for me.

I’m a former history major so that may explain why I got caught up in the story line.  Reading this book took me back to a childhood in which I learned a huge amount of history by reading the historical romances that were so popular back then.  (And, yes, I’m dating myself.)  Novels such as this were a large part of why I became that history major.  Some of that history I read while young turned out to be very inaccurate but it piqued an interest in long ago events.  The consequences of those events still resonate today because history matters and any book that encourages kids to study history deserves a big plus.  I’m glad to see someone writing today who is hopefully having the same effect on young readers as those earlier novels had on me.

Defining Genres

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In the last few posts I talked about the literary genre.  I find the subject of fiction genres fascinating because so much of what we writers write and who we are as writers is defined by our choice of genre.  We may write without conscious thought of genre but many of our readers categorize our works.  By extension, that category shapes how they see us as people.

So how is a genre defined?  Here are a couple of wiki definitions:

1) A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even (as in the case of fiction) length.

2) Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is plot-driven fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.[1] Genre fiction is generally distinguished from literary fiction. Screenwriting teacher Robert McKee defines genre conventions as the “specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their subgenres.”[2] These conventions, always fluid, are usually implicit, but sometimes are made into explicit requirements by publishers of fiction as a guide to authors seeking publication. There is no consensus as to exactly what the conventions of any genre are, or even what the genres themselves are; assigning of works to genres is to some extent arbitrary and subjective.

I find these definitions interesting because according to one of the definitions, literary fiction isn’t genre fiction.  But writers of literary fiction themselves define their niche as a genre.

So perhaps no definition of genres is written in stone.  Perhaps the definitions… and the genres themselves… are subject to change.  If true, that fact is a good omen for a vibrant writing community.

The Literary Genre Part 3

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More thoughts on the literary genre, mainly who reads this genre and why.

The answer, as I believe I’ve seen from talking to people who love it, is (drum roll, please) readers who want to insert their own ideas into the story, figure out their own endings, and interpret whatever happens in their own way.

The reason I say this is because I hear over and over again from readers of literary fiction how much they hate it when the writer hits them over the head with the meaning… the story line… the ending… the character descriptions… whatever it is they wished had been handled more subtly.  Or, to look at it another way, they want to read the story the way they’d have written it if they’d been the author.

I suspect that for many readers, literary stories work in much the same way as those stories with multiple endings.  The kind where you read so far then decide what ending you want and it pops up just the way you wanted it.  Ten people could have ten different endings.  I suspect that lovers of literary fiction want to be able to see the whole story their way, not just the ending and they couldn’t do so if the writer was too specific.

This is no more than a personal belief of mine based on observations of reader friends over the years but I’ve come to truly believe that they read literary fiction because it allows them to fill in so many blanks in a story that is all allusions and generalities that when they are finished they have read whatever story they were looking for.

Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but I do wish them good reading.

Unicorn Bait by S.A.Hunter

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novel Unicorn Bait

My second book review.  Unicorn Bait by S.A.Hunter.  Hey, I like fun fantasy stories!

This is such a story and the title is the most fun thing of all but I won’t tell you what the unicorn bait is because that would be a spoiler.  But I’ll say this much.  It made reading the book worth it in spite of the fact that, to me at least, the book was a little longer than necessary.  A bit wordy.  And not exactly high English but definitely readable.

It’s a familiar tale with a twist.  Modern day woman inherits a joke unicorn horn from her father that turns out to be the real thing and when she dusts it off she’s whisked away to a magical kingdom where unicorns and magic are commonplace.  Since her only wish is to return to her home and since she’s smart enough to figure out that it was the unicorn horn that got her there, she figures that she needs another one to whisk her back. The rest of the book is the search for a unicorn and a virgin (which she isn’t) to use as bait because, as everyone knows, unicorns only communicate with virgins.  And, of course, in the process she falls in love with the prince of the kingdom who starts out being nasty and ends up being nice even though he remains a little rough around the edges.  Much better than Prince Charming, to my way of thinking.

So there you have it.  I’m discovering that I actually enjoy writing reviews though I’ll never write a bad review.  If I don’t like a book (and I’ve started many books I didn’t like)  I don’t review it at all.  I just put it down without finishing it.