Star's Reading Blog

I didn’t start off intending to write this for the following Not So Novel prompt:
Cliché
…But I wound up racking up quite a few clichés anyway — admittedly some introduced by and generally handled quite effectively by the story itself — so… what the hell.

Once upon a time, there were three bored but imaginative little children left all alone in a boarding school with one nosy maid and an agreeable French governess for the holidays. Having securely wrapped the governess around their collective little fingers, they secure her permission to go into the woods one afternoon. In the woods, they find a castle garden, and in the garden they find a sleeping princess dressed all in pink silk with a magic ring on her finger.

Well. All right. So she’s the housekeeper’s niece, and she’s not really even asleep, and she’s just another girl with an imagination that rivals their own. But the ring is really magic. Hijinks ensue, and we quickly see the truth of the old saying: Be careful what you wish for. There is invisibility, there are secret passages, there are gods and goddesses and a dinosaurus, there is magic and myth and a whole world of hidden secrets.

This is so my kind of story. It turns old familiar clichés (like the sleeping princess and the enchanted garden) on their heads but knows exactly which ones to keep intact as well (like the troublesome magical ring), and more importantly it knows how to use them. It delves into a world of mythology that resonates well with me and doesn’t screw it up, which is a little bit amazing. There’s the fantastic all mixed up with the mundane, which is something I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for. Ditto kids being the bridge between the two, the combining force in the story that brings reality and fantasy into a head-on collision.

It doesn’t get five stars from me because the things that are annoying are really annoying. Which is mostly the children. I like the characters, I really do, but I’ve no idea why. All four of the children are varying degrees of spoilt, conceited, demanding, selfish, whiny, and thoughtless. And yet their adventures and the ways in which they handle them draw me in anyway. The ending, without saying too much, is also a little neat and tidy (although also thrilling), and I’m left feeling like there are some loose ends that aren’t tied up, some explanations necessary that aren’t given. The other side of this coin, though, is part of why I’ve put this all the way up at a four-star rating: because the author has taken a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t like and mixed it up in such a way and in such proportions with stuff that is absolutely guaranteed to catch my interest that I wind up liking the whole very well in spite of myself.

…Because I got in a hurry and posted something without checking and/or clarifying it first. Yes, I do know that “madonna complex” is not an actual thing. I stuck it in when I was writing the previous entry as a placeholder, intending to go back and find the appropriate term for what I actually meant. Then I got in a hurry and forgot that I needed to fix it.

I hope that my meaning was clear even if the terminology was unconventional: The female characters all seem to be this idealized vision of motherhood, docile and selfless and willing to put their role as mother above every other personal priority. And I understand that a little better with the later generations, who have grown up with this priority list that involves making sure the group survives before considering the self — but even the women of the initial group of “rejects” display this trait, and none of the women at all seem to ever struggle with this. As a woman and a mother, I find that completely unbelievable.

On the other hand, though, it may simply be another example of Godwin not filling in details that weren’t directly relevant to his core concept. We only ever do see a handful of women, after all, and if we do not see their internal struggles then that puts them on the same level as most of the other characters. And if I’m fair, honestly, it isn’t just the women who get idealized here…

The thing you need to know going into this is: It’s a big story. I don’t mean long; I mean big. If you expect to be presented with characters whose heads you can get into, whose individual stories you can get involved with, this book is likely to disappoint you. It isn’t the story of a single character, or even a small group. It’s the story of a civilization developing almost from scratch.

How much from scratch? It goes like this: The Gerns have attacked Earth. A shipload of humans flees in the direction of a planet called Athena, whose resources are humanity’s last hope for survival. In transit, they are intercepted by the Gerns. Those with skills useful to their new overlords are taken as slaves; four thousand men, women, and children deemed useless are dumped on a planet called Ragnarok with minimal supplies to sustain them. Ragnarok boasts a gravity 1.5 times Earth’s, a binary star system that gives the planet a weather cycle swinging back and forth between extreme heat and extreme cold, no significant deposits of metals or minerals which could be used to build helpful things like spaceships or weapons, a “hell fever” that kills overnight, and at least three species of animals intent on killing these new interlopers. Also, it’s the beginning of winter, and the Gerns don’t provide the humans with niceties like shelter. This is intended to be an execution.

It’s rough. It’s really rough. Four thousand dwindle to under a hundred in the space of a few years and the humans are reduced to near stone-age levels of civilization. But the scant handful of survivors are just that — survivors. And they hate the Gerns with a blazing passion that drives them to take the only practical view of their situation: the long term. They expect the Gerns to return, in fact actively work to lure them back, and the intervening time is not spent in idleness. Knowledge is preserved until it can be useful again, each new generation is better adapted to Ragnarok, and the humans begin to claw their way back up out of the abyss into which they have been thrown.

In broad terms, I liked it as long as I could look at it in the appropriate context. I warn my readers about the nature of the story not to drive them away, but because I did not understand it at first and found myself disliking the story for the personal details it skipped, the continual killing off of what seemed to be main characters, the appalling madonna complex all the female characters seemed to have (product of the ’50′s? yes indeedy), and the rather simplistic nature of the basic overarching plot. I think it was after the fourth or fifth viewpoint character died, though, that I started to get it. This is not a story about Irene, or Bill, or any of their descendants. It isn’t even really the story of a scrappy band of humans triumphing over cruel alien invaders. It’s about what happens when you dump a bunch of people on a planet with everything against them and no resources, and they have to be tough and innovative and yet also cooperative to survive. And most of all, they have to think not just of their own survival, but of how their actions can allow future generations to survive even longer, how they can ensure freedom for their great-great-grandchildren if they can’t get it for themselves. It’s never about the character you’re looking at, it’s about the next generation, and the one after that, and the one after that. As long as you look at it like that, it’s a fairly interesting little thought-experiment.

It does have some serious faults. There are times when things seem almost a little too easy — which is quite a feat given what the humans are up against. Time seems to have stood still outside of the immediate scope of Ragnarok while all this evolution was going on. There are places where a spouse, a child, a relative, a friend springs up seemingly from nowhere and even if this character’s life isn’t the point it might have been nice to have a teeny bit of background slipped in. There are things about Ragnarok itself that don’t quite make sense to me. Theoretical knowledge of things no one has seen or done for generations seems to transmit remarkably well to practical skill. And really, honestly, no one does seem to have given much thought to what happens after this story is over, which… For people who spend generations plotting their escape, seems a little short-sighted.

In a weird sort of way, though, this almost complements the story itself. The humans dropped on Ragnarok have had to put aside everything that wasn’t relevant to their project of surviving long enough to get off the planet again. Given that they are required to maintain a certain level of theoretical knowledge in order to have any hope of success, even if things like operating a blaster and flying a Gern cruiser are beyond their actual technical capabilities, what gets kept is sort of eclectic and might not appear to make sense if you don’t have a good feel for their goals and methods. Likewise, Godwin has neglected everything that wasn’t directly relevant to the core concept of this group of people starting from the bottom and working their way back up through the layers of civilization. The point is to have hostile species on the planet, not to explain said species’ motivations; the point is that there is another generation, not the story of its conception; the point is how these people rise from the depths, not what they see or where they go when they return to the heights. The point is that the struggle exists and where it goes, not to detail every last movement of the battle.

In that respect, I’d call this work successful. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a good piece of broad-scope old-school sci-fi. The arc is very different from that of most fiction we’re used to, and that does take a little effort to assimilate, but it’s well worth it.

This was written partly in response to the following Not So Novel prompt:
Monsters in the Wilderness
…But also just because it’s been bugging me, and the monsters/wilderness theme lent itself to this little rant.

In the wilderness, there are monsters. Everyone knows that. It’s sort of a Thing in fiction, I think: exploring the various kinds of monsters that exist in all the myriad wildernesses around us, describing how we react when we encounter those monsters, examining and analyzing those reactions.

Every once in a while, though, you get a story in which the characters don’t appear to realize that they are the monsters. Sometimes that’s obviously intentional, but sometimes even the author seems totally oblivious. I suspect half my teeny-tiny reading audience has just had the exact same reaction I had when I reread that sentence after writing it, but — no, this isn’t another Twilight rant.

Rather, it’s about my current DailyLit selection. “Paradise”, the first story in Interstellar Patrol by Christopher Anvil, begins with your basic marooned-spacer conundrum: How to fix a damaged ship with no repair facilities available. The primary city of the planet on which the three spacemen are trapped was colonized with the intent of engineering a perfect society, but the computer left in control has some odd ideas about interpreting the directives involved. There are slums. There is a police state. Perfection is never what you think it is. You’re familiar with dystopia; this isn’t a particularly notable example, but you get the idea. So the techs who could have repaired the spaceship have packed up and moved elsewhere, and refuse to return until conditions improve. Which is what Roberts, Hammell, and Morrisey have to sort out before they can lift off again.

Fortuitously, they discover an odd glitch of machinery that allows them to project “wants” into human minds. They can now make the techs want to help them, make the city people want to improve their society so that the techs will be more inclined to come back and stay back. And so forth.

…Is your skin crawling right now? Because mine is.

It’s not that I can really argue with the very most basic level of decision making here. The use of the want-generator is necessary to get them out of their predicament. When they return with it a second time, they’re really just trying to clean up the mess they made the first time. (Because, you know, nothing goes as they expect it to. They can control wants, but not the interpretation of the desires they’re creating or the reasoning that leads to the way in which same are pursued.) Okay. I get that.

The thing is, though, that there are layers and layers of morality and ethics that the idea of the want-generator touches, and all that is just skimmed over. What we’re talking about here is the removal of not just free will but also free thought and even free emotion; people don’t get to decide what they really want, they’re just programmed to want specific things regardless of their natural inclinations. That is a really, really big ethical dilemma, trying to balance the needs of the crew against the rights of the population, weighing the crew’s responsibilities once the scheme is in motion and especially once other forces show up and enter the game, figuring out what freedom even is and how to respect it all around.

Crew and author alike shrug it off. In fact, in the end the crew are actually rewarded for their actions, which apparently are considered shining examples of ingenuity and inventiveness. Maybe a sentence or two is seriously devoted to question of whether the crew’s need to get off-planet before they run out of supplies gives them the right to play God with the populace in this way. The overriding assumption is that they do, and anyone who questions that is just being oppressive. To the crew. Because clearly they’re helping the people, right? Right?

It’s creepy. And it’s a wasted opportunity to explore the wilderness in which the three find themselves stranded. I don’t mean the literal forest infested with frightening alien creatures in the best tradition of planetary-exploration science fiction. I mean the metaphorical moral wilderness in which there is no map to tell them which of several unappealing paths to take, no compass even to point them in the right direction. They could have been explorers — also in the best tradition of science fiction! The utter lack of recognition that they are in a wilderness, though, has cast them as the monsters instead.

I’m trying very hard to give the book another chance with the second story. If it doesn’t grab me soon, though, I think I’ll have to just drop it. This first selection has certainly not made me very inclined to continue with book or author.

Murray Leinster paints the following picture for us: It is the time of the Cold War. The UN has declined to attempt to launch an artificial satellite into orbit, so the USA has gone ahead and done so on its own. Said satellite is a space station, with a small crew aboard. (I know now, though I did not when I started the book, that these events are detailed in a previous novel.) Now Joe Kenmore is commanding the first mission to fly a manned ship up to the space platform, bringing supplies and weapons. This is not a tale of alternate history; it was published four years before Sputnik 1 launched, eight years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man to make it to outer space. It is speculation on the future which has become our past.

You’d think that would get in the way. It doesn’t so much. History didn’t come close to matching what is depicted here, and this is not how we actually launch spacecraft, and so on and so forth. I know that. That’s okay, though, because what we’re told still has a sort of authentic feel to it. Like, I can totally see some engineer trying to solve the problem of achieving escape velocity and going, “Okay, what if we had a bunch of little jet engines, and then some JATOs…” I don’t know how the science checks out, either, but to me as an uninformed reader it at least feels real enough to support suspension of disbelief when it’s coming from a time when all of this was theoretical. I really enjoyed the first few chapters in that regard.

Unfortunately, there’s more to it than that. It’s a wonderful example of how science fiction proven wrong when history caught up with it can still be quite enjoyable. It’s not such a stellar example of the actual fact of writing, though. I give some allowance for the time in which it was written and the social and political biases it exhibits as a result; I’m not complaining about that. (Much.) It’s very repetitive, though. We’re told things multiple times, as though we won’t remember anything from one paragraph to the next, and the same words and phrases are used over and over and over again. Besides that, after a certain point in the book, things start to go awfully fast. I don’t mean that the action is fast-paced. I mean that in-story technological advances happen with a speed and a lack of testing, setbacks, red tape, or unexpected results that utterly defies everything I know about development. My suspension of disbelief was totally fine with “Americans get to space first, in the form of a manned space station”, but could not survive this.

I also, even allowing for the times, have trouble believing that anyone could look at this space station being loaded up with weapons, especially when they’re prepping to stock a prospective moon base and are absolutely overloaded, and think that it could only be interpreted as a threatening move by people trying to make the USA into the bad guys. I mean, hello. What part of “the US has a space station full of missiles they can throw around and no one else has figured out how to get there yet” doesn’t sound like it might be a little worrisome to certain other nations?

Ultimately: Neat historical curiosity for the first few chapters, but not that great overall.

This is a science fiction short story by James Blish which follows five members of a tree-dwelling society as they are cast out for doubting the Book of Law and forced to attempt survival on their planet’s surface. Nominally they are only condemned to stay on the surface (a primeval jungle which their society calls “Hell”) for a limited time, but in actuality no one has ever returned from even a very short sentence. And their sentence is very long indeed.

It’s honestly more interesting as a writing exercise and a thought experiment than as a story. It’s an exploration of writing from a foreign point of view, in this case that of someone who has spent their entire life in trees and is only just now encountering solid ground for the first time. It’s an exploration of indirect characterization. It’s to some extent an exploration of how a society develops, although that takes second place to the more personal stories of the characters we’re following. And those things are not without their charms, but…

…But I’m not sure it was entirely successful either. Some of the what-ifs feel a little disingenuous. Okay, the characters don’t know what a river is, but your audience perfectly well recognizes it. There’s a balance somewhere between the two, recognizing the characters’ ignorance while recognizing the reader’s knowledge, and I don’t feel like this story achieved that very often. I also disliked the ending; it was just soaked in the arrogance of humankind, and not in a way that acknowledges those actions as being at all undesirable. And the theme of the story, particularly in the beginning, maps a little too closely to debates about Biblical literalism for my taste. So, points for trying, but ultimately not something I can recommend.

As an aside, I cannot recommend the Librivox recording of this one regardless. The sound quality is poor, almost muffled, and the reader… Well, it turns out that there is an uncanny valley for sound as well as vision. The inflection is very text-to-speech, and yet there is enough variation to make me doubt that interpretation; it’s disconcerting at best.

The Heroines of History is a collection of short biographies depicting prominent female historical figures: Marie Antoinette, Catherine II of Russia, Elizabeth I of England (here “Elizabeth of England”, as the book predates Elizabeth II), Isabella of Castile, Joan of Arc, Maria Theresa, Mary of Scotland, Cleopatra, Madame Roland, and Josephine Bonaparte. It is nominally authored by John S. Jenkins, though he died before completing the work and it was finished according to his wishes and instructions.

I picked up the Librivox recording because I’d just been going through some history-related podcasts and had become interested in the stories of some of these ladies. It was also something that broke up conveniently into small segments to be listened to while I worked. Although some of the biographies are read by more than one person, most are presented by a single reader, which enhances the feeling of reading a small collection rather than a single volume.

It was an interesting read, but I would hesitate to recommend it as an actual source of reliable information as opposed to reading for entertainment. There is a heavy bias in most sections, sometimes for and sometimes against the subject, that troubles me somewhat. Perhaps Marie Antoinette really was that innocent and Catherine the Great really was that horrible, but it’s one thing to imply that through presentation of facts and another to explicitly tell your audience how these women should be perceived. For example, Isabella of Castile is given a free pass on the Spanish Inquisition because: “Had [she] been left to her own judgement, she would have used milder means to root out heresy from her kingdom; but actuated by her early teachers, who impressed her with the duty of thorough action and influenced by her confessor Talevera, she countenanced the proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition.” It isn’t her fault, she’s a good girl, really; it was the Catholic Church that made her go against her own sweet nature! The horror of the Inquisition, the conquest of the Muslims, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain is not softened, but Isabella is excused from personal responsibility for any of it and the Church blamed for influencing her to ignore her conscience on the subject of religious tolerance at every turn. By contrast, we are assured many times over that Elizabeth of England was a selfish tyrannical capricious coquette who actually contributed nothing to the age that bears her name, but the major evidence of her self-centeredness and the ways in which England’s golden age was brought about by other people than its reigning monarch is considered too well-known to bother presenting it. When I say the bias is easy to detect, I mean it kind of smacks you upside the head and refuses not to be detected.

I suspect that one would be better off to find other full-length works dealing with the specific women in whom one is interested, if one is concerned with neutral and objective reporting. If one is looking for public-domain true-ish stories of politics and intrigue, though, this may be worth picking up. The bias is generally easy to detect, making it also easy to compensate for, and of course one can always use it as a jumping-off point for further reading. Four stars for being entertaining, but my rating gets knocked down because it’s more skewed to entertainment and less skewed toward actually imparting factual information than a work like this should be.

Librivox’s description of this book, upon which I find myself unable to improve, reads as follows:

Peter Tourmalin is on a sea voyage back home to England from Australia, to return to his fiancee, and he is very bored. The fact that the time difference adds on extra hours to his boredom only makes it worse. So when he gets a unique opportunity to deposit his spare time into an account with the “Anglo-Australian Joint Stock Time Bank, Limited” he doesn’t hesitate for long. By opening this account, he doesn’t have to spend his spare time right away, but can withdraw it at any future date, when he wants a break. All he has to do is present a time cheque to any clock, and he is immediately brought back aboard ship to spend the time withdrawn.

Sounds perfect? Peter certainly thinks so, when on a dreary November morning in London, a little tired with his exacting fiancee, he presents his first cheque and gets to spend a sunny quarter of an hour aboard ship. However, things get complicated when it turns out the time withdrawn isn’t in consecutive installments, but all mixed up, leaving Peter often with no clue of any preliminaries or his relationship with the person he finds himself with. Since he is almost always dropped in the middle of a conversation this can be tricky – especially since his encounters include tete-a-tetes with not one but two beautiful young ladies (never at the same time of course!)… And things only get more and more complicated…

To which I said, “That sounds like fun!” And it was.

I love time travel stories — but only if they’re done well. What I usually mean by that is that our expectations of linear time are used to surprise and misdirect us as an audience, as with recent Doctor Who or Zelazny’s Roadmarks. However, I also enjoy tales that just plain have fun screwing with time. And that’s exactly what Tourmalin’s Time Cheques does. There aren’t any weighty concerns about paradoxes and continua. (Which is not surprising, given that it was published well before the conventions of time-travel fiction we’re used to were established.) It’s not particularly deep or intellectually taxing. It’s just a big “what if” that happens to involve time. The author is just enjoying exploring it.

…Until the end. The ending is unfortunately rather disappointing, after all that leads up to it. It feels rather as though the author got to a certain point and didn’t know what to do with it, and as a result decided to wrap it up in one of the most tired, cliched manners possible. It does rather have the advantage of addressing the issue of how all this is possible, but that isn’t enough to save it. (It makes me wonder whether this technique was as overused in 1891 as it is now, or if I’ve simply seen and read about too many modern soap operas.) Up until that point, though — I keep using this word, but “fun” is honestly what I keep thinking about this book. It was a nice, fun read.

And if the ending sort of sucks… It sucks in kind of an inspirational way, in that it has me wondering what this would look like if I wrote it. I don’t know that I’m really up to the task, but it’s certainly an interesting thing to think about.

So this is the Dickens novel in which orphaned Pip, brought up “by hand” by his abusive sister (and to a lesser extent her almost childlike husband Joe), unexpectedly and mysteriously comes into money and is consequently turned from a blacksmith’s apprentice into a young gentleman. There are many people whose opinions I value quite highly who like this book very much. Between that and having just finished and loved other Dickens, I had high hopes for Great Expectations.

I can’t give it the five-star rating. I just… can’t. I found the first half of the book or so difficult to engage with at all. The characters I was allowed to spend the most time with were entirely uninteresting to me, and I got only glimpses of the more intriguing Satis House crew. No one else seemed to have any particular backstory, nor did anyone seem to change much; there just wasn’t anything there to get involved in. The action (especially in the very beginning) tended a little toward the cartoonish, which gave me some problems taking it seriously. Not a whole lot seemed to be happening, either in terms of plot or of character development or even of simply setting the scene. Things improved a little once Pip was told of his good fortune and moved to London, but still: New money manages funds poorly and is ashamed of country relations. …And?

But then Estella and Miss Havisham reappear and we get a little more of that backstory, and then Pip’s benefactor is revealed and things really get going. There begin to be layers and depth and development and hidden connections. I think it really did begin for me with the revelation of Pip’s benefactor, which was a great exploration of how something done with good intentions can still be legitimately really squicky and how a person might react as the recipient of such. Pip’s own secret good deed was not a major focus in the overall story, but it was interesting to see that contrasted with what was done for him and how it was done. The novel began to be a redemption story in a multitude of different ways — not just a story of people being redeemed, but a story about redemption and the forms it takes and what happens when it is not granted. At any rate, it’s just the right combination of theme and plot and character. Some of it feels a tiny bit forced, perhaps (the wonderful coincidences Dickens invents feel less artificial in, say, Bleak House where the more complex cast of characters allows for a more plausible use of “oh, and by the way, it just so happens that X is also Y!”), but it’s still a vast improvement over the first half.

And this is why I’ve got to give it a middling rating. I endured the first half, and adored the second. If I could rate it based solely upon the second half, I’d give it four and a half stars easy, maybe five. Unfortunately, if I had to rate it based on the first half alone, that would only get two-ish. So strike a balance: it gets three from me.

I absolutely believe in the power of indie media and the Internet to distribute worthwhile material that the mainstream publishing houses/record companies/etc. don’t think are commercial enough, or PC enough, or edgy enough, or whatever the hell it is this week. Absolutely. I like that the Internet brings me so many options, allows me to connect so easily and so directly with creative people who are producing things that the mainstream doesn’t take any notice of.

This is a double-edged blade, though. The weakness of traditional publishing is that what’s available to us gets filtered through editors who decide what we should be consuming and set the standards by which everything else is judged. The strength of it, though, is that anything that comes out of it has been put through a pretty rigorous editing process that… Okay, it doesn’t ensure a high-quality product. Obviously. But it smooths out the rough edges, at least, and gives the author/artist some idea of how to put their best foot forward. As it were.

As I wander through the free offerings from publishers like Lulu and Smashwords in the iBookstore, it seems like a few of these tips might be useful for those who have determined that self-publishing is for them. Please don’t misunderstand me — I don’t intend to imply that all such authors suffer from these issues, just that the ease of self-publishing without a required review process seems to lead to a greater concentration of these issues in this type of publishing than in more traditional publishing.

1. Get someone impartial to beta read and critique your work before publication. Someone who will tell you what really needs fixed and not pull their punches because they’re your friend and don’t want to make things awkward between the two of you. Preferably several someones. Take a good look at the advice they give you, and follow most of it. If you very seriously think that they’ve misinterpreted what you were trying to do, try to find out why and adjust your work to guide readers more in the right direction.

1a. If you can’t find someone impartial, at least have a friend look at it. A good, honest friend who is good at articulating specific things that they find appealing and effective in books, and specific things that they don’t think work very well. Someone who knows how a good piece of writing is put together.

1b. If you don’t have any friends or anyone impartial to turn to, at least set it aside for a few months — yes, months — to let it cool off, and then read through it again yourself. (If you do have friends but aren’t comfortable with their reading your work, you might want to reconsider this whole publication thing. If you can’t bring yourself to show it to your friends, I question how you’re going to be able to show it to the world.)

1c. Seriously, do not just put your first draft up for publication. First drafts invariably suck. Fact of life.

2. Have someone else copy edit your work, too. Someone who really knows their grammar and punctuation. Even mainstream-published books inevitably have their mechanical issues, but if I can’t get through two pages of your book without wanting to grab a red pen and start marking it up, I’m certainly not going to finish reading the thing.

3. Fact-check. Even the small stuff. It’s very symbolic I’m sure to have a stalker send his victim a bottle of Obsession perfume under cover of the victim having won it in an Avon contest… But Obsession is a Calvin Klein perfume, and there’s no reason why Avon would be giving away a competitor’s product, and someone who has enough presence in the Avon market to be winning a contest would know that. It’s a tiny detail, but enough to throw your reader out of the moment, especially if your work has already been littered with weirdness and typos that show a lack of editing in other ways as well.

4. Logic-check. Does it really, honestly make sense for the thieves who have already got the night’s bank deposit to stick around and beat up the lone attendant in hopes of getting at the (probably piddly amount of) cash on hand for the next day instead of making good their escape before someone notices that something’s wrong? Does it really, honestly make sense for the attendant’s friend to try a daring vigilante rescue instead of calling for cops or at least some kind of backup? And if he absolutely must perform the rescue himself, does it make any kind of sense for him to try to shoot out the thieves’ kneecaps through a closed door when he can’t see to a) aim, or b) make sure he won’t hit his friend? I don’t care how exciting it is; if what your characters are doing makes no sense whatsoever, I’m not going to have any desire to continue reading.

5. Know how to promote yourself. The “about the author” text is supposed to tell me about you, not praise your own writing skills. (If you’ve won awards, by all means mention them here. Just don’t use this space to tell me that you write addictive fiction and compelling characters.) The blurb describing your book in the store should give me enough information to know what the book’s about, leave me wanting enough information to pick the book up, tell me how your book is different from others of its type (I’m looking at you, vampire romances), and it should really sell me on your idea. Because, see, you’re actually literally selling me a product here. Don’t just describe it in the smallest amount of words possible; make me excited about it!

I know, I know. Because I, who have managed two first drafts and no final drafts, much less publication, know so much about the biz. Well, I don’t — but I do know what turns me off, as a reader. Some of these books I’m reading samples of are genuinely bad, ill-conceived things. I’ve found one or two that are pretty decent. Some of them, though, just need a little more care taken with them, a little more thought. A little editing. I want to like and support this self-publishing thing, I really do, but it’s difficult when people abuse it like this.