Sample From My Work in Progress

 I'm been struggling so much with writing over the past few years. I'm not a fast writer in any case--my first two novels took me four years each to complete.  But it has been nearly seven years now since I last finished a book. To be fair, I have been working on two at the same time, which is probably a bad idea, but I haven't been able to help myself.  Both stories have been compelling to me.

I've started to have fun again, though, which is nice. Wrote this bit this morning, and it gave me a good chuckle.

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            Villem hacked and gagged on the earth choking him.  Something warm and wet rasped across his face again and again.  He spat dirt from his mouth and breathed in air sweeter than any dessert.  Gasping and panting, he tried to open his eyes, but it was too painful from the grit that filled them.  He was confused by whatever it was cleansing his face, until he heard a whine.

The dog!  She has saved my life once again.  Despite his utter misery, Villem’s heart filled with a warm glow for the poor, starving mongrel that refused to let him die.  He recalled the ridged line across the dog’s haunch from where the crossbow bolt had left its mark.  Scar!  She deserves a name.  I’ll name her Scar.

He spat and spat until his mouth was free of dirt.  Scar began licking him about the eyes, and soon Villem was able to try opening them again.  The grit was painful and filled his eyes with tears, but he could see Scar standing over him, continuing to lick away the dirt from around his face.

Villem was grateful that the lord’s men hadn’t bothered to do more than toss a thin layer of earth over his face, else he’d surely be dead now.  They had done better with his lower extremities, though—he couldn’t move them much.  He began wiggling his arms and legs the best he could, trying to gain more room.

Scar’s head jerked up and looked away, and she barked twice.  In the distance, Villem heard a voice, perhaps that of a child.  It was coming closer!

“H-help!” he cried.  “Help me!”  He heard a startled cry, then silence for a few moments.

“Back dog!” someone yelled, sounding like a young boy.

“It must belong to the witch,” came a voice from a different boy.

“No!” Villem cried.  “It’s me.  Help me!”

“Run!” yelped one of the boys, and Villem heard them scampering away.

Villem wept and laughed at the same time, while Scar began to lick his face again.  “They thought it was you, girl.  Good girl.  Good, Scar.”  He wished he had an arm free so he could pet her.  He began to wiggle his arms and legs again.

Just when he began to feel he was making some headway, he heard voices again, and Scar again looked up and barked.

“There it is, see?  Don’t get too close,” came the voice of one of the boys.

A man’s voice responded, “It’s just a mutt.  Are you daft?”

“It talked, I swear!”

“It the witch’s, I tell you.”  So the other boy was there as well.

Villem gathered his breath and called out, “It’s not the dog.  It’s me!  Help me!”

Silence reined for some time before Villem heard scuffling sounds.  Scar barked again.

“Easy, dog,” came the raspy voice of the man.  “I’ll poke you if I have to.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Villem called out.  “She’s a good dog.  The best!”

“Show yourself, whoever you are.”

“I’m here, in the ground.”

A man’s face appeared, eyes widening as he saw Villem.  The man was old, but he wore a conical steel helm on his head, so Villem assumed he must be a guard from the keep.

“What’s this then?” the man said.  “What are you doing in the ground?”

“Just help me, please!”

The man looked behind him.  “You boys, come here.  Nothing t’be affrighted of.  Just some demon digging his way out from the bowels of the earth.”  The man chuckled.

Audiobook Release for Epic Fantasy The Shard

My very first audiobook was released in Audible yesterday. It is narrated by the talented Rosa B. Watkinson. It's a whole new realm of learning for me, trying to figure out how to be successful in the audiobook realm. I imagine getting reviews for audiobooks isn't easy. I've Googled for audiobook reviewers and there don't appear to be very many.

For those who enjoy audiobooks and think they might try this one, I think having a map may be useful. I have a link on the right side of my blog to the map for The Shard. If you click on the picture of the map, it will enlarge and you can do CTRL + P to print it out.

Click here to visit the Audible page for this book.

I am looking for lovers of epic fantasy to do reviews of the audiobook of The Shard. I can provide a free code for Audible US or UK. I don't expect anyone to do dishonest reviews. If you truly dislike the book, then it would be better for me if you didn't post a review, but any honest reviews are appreciated. Note that a review on Audible is great, but please also consider posting a review on other great sites, such as Reddit's r/fantasy or in various Facebook groups that love fantasy or audiobooks. Thanks for your consideration!

Pandemic Diary Rome

I don't write that much on this blog anymore, mostly because I use Facebook for the bulk of my thoughts these days, but every so often it's good to put something up here if for no other reason than to serve as a sort of diary entry for myself. Everyone is going through this Covid-19 global pandemic these days, though here in Italy it was one of the early epicenters of the virus. The entire country was shut down about two weeks ago.

Empty street in center of Rome

 While most of my colleagues stay home, I'm unfortunately considered to be an 'essential' employee, so I continue to have to go to work. It's an eerie experience walking through the heart of historic Rome and seeing how empty everything is.

Piazza del Popolo with no people

I couldn't take photos in some spots, like the Trevi Fountain, because there was a cordon of police officers and I didn't want a confrontation with them.

The Spanish Steps

Walking down the Spanish Steps, the two lady police officers that you see in the picture stopped me to make me show my paperwork that allows me to be outside.

Sadly, the past couple days I have started to see more and more cars and people out, which tells me that people are starting to lose patience with staying indoors. But this will only help the virus to start spreading again.

I feel a tad prescient, since my novel The Immortality Game has a Dark Times from the middle of this century until the start of the next, and the Dark Times was caused by a mixture of the effects of global climate change and a terrible pandemic, much worse than our current one.

I hope that our scientists find a vaccine sooner rather than later, so we can save many more lives.

Russian Names in The Immortality Game

I only have one review in Amazon France, and it's a bad one. Two stars. That's fine; it's what that person felt when they read the book, and I appreciate that they read it. I just don't like one thing that was central to their dislike--the reader complained that the Russians in my book use diminutive names, suggesting that they would only be using the formal of first name and patronymic. He seemed to be suggesting that I didn't know enough about Russia and Russians.

I have lived in Russia and other Soviet-sphere countries for 13 years. I had a lot of experience with Russians, speaking not just to me but with each other. Yes, I saw the situations where they used the formal first name with patronymic. I've seen the occasions where my Russian wife of 24 years will use the formal. I do understand when it is generally used. It wasn't the case of the situations set in my story.

I am sure there are work places where colleagues use the formal addresses. Probably in such places as the police force, hospitals perhaps, etc. In the places that I witnessed, even at the embassy, everyone was closer to one another and they used the diminutives, not the formal. That was what I was expressing in my story. These scientists had been working closely with one another for decades. They were beyond the point of using the formal names with each other.

I'm sorry this reader felt the way he did about my book, but I disagree with him that I used the language of names wrong.

What I Read in 2019

At the end of each year I do a summary post of what I read throughout the year. I find it interesting to see my reading habits, and to make note of what the best books were each year. I managed only 28 books this year, though to be fair some of them were very long ones. I use a standard five star rating method with five stars meaning I loved the book so much I intend to re-read it throughout my life, so there are rarely any five star books.

1. The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey ****
2. Langue[dot]doc 1305 by Gilian Polack ***
3. The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke ****
4. Silent Hall by N.S. Dolkart **
5. God's War by Kameron Hurley **** and a half
6. Infidel by Kameron Hurley **** and a half
7. Rapture by Kameron Hurley **** and a half
8. Somebody to Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury by Matt Richards ****
9. The Wolves of Winter by Matt Johnson ***
10. Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh ****
11. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer ***
12. Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh **** and a half
13. One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence *** and a half
14. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon *****

15. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson ** and a half
16. Fall of Giants by Ken Follett **** and a half
17. Low Town by Daniel Polansky ****
18. Lucifer's Hammer (reread) by Larry Niven ****
19. Embassytown by China Mieville *** and a half
20. Winter of the World by Ken Follett **** and a half
21. The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin *** and a half
22. With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge ****
23. Alliance Space by C.J. Cherryh ****
24. Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett **** and a half
25. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi **** and a half
26. Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton ****
27. The First Man in Rome (reread) by Colleen McCullough *****
28. Limited Wish by Mark Lawrence *** and a half 

Writing a Single Point of View

My first two novels were written with multiple point-of-view (POV) characters, and it never occurred to me to do otherwise. It just felt natural. I have seen a few readers complain about not liking the change of characters, but it never bothered me much given that I really love reading multiple POVs in a novel. I love complexity.

One POV from The Immortality Game, art by Stephan Martiniere

But in the sci-fi novel I am currently working on, I tried to do it with just a single POV character. It was more 'young adult', which is a category forced on us by the book industry these days and not something I actually like, but having said that, the YA category often outsells the standard adult category. So since I felt a young protagonist was necessary for this particular story, it felt logical to try to tell it in the manner of most YA novels -- with a single POV.

I managed to get through about seven chapters this way before hitting a wall. It began to feel to me that I was running the character around far too much to try to witness and participate in all the key plot points. It began to ring false to me. And this is with only two primary locations for the whole plot!

I haven't read a ton of books with just one POV, so I don't recall whether I had this feeling of the character running around too much and seeming to overhear or oversee too many key moments, but I vaguely recall feeling this way a number of times. I'm certain some authors have brilliantly pulled a single POV off with no such issues. I guess I'm just not that kind of writer.

I've come to realize that I just can't make this story work without at least two other POV characters. I wonder if it will always be like this in my writing?

False Romance

A recent review on Goodreads of my novel The Immortality Game made a similar point of several other reviews, so it made me start thinking about the romantic aspects within that story. I set out to do romance quite differently from what is typical in novels, and I guess people are either confused by it or simply don't like it.

Zoya, art by Stephan Martiniere

The two primary characters of similar age in The Immortality Game are Zoya and Marcus. Zoya is a young Russian woman just trying to get by in a harsh life. Marcus has had it both better and worse in his life as an American living in Phoenix, Arizona. He has no financial difficulties. His father was the most famous scientist in the world. And that is the main problem for Marcus--he was sheltered and very much overshadowed by his superstar dad. Marcus is no dummy, yet he feels very small in comparison to his father, so he has struggled to figure out his place in life. He became one of the billions of Mesh addicts, and probably would have died of it if his father hadn't intervened.

Marcus has been sheltered in the extreme, barely ever going outdoors and almost certainly never speaking with a woman other than his mother. His entire education happened via the web and food and anything else that is needed arrives directly to his door. I purposely made Marcus lacking in self-esteem because I wanted for a change to see a main character that I could personally relate to.

I was so painfully shy when I was young that I didn't date until after graduating college. It's not that I didn't want to but rather that I simply couldn't start a conversation with a girl. If I saw a girl that I found attractive then I automatically assumed she was out of my league. It is painful to go through all your formative years this way, and I had never yet read a book that really gave me a character who went through this.

So I did it with Marcus...and readers don't seem to like it. Or else they don't understand it and act as if there is a real romantic arc in the book that actually isn't there. I'm sorry the readers are confused, but I'm not sorry I wrote it the way I did. I'm tired of standard romances and am glad to do one that rings true to life, at least for my own experiences.

From Zoya's perspective, a romance never made any sense in the story. It all takes place in one day, and it's the worst day of her life. I don't see a romance happening in such a place and time, so I certainly never shoehorned a romance into it. I think where the readers get confused is that the Point of View switches between chapters, so sometimes they are seeing things and thinking and feeling from Zoya's perspective, while at others they are seeing everything through Marcus. Naturally in the thoughts of a single character you are going to see when they notice an attraction to another person, so there are hints of that throughout the book. Marcus clearly is smitten with Zoya from the start. But he never indicates anything of this to her other than subconsciously. He definitely doesn't flirt with her. Alternatively, Zoya is going through hell that day, and barely has a few moments to catch her breath. She does notice certain nice qualities about Marcus, but that's where it stops. She goes no further with it, and it makes no sense for it to go further.

I think the readers forget that they are seeing inside the minds of both characters, so they know the thoughts and feelings of both. But the two characters don't know what each other think and feel. So there is no romance there. Only some budding feelings that never get any chance to bloom. Yet readers keep seeing a romance. Even at the very end of the story, when circumstances change dramatically, I only hint that there now exists the possibility that a romance could potentially happen in the future.

So my point--I guess it frustrates me that readers want to elevate the relationship between Marcus and Zoya to a romance when it really isn't there and isn't meant to be there. Perhaps readers only want the same old cliche romances? Perhaps they don't like real life intruding upon the stories that they feel should go the way they want them to go? They don't like Marcus because of his weaknesses, his lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. Well, a lot of us live like that in real life and I think there should be a place in literature for us to have our stories told.