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► Review swapping and Tinkerbell
Fri, 24 May 2013 008:06:00
| Recently I was informed by my good friend and excellent author Pete Morin that my review of his book was listed on a blog as proof of review swapping. There is a site called Stop the Goodreads Bullies, which has taken exception with Pete's books and his alleged review swapping procedures. While I have not been able to go out for a couple of beers with Pete, since he lives in Boston and I am in Finland, I have come to appreciate him very much. We met on Authonomy already in 2009 and, like so many other authors of the early days, began a friendship that enabled (hopefully both of) us to develop the craft through constructive criticism. I sent him my short stories and he let me read his own work, and I dare say that along with Greta van der Rol and Pd Allen, Pete's crits were the most valuable. So when we both published our work, we did leave reviews. However, I am absolutely adamant that Pete never solicited the praise I left for "Diary of a Small Fish" and his words on Tulagi Hotel were not influenced by our knowing each other. I would have left the very same review even if the book was written by John Doe. But this site, which I am unable to see now because of "internal server error", provides a long trail of supposedly evil behavior by Pete, as evidenced by a bunch of bilateral reviews. These people are hell-bent to prove Pete is one of the sock puppet people who buy and sell reviews. That is silly. It is idiotic in the extreme, because Pete's writing, and indeed the mutual reviews of people, are up to high standards and there simply is no need to buy reviews. The people who run this smear site are not out with their real names. Instead, it is run by "Tinkerbell", "Experiment 626", "Athena" and "Peter Pan". These people, who are too scared to have their names on the site, claim to be Goodreads readers who want to eradicate "false reviewing procedure on Goodreads" and "expose review buying and other bad behavior". Well, that's all good and well, but if they do it by smearing people who simply do not engage in those tactics in the first place, they are in error. Shooting from the bush is of course the first indication that the site is not to be taken seriously, but I was sufficiently irked to write them a comment. It sunk without a trace. So I sent another comment, this time directly to the admins, in which I said some nasty things about the allegations they make, and now I cannot reach the site. Of course, if you get attacked by Tinkerbell, and not someone honest enough to have their own name and email on the site, the effect is comparable to that of having the little fairy kick your butt from the movie screen. But I was really annoyed by being listed in this farcical blog, and I left this comment twice: "Well... as one who has the dubious honor of appearing as one of your "exchange students" (I am from Finland) I have to say this: I am astonished at the stupidity of this post and whoever wrote it. Such Mount Rushmore scale idiocy is rare to come by. I am an adult, a grown-up, and a fan of good literature wherever I can find some. I can make a distinction between scratching a friend's back and writing a review for a book I enjoyed very much. I know when a friend is fishing for a compliment and when he had produced something I can enjoy and help other people enjoy too. I have not endorsed any book or any other product by anyone, if I have not felt it deserving of the praise. I have left Robert Harris five star reviews on Amazon, and a two-star one for "The Fear Factor". Because it was not good. If you think it happens so that I rate Pete well and he rates me well too because we're friends, you're free to have that opinion of course. But I'll tell you something - I know a lot of indie authors, and the most honest and brutal feedback ever has come from these people. And I have told Pete Morin when his writing sucks. There simply is no point doing it any other way. I will keep my free will in rating, and issue stars and other adornments as per the merits of the book I read. And I thank you for keeping very far from me and my judgment in these issues - you can keep your sandbox free of me. Thank you for reading this far. It may have been arduous." It remains to be seen whether Tinkerbell knows how to read feedback. If you are able to see http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2013/05/19/pete-morin-review-swapping/, read the page and comment. It'd be so good to swamp them with replies. |
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► Book review: The Churchills by Mary S. Lovell
Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:34:00
| When you pick up a book of Winston Churchill, you sort of know what you are going to get. You think you will have yet another retelling of how Winston won World War 2, after featuring in the Boer War as a correspondent and even before that in Sudan as a cavalry officer. Well, yes - you get that, but you get a lot more than that and in a much more entertaining package than many other books can offer. The main feature of this book is of course the extraordinary love and affection that Winston Churchill found in Clementine Hozier. There are few couples at the top of the ruling classes in this world who have found a relationship that sees them through the good and the bad times: Margaret and Dennis Thatcher, Ronald Reagan with his Nancy, and Mikhail Gorbachev with Raisa Gorbacheva spring to mind. I do declare though that the Churchills take the cake. Clementine realized early on that Winston was an exceptional man and he would change the world, but only if he had a home to call his own and a balanced life. She set out to provide just that, and she did it so well that Winston was able to steer full steam ahead through times of peace and war. This is not to say the Churchills did not have their adversities in life, far from it. Besides losing one daughter to sickness at the age of three, their other children provided ample problems all through their lives, and the author is very balanced in her delivery of these events in the Churchills' life. In fact, it is in a way cathartic to see that even if you rule the remains of an empire, you still have to deal with an unruly son whose ego was second only to his father's, and who had such trouble locating his place in the world. This book also excels in the description of upper-echelon life in the late Victorian period into the Roaring Twenties and the post-war era. It is nothing short of revelatory to see how behind the facades, men are cuckolded with glee and women are thrust into societal sidelights through the unbelievable extramarital affairs of their husbands. It seems that many marriages were entered into for all the wrong reasons such as money, prestige, family ties or simple coercion. Another feature that gets much air time in the book is the role of money in the said circles. Take Blenheim, the Churchills' family estate, a vast mammoth of a building in dire need of funds for repair and upkeep. The solution by the then Duke? Marry money. It's fine, because the mother of the bride-to-be had long been of the opinion that her daughter should be a Duchess. So, Sunny Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt got married only to find very quickly that they were exact opposites in any issue imaginable. Sure, the next generation heir was produced, but the heart-rending story of these two unhappy people has been delivered by the author in a delicate vein. WHy read this book? First, because it sheds light on Winston Churchill the man instead of WC the PM. Second, because few books have such a wide cast of characters, and still form a coherent narrative. And third, because this is the best book I have read so far that makes you understand just how the posturing, pomp, and circumstance of Victorian England actually operated, and how the influx of American money princesses changed things. This is a highly entertaining read and you will have much fun picturing people running into their mistresses in the company of another mistress while on the run from their wives. And vice versa. And you will see that there is such a thing as true love. |
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► 8mm and historical fiction
Sun, 07 Apr 2013 009:24:00
| I just went to Wittner Kinotech's site and bought a roll of 8mm film. Technically it is 16mm film, but it is shot twice, once on each side of the film, and then split down the middle. I have a Bolex D8L camera of 1962 vintage, left to me by my late father, and it is a testimony to its engineering excellence that it still takes perfect movies. My father was a home movie buff to the extent of mixing musical scores to his 20 minute movies (Wagner for the movie "To Austria and back by car" etc.) and hammering a hole in a wall between two rooms to be able to project from there, cinema-wise. He would have been crazy about the new way of making digital movies with the limitless editing capabilities and various delivery methods, but he passed away before seeing the old home movies on DVD. I find it absolutely wonderful that there still are sites where you can buy this film stock and have it developed too. My Bolex projector still runs, I have a spare lamp, and if that one fails, I can buy one online from a small company that makes special lamps like that. The Internet is wonderful. I have bought a roll a year since 2011. When the movie returns from Wittner, we watch it on the projector, then send it to be scanned. That service is only 20 euros per roll, and then it is very easy to edit the movie into a coherent one. It is amazing how real 8mm film sends you back in time. Last summer our son was about to leave for the Army to do his national service, and I shot some film of him grilling sausages, and then another scene of him returning for his first furlough. The ambiance is magically transformed into something from the 60s and there's this indefinable sense of peeking into history, merely because the movie is silent and the colors are so full. But as a historical fiction author, my job is to do exactly the opposite. I should take views and vistas from the past, and deliver them to the modern reader so that they don't seem vignetted and shot in film, complete with light leaks and dust and streaks, but as if they were watching their fellow men and women today, in full personal view. This is sometimes hard to do, and yet, at other times I get feedback from readers that they saw the scene in their own mind as fresh as if they were there themselves. It is times and comments like that which make it all worthwhile. I was especially touched when a reader of Tulagi Hotel wrote a short review on Amazon, explaining that the book had taken him back to his own memories when he took part in World War 2 in the Pacific. Of course, when it doesn't work, it's not very good reading. We all have read historical fiction that just doesn't sound right and doesn't deliver the immersive experience, and I am sure I have written such stuff myself. In that case it is back to the writing chambers, to think hard about how to take the saturated colors and Technicolor images and jerky camera movement of age-old films, and transfer that to the high-definition life we live today. It is a challenge, and I enjoy it almost as much as listening to the spring-driven Bolex whirring and capturing our life on film. |
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► A quick request posing as a blog entry
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:17:00
| Here's a little request, (a little more direct than what I usually do), and I've been told the results might be very beneficial to the book. It has to do with Amazon's search engine and how it can be trained. If you know someone who might be interested in Tulagi Hotel, ie. someone who goes for meticulously researched historical fiction with a little romance and way too many airplanes in it, please ask them to do this: 1) Go to Amazon, and search the Kindle store for "World War 2 novel" 2) Find Tulagi Hotel in the results, click straight through, and buy it. Now, this process, if done this way, should push the visibility of Tulagi in search results. I am in no way against purchasing in via the natural method, of course, but... you know. End of direct marketing. I will provide a regular blog entry soon. Probably to do with supernatural issues. Or 3D design and books. Or something ... completely... different. |
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► A review of "Chickenhawk" by R. Mason
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:44:00
| Once every five years or so, a book comes along that really sticks in your mind after you've finished it. "Chickenhawk" by Robert Mason is definitely one of them. I bought this book on eBay in the year 2000, and I've re-read it many times. It never fails to deliver a fresh reading experience. Mason used to dream of flying as a kid, and he experimented with jumping off roofs and other high places. It was not until he enrolled in the US Army's Helicopter School in 1964 that he managed any serious time in the air though. He wastes no time in getting to the thick of it, and he takes us through the school in vivid detail. Learning to fly helicopters is not for everyone, but Mason manages the craft and graduates just in time - for Vietnam. He is deployed with the 1st Cavalry Regiment in August 1965 into the cauldron of war. He decides he wants to fly 'slicks' as opposed to 'guns', which means he flies unarmed troop-carrying Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters. He takes troops to battle, evacuates casualties, flies cargo all over the country, and acts as a 3D chauffeur for a major conducting clandestine operations with his grunts. From the first moment of being shot at while landing troops, to the final flight before his tour of duty expires, he allows us to board his trusty Huey and takes off with us in the back. The invaluable instructions of the more experienced pilots, ranging from how to maintain position while flying in a hundred-ship formation to how to use the Huey as a lawn mower when landing on top of a hill that is sprouting bamboo, keep him safe and sound. Except that the strain of flying around the clock if need be, and the toll of seeing people shot down, and having to land the Huey in the river so that they can just wash off the blood of evacuated grunts begins to take a terrible toll on him. When he is discharged, he finds it hard to readjust to the civilized world after the madhouse of Vietnam, and in a short epilogue tells us how things went after the war. What is the enduring legacy of this book? It must be the way Mason frankly and candidly tells us everything that went on during his tour. He doesn't glorify war, or his pilot friends, or what he did when he was there. He merely recounts the life of a man who wanted to fly helicopters and was issued the best of them to fly in war. His tales, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes even incredible, never cease to drive home the message that war is a terrible thing. This book is not to be missed by anyone who is into history, especially aviation or military history. It is one of the classic books in the genre. |
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► A review of Enemies - a history of the FBI
Mon, 14 Jan 2013 005:26:00
| [Note - I read the translated Finnish version of the book, but the translator, Jyri Raivio, did excellent work with this book] The FBI is an iconic organization; even if it is an American feature, it is recognized and remembered around the world. When I grabbed this book, I expected to learn many details of the crime-busting the FBI has done, you know, the Dillingers and the Bonnies & Clydes, and how the Mafia was tackled. There is some of that in this book. But much, much more this book focuses on the blatant civil rights abuses the FBI has committed all through its existence. From the very beginning the FBI was designed to be the cutting edge of the law, the final frontier that would maintain peace in the country and protect the American citizen from the threat of communism and organized crime. Well, if the aim was good, the methods used to achieve that were definitely outside the tool box allowed by the law. I was very surprised to see how J. Edgar Hoover was able to keep his outfit untouchable by such boring people as a succession of Attorney Generals. Some of these condoned his wholly and totally unconstitutional actions, and some just feared him and let him keep attacking the civil rights of the people he deemed to be threats to society. This bunch of people was so heterogeneous that it was really stretching my imagination even to understand who were being targeted by Hoover's FBI. Then during WW2, the FBI enlarged its operations way beyond its intended purpose and installed agents everywhere. Some of these actually managed to do useful work, but the quality of the agents sent out was not very high; consequently the results were more often negligible. If you want to compare the FBI's operations to those of the CIA, see "Spycraft" by Wallace and Melton. The juxtaposition of FBI and CIA is actually interesting, especially since neither of them have managed to sit comfortably within the framework of the law. The rest of the book is pretty much taken up by the fight against global terrorism, and even in that part of the book, incompetence and turf wars are much more on the scene than successful operations. Considering the amount of manpower and the sheer torrent of dollars issued to the FBI, I had to collect my eyebrows from my neck many times. Single agents, hard-working, loyal, and true to the law, have produced good results, but bungling chiefs and the incessant inter-departmental squibbling have wasted much of the benefits. Yet to me, the biggest worry this book raises is this: I just reviewed "Wiseguy" by Nicholas Pileggi, and was appalled by the way any regular citizen can become a target for the Mafia. The society of gangsters has taken on the society of citizens and has become superior to it, rendering judges and politicians corrupt, and financing their way out of any legal consequences. And now, when I read this book, I saw how the one of the arms of the establishment have attacked the society of citizens from the other direction, stripping ordinary citizens of even basic civil rights based on hearsay and sometimes not even that. It is terrible to read of how the mere hunch of associating with Communists was enough to land one in jail and in serial court cases which were unwinnable, because the FBI had no proof, and the citizen was not told why he was being accused and of what. As a final comment, I have to say this: I see the freedom so much touted by so many Americans in grave jeopardy from many directions. Maybe it would be good to finally issue a charter for the FBI and see to it that they stick to it. |
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► A review of "Wiseguys" By N. Pileggi
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:40:00
| This is the sort of book that makes reading true crime interesting. What I mean is this: while reading about gruesome murders is sometimes chillingly good, and one reads such books just for the shock value, sometimes a book comes along that gives you the big picture. This is such a book. Henry Hill fell in love with the Mafia way of life as a kid, and he stuck to it until the bitter end - or rather, until he had two choices. Either join the Federal Witness Protection Program, or face the music with the mobsters he had been living his life since he was twelve. The music would have killed him. Pileggi's book traces the life of Henry Hill through all his scheming and swindling, from earning a few pennies delivering sandwiches to poker players to stealing cigarette trucks, and on to stealing millions of dollars' worth of cash and other goods from Kennedy Airport. It is sobering to see how anything is stealable in their world, and how little faith these people have in ownership. It is also hair-raising to read this book and learn how these mobsters would just identify a target, be it Italian scarves, a truck of booze, or a load of mink furs, and they'd just go and grab it. Sometimes there is assistance from the people who have been charged with delivering the truck - they may be in on the hit and get a little bit of the money, but more often they just enter the truck, tell the driver they know where he lives, and drop the hapless guy off the truck by the highway and disappear with his truck. It is this disregard for other people that makes this such a chilling book. In this world of wiseguys, all is theirs for the taking. In fact, it made me think that if this is still the case, that anything you happen to possess that is of interest to the Mob can be taken away from you, the much-touted American concept of freedom is not very valid. At least you're not free to own things, and if you try to put your case to the law, Hill provides ample examples of how both the police and the judicial system has members on the take. And when you finally get to the end, and see how Hill escapes a bullet in the head (that was issued to everyone else who knew of the Lufthansa heist) to become a Federal employee, you wonder... is this all okay and correct that this should happen? People are killed en route to this, millions of dollars of property and cash are redistributed among wiseguys, and yet the prime mover becomes another man in lieu of the one he never was. I am not sure. Read this book to learn about the business of being a wiseguy, but for splatter and flying kidneys, read "The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer" instead. |
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► Visiting Mr Baggins
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:36:00
| Visiting Mr. Baggins So, I gave in to temptation and went to see The Hobbit. Having seen 1½ of the LOTR trilogy, I knew what to expect. To a point. I have a long history with Tolkien. I first read Lord of the Rings when I was given the classic 1960s Houghton & Mifflin boxed paperback set for helping a friend of my sister to move house. I got into the book very deep, and loved every moment. In fact, I happened to find Pink Floyd's "Animals" at the same time I first read LOTR, and to this day I cannot listen to the song "Pigs" without thinking of Orcs. I then went into Silmarillion with the same gusto as I accorded to the trilogy, and loved it even better. The High Elves and all the rest of the cast just resonated in my mind and I came out of the book with my head tingling - this was literature at its best. I still like Silmarillion best of all his works. And then there was the Hobbit. I had to take an exam in Childrens' Literature at the University, along with seven other books, so I read it a little fast at first, but returned to it in the summer. I found it a very enjoyable introduction to LOTR and a great book on its own, as an adventure for all ages. Now it is out in glorious 2D, even gloriouser 3D, and the gloriousest HDR 48 frames per second. Given my inability to stomach 3D in movies, I went to see the regular version. I have to say, I got my money's worth even in that old format. The thing is that it is simply overflowing with the magic of CGI. Ever since Tron, movies have fought to have the biggest guns in computer-generated imagery. Just remember Terminator, Star Wars, and all the other movies which boldly state how many processors were used to create so many gigapixels and full-CGI movie frames. If you think of it, today's kiddie TV shows have more CGI than many a full-length movie had in the 90's. And it is just this onslaught of CGI that wears me out. When you do motion capture on ten people, you can easily turn that into a hundred differently moving characters, and those hundred become 48,000 goblins with a click of the mouse. In this movie, the excess of everything is the norm. It's truly a derivative of the LOTR movies, where we got to admire the wondrous plains of Rohan, the dungeons of Moria, and the sulphurous wasteland of Moria, all created in 3D. Now, after we leave the sedate Shire behind, there is nary a slow moment, unless our protagonists sleep. The first attack of the Orcs is believable, but the trouble with the rock giants having the rematch of Ali vs Frazier is that while the rock giants move well enough, there's so much debris flying around that no one could survive. Why? Because the computer that rendered it was the size of an aircraft carrier and it could do that. All the rest of the mass scenes pay homage to Lion King - remember the scene where the gnus rush down the canyon - but the problem is that there are simply too many Orcs and Goblins and whatever sundry baddies Middle Earth houses. It would be better to have just 1,000 Orcs instead of as many as your rendering engine will produce without exploding. I also did not think it is necessary to provide Rivendell with so many waterfalls from the mountainside. At the moment it looks like there's a gigantic dam just behind the horizon and it is about to burst. They are absolutely lovely to see, and the rendering power it takes to make them is astonishing, but two or three would have been quite enough, thank you. That aside, I think Mr Jackson and his screenwriters have done well with the storyline. Tolkien's original work, of course, is a story full of goodies, and it is so well written too that all they have had to do is to pick the cherries. The dwarves are a lovable lot of hard-headed warriors, somewhat cartoonishly moulded, and a little too indestructible, but it bodes well for the next two episodes. And it is always great to see Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and Hugo Weaving in one scene. All in all, I was 80% happy with the result. I would have liked it better were it not for the CGI overkill, but we are probably so inundated with it that it takes a lot of CGI to make any impact. |
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► A review of "Spitfire Women of World War II"
Sun, 02 Dec 2012 13:09:00
| War is a bad thing by definition, but it does create unusual circumstances in which unusual things can happen. When Britain prepared for and then joined WW2, it had enough pilots to fight the war but not enough pilots to ferry aircraft to the squadrons. Hence the ATA (Air Tansport Auxiliary) was founded, and soon it was seen that more pilots would be needed for it than were readily available. This crack was forcefully hammered wide open by Pauline Gower in the UK and Jackie Cochran in the US, and women entered the ATA. Originally they were allowed to fly docile aircraft such as the Avro Anson, but bit by bit Gower managed to grow the stable of airplanes her pilots were allowed to fly. Soon she had pilots taking to the skies in Hurricanes and Spitfires, and eventually gargantuan Lancasters and B-24 Liberators. This book brings us delightful stories of such classic aviation heroines as Diana Barnato Walker, who flew a Tempest when it shed its air scoop and much of the lower part of the plane with it. The squadron officer who was to receive the plane chided her for delivering just half of the plane. There's Maureen Dunlop, who exited a Barracuda just as the reporters from Picture Post took her picture (see [...] for that great shot) and who flew many a hazardous delivery. And of course, Ms Duhalde, known as Chile for her native land, who promised to knock a Polish woman pilot's teeth off for jumping the landing pattern. These ladies delivered thousands of airplanes but also died in the rapidly changing British weather, when they were surprised by a cloud, or flew into mountainsides when they became lost. The balance between a successful delivery and a fiery death in a crash is well told in this book. What is also well told is the incredible callousness of the all-male military aviation establishment, which refused to give the women pilots even rudimentary instrument flight training, which resulted in many deaths directly attributable to loss of spatial awareness. The author has done a good job in presenting the big picture, but it could be structured better. Now we often are led from one situation into another which has no other connection to the grand narrative than the person we started with, and that makes it a little hard to follow the action. Also, in the Kindle edition, quotes were not indicated: many times you'd start reading a fist person narrative right after a third person viewpoint and it takes some time to figure out who is talking. Nevertheless, these minor quibbles aside, these ladies deserved this book and all publicity they could possibly get. Now in their nineties, some of them still remember the ATA days as the best of their lives, and after reading this book, you will understand why. |
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► The next big thing
Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:08:00
| I’ve been tagged in The Next Big Thing by fellow writer Susanne O'Leary, who has a string of wildly successful books in a variety of genres. Susanne can be seen at http://bit.ly/SwT9eQ I’m instructed to tell you all about my next book by answering these questions and then to tag five other authors about their Next Big Thing. So here I go! ** -What is the working title of your next book? I have tentatively called it "Willow Hill 3D". Willow Hill is a sanatorium which has a real life counterpart. -Where did the idea come from for the book? It is a result of two things. I write speculative fiction and most of my work has a little twist of the paranormal, and on the other hand, I am a full time University lecturer with 3D in my domain. One day, as I was working in Blender, the open source 3D software I teach, it occurred to me it would be very spooky if something appeared in your 3D model that you did not insert there yourself, and from there on it was regular plotting. -What genre does your book fall under? I have not yet decided whether it is Young Adult or regular Mainstream Horror. Both would have advantages, but I must first work out the internal operation of the story to see which genre would be better for it. -Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Ah- As with all my books, I would like to see newcomers instead of the old hands. Of course, since the story happens at a University and it features a certain lecturer who is tall and exceedingly handsome, George Clooney would get to play, well... me. -What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? A student, working on his thesis, creates a 3D representation of a sanatorium with a history of haunting, and in doing so, is contacted by the dead staff of the sanatorium. -Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? -As I am now in the stables of Fingerpress in the UK, I am happy to report they would consider this book. -How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? -I don't have it yet in a manuscript form, but the synopsis is quite complete and the remaining writing would take me about a year or eighteen months. Having a full-time job slows down the writing. -What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? "The Shining" does spring to mind, but my style would be close to the old English ghost story tales. Also, in nonfiction, John G. Fuller's two books, "The Airmen who Would Not Die" and "The Ghost of 29 Megacycles". -Who or what inspired you to write this book? Two things actually. All of Fuller's work is very readable, laconic, but very much fact based; I would like to create fiction that works in the same format and keeps the reader both at bay and at the edge of the seat. Then again, I've seen people create stunning 3D models using Blender, displayed at BlenderArtists.com, and I wanted to see if I could connect the two worlds with some paranormal bridges. -What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? I hope to bring in some detail of how you work in 3D and maybe encourage some readers to try their own hand - Blender is free and while it is not the easiest thing to learn, there are oodles of free tutorials available. --- Here are some other authors I’ve tagged to tell you about their Next Big Thing! Diane Nelson - http://bit.ly/gP1uj1 Greta van der Rol - http://bit.ly/U9jHit Bill Kirton - http://bit.ly/xKfvNE Kimberly Menozzi - http://bit.ly/StP3kh Do make sure you drop by to see their worlds. |
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► We're back in business
Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:58:00
| It is time to update you all. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you will have seen that I have had the good fortune of signing a deal with another publisher. When Diane Nelson told her authors that she was going to move from publishing to editing, we all felt nothing but gratefulness toward her. She did an amazing job and worked really hard at Pfoxmoor Publishing, but as a former President of Finland, Mr Paasikivi, said - the wise always acknowledge facts. At that point then the question arose, whether to self-publish or whether I should try to get onto the roster of another publisher. I pondered upon this for a week or two, and then I decided that for me, a publisher would be the better option. Going solo would have been nice in its own right, but two things spoke against it. First, I am a full time lecturer with quite a lot of students on the courses and as thesis candidates, so the time I can assign to sales and marketing is limited. And as my plan still is to get translated, being represented by a publisher gives me some small edge in these efforts. In any case, I contacted some of my author friends whose opinions were much valued, and through these contacts I started discussions with one well-known house. Due to issues of circumstance and timing, these did not lead to a contract, but it was during this time I was contacted by Fingerpress, a small but very energetic publisher in England. It turned out that my books would be well suited to the publishing style of Fingerpress, and my discussions with Matt Stephens, the publisher, went really well right from the start. In no time at all, I had a contract and my books were being edited for re-issue. A new cover was put together and while it is very different from the previous one, it does represent the colors and locations and events of the book well too. So the situation now is this: Tulagi Hotel is out on Kindle both at Amazon UK and US. It will be out in paperback within a couple of weeks and also available from Amazon in that format. Filtered Light and Other Stories will be out on Kindle soon. The links are Amazon US: http://amzn.to/UGYqh0 Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/PSGTSa I am happy to send out review copies to interested bloggers or reviewers - please mail me at heikki dot hietala at sabulo dot com, and we'll get you a book. |
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► Update - what's going on?
Sat, 18 Aug 2012 13:46:00
| As you may have seen, my books have been taken offline. This is due to the decision taken by Diane Nelson, owner and publisher at Pfoxmoor, that she no longer can both work full time (and then some) running Pfoxmoor Publishing, write her own work in the prodigious amounts she does it, and keep editing books for others. Hence, she decided to close the publishing business. While I was very sad to learn of this decision, I fully understand the rationale and support Diane. She did sterling work as a publisher, and us authors in her stable (John Booth, Bill Kirton, Maria Kuroschchepova, and others) felt we were being lovingly looked after. Our books were always picture-perfect in layout and spelling, and Diane would stop at nothing to ensure the best of service for her authors. I, and the others, cannot thank Diane enough. So, what next? I'm very lucky in having made many friends through writing. Many of these people have gone on to self-publishing their books, and they have made it into selling thousands of books. Some of these have told me to go ahead and self-publish Tulagi Hotel and Filtered Light myself, and I did consider that for a while. However, my situation is a little different from these friends, so I remained looking for a new publisher. I am glad to report I have found a house which is interested in having me on their lists. I will let you know, as soon as the negotiations are over, which publisher this is, but I can't do that just yet. Their list of authors and books is extensive, and it looks like a perfect match for my style and genres. I hope to be able to reveal more very soon. And then what, with the new publisher? First, I hope this move will gain visibility for my books. Just before Diane shut down her outfit, I was getting good sales on Filtered Light, and surprisingly, on Tulagi too, which means some cross-pollination must have happened there. Therefore I remain confident that when the books become available again, I may get the traction back and see a little surge in sales. I also have a dream regarding Tulagi. I mean, so many people have come back to me and told me it is 'cinematic' and that they see it as a fifties movie when they read it. Looking at the current crop of movies, you can see that every few years a story comes along that is based on WW2, and even if I say so myself, I could easily see Tulagi produced as a movie. While it appears there are no flying OS2U Kingfishers around anymore, a replica would be easy to produce. The air battles would not pose a problem these days, what with the giant leaps made in computer graphics. Sure, a major part of the movie would demand heavy CGI, as the air combat of the day called for hundreds of planes of various types in the air, but that is a negligible cost today. The key characters would have to played by unknown young actors, but there's a few spots for Clooney-rate people. All I need is mr Spielberg's phone number, but it seems to be unlisted, and none of my friends have it. In case you know someone in the business, I'd love a chat with them. Is this stupid daydreaming? Sure it is. But the entire book is the result of a stupid daydream, as is its publication first by Diiarts and then by Pfoxmoor, and as is the publication of my short stories as Filtered Light. I never had any certainty these things would come to pass, but they did. Getting Tulagi made into a movie is a dream now, but maybe, just maybe, with a little luck, it becomes reality. You may be surprised at some point. PS: When I republish my books, I would love it if you could drop a little review for them. I saved the reviews of the previous edition, and will mail the writers the texts, but new ones would be very welcome. |
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► Origins of "Wind in the Pipes" Part 2
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 14:44:00
| [You may want to read the next entry, Part 1, first - it contains the link to the story being discussed.) So, we have established the fact that the church organ is indeed haunted. It plays by itself without human intervention. Surely this must mean the inanimate object harbors paranormal forces. The concept of haunting is very interesting to me, since it is so much part of popular culture. The stories of haunted houses and objects abound in the folk tales of every nation on the planet. If you check the Internet for the "most haunted house" in England, you'll see it is the Borley rectory. Buildings associated with the Church have always been staple places for ghostly activity. Maybe it's because of the role of the Church as the gateway between this world and the next, and the sacraments it has to keep the living apart from the dead. But does it always have to be malevolent? Is it not possible to have a positive force haunting something? This type of haunting is actually what I am trying to build, when I let Stephen Newman hear the first tones of "Three Blind Mice" in a vacant church. This he first takes to be an ominous thing, but when he discusses it with the old priest, the whole idea behind the self-activated organ becomes clear. Besides haunting, we can find the ubiquitous concept of dead people hanging around, waiting for someone to die, so as to take him or her across the threshold and into the world beyond our own. I have taken this idea a little further and suggest that the people of the close-knit village, who eventually die, will wait for others; and to signal their presence in the village still, they learn to play the organ. Now, the young priest believes this to be something that he needs to guard himself against and prays in the company of the old priest. He consoles the young curate - there's no need to pray. This is another time when I suggest that merely being dead doesn't turn one into something evil. Quite on the contrary. If one was a pillar of society while alive, like Farmer Miles of Woollenham, why would he be automatically something sinister after passing away? Or why should they lose their sense of humor? There's a magnificent book called "The Airmen who would not die" by John G. Fuller. It is the single best documented case of survival after death, when the men who perished in the crash of the dirigible R-101 came through a medium and explained in grisly detail what happened when the airship crashed in Belgium. These men bring not only their information, but they bring it in their own ways, their own words, and with their own sense of humor. Back to the story. When the two priests are in the dark church all alone, and the organ plays the delicate tune by Bach ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"), the young priest accepts the old vicar's view: as below, so above. If the priests take care of their villagers in life, the villagers will repay in kind, only in the hereafter. A little later the old vicar explains that his predecessor stole a sizable sum from the parish, and when the organ played at his passing, it was no gentle tune, but "Confutatis, maledictis!" which is a strongly-worded part of Mozart's Requiem, reserved for wrongdoers. It is at this point that I offer the second piece that is in place to give a creepy feeling to the reader. As the Reverend Redstone, the thief, passed away, his successor felt a presence in the church that wasn't God. The old priest soon suffers a stroke, and dies afterwards. Why, then, does the organ play... "Blest, I may now look on thee, oh, my native land, and gladly greet thy pleasant pastures"...? This is the Pilgrims' Choir from Tannhäuser. In this scene, Tannhäuser is shown to receive the Lord's blessing and forgiveness for his muddled love life. As the music plays in the church where Stephen stands, he understands a photograph he saw in the hands of the old vicar. It also transpires that the old vicar had some sort of affiliation with a lady in his youth, and that the love, which he had to forsake, is now atoned. This piece of music is also simply wonderful to listen to. I had some other pieces in mind, notably Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem, but the Confutatis worked better in the dramatic scene. I could also have inserted another piece by Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, because the theme of being cursed to sail the seas of the world eternally could also be taken to mean reincarnation. But, as it happened, I merely liked this bit the best, and I think it fits the theme nicely. It also brings us back to the genesis of the story itself, the funeral, and my strong emotions as I played this at the interment of my father's ashes. This event took place on a sunny July day at a graveyard with tall pine trees swaying in the wind, and white clouds sailing slowly across the blue skies. To me this story means the most of all my stories, but I can't really say why. You be the judge as to what it says to you. |
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► Origins of "Wind in the Pipes"? Part 1
Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:53:00
| I agreed with my publisher, Diane Nelson, that my short story collection "Filtered Light and Other Stories" will become free for three days at the end of July. To assist with that sales drive, for which I would dearly love some help from you all, I wanted to tell you a little of the collection, and especially one of the stories in it. The 18 story package has nine stories of speculative fiction, and the other nine are flash fiction, humor, and real life, with a couple of Scifi entries for good measure. Speculative fiction is my favorite genre these days, because I like stories and movies wehere there is a little element of the eerie, especially if you can't just put your finger on it. I have written a 6,800 word story called "Wind in the Pipes". I stuck to the name, despite some efforts by my British friends to tell me it suggests something you get after eating lots of peas. It does not (indignant humph). It describes the story well, since the main events take place around the organ in a rural and medieval English church. You can read the story at http://bit.ly/MgUj7I and you may want to read it first, before venturing into the text below. There are some spoilers there. The whole idea for this story came to me at the funeral of my late father. He had requested as much music and as little talk as possible. In specific, he had asked the organist to play "The Pilgrims' Choir" from Tannhäuser at the event. As it turned out, the organist declined, and we got some other music instead. However, I found a reel tape from 1966 where my father himself had recorded the said piece as a choral arrangement, and I was able to salvage that on an MP3 player. I played it when we interred his ashes. So, the idea of organ pipes playing by themselves is very directly from my own life, because at the funeral I concentrated on the organ music to keep calm. I could have written out the story straight into modern day Finland, but I wanted a more atmospheric time and place for it. At first I loosely based it in the inter-war years in Britain, but very soon the timing was fixed into 1942. This is because I wanted to have that damp, dark feeling into the opening scene, so as to lay the ground for the rest of the story. And if you have an insufferable need to say I am fixated with World War 2, go into the corner and sit down. To tie the location and time in place, I have the Germans attacking the village during the famous Baedeker Raids. These bombing raids that took place between April and June, 1942, on York, Norwich, Canterbury, Bath and Exeter. The name comes from a German propagandist who claimed Germany "shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide". To be frank, most of the raids took place during the night, but it is not beyond reason that one of the early morning bombers could be separated from the attack wave, and hit the school to kill 20 boys (needed for the storyline later.) Okay - the young priest, Stephen Newman, straight out of his studies and a stint at the Diocese, arrives at the parish, late in the evening, wet and cold and miserable. Some may say it's a cliched start, but then again - cliches abound in literature, it's how you use them that makes the difference. I am sure the old priest - young priest coule is second only to the good cop - bad cop setup, but I hope I managed to use the main characters well enough. By bringing the young priest straight from the Diocese into a rural parish I could also import the information that the old priest's church was haunted, and that the higher echelons were aware and worried by it. I spent quite a lot of time establishing the relationship between the two priests. This is because I needed the younger one to trust the vicar later, when the odd events begin to manifest themselves in the parish church. Also, the fact that the parish of Little Fawnton was called Little Haunton in the Diocese had to be built into the mindset of the young priest, and that takes some time. As he comes to the parish, he needed to be wary, but it's not until page 5 that anything out of the ordinary happens. To some, this may be too slow, but I hope you bear with me. Then we come to the events themselves. I am not a fan of out-and-out ghosts that are only brought in to scare people. Instead, I would love to be able to write in such a vein that the eerie and out-of-the-ordinary feeling gradually builds itself through little incidents that cannot readily be explained away. Therefore, the young priest does not see anyone in the parish church, but the organ plays on itself. He hears some tones first, and doesn't understand from where they come, and then hears an almighty blast from the organ, as if someone hit all the keys at once. That is brought in to scare people. Another feature in the supernatural that fascinates me is how some people are at ease with ghosts and the supernatural. As I have never had a real experience in the field, I can't tell how I'd act in a situation like that happening on Stephen. I probably would be spooked out of my skin, as I am quite impressionable. But priests are supposed to handle the spirit world too, and Stephen works hard to understand what happens with the organ. The old vicar, then, is entirely at peace with his automatic musical instrument, because he knows why the pipes play. I've read quite a lot on ventures into spiritism and reaching out to the spirit world. In "The Scole Experiment", verifiable research showed that during these spiritist experiments, temperatures could drop by ten to fifteen degrees C. If this is so, why wouldn't it be possible that ghosts, or entities, or spirits, could alter the air pressure in organ pipes? After all, that's what causes it to make the sound. So, my ghosts make themselves known to the real world by causing wind in the pipes. Once Stephen understands who these ghosts are, and why they play, it is easier for him to be at ease with them. I will post the second instalment for this in a week or so. Stay tuned. |
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► A review of "The American Future" by Simon Schama
Sun, 20 May 2012 19:53:00
| Simon Schama's book is a really interesting one to read. It has such strength in its message, such lucidity in the examples, and such a formidable intellectual background that it promises to be a very fulfilling book. Schama is very well versed in American history and has done his research meticulously. He takes the reader across the vast landscape of Americanism and conclusively shows how that concept is one based on eternal discovery, eternal progress, and the American ideal of finding your happiness through hard-earned wealth. The dark side of this, then, is the at points ruthless behavior against those who were there first, or who did something before. The Native Americans are a case in point. He is also wonderfully clear in his thinking and how he presents the unbroken arch of American thinking from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama. This he achieves through the careful selection of men (and women) of action who have played a crucial, but many times forgotten, role in the history of the country. I was especially enthralled by his delivery of the tale of the military family Meigs, starting from the aptly named Return Jonathan Meigs and finishing it with the current General. Such tales, told through one individual, but illuminating a vast landscape of people and events, are the absolute best part of this book. His talent for tying together ideals, ideas, and actions of people that at first seem to have nothing to do with each other is also considerable. You as the reader stand to benefit much from all these details, laid out in good order and in a very comprehensive manner. Now the bad news, and why this is not a 5 star book. Schama gets so carried away by his experiences and ideas that his prose sometimes gallops off into the rich pasture of Latin words. This, and the tendency of using sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, causes the prose to become hard to read. In my edition's back cover, Ferguson in Financial Times compares Schama's prose to Kerouac. A fair comparison, but one that also makes for passages that have to be read many times. I used a dictionary more times with this book than with any other in years. But to sum this up, if you are interested in why America is what it is, read this book, and have the dictionary handy. |
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► Work In Progress
Wed, 16 May 2012 15:31:00
| Real life has seriously interfered with my writing of late. You may have seen that I am a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology at a University of Applied Sciences. My field is quite varied with 3D Design, Usability and User Interface Design, and Thesis management. Especially at this point in time, just before the end of the academic year, people become quite active in their studies, and the resulting flood of projects to grade and theses to read is quite formidable. Be that as it may, I do have work in the pipeline. At last check, my trusty word-count cum progress indicator Excel file shows that my current short story base stands at 29,955 words. This is divided into ten WIP stories, but there is one much larger than the others. It is called "Nueva Congo" and it is my first attempt at a novella-length Scifi story. It is funny how these stories sometimes start to guide their own development. "Nueva Congo" is the result of a short article on long-hau space trips that I read somewhere. That article dealt with the pressures that would face people on trips to Titan and other far-flung places, when the travel time exceeded a year per direction. Generation Ships, then, have travel times of decades or more. The fact that those who left on the trip and those who eventually end it are of different generations does give rise to many interesting thoughts about such a project. My own take on the theme doesn't deal with the internal workings of a generation ship as such, but more with the whole feasibility of such a trip, and especially, is such a trip to be made in the first place? Many a night I have pondered upon this theme before going to sleep, and the name of the ship serves as a hint for you - I do not intend the voyage to be smooth and the ship to unload its cargo onto a new colony. But I will leave it at that for now. The other stories then? There's a sparky one of an old woman who wants a tattoo; a mellow one on the end of a marriage when Alzheimer claims one of the spouses; a short one on a kid who loses a fiver that belongs to the neighbor guy, and my pet project, a horror story called "Synodikon", featuring Ivan the terrible. This story, for which I have had help from my author friend and PfoxChase colleague Maria Kuroschepova, deals with a list of people who perished in Ivan's lunatic purges, and is a good example of a story that waits patiently to be written, but gets better by the wait. I wanted to write it at one go, but instead it is still at 300 words, waiting for me to come back to it and finish the job. During the hiatus I have changed the focus of the story and honed the ending in my mind, and I believe it is now better. All that remains is to write it all down... I have also found that a backlog of ten stories, plus two book ideas, block new story ideas. I haven't added one idea to the palette in six months, and that is simply because I can't keep adding ideas before I get the old ones processed. That's all right, having ideas all the time would be frustrating when I still want to get the old ones written out first. Stay tuned. |
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► One step at a time
Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:37:00
You know, this is a funny business, this writing. With more than 250,000 words in a novel and many short stories you'd think you know something of this, but no. Every time you think of a new idea, it's always the same long path towards fruition. No shortcuts, no easy ones. I've finished 38 stories, and of those, only two came about without a tiresome process of figuring out how to join the pieces. It always feels like this will never turn out to be a story that will interest anyone even remotely. And yet, when the stories are beta-read and edited and alpha-read and edited and double-checked, then typeset and printed or Kindle'd, they become something else. Some of them actually feel like good short stories, ones I can feel proud of. Others seem to be okay stories, and they have attained a readership I am fully satisfied about. Now that "Filtered Light and Other Stories" is out, I'll have a look at some of the stories in it and give you a bit of background to them. Your opinion will of course vary, but I seem to like these stories, for various reasons. I've also been told (lately in the Short Story Special evening I hosted at a book store) that my stories can be read in 4 different ways, if there are 4 people reading them. I am all for that. First, "The Wind in the Pipes". It's a ghost story if ever I wrote one, in the classic British vein. Lots of ambience, old books, fireplaces, and World War 2. And dead people playing the pipes of an organ. Why? Because I've always loved the English ghost story with the stopping clocks and pictures falling off the walls. In my own story, I tried to bring in the rich tradition, and therefore it is quite long, 6800 words. I also am happy about how the namesake of the collection, "Filtered Light", turned out. It's an amalgamation of a boyhood experience, inspiration from a Finnish rock song, and nightmares. I've thought much and hard about dreams, feelings, and how they relate to everyday life. In this story I wanted to bring forth a dark internal world and the search for a way out. Another personal memory blending with a full fictional stage is "Les Feuilles Mortes". I did go on a trip to Agadir, they had a jazz band, and yes, we had an irritating person in the team. But no one got killed, and on the whole it was a very nice trip. Sometimes you just take settings from your own life and populate it with fiction. It lets you spend less time on research and more on the storyline. The problem lies in deciding what to bring from real life and when to depart into fiction. There's a rare story in this book: an attempt at a humor story. This came about because I saw a humorous site in which you are given instructions how to hunt Moomins, and once you've slaughtered one, how to make Moominburgers for the entire family. This led me thinking about how to depict irradical behavior among oversized stuffed theme park animals. To avoid slander and libel suits, I decided to opt for a remnant of the past - there used to be a Troll Park in Finland when I was a kid, somewhere in the last millennium. I am happy to report that a reviewer said that "particular story has one of the best laugh-out-loud lines in it that I have read anywhere." If you like, have a look for yourself. That leaves 14 stories for you to explore. |
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► Abandoned places and art
Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:24:00
| I have been interested in abandoned places for many years. I guess all little boys like to stage adventures around construction sites and junkyards, and imagine they're excavating Egyptian tombs and roaming in Mayan ruins. That fades when we grow up, but somewhere in the back of the mind, the idea lives. Now, with the Internet, many sites have sprung up where people chronicle the demise of urban areas. Called Urban Exploration, the idea is to enter abandoned places, usually against security rules and by crossing fences, and then document whatever can be found. The explorers find utterly amazing material, and on the best sites, every image is a work of art. You may ask yourself, is this not what they do on Discovery Channel - ghost hunting? Well, in a word, no. Those shows are cheap thrills, fake electronic devices supposedly giving off signals of paranormal activity. Fuzzy images of dust flakes reflecting light in derelict buildings just do not have much validity or believability. Scary sound effects, added in the comfort of the post-production studio, merely add to the lack of reality. This is indeed far from the true explorers. When they enter a building, they do it with respect and a genuine desire to document the site for its own value, not for some mock horror show. These people have excellent equipment and at best, they are professional photographers. Many of them are of course enthusiastas, but for example www.opacity.us is chock full of pro images. When I go to see pictures of abandoned buildings, I am always struck by the beauty of gradual decay. In many images it is nature taking over again; trees growing through factory floors, having entered as seeds from broken windows, and watered by the rain falling from the collapsed roof. In others, walls are given hues and forms more imaginative than any artist could have painted them with moulds and leakages of pipes in them. In a theater that has been left to wither, you can still see the set of the last play performed there. Where are the players now? Or you may come across a factory with machinery still intact (albeit rusty of course), a pin-up calendar tacked to the wall next to it, and a pair of cracked safety goggles. What happened here - did someone get hurt when the goggles cracked, or did he step on them when he knew this was his last day at the plant, and the need for eye safety ended then? Many of the images are somewhat disturbing. There may be an operating table onto which a surgery roof lamp has collapsed. Who was operated here? Did they recover, or did they expire in this operating theater on a day or night long ago? And whose medical records are those, stacked in a box with thousands of others, left to the elements and allowed to decay on the shelves of the abandoned hospital? There's almost always a view down a corridor, along which you may have patient rooms or other spaces. You cannot escape pondering what the doors have seen: there are some, especially in former psychiatric hospitals, which show scratched marks, sometimes even text or images. Shivers may be running down the spine when you happen on an image of restraint straps fixed to a wall. What actually differentiates these pictures from archaeological images is this: the ruins are still in the process of decay, and you get the eerie feeling something remains in the image and in the building itself, something you can't really pin a name on, but which definitely inhabits the site still. In Roman ruins the effect of humans is so long gone that you don't get the same feeling. The photo essay that affected me the most were a set of images from the graveyard of a former asylum in an undisclosed location in the US. In this institution, when inmates died, they were buried within the perimeter of the asylum, but not with regular tombstones; they have a stone marked with their patient number. Apparently the names of the inmates could still be matched to the numbers, but the management refuses to put up a memorial with names on it. Such human fates of course evoke sensations. Even if you were mentally disturbed, you were still a human being, and you should have been respected well enough to be given a proper burial. It is impossible to look at these images and not be touched by the fragility of human life, especially those of us who are not able to function as a cog in the machinery of society, but must leave themselves at the mercy of society. Often this mercy fails to live up to its name. As a writer of speculative fiction, I aim to raise the same feelings as these photo essays do in me: a chill, bewilderment, sadness, and not just a whiff of hope. I have yet to write a story that would capture the essence I can see in these pictures, and I freely admit I watch these images to get into the mood to write that story with an eerie ring to it. I encourage others to have a look too - it's really an art form unlike any other. |
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► Guest blog - Greta van der Rol
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 22:09:00
| Greta van der Rol, the new master of scifi/romance, is now a guest on my blog. Her style is unique in combining convincing and well-crafted scifi with romance that will please you in its honesty too. There's a link to her latest book at the end of the blog, so do read on. Heikki: You used to write historical fiction, of which your first book "To Die a Dry Death" is a strong example. Why the switch to SciFi? Greta: Interesting question. In fact, it was the other way around. I had written what became the two Iron Admiral books and a forerunner of 'Morgan's Choice' long before I wrote 'To Die a Dry Death'. TDaDD was an aberration, a book I'd always wanted to write. Circumstances conspired to make it happen, then I returned to my true love – science fiction. Heikki: Women writers in SciFi have been not as plentiful as men. Do you agree, and if yes, have you got an idea why that is so? Greta: Maybe not as plentiful – but they've always been around. Two of my recent favourites are Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon. I would also include Bujold and Cherryh. I'd suggest that until fairly recently it was a Boys Own thing, especially for the comic book types like Dan Dare and Flash Gordon. It's much the same as boys write war books, girls write romance. Gender stereotyping. Heikki: In your book "The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy", you launch a series around the very masculine Admiral Saahren. What is it like to focus the entire multi-book series on the viewpoint of a man? Greta: I share the point of view between Allysha and Saahren – but if you're asking me about Saahren, I've always wanted to write about a man at that very senior level. A field agent may have to kill a few people or face the very real danger of being killed but a senior officer must make decisions which may result in the deaths of thousands of troops and civilians. Sure, command officers don't usually face the physical dangers that Saahren does in 'Conspiracy' (but in that book, he'd been sacked, so he was acting as a civilian). In the second book, 'Deception'', he's back as the grand admiral and forced to make some mind-blowing decisions. Heikki: Is it hard to write a man's POV? Greta: Not especially. I've done a bit of research, talked to a few men, tried to find out how they tick. I think I've done it fairly well. However, this new book, 'Starheart', has two new characters, a new admiral and his lady. Saahren makes a cameo appearance, that's all, but the action takes place in the same galaxy, with the alien ptorix and the right wing fundamentalist Galactic People's Republic. It's set a short time before the events in the Iron Admiral books. Heikki: SciFi is just as good as its technology is believable. When you write, how do you go about designing gadgets, and what are your design principles (never to do a deus ex machine etc...?) Greta: I suppose I build very much on what's around in the literature. I keep an eye on scientific publications and I draw a little on my previous life in computer systems. I never do 'deus ex machine' – that takes us into fantasy. I'd like to think my science is rather better than what you'll find in 'Star Wars' or 'Star Trek' without being for geeks only. I try to obey the laws of physics and extrapolate on what's happening now. On the other hand, I don't claim my stuff is 'hard' science fiction. I tend not to explain. I'm not taken with authors who require an aside to explain the functioning of a particular device to the reader. I try to make sure the reader can follow along – and judging by comments, I've been successful. Heikki: Considering your Iron Admiral series, what would you state as its main hooks for readers? Greta: It's fun, fast-paced, space-opera. Readers like the characters and the addition of a dollop of romance adds to the story without taking over the plot. Heikki: Have you laid out a roadmap for the entire series already or will you allow the story to form as you go? Greta: I guess this isn't so much a series as a number of books set in the same universe. It's such hard work coming up with believable alien races, planets and tech that it seems a shame to write only one book. Then, too, some of the minor characters take on a life of their own. One reader took a fancy to Saahren's adjutant, Senior Commander Butcher, who plays a small but crucial role in the Iron Admiral books, especially in 'Deception'. I may well write a new book starring that very same Butcher, but promoted to captain. Heikki:Do you ever write yourself in a corner, or are you able to know at this point everything that will happen in the series? Greta: I've had to back-pedal and re-write the Iron Admiral books more than once, and 'Starheart' has been reshuffled a few times. When I write, I start with characters and I have a fair idea how it's going to end. I jot down ideas for a bunch of scenes, then I let the characters take over. If I ever write a TRUE series I think you'd have to know how each book would end and where they were all going. But, hey, this is writing. It's all subject to change without notice. Isn't it? Heikki: If you were to give me a one-liner why I should read the series, what would it be? Greta: It's good, escapist, fast-paced fun. With a bit of sex on the side. (Oh dear. That was two sentences, wasn't it?) ***** THANK YOU! ***** Greta van der Rol loves writing science fiction with a large dollop of good old, healthy romance. She lives not far from the coast in Queensland, Australia and enjoys photography and cooking when she isn't bent over the computer. She has a edgree in history and a background in building information systems, both of which go a long way toward helping her in her writing endeavours. See Greta's latest book at http://amzn.to/zmGZmK. Here's the blurb: "She's lost her husband, her best friend is missing. What else has she got to lose? Slightly shady freighter captain, Jess Sondijk, thought she had her life under control until Admiral Hudson's Confederacy battle cruiser stops her ship to search for contraband. His questions reopen matters she had thought resolved. What if her husband's death on his way back from Tabora wasn't accidental? Jess decides to investigate, while keeping Hudson at arms' length. While he's attracted to the lovely Jess, Hudson is also concerned about what might be happening on Tabora and how that may involve the Confederacy's enemies. Jess and Hudson's interests collide in more ways than one. But while Jess is more than willing to put her life on the line to protect what's hers, Hudson must balance the risk of inter-species war at worst and the end of his career at best, in a deadly game of political intrigue, murder and greed. At the end of the day, how much is he willing to lose for the woman he has come to love?" |
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► Zealous Guy - Simon A. Forward's guest blog
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:59:00
| You have to laugh. I sometimes wonder if the world was slightly less inclined towards insanity whether there would still be a place for comedy. Maybe that’s why our global problems will never be resolved. Years and years of all those Miss Worlds in favour of world peace and – so far – no discernible result. There has to be a reason. Maybe it’s because we all need stuff to laugh at. After all, in the face of some things, what other choice do we have? Like last year, very soon after my first book-signing for Evil UnLtd (Vol 1: The Root Of All Evil), I received a hate email. Alas, I can’t repeat the language used here, but it made use of both the f- and the c-word and it’s general import was that I should die and/or get the bleep out of my home county of Cornwall. It was signed GODOFGOOD. Needless to say, I was disturbed – although clearly not nearly as much as the sender – but I did my best to shrug it off. A short while after that I discovered that someone had disposed of all my business cards that I’d left on display – thanks to the kindness of the manageress - at my favourite local cafe. What was this? Some sort of campaign? It was all a discomfiting mystery until two weeks later when I received a phone call from an unknown number. Some guy who said he believed he owed me an apology because – and I quote – he’d “thought [I was] promoting actual evil.” On one level, this was horrifying, grossly unsettling and all the rest. On another, it’s comedy gold. Heck, it’s not like I go door to door handing out Evil Watchtower pamphlets. It’s a thought, but no, too risky. There are a lot of nuts out there. Probably gathering up squirrels for winter. In some respects I wish there were more fellows like this idiot, willing to speak out against my book. I can’t help feeling it’s easier to make a name for yourself as an author by offending God than it is by merely entertaining people. And while God himself (beg your pardon, Himself) is generally quiet on these issues, there’s no shortage of folks ready to speak up on his behalf. Bless their hearts. Anyway, as my second Evil book hits the electronic shelves – there is a paperback version for those who prefer, but our primary focus is on ebooks – my first impulse is to clarify that although our title does brazenly use the word ‘Evil’ and advertises it’s Unlimited nature, it is only a work of fiction. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the majority of actual evil organisations tend to avoid drawing attention to this aspect of their operations – indeed, many claim to be the exact opposite. Then again, I’m torn. Because maybe – just maybe – what I need to do is capitalise on this. There was that Rushdie chap and a Danish cartoonist who really raised their profile by upsetting fanatical religious sorts. Maybe I should be approaching fundamental Christian groups in the US, asking to be condemned. They might be interested to know that we take a passing crack at religion in Vol 2: From Evil With Love. It’s not a massively major plot thread, but hopefully enough to offend them a bit. But please, don’t get me wrong. You can’t necessarily tell because I’m not slurring my typing, but my tongue is firmly in my cheek here. I mean no disrespect to people of faith. I have no time for intolerance, unless it’s dairy, which I just have to live with. And that’s going to get a lot tougher, believe me, when the cheesemakers inherit the earth. There are just some out there who take things a tad too seriously. Same goes for science fiction fans. Not quite so many issue death threats and what have you. Some of them probably do, but the worst I’ve had to contend with were a few who were put out that in my Doctor Who book, Drift, I didn’t introduce the Doctor until page twenty or so. I’m glad to say, Evil UnLtd has been applauded by fans of the genre and people who don’t generally read science fiction. But I do know that some sci-fi-philes might be wary of anything that pokes fun of their beloved SF. And to them I would just like to say, I can’t claim to be any Douglas Neal Adams but I’ll bet my entire collection of Hitch-Hikers Guide books I have as much love for the genre as he did. I don’t think you could write good SF humour without that. Indeed, I regard the really good, serious science fiction with a kind of reverence. And, for my sins, I suffer from an almost religious devotion to Doctor Who. It seems you can’t take the -atic out of the fan altogether. Fortunately, you can keep the fan in the attic if he gets out of control. But no matter how deep your devotion, I find a healthy sense of humour goes a long way. “The secret, guys,” said DNA, “is to bang two rocks together.” Equally, the secret, I would say, guys, is to lighten up. Yes, we are promoting actual Evil. Actual fictional Evil. We hope it’s funnier than the real thing. If not, if it offends, then please don’t write to me. Address your complaints to your MP, to the rabid tabloid press, your church leaders. The world could use more laughter. I leave you with a song: “I didn’t mean to hurt you, babe. I’m sorry that I vowed you’d die I didn’t mean to launch a hate campaign against you, babe I’m such a zealous guy.” ***** Thanks, Simon! Check out his site at www.evilunltd.co.uk |
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► A review of "Conspirator - Lenin in Exile" by Helen Rappaport
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:07:00
| Helen Rappaport's book on Lenin's years in exile is a wonderful, fulfilling book. It is one of the best books I've read on modern history, well on a par with Montefiore's work on Stalin and Service's biography on Lenin. Rappaport traces in minute detail Lenin's ordeal in the wilderness, hampered by dissent, lack of funds, the need to find true believers to follow him, and the slow pace of the revolution. He travels between Paris, London, Zurich, Geneva and a lot of other places, never satisfied, never willing to wait a little for his dream to become true and revolution to happen in Russia. In contrast to Service, Rappaport doesn't read too much into the execution of Lenin's oder brother as a spark that lit Lenin's revolutionary mind. Instead she puts a lot of effort into explaining how Lenin's need for a revolution arises from his pure and doctrinally perfect reading of Marx. It is this drive for a true Marxist revolution that was Lenin's holy Grail, and in the search of it, he burned his bridges, enemies, and allies alike. If you didn't understand Marx the way Lenin did, you were not his ally, and thus, you were expendable. Much of the book is spent showing how people come into contact with Lenin and how he quickly senses whether someone can be trusted to work for the ideal of a Marxist coup. What is utterly fascinating is how Rappaport cleanly and effectively lists all the people we've come to associate with the 1917 revolution and the subsequent Soviet rule, and exposes how the relationships with Lenin developed. Two destinies arise from this mass to shine more brightly, and more sadly. Those are Nadya, Lenin's long-suffering wife, and Inessa Armand, who both sacrificed their own Socialist ideals in support of Lenin's monomaniacal quest for Marxist glory. Nadya especially comes across as an utterly human, loving character, who was wholly blinded by Lenin's willpower, and who deserved so much more than she ever got. Another well-developed theme is that of the Okhrana and other Tsarist organizations, which were able to track the revolutionaries with ease and report on what pillar Lenin used to like to sit by at the British Museum. and who would attend the tragicomically conspiratorial Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party meetings. What strikes the reader is, how can they possibly have been so lax as to banish people to Siberia and then forget about them, allowing them to pop up in Geneva after four months of trekking across Russia? Surely they could have been as effective as Stalin later was, letting people freeze to death. But for some reason the Tsarists didn't really care until it was too late. There's nuggets of information I was never aware of, even if I consider myself well read in Finnish history. I did not know, for example, that there were British officers at the Finnish grand duchy - Swedish border in the North in 1917, and that these officers were later ridiculed for allowing Lenin enter Russia on the Sealed Train. Lenin's hair-raising escape from Finland to Sweden across pack ice and other dangers was also a most fascinating passage. No book is perfect, and this one's main fault is in the editing. Lenin's journeys covered a lot of countries and a lot of places, and I was unhappy to see names misspelt in the Finnish and Swedish sequences. For example, there's no such place as Stutorget, but Stortorget. Russians would not have referred to Helsinki as Helsingfors, the name used by the previous tenants, the Swedes. Typos are rife, and there's a strange vacillation between Finnish and Swedish names. I was surprised at this, because Rappaport credits the Finnish Lenin Museum's strong man Aimo Minkkinen, but did not have him check the names. That is minor still - I recommend this with five stars to any student of the Russian Revolution and the madmen behind it. |
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► Short stuff - what's it worth?
Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:31:00
| Now that PfoxChase Publishing again displayed their trust in me by publishing my short story collection, I think it's time to discuss short work a little further. The other day, I was actually asked why I don't write novels but short stories. I told the person asking me that it's not really something I choose to do - the stories choose me instead. Short story as an art form is curiously underrated even if some of the biggest name in literature have invested a lot of time and effort in perfecting it, such as Roald Dahl, HP Lovecraft, and Hemingway to name but a few. My own entry into the world of the short story surprised me. It was after I had finished Tulagi Hotel, and my father passed away in the spring of 2008 that I wrote my first real short story - my signature piece of sorts, The Summerhouse. It is a very personal story, in effect a way to say goodbye. The bigger surprise however was that I wrote more than ten other stories in the span of a few months. Many of these have seen the light of day on websites, some in anthologies, and a few on shortlists in competitions. In all, I have 109,000 words in 34 finished stories now. That's four fifths of the words in my novel. This would make me think that if it were just the number of words, I might just as well have written another book (and I have a couple of ideas for a book). It's just that I found the form of the short so interesting to explore that I've let my subconscious come up with short rather than long form. If you look at the styles or genres of the finished stories, you'll see that there's 15 that can be slapped with the category "speculative", another 15 that are mainstream without any supernatural element, four flash stories, and a couple of humor and scifi stories. History also features in many of these regardless of the style. Someone might say that I am wasting my talent (if any) by not sticking to a genre, much as Lovecraft and Poe did. To these I should like to say that my own preference in reading is to read anything I can get my greedy little paws on. Similarly, I want to try my hand on different ideas and ways of delivering a story. This is very much so in Flash work; with only 500 words to set up, plot, and solve a story, it's very interesting to go from Scifi to Historical fiction and see whether the outcome is believable. I've had the great fortune of acquiring a set of beta readers who I can trust to tell me when I succeed, but much more importantly, when I fail to deliver. There's a few stories that I liked a lot myself, but got a lukewarm response from the gang; after the indignation and irritation at this treatment of my darlings has waned, I usually go back, read the story, read the response, and agree with the comments. Thank you one and all for that - it's been vital in my development as a writer. So what's in the pipeline now? There's 25,226 words in 12 stories now. They range from the supernatural to real life to my favorite, mild horror, and to scifi. For the scifi story I have already requested and received utterly valuable help from my bestest beta lady, Greta van der Rol, whose eagle eye can spot looming trouble from the first five lines of text. I hope to finish these one by one, and I will probably be camping at the PfoxChase offices to try and get a second compilation published too; however, that will only happen if the current compilation, "Filtered Light and Other Stories", actually sells some copies. So please have a look at the book, and see whether my variety of short stories works for you. It's at http://amzn.to/wp3baL. |
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► A review of "The Fear Index" by Robert Harris
Wed, 25 Jan 2012 009:09:00
I am a big, big fan of Robert Harris. I found his book Enigma when my interest in the code breaking of Bletchley Park in WW2 was at its peak; that mix of fact and fiction blew me away and it remains his best book in my mind. On a par with it there is Fatherland, the alternative history classic, and almost level, Pompeii. Archangel is also not to be missed. So, when I started The Fear Index, I was positively titillated with anticipation - a new Harris is always good news. Within 50 pages, my enthusiasm was dampened somewhat, and after 150 pages, I was downright disappointed. This tale of a brilliant physicist who leaves CERN to write the best algorithmic investment system ever seen was just not what I have always liked best in Harris. In my mind, Harris shines when he tells the tale of the single man, cast in a role by chance and personal talent, conquering insurmountable odds. Tom Jericho in Enigma, Xavier March in Fatherland, and Fluke Kelso in Archangel have all been set in a situation where only their personal integrity and hard work will win the day. Not so in The Fear Index. Harris writes well as always, but the picture he draws of Alex Hoffmann has none of the usual charm of a Harris hero. Hoffmann is arrogant, talented, and definitely the man for the job, but his almost autistic lack of interaction doesn't endear him to the reader. Alex's relationship with his artist wife Gabrielle is superficial and uninteresting, even if the culmination point of that relationship in the art gallery raises eyebrows in the best tradition of Harris' books. Another thing that worried me much was that Harris ventures into Clancyist methods of adding technobabble to add excitement. I was especially disappointed with the small things that he's always done really well: risking that I will be called a muppet by some people, I'll say that CPUs do not hum - transformers do, and there are no files in a computer's registry. Such small items become more and more evident towards the end of the book. And the crucial element of any book of this type, namely suspension of disbelief, just didn't go far enough. I will not disclose the plot, but at 2/3 of the book it fell flat for me and I read the rest merely to see what happens, not on the edge of the seat enjoying every moment of it. I will repeat that he writes just as well as ever (with a few somewhat tired similes, a first for me in his books), and to some people, especially in the world of finance, this may be more interesting than to the average lay person, but my expectations were not met, and I will remain in wait for his next book to see if he goes back to creating a truly interesting character in a complex and dangerous situation. |
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► A review of "Enigma" by Robert Harris
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:56:00
| Enigma is one of the icons of World War II. It is told countless times in as many connections how the British cracked the seemingly uncrackable German cipher machine, and utilized the decrypts in all secrecy to win the war. Of course, such a situation provides ample opportunities for suspense writers. I've read about ten books on the Enigma, its precursors, and successors, but I have to say Harris delivers such a wonderful novel on the singular starting point, which is the near-invincibility of Enigma. The one flaw in Enigma was that even if it yielded astronomical permutations for its ciphertext, a letter would never get encoded in itself. With this wedge into the cipher, Bletchley Park turned the war around. Enter Tom Jericho, a brilliant mathematician straight out of Cambridge's mathematical Tripos exams. He delivers crucial input for the cracking of the coded messages, falls in love with one of the girls in the Huts where the hard work is done, and suffers a mental breakdown. His medical leave is cut short when the officers who run Bletchley Park need his services again, but Claire, his love, has disappeared. After WWII, especially now that we live in an age of information and computers, it is easy to forget what a Herculean task it was to crack Enigma, and that the basis for all British success was lain by Polish mathematicians who reconstructed Enigma from the messages, without having access to a live one. The diverse set of people, from Classical scholars to crossword and chess champs, all the way to musicians and mathematicians, performed an amazing task of intellect and we owe something to them today. Just remember Alan Turing. Harris spins a tight web on intrigue and narrow escapes and this is a pageturner if there ever was one. Having read extensively on Bletchley Park before reading this book, I am full of admiration for his skills in taking real events and people, and embedding his fictional ones in the mesh so that there's no telling who is for real and who is not. That question pesters Jericho all through the book too. He trusts few people, mostly himself, and is proven right in doing so. The culprit in the book remains hidden into the end, but at that point, when all is revealed, the reader marvels at the author's skill of making all facts available so that they come together so well. The final outcome of the book is as surprising as it is convincing and believable. I can recommend Harris' Fatherland, Pompeii, and with some reservation, Ghost, but for sheer brilliance in concept and execution, Enigma remains in my mind the best of his books. |
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► A review of "The First Day on the Somme"
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 008:23:00
| The First Day on the Somme, Martin Middlebrook, 1971, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-139071-9 The Great War of 1914-1918 included many battles that have become legendary, perhaps none more so than that of Verdun. A separate effort, aimed at alleviating the pressure the French were experiencing at Verdun, became known as the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916. The story of this bloodiest of all British battles has been admirably told by Martin Middlebrook. This book is the tale of human courage of the men in the trenches, dimwitted thinking of generals, unfounded belief in the power of the artillery, and above all, the honor and devotion to duty of the single infantry private. It was believed that a week of artillery bombardment would pulverize the German defences, and allow the British to advance to their targets in parade formations. This was not to be. The Germans had dug deep, and the amount of barbed wire was staggering. Moreover, the British expected their artillery to cut the German wires and create lanes along which to advance; they also sent out parties to cut holes in the perimeters and marked them with white strips. The artillery didn't manage to cut the wire nearly as well as was expected, and the infantry met huge tangled obstacles along the way. The biggest blunders were General Rawlinson's decision to delay the onset of the attack after the artillery bombardment was over; the Germans had time to man their machine gun positions, which had survived the bombardment much better than expected, and this enabled them to scythe down thousands of men who walked towards their positions. The Germans couldn't believe it when they saw the British advance methodically and slowly, and the murderous cross-fire slaughtered the British. Another unbelievable error was not to use the only breakthrough on the right flank to attack the Germans from the side and behind - as well as the decision not to use cavalry. It was the end of the era of the cavalry to be sure, but in this battle, the large cavalry contingent could have made a huge difference, had it been let to advance through a breach and cause havoc in the rear of the Germans. They could only wonder at this decision when their lines became thin and tenuously held, but the British never released the cavalry and thus lost the only chance of success at the Somme. In a way this battle reminds me of Tarawa and the US Marines. There, too, the belief in the intense naval bombardment caused casualties when the Japanese re-manned their positions right after the bombardment lifted. Hundreds of Marines were killed as they waded ashore in the direct sight of Japanese with their machine guns and artillery. The US did not lose 57,470 men in casualties as the British did, however. This single day cost the British more than any other day in any war, or indeed, months of other wars. The heartbreaking tale of innocence lost is a key part of this book as Middlebrook confidently relates the fates of men who joined up with their friends to form units such as the "Manchester Pals" and "Grimsby Chums". These men fought and died with their friends, and in the process, those who survived ceased to believe in their country which had sacrificed them. This book is an excellent starting point if you want to read quality books on war. Middlebrook's series on the Bomber Command of WW2 is unrivalled, as is his book "Convoy" which tells the story of the bitter sea battles of the Atlantic through the eyes of men on one such journey. |
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► Wrapping up 2011
Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:20:00
| We're back to the dim days of the Winter Solstice and it's time to have a look back - what happened to me and my writing in 2011? The biggest thing of course was finding a new publisher for Tulagi Hotel. Diane Nelson of PfoxChase Publishing is one of the powerhouses of the new Indie publishing world. She incessantly finds new people whose writing appeals to her, and as she publishes these books, more people get a chance to see them. Needless to say I am very happy that my writing was to her liking, as she has done a massive amount of work to promote the book. I am even happier of the fact that Diane will publish my short story collection, "Filtered Light and Other Stories" in both book and e-book format. In these days it is not a given that a book will see the light of day in both formats, but for me, up here in Finland. having it in book form will be a big part of the marketing campaign. The book will be out in February 2012. What else? I was mentioned in a couple of newspapers, namely The Helsinki Times, which wrote an interesting article of the new breed of Finnish writers, namely those who write in English. The link to the article is to be found in the Reviews section. If you ask a Finn today to name one, chances are they will only remember Hannu Rajaniemi and his brilliant "The Quantum Thief" but there's more than just him and me; especially in the field of science fiction and speculative fiction, there are many who are about to make the quantum leap into writing in a foreign language. The Finnish Scifi scene has been given valuable exposure through Jeff Vandermeer, a premier proponent of Scifi globally. On the speculative fiction front I was glad to gain access to The Cosmos Pen magazine, which allowed me a short story space as well as a chance to write of my path to publication. This work is now contiuing in the next edition of the Finnish language version, Kosmoskynä. I translated my short story "The Dispatchers" for it, and it will be out in January. Anne Leinonen, a Finnish author, has been of enormous assistance in this field for me. In August I took advantage of the wonderful Arkadia International Book Shop's offer to come and give a talk on the origins of Tulagi Hotel. The bookstore is truly unique in Finland, and the event itself turned out to be a warm and lively discussion on the new paradigm of publishing, on top of the tale of the book. I will probably go and arrange a book launch for the short stories there too, as the proprietor Ian Bourgeot has an extensive mailing list of literary-minded people. At the writing of this, I have some 23,000 words in diverse short stories that are labeled "work in progress". I have to confess I have not worked on writing in the past 3 months due to work pressures, but I am confident I will again start writing soon after I get the new courses running and have some spare brain capacity. .,You may therefore expect to see some new stories appear along the Sun that now begins its slow but sure crawling towards our Northern hemisphere. I wish all my readers a very successful and enjoyable year of 2012! |
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► A review of "Diary of a Small Fish" by Pete Morin
Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:16:00
To start off, I don't usually read courtroom drama. I've done the Legal 101 reading books by Grisham, and I have enjoyed the early two or three, but since that I've not touched the genre. One of the causes for that is that the American legal system is very different from the one we have in Finland, and it's like learning a new game to be able to understand what happens. This usually leads to info dumps and lots of backtracking for the reader to understand what happened. Pete Morin's book succeeds brilliantly in carrying the story and offering the uninitiated reader just the right amount of information; the legal story is easy to follow and it is very interesting too. Paul Forté's plight in the maelstrom of a corruption trial is believable in the extreme. There is none of the "As you know, Bob,..." type of explanatory tirade. Mr Morin cuts the picture of Forté so close he becomes very real. I happen to have a brother with the same attitude towards the game of golf that I could relate to people that Forté has to explain his stance on the game. It also serves vey well as the glue that bonds together the world view of honor codes that Forté has. The human interest side of this book is also handled very capably; I was hooked by the character of Shannon right after she had the nerve to ask Forté a question at his first meeting with the jury, and it had precious little to do with the trial. I should also say that Morin is an adept observer of emotions and the effect they have on humans - his portrayal of Forté's broken marriage is on a par with John Updike's Rabbit books. The variety of characters appearing in the book is quite large, but they all serve a purpose and there are no superficial, pasted-on personnel. Of the side characters my favorite was Sidney Hartfield, the 90+ year old former SEC official. Morin has considerable talent in imbuing his characters with just the right feel; Hartfield especially brought chuckles to me as I read. Ah, chuckles: there's many a moment in this book when you laugh out loud because Morin knows the world he writes of and has the linguistic wit to bring it out too. I am envious of his one-liners and sarcasm. All in all, I think you can't go wrong if you are in search of a quick-paced book with twists and turns, intriguing plot, wine and osso bucco. This book is to be highly recommended. |
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► A review of "QUINTESSENCE" by Andrew Meek
Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:35:00
| I knew what to expect, because I had seen an early draft of this book when it was on HarperCollins' website Authonomy. I remember feeling ambivalent about it; I could tell there was much going for it, but also things that bothered me. Now I have read the entire book in its final form, called Quintessence, and Andrew Meek has put together a really strong debut novel. Alexander Staalman, physicist, husband, grieving man, an altogether human character, takes us on a tour of mental breakdown, quantum physics, cosmology, and the deepest questions possible: what is this thing called Life, and how can we, conglomerations of atoms consisting of mainly void space, be able to think about it? The eminent plus points of the book are (in no particular order) depth, honesty, force, intellect, inquisitiveness and beauty. By depth I mean the way Meek has invested countless hours and massive effort to write a book that manages bind together quantum physics and cosmology, as well as everything that walls in between these two extremes. Staalman ponders believably and interestingly how it can be possible for humans to think - it's just electric current flowing between synapses that are mere atoms in close proximity. And is thinking real? If someone has a thought, is that thought real? Is anything actually and verifiably real? Honesty is apparent in Staalman's anguished quest to set right a horrible injustice rendered on his beloved wife, Millie. The guilt he experiences over the pain he caused her is rendered in such detail that the reader is wishing to absolve him all the time, but the need for Staalman to correct past deeds, which is of course not possible in our concept of time, forces him to think about time in terms of non-linearity. This is where the book gets to be somewhat challenging, but the author invests sufficient time and space to illustrate his ideas, and all becomes clear at some point. The force of the book is in the mental breakdowns Stallman experiences. I have often wondered what it must be like to have one of these, and after reading this book I can safely say I wish such events happening to no one. Meek writes with such terrifying clarity of what it's like to feel sanity slip away that the text actually had me shivering more than once. Intellectually this is one of the most challenging books I've read in a while. Sure, I am a longtime fan of Carl Sagan and cosmology, and I have read all the reports on quantum teleport and how Schrödinger's Cat must be doing these days, but man... this book gets you going really. Meek binds together thought experiments and real-life science so effortlessly that I found myself checking Wikipedia every five pages. I have nothing but admiration for his capability of bringing all of this together. Inquisitiveness is a natural part of this book. We all wonder about life from time to time and then check to see what's on the telly tonight, but Andrew Meek sets the table for a full feast of questions. How can it be that when he thinks, then writes, then sets to type, uploads the book, and as I download it, I get to see what he thought? But surely all is just electric charges between our synapses! There can't be anything more than electric signals - or is there? And the beauty... there is beauty in this book. It's in the way electrons spin around the nucleus, and how these atoms self-assemble into molecules, substances, cognitive humans, solar systems and ultimately galaxies. All is from the same source, and yet, nothing is alike to another substance. Alexander's and Millie's love story is hauntingly beautiful too, and even if this seems weird to say, I'll say there's beauty in Alexander's madness. If you like your books thought-provoking, interesting, fact-laden to the hilt, this is for you. On the other hand, if you are up for an easy read, pass this one by. I definitely hope you will be of the former kind and give this book a serious attempt. If I may nitpick, I would say this book would benefit from one more run-down by an experiences editor. There's a smidgen too much of stuff in it, and some typo issues. None of this is critical; it is much more important to just read the book. HarperCollins, are you paying attention? |
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► Reflecting on Short Stories
Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:24:00
| As I write this, my publisher PfoxChase is busy editing a set of my short stories for publication. They will be released as a set of three e-books and a collection of all eighteen both as e-book and softcover. Even if I have always loved short stories as a form, I didn't plan on writing them myself. As you may know by now, it took me twelve years to write and publish Tulia, so during that period I didn't write anything else. Someone has said TH is essentially a collection of short stories, but I beg to differ. I tried hard to write it into solid book form (when I finally decided to push it through). What launched the short story writing was actually the passing of my father in March, 2008. It must have been part of the grieving process, but I wrote a 1,800 word story called "The Summerhouse". I wrote that almost at one go, gave it a casual polish and asked some of my writer friends to have a look. To my surprise, it became my trademark in a sense. It has seen publication in two anthologies, the Year Zero Writers website, Escape into Life, and the A3-sized printed Broadsheet in England. And it earned me a seat at the Book Shed author site, where my shorties have received constructive criticism on their way to the reading world. What surprised me more was the fact that I wrote fifteen more stories in the span of eight months. The Summerhouse was somehow the key to a flood of short story ideas, and I wrote some 60,000 words in those stories. By this time I was part of Year Zero and people such as Dan Holloway and Cody James (and all the others too) helped me find issues in my writing; I like to think I have developed in their tutoring. At this stage I learned a new word: speculative fiction. This seemed to encompass most of my stories, where there often is a sense of the supernatural or something just a little out-of-place. Dan Holloway tells me he likes my slow chill, and that pleases me very much. This trait is evident in three stories out of four. Then there was Michael Wells and his idea: he sent forty writers forty-nine songs to be used as story names and inspiration, but nothing more. I was sent Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science", which happens to be an eternal favourite. I combined that song title with a Russian airplane of the 1930's, namely the gigantic, eight-engine Tupolev ANT-20, and wrote a story on the Gulags in the Soviet Union. This was an important story in my own view, as it gave me trust in my own voice. The book, "Words to Music", is available on Amazon. I have wanted to try different types of short stories too. It seems my flash fiction is attractive to readers, as "Lord Stanton's Horse" won the Flash500 competition in September 2010. A couple of others have been shortlisted there. I have also had some speculative fiction shortlisted in other competitions, as well as published on websites and e-zines. And, I am happy to note, a true-life story called "The Campsite vol. 1" made it to second place at the Global Short Stories of March 2011. So, all in all, while I am working on a couple of book ideas at the back of the neck, it looks like I will be productive with short stories for some time to come. I have 33 finished stories, 12 in the works, and many story nuggets in the Moleskine. While some of the nuggets turn out to be chicken nuggets, some are indeed better ones that can be wrought into real stories. I believe short stories are an underrated area of writing. The best short stories can leave you with more to ponder than a full-blown book (you can find many of these on Year Zero Writers, and I am not talking of myself here). You can take a 500 word flash fiction with you in the bus even if you only ride a few stops, and a 2,000 word story is perfect for reading just before falling asleep. I hope PfoxChase will allow me to publish another set of short stories at some later point, but that of course remains to be seen. |
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► Review of The Iron Admiral – Conspiracy
Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:35:00
| Greta van der Rol’s The Iron Admiral – Conspiracy is the first Scifi book I have liked in the past ten years. I’ve read Scifi since I was a kid. Lem, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury filled my teen years too and well into adulthood, but then I found myself falling off the genre. For example, everyone touted Ender’s Game as something that everyone should read, but I dropped it halfway through. Since then I have taken up Scifi with lukewarm results. Now, however, I picked up Greta van der Rol’s The Iron Admiral. I found the same elements in it that I used to like so much in the past: a solid, interesting plotline, good writing, and the most important thing: the Science in Science Fiction delivered so well that it simply doesn’t attack the reader. There are the shift-space-capable battle cruisers, stun guns and alien species, but as in the best of the genre books, they simply exist and are not elaborated upon, let alone explained to death. I especially liked the portable hyperspace gate – when can we buy them? I have read van der Rol’s excellent debut To Die a Dry Death, in which her voice was clear and lucid already, but I am happy to see development even in this department. The way she carries the story and its multitude of characters is very readable and it is easy to follow the convoluted storyline. Allysha and Saahren come across as very human characters, complete with little quirks and habits. I have never met a live ptorix, but I am willing to take van der Rol’s portrayal of them as a species with their own agenda (and tentacles). I am willing to recommend this book to any fan of the genre, and even to fans of just romance: you should check how romance can bloom while an interspecies war looms in the future. |
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► A review of "The Sparrow Conundrum"
Thu, 15 Sep 2011 009:20:00
| Bill Kirton's The Sparrow Conundrum is a truly entertaining read. In the underworld surrounding the Aberdeen oil business there is a bunch of thugs who like to have an elaborate code name system based on birds. The Cage is run by the Eagle, and the ranks descend in various stages of fearsomeness through Kestrel and Hawk onwards, until we come face to face with... Sparrow. Chris Machin is really way out of his league when he is scooped into the world of criminals who like finger-busting and quick knee movements into the groin of an opponent. All he wants is to have a quiet life teaching, but as luck would have it, he's caught between the Cage and the Bellazzo Boys. Or the Third Way. Or Inspector Lodgedale, for that matter. This singularly homicidal police officer brings restless energy into the cast and plot of this book, which are well nigh overflowing with it already. We follow Sparrow's hapless drifting from one criminal event to another via pro wrestling and occasional moments of peace at the Cage. What makes this fast and furious crime story different is the quality of writing. Bill Kirton delivers such eloquent and flowing prose that I found myself frequently reading passages again, since the sentences fall tingling onto the reader's mind. He is also the master of the understatement, as well as the unexpected. His effortless delivery of the nitty-gritty of the oil business is another source of wonder to me. In some books the frame of reference is created with clarity and ease, and this is one of them. If you do it the way I did, you'll be reading this book fast at first, to see what can possibly happen next, but then you'll slow down to savour the depth of the story. And the plot will have you riveted and entertained all the way to the ingenious end. The only negative side is, this is not a book you can read in bed in the night unless you're single. I was unable to keep myself from bursting out laughing so many times while reading this that I was a source of irritation. Highly recommended to friends of crime with a sense of humour and a taste for the unexpected. |
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► A review of "The Scole Experiment"
Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:53:00
| This is a very, very disturbing book. That is said in a positive tone, mind you - there's no Stephen King here. The book features a set of lay people who decide to see for themselves, just how far they can get when they apply scientifically designed methods to trying to reach the spirit world. There are natural mediums in the group, and others who have become interested in the spirit world; there's also a healthy dose of sceptisism in the group. They furnish a cellar for research (hence the name "Scole Hole") and go about designing tamper-proof systems for keeping film and other test objects safe. They make contact with a group of advanced spirits, who deliver an unbelievable range of results: apports (objects transported into the locked room), images on film and video camera, and even a picture of a newspaper that can be verifiable found in the archives. Now, I write speculative fiction; one of my very favorite topics is the activities of the spirits in this world, and the threshold between the two worlds. If you don't go for that kind of stuff, I challenge you to read this book. It will offer you compelling evidence of life after death and continuous spiritual develoment. If you already are interested in this, you will find many interesting examples and facets of this interaction between spirits and this world we can rap our knuckles on. What really tantalizes me is how the spirit team comes across as a set of individuals, with different tempers, senses of humor, and goals they want to achieve with the research team. This to me as a writer of fiction is invaluable, as I feel myself working within a framework when I write stories of ghosts in medieval churches and so on. Some of the images are blurry and resemble light leaks in a camera, but when you read about the setup the team used, you will see it is not a possibility. And then there are the perfectly formed, colorful, sharp images of poetry that span many frames in a roll of 35mm film. You need to see them to form your own opinion, but I recommend you have a look. There's two more such books I must recommend at this point, for the same reasons, both by John G. Fuller: "The Airmen who would not Die", and "The Ghost of Flight 401". |
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► A review of "In These Hands"
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:13:00
| This book is a set of flash fiction pieces from the website Rammenas.nl, and they show you very well the lure of flash: with only 500 words to go, you cannot spend a moment too long in setting up hte situation, cast, and plot. I enjoy writing flash fiction whenever the idea hits me, however, only a few ideas are suitable for flashing - most need more words, like 1K or more. But when the real nugget comes out, it is very enjoyable to work it into 500 words. My own piece in this book, "Think Positive" arose from a photo challenge on the site. There were a dozen different pieces written on an intense photo showing just two people, separated by a fence, engaged in conversation. Such is usually the origin of flash fiction - something that has an intensity that can be packed into this tight format. I will not give stars to a book I contributed to, but I encourage you to get it and see just how much can be said in so few words. This book is available at http://amzn.to/qS7mfo and all proceeds go to the Dutch charity War Child. |
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► A few thoughts on the Arkadia event
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:28:00
| There's a chap of true character in Helsinki, namely Ian Bourgeot, the proprietor of the Arkadia International Book Shop. Not only does he sell books, he hosts evenings of a stunning variety in depth and topic at the shop. I contacted him out of the blue in May, and we set a date for the Literary Evening straight away. He was intrigued by my book, and was interested to host an evening for me to tell people about it. He said that the shop sometimes has 5 people at an event, and sometimes there's no space to move. My chosen date was not the best, as July is a month of holidays for Finns. I set up an event in Facebook and Ian added my info on his mailing list. At the event we had about 15 people, half of whom I knew, and half were not my acquaintances. I proceeded to put up the PDF file I had prepared, and almost every slide of 25 led to questions from the crowd. You can see a link to the the slides on the front page of this site. When the slides ran out, conversation went on still for some 20 minutes, so even if Ian did not have to forcefully eject us from the shop, we used the two hours allocated to us. It was a very nice evening and the questions a pleasure to answer. I decided then and there to host another such evening as soon as Slivers (the short story collection) is out. I will probably introduce the book, but mostly I hope to concentrate on the craft of short story writing. It seems to me writing was the main interest to many of the guests, so it'll be even nicer to plan the evening around that next time. I'll send you an invite in Facebook! |
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► The Literary Evening at Arkadia Bookstore
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:13:00
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► Review of Pete Morin's "Uneasy Living"
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:52:00
| Pete Morin is a true talent in the short story genre. It is rare to see someone move so fluently between moods and ambiences, creating believable worlds in few words and letting the story proceed at its own pace. In this compilation I especially liked "Celestial", which is a story verging on speculative fiction. Pete brings to life the main character effortlessly and believably, and the piece leaves the reader with a sense of wonder. Another favorite is "Joyful, Joyful", which rang so very true with me, due to my own experience after my father passed away. I marveled at the depth of Pete's perception and the frankness of his thoughts. In this piece his insights really shine, and one cannot read this short story without being moved. "A Dirty Angel" shows Pete's flawless handling of sequencing, a thing which has always been is forte, especially in his book "Diary of a Small Fish". I am eagerly awaiting more in this line of short stories, action-packed but fun. In all, I'd say any serious fan of short stories has to read these stories; it will leave him with a sense of contentment. You can buy this book on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/71893, and it is very well worth every cent. |
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► Language and author identity
Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:40:00
| I had the distinct pleasure of being interviewed by Laura Kyllönen, who recently graduated from the University of Jyväskylä with an MA in Writing. She wanted to find out how I see my use of the English language in my writing, and whether that affects my author identity. The following is a review of her thesis. Her thesis has very interesting insights as to the voice and identity of authors who work in a language that was not their first one. Kyllönen says most all people are bilingual, some multilingual, and therefore there has always been such authors. She starts from the Middle Ages and makes a valid point of the fact that Latin was not the first language of any writer then, but most material appeared in Latin anyway. In the modern age, especially the 20th century, bilingual authorship expanded and was diversified. Steven Kellman says that much of this corpus is actually literature by migrants who have been forced to move abroad for reasons beyond their control. This makes language choice one of necessity, not a voluntary one. Kyllönen cites many examples of this type of writers, and the corpus is large too. Immigration also caused authors to select their topics so as to better handle the pressures of forced migration. A good example is the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe who lives in the US and writes in English, which is not his mother tongue, as only a small minority speak English in Nigeria. Another point of Kellman's is the use of language to bolster the existence of a minority in a country. Many African writers do this nowadays to resist the power of English and to support the language and life of small minorities in African countries. None of this applies to me, of course, as I am still in the country I was born in with no pressures applied to me to get me to write in English. Jane Miller states in a paper written in 1983 that for people like Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, writing in a foreign language opened new doors for their creativity. Miller claims that for many authors, writing in this manner has contributed to their work and enabled them to explore new depths of creativity. These authors can be said to have a hybrid author identity. Then we have ambilingual writers, who have two distinct voices in two different languages. A good example is Rosario Ferrè, who states, "A bilingual writer is really two different writers, has two very different voices, writes in two different styles, and, most important, looks at world through two different sets of glasses. This takes a splitting of the self that doesn't come easily and can be dangerous. (Ferrè, 2003, 138.) Now, I strongly disagree with Ferrè. I would much more like to think I have one voice, a sort of sub-structure, which is the story, and that I can add on it a presentation layer in either Finnish or English (attempting to write in German would probably get me shot at dawn for distorting the language). The story in itself is my voice, and I then use either Finnish or English to give it the presentation I hope to convey. Kyllönen interviewed me through email. She is of the opinion that my English author identity is built on being accepted as an English-language writer, and asks now in the thesis, whether I would have such an identity if I were not accepted. She actually says that author identity is built on the continuous acceptance of readers. What affects both me and the other Finnish author who's been published in English, Hannu Rajaniemi, is the fact that there's a host of practical reasons for selecting English as the language. These include the probability of publication, the range of topics, and the vocabulary for the chosen surroundings in the story. Sure, I'd like to use the very concise Finnish terms and idioms for some events, such as a specific type of snowfall, but that's just the way it is. And then there's the question of language quality. I'll finish with Kamala Das's poem "An Introduction" in which the issue is very nicely put to rest: (--)The language I speak/ Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses/ All mine, mine alone. It is half English half/ Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest/ It is as human as I am human, don’t/ You see? (--)(Das, 2003, 5) Taking part in this thesis was most interesting. I had never properly thought of this issue before, but now I have more of an idea of myself as an author with an English identity. |
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► Press Release - Pfoxmoor acquires Tulagi Hotel
Wed, 18 May 2011 008:09:00
| After a year and a month with Diiarts, I have made an agreement with Pfoxmoor Publishing to reissue Tulagi Hotel as part of their expanding list of titles. I am very happy about this development as it gives me significantly more visibility and opens new delivery channels. This is the press release: ***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PFOXMOOR PUBLISHING (New Tripoli, Pennsylvania) is pleased to announce the acquisition of Heikki Hietala’s intensely romantic and charming historical fiction: Tulagi Hotel. Watch for the eBook version soon, following by the paperback in June 2011 under the PfoxChase imprint. ABOUT PFOXCHASE PfoxChase Publishing is the adult title division of PFOXMOOR Publishing, an independent press devoted to discovering and bringing fresh new talent in the genres of young adult, fantasy, science fiction, mystery/suspense/crime, romance, historical and cross-genre titles to the reading public. We believe the future of publishing is digital. All books chosen for publication will be available first as eBook editions, with selected titles also available in print. ABOUT TULAGI HOTEL World War II has given Jack McGuire the chance to escape the confines of the Midwest and the family farm. An ace U.S. Navy fighter pilot, he risks his life each day with his squadron in the South Pacific theatre. For him, there’s calm and camaraderie up there in the cockpit. But when the war ends, Jack struggles to find his place in civilian society. Turning his back on his home, family and inheritance, he returns to the Solomon Islands. Here he builds a hotel on the same island paradise he flew over in his years of combat. But when Kay Wheeler, the widow of his wartime best friend and wingman, comes to visit the island, Jack’s orderly world is disrupted. He is forced to consider whether there’s room enough for two in his reinvented life. ABOUT HEIKKI HIETALA Heikki Hietala is a Senior Lecturer at HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences. He holds an M.A. in English Philology from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and has worked in IT and localization for more than 20 years. Besides this novel, Hietala has written short stories, some of which have appeared in anthologies, e-zines and literary websites. All of his writing is in English, though his native language is Finnish. Tulagi Hotel began as a single idea and then went through 12 years of intensive research and background work. It has its roots in the author's deep interest in military history and popular culture. Hietala is a keen fan of British comedy and an avid Monty Python aficionado. *** Please bear with us as we transfer the book into the new delivery channels. There may be delays in delivery, but to offset that, you get Smashwords and its multiple e-book formats that were not available hitherto. |
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► Home Movies and Memories
Fri, 13 May 2011 15:53:00
| My father was a lawyer by trade, and he worked his whole life in administration. He worked at various ministries, including Agriculture and Education, before moving to Jyväskylä to become the first Administrative Director at any Finnish university. His work was always the same; to make sure everything proceeds by the book, and by all standards, and abides to all the rules. No space for creativity there, except for the fact that he bought a rocking chair for his office at the University. When people came over to vent, he'd sit them down in that chair and only after a while ask them, "So, what seems to be the problem?" (Story has it the chair is still there though he retired in 1985). It only now occurred to me that his work was the reason he shot home movies like he was Bertolucci. It was filmmaking that provided a creative outlet for him, complete with movie titles made in stop motion animation, and poking a brick out of a wall at home to get the projector into the other room, just like in the movies. He bought his Paillard Bolex B8L in 1957, after borrowing a friend's camera to make sure he didn't rush into something he wouldn't like after all. Well, it was a good purchase, even if it was expensive and it caused some problems for my mother to figure out that month's grocery bills. To add insult to injury, he got the camera with an extra three-lens revolver optics.It paid off in the long run. I still have the camera and projector, and they work. He bought a Swedish book too, "Lär Dig Smalfilma" or "Teach Yourself Moviemaking". He read about scripting and sets and different shots and lighting and whatever there is to know, and then he started filming for real. There'd always be shots that last for ten seconds or more, because the book said that five second shots are jumpy (this is waaaay before music videos, obviously). There's nice transitions between scenes, and the obligatory nature picture of flowers in every movie. He documented his family in every conceivable situation, doing domestic chores and celerbrating, traveling, having fun at the summerhouse, or especially waterskiing. Apparently he was enthralled by the sight of the water spray off the bow of a fast boat. A couple of years ago my brother and I decided to digitize the 40 rolls of film he amassed during his life. The films are becoming brittle as they have been stored in less than perfect settings. It came to five DVDs with some 6.5 hours of material. Just a few days ago, I got to thinking about the films. It seems to me I've been too close to the films, knowing every scene by heart, that I've forgotten what a treasure trove the set really is. I had another look at some of the films, and there's really a lot more than you see on the casual glance. It is a time capsule of a civil servant's life outside the office. Due to the high quality film he used, and the good work the digitizing agency did, we see colours still fresh and pure after 55 years. And it is wonderful to watch these silent movies; it adds a dimension, though you'd think it takes one away. When my father passed away in 2008, I made a fifteen minute compilation of the films, and picked the scenes where my father appeared to be at his happiest. Many scenes were shot at the summerhouse (yes, THE summerhouse), some were shot at the tennis court, or skiing in Lapland. I called the movie "Scenes from a Life", and installed some Sibelius piano music on the sound track. At the memorial service, many people just watched the film through, some twice, and commented on his life. It felt good to be able to send him off with a smile on his face. If you have such material in your possession, do take it forward - digitize, map, and describe what you have. The next generation will like you for that. And, at the end of the day, memories are all you really get to keep. |
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► Book Review: The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:43:00
| I decided to post my review of the book for a change.
***** Guy Saville's The Afrika Reich was one of the books I simply had to have. First off, I am a fan of alternative history, and second, a book based on a different ending to WW2 must be interesting. There's of course Robert Harris' masterpiece, Fatherland, but there have been less books based on this premise than one would expect. Maybe because the topic is so well known that a book based on such a premise would have to be exceptionally well written to pull off the stunt. I am ...moreGuy Saville's The Afrika Reich was one of the books I simply had to have. First off, I am a fan of alternative history, and second, a book based on a different ending to WW2 must be interesting. I am happy to report, Guy Saville does indeed pull it off. The first criterion of any Alternative History book is the setting. It must be solid, believable, and sufficiently different to the status quo. Saville excels in all three. He never explains his world, where Hitler has entered an uneasy peace with Britain and conquered much of Africa - everything is taken at face value and we readers merely acknowledge what has happened. Saville's Africa, then, is a beautifully crafted Nazi wonderland, a steamy jungle run by Walter Hochburg. This man is the epitome of Naziness, ruthless, all-powerful in his dominion, and driven. His grand plans for Africa can indeed be traced back to the Kolonialpolitisches Amt. Had Germany managed to make peace with Britain, KpA's significance might have been just what Saville shows us. And its plans would have quite plausibly been those of Hochburg's. The protagonists, Burton Cole and Patrick Whaler, then, lead us through Dunkirk and the truce to a descent into hell - to kill Hochburg. Saville really shines in his handling of the assassination and the subsequent escape across Africa, finally into Loanda. Double and triple crossings have the reader at the edge of his seat - can one trust anyone on the entire continent? Still, Saville never digs into Indiana Jones' locker. Cole and Whaler hit hard, but they are hit hard as well. Saville's forte is how he manages to add steam to the action page by page. There was a high point in the action, about two thirds of the book, when I thought this must be the pinnacle of the entire book, and that to take the adventure higher would risk becoming a farce of itself. But I was pleasantly surprised - contrary to what often happens, namely that the reader loses the suspension of disbelief, Saville brings us ever further, closer to the coast, and closer to the edge of our seats. The ending is perfect, since we already know Saville is working on Part 2 of this eventual trilogy. I am expecting Vol. 2 with just as much enthusiasm as I did Vol. 1. No book is without its flaws, but I can only report one thing I didn't like. I am aware that it is part of this genre to use short sentences, two, three words, in a machine-gun fashion. This is all well in books of lesser value, where the staccato rhythm is used to generate action. Saville. however, is a superb action writer and has absolutely no need for sentences without a subject, and could well tie the tat-tat-tat sentences into longer ones. It would not take anything away from the effect, but would add to the reading enjoyment. Five stars not given out of kindness of heart, but out of amazement. A great book indeed. |
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► Busting Bieber and Googling Gaga
Sat, 16 Apr 2011 11:25:00
| Last night I went shopping with the family. We had a list of stuff to get, and found it all, so things should have been fine. However, the mall played piped music so loud it was impossible to ignore, and the choice of music was very much dictated by what appears to be hot right now. I got irritated and started thinking about the situation. I am not against mall music as such. In fact, the local Citymarket here in Klaukkala has a quite erudite playlist, including Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama", and Steely Dan's entire record "Aja". They are original performances even. There's also a lot of easy listening classics on the list. When I shop, and I hear the raucous rhythm of "Babylon Sisters", drums by Pretty Purdie, I feel really nice. But when I am pondering which pair of running shoes to get, and deciding between two almost equal pairs, I simply have zero tolerance to mr Bieber chanting, "And I was like baby, baby, baby, oh Like baby, baby, baby, no Like baby, baby, baby, oh I thought you'd always be mine, mine". Now, I am no spring chicken, and I understand that there's always been teen idols since Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774). There's been a massive dilution in the substance of teen idols though, and I fear it is correlating with the rise of the Internet. I mean, Elvis was a true revolutionary, as were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and all those who have entered the halls of the immortals. The current crop of teen idols have nothing of their own. Sure, Beatles had lyrics like those quoted above, but they played their own music; Bieber et al. are produced by a computer, splicing together one-bar lengths of music, and packaging the whole through Photoshop. And I bet Goethe didn't need Autotune. Being sufficiently incensed, I went to Google and entered "why should I care about lady gaga?" as the query. Google's response was "About 1,220,000 results (0.13 seconds)" and the first was conveniently an exact match for my query. Apparently, I should appreciate Lady Gaga for her trendsetting abilities, her outrageous lifestyle, and her being a phenomenally important cultural phenomenon. Let's look at that for a sec. Trendsetting? I do not call it trendsetting, if one wears shreds of livestock to a party - after all, trends should be something you can emulate and use, but if you have one strip of bacon on your forehead, you'll be banned from public transport. Similarly, being carried to an important event in a resin egg merely emulates the age-old tradition of being carried around in a litter. Again, hard to pick up for everyday use. Her lifestyle, then, is based on her frantic running ahead of everybody else, including herself. Her worst nightmare probably is having Lady Gaga 2.0 emerge from somewhere wearing a stoat through her head. Oh no, that was already done by Monty Python. Her lifestyle is a figment of her feverish imagination, one that is completely unhinged. The second most popular link on the Google results was one pointing to a site where Lady Gaga was praised for her point on sleeping. Apparently she had first said, she'd sleep in her grave, but has since reneged on this and now has said people should sleep more. That's all well said, but given the fact she issues another statement within the next ten minutes, any point she makes will be lost in the hoopla created by the next one. So far she has probably promoted thousands of things, never bothering to stay with any one of them, just because of her need to go ahead all the time. As for her importance as a cultural phenomenon, I think she is a living monument to our time, which has progressed from ADHD to Full HD in a span of a couple of years. This, if anything, is detrimental to mankind. Substance is buried under masses of presentation, and we no longer stop to appreciate the value of things per se, we only appreciate whatever makes the most noise. So, I'd rather shop with Steely Dan than any plastic production, and prefer Goethe to Gaga. |
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► Decomposing a shortie
Sat, 02 Apr 2011 13:19:00
| I was recently sent a very nice email by someone who had read my short story "Les Feuilles Mortes". He had liked its unhurried pace as well as the way I exposed a random acquaintance piece by piece. As this story was only the third one I wrote after starting to work in shorties (after "The Dispatchers" and "The Summerhouse"), I was all the more happy when he liked the structure. I was now prompted to recollect on the crafting of that piece, and if you like, I'll explain how it came to be. If you have not read it yet, it is available at my other website, www.sabulo.com for the time being. The structure is straightforward enough: the MC takes a trip, meets a person en route, and has dealings with her all through the two-week trip to the sun. I do not mean pleasant dealings, the lady in question is more or less annoying. Nevertheless, the MC comes to see that the way the story ends for her is not something that anyone should endure. The trip to the sun is autobiographical. My father wanted to join a bunch of neighbours who were going to Agadir to play tennis for two weeks. At the time I was a student in my early twenties, and it sounded like a nice trip. And it was one, since the hotel stay was all-inclusive, and they had this Hacienda, a tennis oasis in the desert. The annoying lady is an amalgamate of two people. One was a Ukrainian woman who sat next to me on the red-eye from New York to Helsinki. She was the physical representation of the lady in the story. Incessantly talking, and with way too much perfume, she provided me with the worst long-haul I ever took. The other part, the lady who wanted to hear Les Feuilles Mortes all the time, was one of our team. She was by no means as irritating as I made Maija; the thing was that she alone knew French, and therefore assumed leadership of our little entourage. And, she did appear at the jazz corner every night and want to hear just that one song. Maija's use of alcohol was brought about by the other Finns who were flown in with us. At that time it was no secret that many Finns would drink too much while abroad. These people were genuinely a pain in the posterior, and I soon learned to make my own way into the town instead of hopping on the complimentary minivans. Our team never missed the afternoon tennis because of a long lunch, or indeed stayed up too late. The hotel did indeed have a jazz corner. There was a band for five nights, and a couple of nights there was a DJ of sorts. His music was not the very hippest I'd heard, and at some point I was fighting an urge to go and offer him my cassettes instead. A couple of nights there was bingo for the benefit of the elderly travellers. I'd say that the jazz cats were not entirely up to the level I made them out to be in the story, but thoroughly enjoyable anyway. As for the setting of the whole story, Agadir was and probably still is perfect for a short story. The colours, the scents, the hospitality and the cats lazing in the vertical rays of the sun did burn onto my retina - I can still see the brown and white blocks of houses, joined wall to wall, and the colorful textiles, and of course, the conical piles of herbs and saffron at the Souk. I did also venture to the roof terrace of the hotel one night, just to see the transparent, pitch-black sky. I've never seen the stars as I did that night, and the sight remains with me evermore. In a way, every story I have written has something of me and my experiences in it; this, and "The Photo Opportunity" probably the most. A cynic would say, of course they do. But I'd rather try to say they are merely a filter through which I see what I then write down as a short story. |
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► Everybody wants to write
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:21:00
| I've been wondering about a thing of late. Since I published Tulagi, many people have come to me and said, it's fantastic I wrote a book, and that they'd like to write too. They then say there's no time, they don't know how, or they're worried people would not like their writing. First of all, it's really interesting how many people are interested in writing. When I ask them, they always read a lot - seems there is a 1:1 correlation with the need to write. Most of them don't do much writing in their work, but some do. One of my recent acquaintances said that he writes technical reports and scientific research reports all the time, and yet, he dreams of writing fiction. Many have asked me, how I have time to write, since I work full time and I have a family and all. This is of course something that has to be decided by everyone for himself. I seem to think of things to write when I am going to bed, or when I am sitting in the morning rush hour jam, or in the bus. Then, when I have a little time, I make notes of the story in a file, and then fill in the meat onto the bones piece by piece. I would of course like more time to write, but then again, writing is a tricky business. You can't beckon the muse. Sometimes I've had an hour in my hands, and nothing flows onto the screen. Therefore I believe it's better to get used to the fractional method of writing, unless you can dedicate a steady amount of time for it. Then there's the how of it. I have to say I don't believe writing can be taught. The craft of writing has some fundamentals of course, but then again, some of the irregular writing I have seen has entertained me much better than something written by the book. Also, I think sticking to rules and regulations tends to stifle the process and makes the story conventional. Especially in the writings on the Year Zero website you can see some stuff that doesn't conform much to anything, but will amaze you and provide a much better reading experience. And hey, at the end of the day, you own the story, and you own the process, why should you not write it up just the way you see it happen inside your head? Then there's the question of readership. You can write the worst of stories, but if it has something that allures the readers, you get to be Dan Brown. And then again, you may write a story that's beautiful and perfectly executed, and it fails to get the readership it would justly deserve. This is reason enough to stick to your own words, and write just what you would like to read yourself. I always try to encourage people to go to writing websites, for peer help and reviews, but the question always remains, where does one find a site that really works. I've been lucky in finding such sites, but I am quite confident there's always a site for aspiring authors that would be of assistance. All it takes is a bit of googling and sometimes the effort to finish a couple of stories so as to show others what your writing is like. And at the end here, I'd like to state that writing is a very relaxing hobby, and those who feel a call to do it, should just go in and see what comes out. They may be surprised; I certainly was. |
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► Unknown Photographs
Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:51:00
| Ilta-Sanomat, exactly one half of our Yellow Evening Press here in Finland, has a curious side project besides delivering stories on politicians misappropriating state funds, and kittens making it home after family moved 790 kilometers. They publish booklets on the turning points of Finnish history, such as the Winter War, the Continuation War, and the fates of the Miss Finlands from 1930 onwards. I have the curious feeling they do this not only for boosting the sales of the main newspaper, but that they have a somewhat patriotic motive in this too. The latest instalment in the series is, "Finnish Wars in Color", out today. In it, Iltasanomat has dug up fantastic and very rare images, taken during World War 2 here in Finland, in bleached but very distinct colors. In the war, Finns had a specific task force whose duty it was to document not only the fighting and the successes of the army, but also, the Finnish soldier as a character of war, weapons in action, areas that have been retaken in the condition as they were left, and surprisingly, purely landscapes and images of people in the Finnish-held areas. These people, the TK (Information Company) photographers, shot and left behind a legacy of war images unrivalled by any belligerent nation. As you may remember, Finland was the only country that lost the war, but remained independent aside from an Allied Control Commission. After the war, some images were of course destroyed by the ACC, but the great majority was left intact. And in this set, there is a bunch of pictures, shot in AGFA Color stock, delivered by the Germans who were in Finland. The color stock rolls, and especially the AGFA color transparencies, were reserved for special occasions. Its veracity and impact were so much bigger than that of ordinary black and white film. It is in these pictures that I found a few shots, taken in the trenches of the front line, that got me thinking. For example, there's one of three soldiers after a pitched fight, arms on shoulders, and the smile of being alive after such an encounter on their lips. On the left is someone whose name we see printed on the page, on the right as well, but in the middle, we have "unknown." The TK photographers were instructed to note as much metadata as possible, but of course, in the heat and fog of war, not all can be taken down. The thing is, we can now find out what happened to Väinö Virtanen on the left, and Jussi Mäkinen on the right, but there is no way to find out what happened to the third young man, smiling just as broadly, even if we were to track down Väinö and Jussi, now in their nineties. I find myself fascinated by these unknowns. Did this man in the middle make it beyond the next assault, or did he die in it, survived by the two others whose names we know? Or did he make it all the way out of the war, and go on to build the post-war success story we, the current generation, are allowed to inhabit? This is exatly why I love writing historical fiction. I can look at that picture and build myself the situation in which the image was taken, and let the story emerge from it. I have no way of knowing whether it has an inkling of truth in it, but I can look into their eyes and see them telling me something. From images to stories is a wondrous journey. |
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► Writing on Cue
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:25:00
| I had the privilege to participate in a wonderful writing experiment last year. Michael Wells, also known as Mayor Biggie to all on Authonomy, decided he wanted to put together an anthology of short stories with his author friends around the world. He had a twist in the idea: he'd pick a name, shake his MP3 player, and assign whatever song came out of it to the name. No questions asked, no reassignments. Luckily his music machine is amply stocked and there is incredible variety in the songs. Another limitation was that we were not to use song lyrics or events in the song in any way. This was not only to prevent any copyright issues, but also to force authors to think outside the box. Of course, many people jumped at the chance to get in this crowd and I was one of the lucky ones. Michael shook his MP3 player, and assigned me a song by Thomas Dolby - "She Blinded Me with Science". I was amazed. How can it be possible that chance brought me a song from my high school years, one I have listened to ever since it came out in 1982? I set to work. The first idea I had turned out to be a false start; it was too close to the song to be viable, and when I tried to work it out, it fizzled. (It was a piece on the love story of Marie and Pierre Curie). To try it out, though, I posted it in the blog that Biggie had set up for us to discuss stories and ideas. The other authors were quick to convince me it had no chance. This was one of the really great features of this project - one could always trust the others would give an honest and truthful comment on the others' work, and could expect the same. I then happened to be reading a book entitled, "The world's worst aircraft". There's a humonguous plane in it, the Tupolev ANT-20, a real behemoth of a plane. I read that with interest, and then went around for more facts. This was just what I wanted for my story. You may want to go to Wikipedia and have a look at the plane, it's nothing like what you see today. So, my piece has a Siberian peasant who is confronted by a propaganda machine on a country-wide tour, but there's a sinister undertow in the story. I will not explain any further, you need to buy the book to read it - all proceeds go to charity. To my surprise, I got a second shot at this. Now I was sent a song I'd never heard before, Eddie Vedder's "Society". Again, a false start ensued, but this time with something I will work out later, as it revolves around Amelia Earhart and her companion on the fateful flight, Fred Noonan. The real shortie in the book emerged almost in parallel with that dud story. In it, I try to work in a notion of society consisting of many people, but with as many life stories. None is more important than any other person's story, and nole less so. Again, I cannot divulge what happens, but it has its origins in the Civil War of Finland, 1918. The direct link to the book is http://amzn.to/fCM0Zb. Please have a look and read it. Happy 2011, everyone! |
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► On the Kindness of Strangers
Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:29:00
| As the Winter Solstice occurs at 1:38am tomorrow, Dec 22nd of 2010, I'll be fast asleep, but let me take this evening to take a look back and see what happened this year. The common factor in much of what took place can be distilled in the title of this blog entry. Most of the events I had the privilege of enjoying this year were brought about by people who were total strangers to me before, but have now become friends in a very real sense. For example, I had no connection to the nucleus of Diiarts before I met them on Authonomy. Indeed, it would not have been really possible for me to have made the acquaintance of SJ, Ben, and Jason, except through an extraordinary set of circumstances. But for the wonder of the Internet, I would still be hawking my book to unsuspecting publishers and wondering if I will ever have it in my hands as a book. It did happen in April, and much of it due to the kind response I was awarded on Authonomy, not just by Diiarts, but by all of the old hands there. I learned much of writing through the feedback and comments I got there, not least from Greta, who has gone from casual Internet buddy to a very real friend. And there's more. It was on Authonomy that I met and befriended Dan Holloway, who was willing to lend me a hand when th short stories began to roll out of my head, apparently after the logjam of Tulagi was finally broken. I wrote sixteen short storied in the span of eight months, and Dan was sufficiently impressed to offer me a seat on year Zero Writers. And the people I've met there have accepted my writing as part of the brand that YZW has become. This is something I revel in every time I post there. The troop is so willing to offer critique and support that it is nothing short of amazing. The same happens at The Book Shed, where I've enjoyed very lively and powerful discussions over many of my short stories, before I've decided the story is ready for delivery to the Internet, or, as you will see next year, into Biggie's Words to Music, Jane's Bits Bobs and Baubles (2009 and 2010) and other print formats. More on that later. Still, the biggest and most significant display of the kindness of strangers happened in 1998. I was two years into Tulagi Hotel, and even if I had not even decided to make a book out of it, I had already made my mind up on one thing: research. Consequently, I was all over the nascent Web, searching for tidbits that might help me along the way and make the story believable and true to the reader. I spent some time every day hanging around at soc.history.war.world-war-ii (remember the Usenet News naming conventions?), asking questions and scanning the topics to see if something sounded interesting. One day I posted this: "Info on Navy Pilots Needed", and inside the post I wrote "Does anyone know the size of the staterooms on Enterprise-class carriers?" and other similar items. Then I settled down to wait a couple of days, as was usual for anyone to respond. In the morning I opened my email at the office got a cup of coffee, and read this line: "I flew off those carriers. What would you like to know? Wells Norris." This man, an ex-Navy pilot in his eighties, was willing to help me, a fledgling scribe on the other side of the globe, to add realism and emotion into a story that was probably a stillborn idea anyhow. That was exactly what I needed at that point, especially since Wells would end his emails with something like "Good luck on the project," "PS I liked the section you sent me," and "You do understand I want an autographed copy of the finished book." He's in the dedication of the book and his daughters have their own copies. So, in all, I'd like to thank all you strangers turned friends for accompanying me on this journey that was 2010, and I hope to see more of you in 2011. Let us hope it becomes an even better year for all of us. |
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► Marketing Blues
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:45:00
Marketing Blues So, the book is out, in three formats, there's reviews, a website, Facebook group with 300+ fans, interviews, plugs (shameless and otherwise) and a few copies in the hands of readers. Now what? I must admit the marketing side of writing and selling a book has proven to be even more of a handful than I ever expected. I know I was told up front way back that there's lots of work to do. I've been applying every channel and outlet for getting the word out and making noise, and probably lost me a couple of friends in the process by talking about nothing much besides my book. My apologies to all. R.R. Bowker (the people who run Books in Print) say that "there were 407,000 books published in 2007 (the last year for which final numbers are available), a total that includes 123,000 “on-demand, short run, and other unclassified” titles. Of the 274,000 classified titles, 43,000 are “fiction,” a category that includes “strictly adult novels (including graphic novels) and short story collections.” Yikes. The numbers can only be bigger this year, and only one of these books is Tulagi Hotel. While it's cool in the sense that it's swimming in a very large pond, and doing okay, it also places huge barriers to actually getting somewhere out of the deep end. Methods of being noticed are scarce, but they do exist. One would be to get reviewed in a major newspaper. This is something I've been working on for a long time, but the problem there is the stack of books they get from established publishers; us indies tend not to float to the top, unless one has connections in the circles. The second is to try to do as many interviews and plugs in websites. This avenue has also been covered enthusiastically, and I offer my sincere thanks to all sites who have either interviewed me or published a plug for the book. But there's such a huge number of websites competing for eyeballs too that it's easy to get lost in the woods. My third avenue is short stories. I have been querying and submitting to many websites and print magazines, and have been successful at Year Zero, Eight Cuts, Emprise Review, The Book Shed, Words with JAM, and Flash500. All these hopefully help me establish a presence on the Web and get noticed. There's one more print publication coming up but I will tell which it is when the magazine is out. So... what's the punchline? Very simply - it's you. It is friends like you who take the time to read this, who may happen to mention the book to someone who has that connection to someone who can make a big difference. Without your help it'd be next to impossible to get the word out. It's all a big lottery, and I have just one ticket. I'll keep plugging everywhere, but I just wanted to say thank you for all your help so far. |
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► In search of substance
Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:01:00
| It appears that our times favor a quick stimulus-response cycle. Starlets are ignited, burn briefly but brightly, and fade out just as fast as they appeared. This is very evident in the music scene; few of the hottest names of today were there three or more years ago. In a way, I miss the Fifties. If someone came to the fore and turned into a household name, the fame was based on years of hard work. The Sinatras and Hepburns, even Marilyn Monroe, all had substance in their work. (She had something else besides.) Authors of the era toiled for years on books, no doubt partly because of the manual typewriter and associated printing processes were slower, but also because they wanted to deliver a lasting reading experience. But these days, all you need is a good agent with connections and a flexible young person who is willing to wear sundry body parts of demised animals as her dress, and sing a bit, and hey presto! you have a phenomenon. I have a hard time imagining anyone dressing up like that in the Fifties, except in some hush-hush S/M club in downtown Hollywood. But it's also due to the fact that they had content and they had substance in those days. The ones who didn't faded so fast and so completely we don't even know their names today. I've been reading stuff on Authonomy lately, now that I am keeping Slivers up there to see what happens to it. I find myself looking at more titles than before, but spending less time on each before discarding it, or upon finding something I would buy, backing it. Somehow it seems to me the content and substance problem is evident there too. Quite a few of the books that make it all the way seem well enough written and with a story that could capture my attention span (short as it is), but I have not found books as good as were there, say, 2008-09. No book I've seen of late has reached the lofty peaks of literature where Paul House's Harbour resides, or been as well written as Gemi Sasson's The Crown in the Heather. Some sci-fi has been slightly interesting, but none of it is at Patty Jansen's level. I've also been checking out many writing sites, but none are as good as Year Zero and Bookshed. The limited time I have for reading is better spent hanging around there (and at Goodreads) than searching for yet more sites. Now you will say, who am I to say anything on substance. Well, I'm just me, and entitled to an opinion along with anyone else. You can also ask, is there any substance in my writing? That's for you to say. All you need to do is to read some and decide for yourself. |
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► Mä mistä laulun aiheet saan
Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:39:00
| The title of this blog entry is a very popular Finnish song from the 1950's, with words by our incomparable wordsmith, Reino Helismaa. For people outside this little Northern country, it may be easier to understand the topic in English: Where do the ideas for songs come from? That is one very relevant question. In his view, mr Helismaa finds song ideas far and wide: a chirp of a bird, the bite of cold air on the cheek, rain, wind, the gaze of a loved one, rags or riches. The question has come to me quite a lot of late. After Tulagi, which came about after a singular idea of a hotel run by an ex-Marine, I have been jotting down ideas for short stories at an alarming rate. For the Tulagi idea, I blame extensive reading of WW2 history books, including biographies of Nimitz, Bull Halsey, and Raymond Spruance. Having an uncle who fought in the Finnish Air Force in WW2 may have caused the final spark. Some of these ideas are stillborn, of course. There may appear a brilliant lead for a short story, which then upon closer examination turns out to be useless, most often due to insufficient substance. Some of these ideas may cause a rush of other ideas to surface, initially looking like a viable whole, but then turning out just as dead as the original one. In rare cases, these will yield usable phrases or events, which are duly noted for later use. Then there's the set that doesn't look so hot at the outset. These ideas may cause a lukewarm reaction in my head, but appear to have enough merit so as to retain a seat on the back burner. I often work on these when going to bed in the evening, as I have a habit of boring myself to sleep with my short stories. Writing these can be a drag, but I have to try each one out before deciding whether they will live or expire half-baked. Every once in a while, along comes an idea that lends itself to a story plot without too much conscious work at all. These include "The Summerhouse", "Carbon-based", and "The Wind in the Pipes", all of which were easy to write after boring me to sleep about five times each. Working with one of these is a really enjoyable experience; the text flows without any trouble and molds into a final product without hassle. All that is needed then is the help of a little ring of hand-picked, honest beta readers. A sub-category of the previous type is the sleep-depriving freaking good story idea that uses up all available processor power and prevents work on other stories until it is all written out. Such a story is "Filtered Light", which had me in its grip for two weeks and kept me working on its twists every free moment I could assign to it. But finishing such a story always makes me feel a glow of accomplishment. The final category of ideas is the Flash. These resemble ball lightnings in many regards, such as regularity and effect on the mind. I only have finished two of these, "Yessirree" and "Lord Stanton's Horse", but both made the shortlist of Flash500. They were conceived and outlined within 20 minutes, written in about the same time, but mulled over sentence by sentence for 2 weeks each. The intense concentration needed for Flash fiction calls for a certain mood, which is not always available - nor is the time to write intensely. It remains to be seen whether new flashes will appear. I will be glad to discuss any of these points with you if you'd like to challenge me on them. Or if you have any other categories, I'd be happy to learn more. |
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► The Power of Dreams
Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:04:00
| Sometimes you think that there's nothing beyond the day-to-day life. You wake up in the morning, and make coffee and the pair of sandwiches while watching Good Morning [insert your respective country here]. You go to work, apply some effort to the tasks at hand and stop doing that by four-thirty or so. Drive home, make dinner, watch TV, update Facebook, fall asleep. And then things get interesting. You start to dream. Someone said that as proof of life after death, a life without physical bodies, he offered the fact that we have a non-physical life in dreams. I found this a very interesting thing to say. Isn't it a wonderful thing, being able to go to bed in the evening and be transported into a realm where everything is possible? Dreams can be recurring, singular, lecherous, terrifying, boring, eerie or stupefying. They can also be productive beyond any proportion to the effort invested. There are those who say that dreams are a gate to the power of the subconscious mind, and as I have had mild success in harnessing that, let me explain what I mean. As you may know, it took me 12 years to write the book at hand. That's mainly because I had no opportunity to allocate eight hours a day to the project. Neither did I have something to write every day. I had a very loose idea how the book would be constructed, but I had no accurate, chapter-based game plan. So, to make the most of the time I could invest in the book, I used my subconcious in the project. In 2000, I was handed a book called "The power of the subconscious mind" by J. Murphy, a classic book in its genre. I read the book with an entirely skeptical mind. Nevertheless, some of the ideas presented in the book seemed worth testing. Around those times, the book had developed a bad snag. I had written it as a loose collection of chapters, and numbered them one by one, in a more or less direct time frame. This resulted in an exceedingly arduous read, boring as the Helsinki Yellow Pages of 1973. I had litte ide what to do now and how to get the thing going better. So, using an idea from Murphy, I began to try and connect wth my subconscious. The best time for this is just before falling asleep, or just after waking up, close to the transition to dreams. I began to tell myself, "I have the structure." A simple statement, pertaining to a situation that has come to pass - not a wish, not a request, but a statement. According to Murphy, getting access to your subconscious takes time. I said this to myself, mentally picturing myself happily hacking away with the structure in place. Nothing happened for the first month or so, but I stuck to it for a month more. And then, one morning, I understood - there was no need to be chronological as long as there was an interesting main character, whose life was the framework. Now, I can just about hear all of you say, "What a silly person - of course that's what you would do." But bear in mind, I'd never written anything in my life before. I simply had no tools for crafting this. Therefore it was such a revelation for me to get back to writing, using Jack's life as the structure. I applied the same approach to the ending, and to clarify to myself what to do with twelve characters. (The answer was extermination). And to four or five key points in the book, and it worked every time. In 2007 I also began to think, "The book is in print in 2009". Well, that came to pass in 2009 first in Blurb edition, but for real in 2010 with the Diiarts edition. These days, I try to use dreaming for short stories as well, and have had some success with it. But seeing the book on a bookstore shelf is all the proof I need for saying that using the subconscious really pays off. |
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► Romance writer - moi?
Tue, 05 Oct 2010 008:57:00
| As soon as I had written the first chapter, I knew I was in for trouble. Having a strange woman appear at this hotel on a Pacific island paradise would severely limit my chances of writing a buddy book with nothing but swashbuckling fighter combat and never-ending beer parties. But the lady did appear and had a stake in the project, because she was the widow of one of the main characters. Damn. You see, I didn't think I could pull it off. Surely romance is for authors who have a steady access to Mediterranean sunsets, a bowl of strawberry Margarita at hand at all times, and a lifetime spent as carefree lovers of fine arts (and beautiful people). I've been to Italy once, rather like non-alcoholic beer, and am married to the same lady I fell for at the University. I had no way out of this situation. The lady in the first chapter was going to stay, and I would have to plan a believable role for her in the book, no matter what. Initially I had no idea what to do. I toyed with the idea of making her the pivot point of the whole book; then I relegated her to a totally secondary role, a bit like a porcelain figure on Jack's weary bookshelf. And then I bit the bullet, and wrote her in as one of the three corners of the triangle that appeared at the very beginning. The way I went about this was one of exclusion. First, I do not like to read books in which everything is spelled out. It was very nice in the early days when reading Sergeanne Golon's Angelique series, of course, but after that phase, I much prefer being given as little as possible regarding how a character looks. Hints as to same are of course needed, but this way, the reader is more free to build the person in his or her mind. And of course, doing this in a "show, don't tell" way adds another layer of complexity. Second, if there's something I knew I could not do, it was writing about relationships in a John Updike vein. If you've read "Run, Rabbit", or any of the other Rabbit books, you'll know what I mean. If not, I'll say, Updike can take the relationship of a married couple and turn it over endlessly and never sound trite or boring. That kind of writing is better left to the professionals, so I steered clear of it. Third, I believe in 'less is more' when it comes to telling what happened. I have been bored to tears with some books I've read, when the main characters go about their problems like two heavyweights in the ring, and the reader gets a bow-by-blow commentary. I could have written reams of stuff about Jack and Kay and who said what and when and why and how. But I deemed it would not have brought forward their feelings any more intensely as they now appear (this is my view of course, your mileage may vary). What I wrote is how I wanted to bring about what happened, and I can honestly say, it was the only way I could have done it, both from my writing ability point of view and my storytelling point of view. It once again remains for the reader to judge if it works. |
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► The Model Airplane Chapter
Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:50:00
| Many authors work on their own life when they write, turning bits and pieces of real life into bytes and chunks of prose. Well, I have a surprise for you. I did it too. When you read the book, and you know some of my friends, you may see a glimpse of real people, but I am quite adamant when I claim no character in the book is based on a real person. They may have traits and gestures, but not one of them is truly a reincarnation of a real person. As for events, there is one event in the book that is not that far from what happened when I was about twelve. I used to build model airplanes in a church club with a friend of mine. I went to the club because I had no tools home (my father was not really carpenteristically oriented), and the club had good tools plus a place to build the planes. I had a good friend who came along though he had all the stuff he needed at home, and he was very handy with the tools at his disposal. But I guess he wanted the social aspect of belonging to a club. Besides, his planes were the absolute best the club ever saw. He was meticulous in following the instructions, and he had a true gift for getting the models built perfectly. That was not exactly the case for me. I always cut the balsa a millimetre or three too long, and had to sand off the extra, only to wind up with a wing main spar that was two millimeters too short. Nothing a little glue wouldn't fix, except then my models had a center of gravity that was never where it was supposed to be, due to the extra glue. My friend's planes flew just like they were supposed to. My own, well, flew like inebriated magpies, if they flew at all. At least one model snapped in two when I wound up the rubber engine. And, what you read in the book, about getting the tissue paper tightened, actually happened. The model in question was called Sinisiipi (Bluewing), and it was a Level #2 plane (#1 was the easiest to build). I managed to get the wings built, and to my surprise, I even got the dihedral angle - the slight V form of wings and tailplanes - right. Onwards to the covering! I applied glue to the balsa of the wing and slapped a thin sheet of tissue paper on it. Getting it to fasten was easy, and I thought nothing of it - this is a piece of cake. More paper, more glue, and there we were, all done. The last bit is to apply water to the paper and it will then become taut and straight. That is, if you don't overdo the water. When you do, the paper will shrink too much and in my case made the wing look like a huge propeller, with the tips twisted in opposite directions. It was at this point that my friend suggested we have a little competition. His father had a chronometer which we borrowed, and as it was a nice calm day, I thought, let him have his victory. In the event, my twisted plane outflew his by twenty seconds, due to some magical aerodynamic features I had created by utter luck. At this point Tulagi's story and real life part ways. So, when I wrote my book, I thought this little event could shed light on the early days of Jack McGuire. How well it works is up to the reader to decide. I have had positive feedback on this chapter, and this sort of makes me feel it does work. One reader said this chapter felt like a real life event. Hmmm. |
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► The Caves of Altamira
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 009:22:00
| The Caves of Altamira I was driving home from teaching evening class last night. On the car radio I had Groove FM, which plays good music most of the time and excellent music every now and again. Just as I turned onto the freeway I heard the familiar opening tunes of Steely Dan's "The Caves of Altamira". Bernard Purdie's immortal drumming and the perfect horn section eased into the song and I leaned back. Donald Fagen tells the story of a young kid who works his way into a cave with paintings on the walls. Left there by an ancient people with no language that we could understand, no names for the woolly beasts they painted, the pictures nevertheless open up to the boy and let him understand how he is a link in a chain of humanity. I began to wonder about cave art and then about writing. Just why did I spend 12 years on a piece of prose, more than 150,000 words at its worst, when I had no means to publish it, make a million bucks, and finally get the means to buy every single piece of Steely Dan in existence? I had no answer. I didn't wake up one day and say to myself, "Today I will start the book project, which will be some 350+ pages." I never did say that to myself. In this regard I am very different from many celebrities on Good Morning Finland, who are asked, what is your next project, and they say, "I'll write a book now." I sincerely wouldn't have dared to say so. I was issued the first chapter of Tulagi Hotel in my head one morning at the office, right in the middle of a 1,100,000 word translation project. I took a blank file, and hey presto - 45 minutes later Chapter 1 was staring at my face on the screen. Then I started to work two ways, to see how we got to the starting point and what happened afterwards. It was a strange journey. The story appeared to me at intervals, sometimes with weeks in between and in one case, an entire chapter at once for me to write down in a hotel room after twelve hours of programming. But it did come out, which is good, because then I don't have that nagging feeling at the back of the head. But why? I tried to figure out that, but the only reason I could come up with is, I share genes with the cave artists. Why did they paint those exquisite pictures of animals on the walls of a calcerous rock cave? Were they honoring the beasts they had to slaughter to make it through the winter? Or teaching youngsters on how to approach a herd of bisons and live to tell the tale? Or was it just to illustrate the stories they told around a camp fire, with the smell of roasting beef tickling their noses? Well, my cave is made of paper and I have no illusions it will be excavated after 35,000 years and interpreted this way or that way. It's just a book, among millions of books out there, on its way to archives and libraries and estates of a small bunch of people whose descendants will look at it and throw it away, wondering why Gramps bought it in the first place. That's not important. What is important, I have connected with thousands of years of human storytelling. The cavemen are long gone but their art inspires even today. My art (such as it is) may offer enjoyment and a nice read, but it will never survive like Lascaux or Altamira. So be it, because the river of human experience grows from these small tributaries of individual effort. Thank you, Donald Fagen, and the unnamed painter of beasts. |
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► So, what's your platform?
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:19:00
| I met with a fellow author and friend today and had a very enjoyable talk with him. We discussed the relative states of our projects, and updated each other regarding any news that might be of interest. It turned out my friend had contacted an agent and they had even responded. Not with the usual request for synopsis and 3 chapters, but just a question "What is your platform?". I have to admit, I played it straight for a second and let him believe I understood what the word 'platform' meant in this context. "Oh man," I said, "what a jerk." And I shook my head. Then I understood the question. The agent meant, what was the marketing platform my friend was about to utilize. Was he famous already? Did he have hook the agent could use in selling the book forward to an unsuspecting publishing house? Or was he loaded with money so there'd be no niggling about marketing costs? I got to thinking about this later, driving home after the post-noon lecture. Do the agents (and the industry) really expect authors to bring a dowry with them, or be able to create a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box scheme to use in selling the book? I always thought the idea was to write a story that would please readers and make them buy the book, and then tell their friends of the fabulous new book they just found. So I got to thinking about my platform. Incidentally, having just joined yet another website for authors, I have to tell you the question was raised there too. People asked, why is my book different? Why am I different? What is the soap box on which I will stand and shout about my book? I told them I have not much. Being the first Finnish author published in England amounts to nothing over there, and frankly, very little here, and that's just what it should be. One member on the site told me to create an online presence; my current presence is too much centered on the book, and I should tweet, toot, and honk about myself besides the book. As one once described by my nephew as a 6'3" flagpole with glasses, I really do not think I should try to be the platform for my book. I am not interesting and I fail to see how it would benefit my book, if I turned myself into a living advertisement for it. About the only such instance I can think of is me trying to land some media space in the teachers' labor union magazine (which is an ongoing project). Even that is not taking off too well. Besides, I feel that the thing I wanted to do was to tell a story; getting it published was a huge bonus, and the best thing is having people walk up to me and say, my story made them think of their own lives and the decisions they have taken during it. It is such pure enjoyment to hear that. Platform or no platform, that is the important thing - to have given someone a moment of pleasure. |
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► The story of the little boat
Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:23:00
| Sometimes, writers insert snippets of their own lives into their books. In my case, Tulagi Hotel doesn't have that much direct input from my life, apart from the chapter where Jack builds a model airplane to race his friend. That is an actual event and I will relate it in a later blog post. Most of the events in the book are devices to illustrate what I wanted to say. One of the themes that surfaces many times in the course of the novel is that of loss and the ways people dealt with it. For the pilots, death was not only a constant companion. It was really a scythe that reaped their wingmen out of the air, and left them with nothing to bury. Consequently, many pilots reported alienation and difficulties adjusting to civilian life after the war, when so many relationships had been cut off without a trace. There appears to have been a common procedure in the Finnish Air Force and the US military in World War 2. When someone died in the air, his squadron mates would go through his personal belongings, separate those that would be returned to the military and collect the rest to be sent to the next of kin; this would help the pilots deal with the loss in many cases that I have read. But war kills people close to non-combatants too, and I wanted to deal with the loss of a child as experienced by the parents. To do this, I got the idea of an elderly man whose only son is lost in the devastating naval battle off Guadalcanal in late 1942. I am somewhat sure this idea stems from a rumor I heard at the office at that time. Seems like one of the partners of the company I was working at had a son, and the son developed an incurable medical condition. We all felt sad for the son of course, but also for the father, who for all his riches could not make his son well again. The feelings of helplessness must be crushing in a situation like that. So, I wrote the chapter where mr Wallace arrives at the hotel to deliver a toy boat to his fallen son, in the depths of the Ironbottom Sound. I had seen a picture of a 1928 Riva boat in a 1956 magazine we had at my family summerhouse, and a friend of mine had a toy boat with a clockwork engine. I fused these together to make a fine toy boat, with which the old man's son played as a child and which had become the token for the son in his mind. Taking the boat to his son was his way of saying goodbye, and Jack was happy to help him along in his life, whatever remained of it. When I had written the chapter, I felt mildly good about it and was happy to include it in the corpus of the book. I also felt it made a relevant contribution to the development of Jack's character, even if he was an onlooker in the event. But there was a surprise to be had: I was on a business trip to Munich in late 2001. The team I was with left for dinner, but with only foreigners in the group, we soon got lost and wandered around much of Munich. (This was pre-GPS, remember.) When we passed a antiquities shop, I stopped cold in my tracks. In the window, on display, was the exact boat I had seen in my head when writing that chapter, albeit without the engine. My colleagues had to drag me away to dinner. But later, when I returned to the home office, UPS brought me the boat, a gift from my colleagues. It is now in the den of my home, on the top shelf, a constant reminder of the fact that even if all is well now, we should keep enjoying the good times, as things may change in an instant and nothing will be the same ever after. |
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► In the mood for writing?
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:56:00
| It's funny, but writing is a mood-based business. I have a high respect to real authors who can make a schedule for their writing. You know, "Wake up at 8, coffee, then a walk, start writing at 10, write until lunch, then write again until 4, play with golden retriever, ... etc." Not me. I write what the feeling brings, and it can't be timed. It's fine when writing a novel, as there's always a scene that fits the mood. But with short stories, it is sometimes hard to get in the right mood. For example, I am now working on a shortie that happens in October; given the temperature now at +30C, very high for Finland, it's not easy to get the right vocabulary even. When I was writing Tulagi Hotel, I was working for a global consultancy that deemed it necessary to fly me around the globe a few times. I used many of these hours in flight to write the flight scenes of Tulagi; it is much easier to write about flying when one is at 36,000 feet, even if it is not really a fighter, that 747. I also used novel writing as a way of fending off hotel death. With the consultancy, working days tended to be 14 hours each, so sightseeing was too rough after that. Having a quick dinner at the local McD, it was nice to come to the room and get totally disconnected from today, and enter the world of my own in the South Pacific. After I finished Tulagi, something happened in my head, and I produced 16 short stories in six months. (That probably says something about the quality of the stories too). Shorties seem to be a totally different vein of writing for me. I have usually a moment of enlightenment during which I get the general idea of the story, and the ending, with some key points. Then I lose all of these but they remain alive at the base of the hippocampus, and pop out when the mood hits me. A story called "The Summerhouse" is a direct product of what I went through after my father passed away. The idea is very straightforward, and I was able to get the right feeling for writing that story (set in November) in June. The need to commit the story to paper overruled almost anything external; as I remember, it took me a couple days only to write the whole five-six pages. On another note, a story called "Cavalcade" took me months to write. The idea appeared clear as glass, the execution seemed easy, and yet, the writing proceeded like a sedated snail going uphill. Four months later it was all there, but even now, I am not entirely happy with the flow and the pace, not to mention with the sequencing. But then again, some stories I thought were great have been received with lukewarm affections, and a haphazard quick'n'dirty piece is hailed as a good one. You never know. But at the moment, I have a mood for three concurrent stories. Stay tuned to see what they are and how they will look. |
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► Favorite chapters?
Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:33:00
| I wonder if other writers have favorite chapters in their books. I have three in Tulagi, actually. As for the reason why one of the 25 would stand higher than others, I have no definite reason, but maybe it is one that demanded more research, or was conceived in a flash (I like those moments), or then again, it may be a turning point in the narrative. The chapter I am referring to is #14. In this chapter, Don Wheeler gets a great idea for boosting morale in the squadron, which has suffered unsustainable losses of late. The young replacement pilots don't feel they can win the fight against Japanese pilots, which at this stage (November 1943) were still very good. Later the attrition in Japan's pilot corps and the errors they made in training new ones made it easier to win aerial battles. Don gets wind of a shipment of torpedo fuel, which is intended for the use of a torpedo plane squadron, but the squadron has already departed the island. Since the Mark XIV torpedo used either methanol or regular ethanol as fuel, so he decides to lift a jerry can of the stuff for the party. Assisted by Jack McGuire and the squadron doctor, Doc Mendel, he liberates a jerry and then stages a party, during which tensions are released, new pilots are sworn in into the squadron team spirit, and everyone is feeling no pain when the squadron is sent on a surprise strike against the enemy. I got the idea for this when I researched torpedoes. Apparently the use of torpedo juice, as it was called, in the US Navy was quite common. To battle the pilfering of pure alcohol, the Navy added either methanol, which was dangerous to drinkers, or croton oil, which makes for very fast bowel movements. As an addition, they added a dye, which was called "Pink Lady". Sometimes they would only add the dye, in which case the alcohol was strained through a loaf of bread, and hey presto - it was good for consumption. Croton oil was distilled out in crude stills, sometimes using steam from a ship's turbines... Apparently when there's a will, there's a way. So, if I had a jerry can of pure alcohol, what kind of buzz does it create? I went to Usenet News and posted a question into sfnet.hobbies.food+drink. Within 4 hours I had the following (my translation from Finnish), though the person thought I was arranging a wedding: "You can get 20,000 kilos of male meat (or 23,000 kgs of female meat) into a nice state of drunkenness at 0.1% blood alcohol, for six hours. Out of 23,000 kilos of female meat you get 350 ladies weighing 65kg, and you can turn 20,000 kilos of male meat into 250 hefty hunks @ 80kg each. This means, 20 litres of spiritus fortis will have 150 couples in a very amicable state for an evening. It will also give a rowdy evening for 100 men, but remember to stash the knives and forks away so as to avoid unnecessary fights, and stay away from the sea." He then went on to describe how to properly construct a 100 litre fruit punch. Given this info I could gleefully write a party in the jungle, with just the right amount of alcohol for getting the party going and then having the pilots somewhat sober to fly with the strike in the morning. Don't you just love the power of the Internet? |
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► Getting airborne through user communities
Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:22:00
| I wonder if anyone has a good, proven method for breaking the media barrier, as I'd be interested in hearing one. I've joined eleventy million discussion boards for the purpose of marketing my book. Some of them are very busy, some less so. For the most part it seems there are many people who come around once or twice, and a few diehards who spend all their waking hours combing the boards and commenting on anything that strikes even close to their fancy. I wonder how efficient these boards are, even for the power users. Of course, some of the boards are much nicer than others. For example, Mobilereads.com is a site that offers much interesting discussion, and the signal-to-noise ratio is good at least, if not even very good. The Stammtisch people have clearly been around a long time and read a lot. Especially for books that are available in other formats besides Kindle, this site has a lot to offer. On the subject of Kindle, the main attraction is the close-knit companionship with Amazon. Kindleboards.com is a very lively site that has a strong presence by the moderator community; posts in wrong fora get moved around with much speed and in general the site is very orderly. In a way it reminds me of Authonomy during the days of Rik the God. Many, many interesting discussions, but with limited time for expending on the site, no chance of joining them all. Speaking of Authonomy - while I have a fond spot for that site for giving me the chance of getting the book out, I have to say, it is a shadow of its former glory. The Klazart incident was the last straw; I rarely go there now, even if I have a bunch of short stories out there for the heck of it. It's a site full of tit-for-tat backings, people who will sell relatives for shelves (now that's an idea actually...) and bland, dull, boring conversations. I am very happy to have retained a set of the Old Guard in my Facebook friends. Then there's reviews on Amazon, and the related discussion boards there. These seem very important to sales; when Tulagi was having a mild streak and I had a view on the relative purchases, I thought I saw a connection between favorable reviews and sales. I have also entered the Amazon boards, but I am not so sure of the quality of the discussions there. I have the feeling a casual buyer might be willing to at least scan the reviews, and when I have submitted my own to books I like, I have invested a fair bit of energy and words to bring out my views on the book. Of course, favorable entries in blogs of friends have driven interest my way, and I remain very thankful for all the kind words written in favor of the book. I hope to repay these in my future blog writings. So, the bottom line probably is, nothing much will happen until by the grace of God, some review will pop up on a large enough medium, be it a newspaper, magazine, or discussion board. It would need to be very visible, but it doesn't have to be a five-star review of the type "I LOVED EVERY WORD". In fact, a review that would set the reading population thinking, why did the review state what it did, probably would work better. I wish someone, somewhere, writes such a review, and makes it public too. In the meantime, let's all enjoy the summer and hope for the best. |
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► Selling the book is a joint venture, part 2
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:46:00
| As you can read below in an earlier post, marketing a book these days is subject to a six-paragraph law. It is no longer just a question of the publisher setting up a massive marketing campaign, especially when one is with an indie publisher, who simply lacks the muscle to do a global campaign. Therefore we need to utilize crowd computing, and get the snowball rolling. The points 4 t o6 are as follows: 4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors 5. Utilizes existing communication networks 6. Takes advantage of others' resources Common motivations and behaviors? That's a tall order when trying to sell a book, when no two readers will fully agree on any point the book makes. Maybe the legislature here is trying to say that if you like something, sharing it and getting someone else to like it too makes your experience of the thing doubly as pleasurable. It is easier than ever to share things you like. Most web pages sport a 'Share' button, with which you can send the page to a number of social media sites. But hitting the button is a double-edge sword. If you hit it all the time, people will see eleventy million things you like on your wall, and they will hide your stream. If you never click the thing, you'll come across as a lurker who keeps things to himself. To utilize existing communications networks, one has to find such services as can be useful. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn spring to mind first. The thing is, the more services you sign up for, the more updates you have to remember to make. I have used LinkedIn and Facebook, but I have also enlisted in seven different reader sites. The volume of traffic I have to monitor, therefore, is much larger than what I have capability for. Besides, on these discussion fora, it is not enough to plug your own book. You need to read other posts, preferably so that you are able to add to the conversation, and just wish people click on the link in your signature. For this, I have picked Kindle Boards and MobileReads, as they seem to me to have the best conversations on Kindle. Later on, when Diiarts comes up with the other mobile formats, I'll attack other boards too. The final point is clearly the most important. Currently the book has 244 fans on Facebook. In theory, then, these people sport the updates on their wall. If all of them had 100 friends, the potential contacts are above 20,000. However, I believe most people do what I do, ie. hide some streams, so let's think 10,000 potential sets of eyeballs. The real force that would apply is this secondary level of contacts, one that I can never obtain myself, but which is within reach if everyone would share the messages. These potential contacts have yet to become any significant force. The same applies to people writing on forums. I have written some plugs for other people, and I hope people who read the book like it enough to do the same, and issue favorable reviews on any sites they visit. This is a long battle, but with your help, it is winnable. |
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► The Indie Spotlight story
Fri, 18 Jun 2010 009:40:00
| I had the pleasure of making the list of books presented on The Indie Spotlight. See it at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tulagi-Hotel-the-book/289819135445 |
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► Selling the book is a joint venture
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:33:00
| We live in an attention economy, we are told. Now that the book is out, I have to admit, I do agree. I've not been keen on attention before, but now, with the book, it's sort of a necessary evil. I've tried many different paths to get exposure for Tulagi Hotel. Not only me, but of course Diiarts and the wonderful supportive crowd I have helping me in Facebook and elsewhere have worked on this too. Still, crossing the media threshold is very hard, and so far, I have only limited success in getting eyeballs. There's another consideration: I would want the book to speak for itself. The best way to market it is through word of mouth, because that way, sales depend on actual support and not media hype. But word of mouth takes a certain critical mass to start a real chain reaction. This returns me to the basic question - how to attract enough attention to get the ball rolling. So, the first path is press releases. I sent dozens of them before and around the time of the launch, but these did not result in much. Only a second round of releases began to gain attention, and the clips in Helsingin Sanomat (our New York Times so to speak) and Me Naiset (a ladies' magazine with a respectable circulation) resulted from these. And one audio clip from the Finnish Broadcasting company, which I missed. But now it is time to try and figure out the viral explosion. One expert listed the following six elements of viral marketing strategy (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm): 1. Gives away products or services 2. Provides for effortless transfer to others 3. Scales easily from small to very large 4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors 5. Utilizes existing communication networks 6. Takes advantage of others' resources Let's see now... I certainly cannot afford giveaways, unless on a minimal scale, such as sending a signed copy to whoever gets the most friends to join the Facebook group. This is where small fish like Diiarts and myself are at a disadvantage to HarperCollins and other big players who have large pockets for marketing money. Effortless transfer probably means how easy it is for people to share the information. On Facebook all it takes is a click of the Share button; on this website, it means having the Share capability, which I will soon discuss with Pietu the Demigod Webmaster. Point 3, scalability, probably means that any website that will be targeted in viral attacks must be able to cope with the rush of new visitors. The demigod mentioned above assures me this will not be a problem, as he leases website servers the size of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Let's work on the other three in the next entry. |
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► The Joys of Research part 2
Mon, 31 May 2010 12:27:00
| Sometimes you need to get down to the minutest details to sound right. Besides, if you don't, some muppet will be up in your inbox, explaining just why your hero could not possibly have worn that special wristwatch in that situation. Mind you, I had trouble with this myself when I still read Tom Clancys. Still, I could not understand why he (or whoever wrote the book) would spend half a page to describe the watch on the man's wrist, when a Mickey Mouse watch would have told him it was too late already to defuse the bomb. This sort of focusing on the tools, not the task, suits some readers, but I like it only to a degree. A Finnish writer called Ilkka Remes is exceptionally gifted in walking the fine line between too little and too much research. For the life of me I do not understand why he doesn't get translated, because his books would fit the genre globally, not just in Finland. He has written books based in modern times as well as around WW2, and he's always on the mark when it comes to period detail. And yet, sometimes you just need that final bit of information to sound real and realistic. In Tulagi, there are a few such moments. One is when McMahon, Jack's flight school instructor, appears at the island. Jack recognizes him by the type of sunglasses he wears, manufactured by American Optical. In World War 2, AO supplied some 1.4 million pairs of these sunglasses to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. No, Ray-Ban was not the only purveyor. In fact, Ray-Ban supplied the Army Air Force since 1937. Wells Norris (see blog entry below) of course was very helpful when it came to getting details. He would list names of songs they'd play when the Fast Carrier Task Force returned from combat and the pilots had time to woo the girls at Pearl, or how the Wildcat and the Hellcat were nicer to land aboard a carrier than a Corsair. Of course, all of this data is out there somewhere, but getting at it can be tricky, and you have to remember, much of the research was on Altavista, not Google, and regular books. Still, my favorite was finding out there was a scheduled airline service to Guadalcanal, started March 1, 1949, when my heroine lands there in early June. Using the data at http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/troce.htm, which shows a scan of the original time table, I could work out the timing of that all-important first scene. I wonder how they did this in the 1950's... Nevil Shute? Anyone? This schedule, if you go see it using that URL, has been scanned from the apparently vast collections of Björn Larsson and David Zekria. The wonderful thing about our times is that, even if there were dedicated collectors of ephemera and sundries in ancient Rome already, they certainly had no intent to publish lists of their collections. Nor did they have much of an Internet those days. But Björn and his pals at timetableimages.com list schedules by airline, and I strongly recommend the service if you ever need to find a flight in 1958. So, even if research is a resource vampire, it is also one of the more satisfying parts of the writing process for me. I do not feel comfortable spinning out stuff off the top of the head; I need to have the crutch of research to lean on. Your mileage may vary, of course. |
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► Guest Blog: Jason Horger and Editing Tulagi
Thu, 27 May 2010 12:43:00
| This entry is from Jason Richard Horger Esq., who edited the first complete version of the book into something remotely publishable. His input was vital, but ever the gentleman, he never forced an edit, but let me decide. I approved 99,76% of his suggestions. ******* Tulagi Hotel—Doing One’s Research As I had when I was editing Heikki’s novel, I want to try to get this as near right as possible. Why did I agree to read through Tulagi Hotel with a critical eye, even as diiarts was in its infancy? What I might have learned from Heikki is to do my research. So back into the stack of e-mails, starting January 2009, I go. Were my motives clear? My aim (to co-opt Elvis Costello totally out of context) true? What I remember without peeking is that I selfishly wanted to read more of TH than the smidgens from Authonomy. I also recall in old chats with Sj is that we saw the book, popular as it was on our favorite authorly gathering-place, as having publishing potential. At that stage, I really hadn’t a clue about what a big deal it would have been from an historical perspective, of a Finnish author publishing in English for the first time. The thought rarely occurred to me as I read, x’ed out and commented. It was just one author to another, really. Looking back, my first fateful e-mail to Heikki on the subject, dated 13 January 2009, read in part: “Anything particular in Tulagi Hotel you'd like me to scrutinize?” So his original mistake, really, had been to fire the manuscript Kentucky-ward in the first place. But I like to think Professor Hietala knew what he was doing—even if I didn’t entirely, at the time. My nefarious plan, as I see it unfolding over the past year-plus, was to push Heikki to discover this guy, Jack McGuire, that he already knew oh-so-well deep down. The challenge, if that’s in fact the right word, was to convey the growth of this very private character—and everyone else within Jack’s sphere of influence—in dialogue and deeds. That was at the heart of the hard work put into writing the story down initially, and the series of revisions which followed. Charting the trail of this discovery was as crucial as it was to get the details of the dogfights right. (And so far as that goes, the dogfight scenes—when the characters get up in the air and Heikki takes you through every cloudbank, every attacking pass—consistently survived most of my editing mainly intact. Give this guy an airplane, already!) The luau scene was the first chapter at which Heikki (perhaps unwisely?) let me have a hack. (Torpedo fuel? Seriously?) That was the spirit of the novel for me, and the governing principle for my revisions, keeping that same can-do attitude in mind as I made my suggestions, and said my piece as the margins would allow. (I didn’t even let the vagaries of Word and the weird thing it did to Heikki’s quotation marks faze me.) But if I managed to help coax Jack out of his shell the slightest bit, so that the reader might get a good look at him, I gladly feel I’ve helped. And if Tulagi Hotel is the novel Heikki Hietala envisioned in the first place—or if he’s discovered along the way that he likes this one better—we’ve all done our job. If you’ve read Tulagi Hotel—and chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have—you realize what a tremendous storyteller Heikki is. He takes you up into the clouds; he sets you down in a Nebraska farm; he checks you in at an island paradise. Add to this his passel of excellent short stories, and you know you have a master tale-spinner before you. But beyond that, I got to work with an author who gets what the writing process is all about: digging deep enough to unearth whatever it was you were looking for when you first typed in those fateful words: “Chapter One”. |
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► Guest Blog: Juha Heikkinen & the cover
Tue, 18 May 2010 21:18:00
| I asked Juha, an old friend of mine and a great designer, to provide an entry on how he made the cover. It has received praise everywhere, so it's interesting to see the process behind it. ************ Heikki asked me to write an entry about everything related to the cover. This proved to be much harder a task than I anticipated when I bluntly said ‘Yes’. What does anyone want to know about the cover? It’s a picture and nothing more. But then again, it is. That is why I turned to Robert Frost for advise and took the road less travelled by. For me a good cover works in two ways. It has to tell something essential about the book and make it appealing to those who have not read it. But it should also have a second layer (no, not into Photoshop yet) which reveals the core idea of the book for those who after reading the last page close the book and see the cover again. At best it is like the movie “The usual suspects”. All the hints are there for those who know what to look for. Someday I’ll be able to make a cover like that. The process started when Heikki gave me the manuscript to read and a bunch of pictures along with his sketch for the cover. After reading the book I discarded the sketch and started to work on the main theme I found in the book. For me it was the ripples. Since we were working on a tight budget, we had to concentrate on royalty free pictures. Or pictures that Heikki had rights to use. I believe it’s unnecessary to say how important and time consuming this rights issue is. I used five different pictures for the cover and copyright issues of four of them were easy. The hardest part was to get clearance for the authentic Burns, Philp & Company letter and I am grateful to ms. Robyn Charnock, who did a massive amount of extra work for us on this. My weapon of choice was Adobe Photoshop CS4. If I ever was to end up on a deserted island somewhere in the Solomons, I’d take CS4 with me. There aren’t that many things you can’t do with it, and most of the things you can’t do aren't that important, anyway. I also had a sidearm to support the CS4: a Wacom Intuos pen tablet. I seriously recommend a pen tablet, if the job in Photoshop requires any use of freehand tools. And this one did. Of the 21 layers in the final picture maybe half required some. I’m not getting paid to advertise, but let me tell you that the masking, painting the shadow of a man to the side of that Zero, erasing 5 Kingfishers from the formation and all that would have been left undone without the tablet. Heikki was kind enough (or he knew me all too well) to let me work on a very loose leash. The only wish he made was to have a look and feel of a book from the 40’s or 50’s. I had to pay a visit to my bookshelf to find some sort of idea. I aimed for the post-war books of my grandfather and there it was; a book printed in 1941 on Finnish female volunteers in the war – an organization called Lotta-Svärd. The cover of the book can be seen at http://www.lottamuseo.com/myynti/lotta_svard_kirja.jpg. I scanned the title and went to one my favourite sites in the net, called WhatTheFont (http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/). After few clicks on the mouse I new what fonts to look for. I prefer working this way. It is much faster to first find a name of the font and then go browsing thru my collection of fonts or the font sites in the web than look at thousands of typefaces wondering what would do the trick. This time I found the font "Nicolas Cochin" and used it even tho it doesn’t work as well on the longer text in the blurb than some other font would. But it certainly does the trick. Since full color printing in the 40’s was kind of rare and making a full B&W cover today would have been a bit dull, I ended up using color but in a washed out way. I guess you might call the picture monochromatic, since it is all more or less bleached blue. Blue was my first choice since the old photos must look like they are submerged. I really wanted a view from Tulagi’s sandy beach of old rippled memories covered by sea that gave and took everything from Jack McGuire. |
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► The Joys of Research, part 1
Thu, 13 May 2010 21:05:00
| This is a book that has a solid foundation in research. That statement is the primary reason for it taking me so long to finish. It also must be said that, while this book could well have been researched offline using books and collections of material, I would have had to live at the National Archives or the Navy Historical Collections for a longish period of time. The first decision I had to make when I began writing the war parts was, does Jack fly in a real squadron, or does he have a fictional one. I went for the latter, for the obvious reason of keeping the book fictional enough. However, I did not want to make the classic mistakes of featuring wrong types of aircraft, or introducing nonexistent ships. Besides, some Marine squadrons soldier on even today, albeit with upgraded planes. For this, two books were of primary value. John Lundstrom has written one called "The First Team", and a second named "The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign". I also found a file on the web already in 1998 at the Navy Historical Center, currently the Naval History & Heritage Command. This single file contained all Marine aviation unit histories. It is wonderful reading besides a valuable source: "VMF-218: Org Jul1 at El Centro and trained there until 12Dec43 [sic]. Transf to North Island whence Sq embarked in Barnes for combat area. Arrived Espiritu Santo 5Jan44; left for Bougainville 28Jan44. Commenced strikes against Rabaul 30Jan44 (...)" So, in essence, this is unit histories condensed and collected. Material such as that is great for getting into the flow of the period, when writing intensively With this info it was possible to bring forth VMF-288, where V stands for Heavier-than-air, M for Marine, and F for Fighting. I also drafted a chart on a map, where I pinned down dates of Marine fighting squadrons' arrival in the Pacific Theater. I positioned the fictional squadron close in time and space to the original Cactus Air Force (VMF-223 and -224), because I needed to have Jack and Don in the thick of the Guadalcanal fighting. Next, I moved them up the Solomons along with the waves of American assaults. In this, Samuel Eliot Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, parts 3 to 14 were indispensable. If anyone is into official histories, this is as good as they come. I copied maps off Morison, and used them to place and date scenes, such as the November 1943 party fueled with torpedo fuel (200 proof alcohol). Some of the files available as PDFs are really classics, such as "US Naval Aviation in the Pacific" by The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, in 1947. The good point of these, as compared to Lundstrom and other scholarly works, is that there is no hindsight; these people write of what they went through, and that is immediacy usually missing in later works. I must also mention my online friend, Peter Flahavin, who has made nine trips to the Solomons and taken thousands of photos in the area. Not only that, but he has also accumulated thousands of wartime photos, and categorized them so well that it was easy to pick the ones I could use for visualizing. For example, after I had located the site I envisioned for Jack's hotel, Pete sent me a DVD full of glorious color images from the site and its vicinity. Next, I'll talk about the planes, and the little bits that helped me get the timing right. That will include an original Trans-Oceanic Airways schedule sheet from 1949. Stay tuned. |
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► What will happen to Tulagi Hotel now?
Mon, 10 May 2010 14:46:00
| So, against all odds, I have finished the book after years of work. I compiled it into a coherent whole, and had my 15 minutes of fame on Authonomy. From there on, against even greater odds, I had Diiarts become interested of the book and (now that my knees have healed) we agreed they should take the risk and publish it. It is now available on Amazon in all three formats, in other webstores too, and on a few selected bookstore shelves. All this is beyond my original scope. I did not even consider Tulagi a book until I had written maybe 15 chapters, in six years. When I decided to write all it would take to call it a book, I postponed any thoughts of getting it published until such time when I could say I had a book. I wanted to have some friends read it and get some feedback, and that was it. Fort the heck of it, I did get me some POD copies. We all know there's thousands of books published every year. Mainstream publishers churn out Brown after Brown, and the Rowlings dominate the charts. What chance do I stand in this deluge of new arrivals? Isn't it preposterous to think I could actually get sales for the book? In one word: yes. But then again, independent publishing is one of the dominant trends in publishing today. Diiarts is a very small independent publisher, but with the first four books it already entered the field with a solid offering, and I dearly hope my book does not dilute the brand. Being independent does not equal being invisible. It does mean there is no bottomless barrel of publicity money to be used, and to be fair, I am only one step better off from a hopeful PODder. I have the distinction of having a publisher and that does make it easier to get the book mentioned. So far, there's been one mention in the leading Finnish newspaper; that consisted of a heading ("Heikki Hietala publishes novel in Finnish" - who the heck is he?) and three paragraphs cut and pasted from my email. But the paper has a circulation of 910,000, and that is where I pin my hopes. Another media that has picked up the story is YLE, Finnish Broadcasting Corporation. They host a Culture News magazine program, and they probably read HS's snippet there - I have not been able to find the podcast, but not to worry. If we get lucky and we get sales, they'll run a new story. It remains to be seen whether my biggest break will be viral marketing. It was said somewhere that 60% of book sales today result from people mentioning books to each other, and the rest is due to marketing in the traditional ways. I apologize for my constant scribbling on the Tulagi Hotel Facebook page, but keeping it on people's walls is always a chance someone will see it and check it out. Therefore the point is this: If you read it and don't like it, tell me. If you like it, tell everybody else. |
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► All Diiarts Books Together - First Photo
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:38:00
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► Excuse me, who is Wells Norris...?
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:00:00
| Now that the dust has settled after the launch, quite literally, it's time to return to the blog. The launch trip was really very much fun and I was humbled by the turnout of such nice people; I got to meet many of my old Authonomy friends for the first time, and of course, got to hold Tulagi Hotel in my hands. When you open the book, you will see the dedication. "To Leena-Mari, Ossi, and Paavo, and to Wells Norris, who flew those skies." The first three are my family, and of course it was clear from the start they'd be in there, after all, they put up with me writing the book for twelve years. But who is Wells Norris? In 1998, I needed to know what was the size of the staterooms on Enterprise-class carriers. So, in those days, pre-Google (and pretty much pre-anything), you'd instead turn to Usenet News. The NNTP protocol connected thousands of news servers and there were 30,000 groups for all kinds of interesting things. I went to my favorite, soc.history.war.world-war-ii, and posted my question. Usually it took a couple of days for someone to answer, so I expected not much. In the morning, as I opened my email - I had no email home at that point - there was a message. Someone called Wells Norris said, "I flew off those carriers. What would you like to know?" As it turned out, Wells was about to turn 80, but keen on the Internet. I couldn't believe my luck. Usually you got answers from people who had the same books as you, but this man had been there. I asked him what he did in the war. His lengthy reply ended: "When I was lucky enough to survive the Palau Islands battles, also the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and other battles around the Philippines, I was ready for something a little milder." He had been there, done that, and could have been Jack McGuire's cousin. I told him I was writing a book, but that I was far from completion of the project, and he took an instant liking to the idea. We went into an email conversation, and I soon found out there was nothing he couldn't tell me. He also had friends he'd ask, when I needed a more technical bit. My favorite was when I wanted the air start sequence of a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine (as seen on Corsairs and Hellcats). Wells said he didn't know, but he'd ask Pete who was a technical representative for P&W in the Pacific all through the war. In the end the sequence didn't make it into the book, but I was mighty impressed by Wells and his knowledge. There were times when I thought I was facing an impossible task, but Wells would always push me along and help me with some detail I'd been looking for. It appealed to his sense of humor, I guess, to be hooked up through email to someone across the globe, working on a book of fiction placed in his wartime world. At some point he said, "I want an autographed copy when you publish this book", and I said, "Sir, if I ever get this turkey off the ground, you'll be in the dedication." Wells passed away in 2004, five years before I got the book in print, but I tracked down his daughters and sent them an autographed copy. And that is why the dedication is what it is. Wells is one of the major providers of help along the way, and I have had many people who contributed to this book in their own particular way; I just have to than all of you here, as you will know what you did to make this book a reality. |
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► Ash Dash - the story of the return trip
Mon, 26 Apr 2010 008:50:00
| [this is a repost from Year Zero Writers] When it became evident that the fireworks arranged in my honor by the Icelanders had gone somewhat over the top, I began to plan a quick getaway on Saturday, April 17th. By then I was one day over my original itinerary, but on the plus side was the fact I could attend the Havant Literary Festival, a quaint event with not too many attendants but all the more soul. Straight off the train from Havant, I went to a netcafe. Bookings for Eurostar were available for Monday morning, but only as far as Lille. Still, it was my only chance, what with Britain being an island and all. So I invested GBP159 in a ticket and was given a booking, which I collected on Sunday. I also booked a night boat from Stockholm to Helsinki for Tuesday evening, because if the stars were correctly aligned, the connection was doable, I figured from online timetables. Monday morning I booked a full train at St Pancras. It’s a nice train, and seeing the British countryside whipping by at 220kph would have been a treat, had the train not travelled within a walled enclosure for the most part. To make up for this lack of pretty views, we soldiered on at maybe 20kph inside the tunnel, and stopped for a good while to marvel at the solid construction thereof. At Lille I was told the train to Brussels was fully booked in 2nd class. Upon enquiring about 1st, the kind official told me that even if I could not place a booking using the ticket machine, or indeed get one from the ticket office, I could always wait an hour and a half, and discuss a seat in 1st class avec Monsieur Train Conductor. I had never thought there is an intermediate state between a taken seat and a vacant one, but apparently there is at the French Rail. It must be a quantum seat. I checked the local trains, but found the Lille-Brussels stopped at every town with more than 20 inhabitants, and that there were a considerable number of such places. I would miss my only applicable Brussels-Cologne by a narrow margin of just 3 hours. Waiting was not an option now. Not to worry, I thought, this is why we have rental cars. I resolutely marched into the first of five which happened to be a Hertz. They happened to have a Belgian Ford Focus, and offered me a reduced price if I took it to Brussels. Nice touch, although I don’t see the deduction in the bill. Maybe they will give me one with the final Visa payment. The kind official also said there may or may not be a GPS installed. The lady had no paper maps over Belgium, however. In the car there was no GPS device. By chance, I had brought one with me, and as I sped out of the parking hall I triumphantly flipped it on. Seeing the red dot appear was ever so reassuring, but the fact I had maps for Germany and UK, but not Belgium, took something off the joy. The map download over the phone would have set me back 120 euros, so I did not do that. The dot was on a bland beige background, but it did show the national border in case I missed it driving through the customs. I found that when the gas pedal is liberally pressed, a Ford Focus with a diesel engine the size of a box of office paper will not go supersonic, but starts to wheeze at 165kph. That was enough to whip me to Brussels with time to spare. Still, the utter lack of signs for Bruxelles-Midi, or indeed any location inside Brussels, was a slight impediment. I stopped a tourist who was very kind and even gave me his map and pointed out my current location. His forefinger, however, went to an entirely erroneous part of town, so soon I was lost again, this time armed with a map though. I spotted two police officers, and learned I was still within the map but over to the other side. A straight road would take me to the Ring Road, and that went to the desired Gare. At the station, there was one sign for Hertz pointing left, but after that, nothing. I deduced it had to be inside the parking hall and found Hertz at level -4, after touring levels -1, -2, and -3 with just a bit more speed than allowable. I returned the keys somewhat hurriedly and sped to the ticket office. I was #6426 and the current queue was at #6210. I stopped a kind official who walked by; she knew that to queue was futile anyway as the train was full. She said the local trains to Leuven, Liege, and then Aachen in Germany would be the only option. Blessed with this data, I rushed out and bought a ticket to Leuven. I fit in that train and met a young Finnish couple, and we teamed up. Brussels-Leuven-Liege went fine, but the train broke down on the Belgian side of the border, and we were herded to two buses bound for Aachen. I was travelling light, with just one carry-on bag, but my teammates were not, so I took on one of their four sizeable suitcases. Cramming everything in, we managed to get seats in the bus. The bus made it to Aachen three minutes before the train to Cologne was to leave. But the Deutsche Bahn ticketing machine has an intuitive user interface and was a breeze to use (this I noted out of professional interest – I teach interface design) in 30 seconds flat. We boarded with a nice 8 seconds to spare. In Cologne we even had time for buying juice and sandwiches. And the Hamburg train had three seats, so we could even sit, unlike a few less fortunate accidental tourists. Apparently some people had invested in reserved seats, and every station caused a new round of Seat Bingo, and the procession of people looking for anything to sit on was incessant. My luck held, I did not lose the seat and could rest for the night ahead. I parted with the couple in Hamburg, and spent one out of the three hours I had to wait in a 24h netcafe. But one could smoke in there, and as I was the only one who didn’t, I had to take refuge at McDonalds. It occurred to me they sell food, and rarely has a Big Mac Meal tasted as good. The previous meals of the day, I reminded myself, were a thimble of coffee and a diminutive croissant in Lille, and the delicious baguette in the train. I met another Finnish couple and a Swedish engineer called Janne at Neumunster at 0018 on Tuesday when we all went looking for somewhere to stay until the next train at 0445. You see, even if the station was open and welcomed people for the layover, it was open at both ends and a freezing wind blew through it. A pub with three locals and the barmaid was still open. We asked when do they close, and the locals said, when they felt like it. So we rotated buying beer at intervals, and listened the locals play the jukebox, alternating between a yodel song, Waterloo, and some Julio Iglesianesque ballad with gypsy violins in it. Surreal is not the word to describe that place, complete with deer horns on the wall. At 0330 this Tuesday morning, the last of the locals passed out and we were ushered out to the street. A 24/7 deli was seen, and we bought token juice etc. so as not to be arrested for loitering. At 0430 the station announced a delay of 30 minutes for the train. This meant I would not meet the train that would allow me to catch the boat Stockholm – Helsinki, which was paid for. I still had one later connection I could use, if not only stars but galaxies would align in a fortuitous manner. This option dissolved by 0600 when we ground to a halt to admire a fine herd of non-interested Frisian cows, or because of some other, more technical reason. When we fell 1h30 min late, the last means for meeting the ship evaporated. Oh well, I thought, all the more time to admire people sleeping on the floor of this overnight express, on which reservation was required, but could not be enforced with every nook and cranny harboring a fugitive. The worst sight was a 75-year old lady sleeping on the floor, because no one would huddle up just a bit tighter to find her a seat in the couchettes. I spent my time walking up and down the train and making conversation with strangers in the diner car to look like a customer. But as always, it was darkest just before dawn. As the Silja Line booking office opened, my wonderfully supportive spouse SMSed me their number in Sweden. I called them to book another trip, expecting my previous one lost without recompensation. The kind official suggested we convert the cabin on the night ship I could not possibly make for a day cruise at 0710 the next morning. Talk about a deus ex machina. And they gave me the price difference in their own Mickey Mouse currency to spend on the trip. I tried to kiss the official but only managed to make my mobile phone slippery. Again, my dear wife found me a hotel to call in Stockholm, and they did have one vacant room of the cheapest class. I would have settled for a doghouse, provided it was within the boundaries of Stockholm and preferably without a tenant for the night. I booked it and leaned back. Little did I now care that there was no direct train with seats between Copenhagen and Stockholm, or that I would queue for 1h45 minutes to hear they would not book me to Stockholm due to overload, but only across the bridge to Malmö, Sweden. The train trip to Stockholm was just about as Scandinavian as you’d expect, complete with seat handrests carver out birch. Many thanks to the designer for this pretty but uncomfortable vision. I didn’t walk the mile to the hotel, but took a taxi. Then I booked the train from Turku where the ship will land to Helsinki, and was sent the ticket as an image SMS. A quick meal, a hot shower, and a shave later I felt so much better already. And now I am 4 hours away from home. My 3 hour flight became a 62 hour multitasking dash. Many people have expressed their view that I will gain much material for writing; they are right. But I found I could not even take notes when the trip was most hectic. All my energy went into following the situation as it panned out and changed all the time, and the risk of being rolled if not mugged was real from Lille onwards. What I will do is see what my subconscious comes up with later on. If I may offer a set of lessons learned, they are, 1) never let Icelanders arrange a fireworks display, no matter what the celebration, 2) it is more likely to get help from kind officials if it is possible to ask them nicely, and 3) never underestimate the power of chance encounters. On this trip I was helped by many people of many nationalities and intents, and I was able to help a couple of people a bit. A bonus learning is to take the world as it comes and not believe one can affect that fact a single little bit. |
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► On the way home from the launch
Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:21:00
| and a chaotic Europe, I'll just say, the launch was magical. I will report with more info as soon as I am home. |
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► Writing in a foreign language
Sat, 10 Apr 2010 11:05:00
| People have asked me how and why did I write Tulagi Hotel in English instead of Finnish, my native language. Some have even asked how could I do it. I think the answer is threefold; first, I have the Finnish comprehensive school's language training, second, I studied at the University of Jyväskylä where the English department is very vibrant, and third, I have almost twenty-five years of translation experience. Finland elected to invest in languages early on, since our own is not really a world language. When I was exposed to English in third grade, I had a very nice young lady as my teacher. Along with the other boys in class, I promptly fell for her, and decided to shine in English. I did my homework every time and sure enough, I had good marks. In upper comprehensive I was lucky to have a teacher who spotted the modicum of talent I have for languages, and he challenged me to develop outside the curriculum. Then I entered the U of Jyväskylä, majoring in English. The Department was full of good teachers who strived to make us see language as a means, not as an end. There is much one can do in another language, if there's a drive to understand the deep fundamentals of communication that lie under the presentation layer of language. This was central to the curriculum at the University, and it left a lasting impression. My first commercial translation effort was helping a friend translate the manual for a database package called Paradox. This was during my early years at the University. Then I was hired by a local high-tech company to provide all English-language material they needed. At Microsoft I localized the Excel 3.0 macro language, and when I returned to Finland I carried on with MS projects, most of them over a million words of quality prose. Talk about practice. All translators dream of writing a book. I could just as well have placed the story in Finland, especially since the aviation war here was very special in its nature and would have provided a good setting for the story (I definitely wanted air combat as the backdrop). That would have meant writing in Finnish, and then getting it published here. We have the same slush pile problem as everyone everywhere. Instead, I opted for writing in English and trusted my luck in finding editors who would groom the book and spot the looney bits. Jason Horger did just that; he pointed out the parts that jarred in the eye of a native English speaker, and David Chudoba did the same for another round, fixing not only technical issues, but also stylistic ones. Editing services have to be applied to any book - no writer is good enough or impartial enough to produce a book on his own. Not me, at least. One more feature I can't emphasize enough is the need to read and learn in English all the time. I'm a hopeless Monty Python fanatic, as well as a Tolkien buff, and out of a hundred books I read, 97 are in English. There's always something to learn out there, and I will never stop that process. So, in a nutshell, I quote George Mallory before he climbed Mount Everest the last time in 1924: "Because it's there". I felt I could do it, and the end result is now out there for all to see whether I was right. |
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► Problems with concentration
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:43:00
| I've had some trouble of late, I freely admit. It's somewhat harder than usual to focus on things, or to have an attention span at least as long as my normal twelve minutes. Besides putting in the regular work at the University, I've been trying to work on a couple of short stories. Two of them will appear later this year in an anthology; three or four more are just stories that I want to write to get the voices out of my head. Some will be out on Year Zero Writers later. I've also got a bunch of changes I should make to a few finished stories. I don't know about other writers, but I seem to write a story almost at one go; I usually build the entire story in my head and then just commit it to computer. I am lucky to have a trusted set of beta readers who very quickly point out flaws in the story and allow me to bounce development ideas off their head. But now, with just one week to the Press Launch, I am itchy'n'scratchy. You see, I've never been to a Press Launch. In fact, I've never launched anything besides a toy boat from the summerhouse, and even that wound up at the other end of the island with the lake currents. And now I should stand up and smile and recite a piece of my book, and then let the tome loose on the unsuspecting readership at large. Whoa! A tall order, that. Usually Finnish books face a potential audience of 5.3 million people, unless they get translated into a civilized language. My potential audience is somewhat larger. I've been going up and down the book, hoping to find the perfect bit inside the 388 pages, one that would expose the quality of the writing, the strength of the story, the underlying themes and the polished condition of the product. I've found five such spots, but I am way too close to the book to understand whether they will work as representative samples, or whether they will only serve to bore the assembly out of their respective skulls. Since the decision rests with me, I must pick three sequences and record myself reading them. Not only to time myself (must clear this hurdle in less than five minutes) but also to hear what a muddled mess my delivery is, and to make it better. That way I will have a choice when it's my time to meander to the podium and try to look respectable. The definite upside is that there will be people there who have supported me for a long time. One from the last millennium, and a few from a year and a half back, and the friends who are Diiarts. These people picked me out of the thousands of people on Authonomy and began hammering it in that they liked what I'd written. By now, when it's coming out in hardcover / paperback / Kindle, I just want to get to meet them and thank them for that support. If only I didn't have to scratch myself all the time... |
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► One week to go
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:54:00
| Today it is one week until the book hits the bookshops, Amazon and Goldsboro Books in the vanguard. Maybe it is appropriate to take a few turning points from the long route it has taken to get here. I wrote the first chapter in April 1996. I can't be bothered to dig out the first archival CD I stored the early version on just to see the date, but I seem to remember it was late in the month. In any case, I was at the office. I had no computer at home those days, and I was working on a very large translation project (> a million words). For some reason I hit Ctrl+N and got a blank file, and I stared at the screen for a while. After that I have no recollection of what happened, but some forty minutes later, the first chapter was on the screen. Not knowing what to do, I saved it as CHAPTER 1. I had no clue what I had written, but reading it a few times gave me clues as to what to do next. I returned to the project (not a book project, just a bunch of interconnected texts) at intervals, gathering bits of information and figuring out what would happen. Then, in 1998, I needed to know a technical issue, and I asked the question in Usenet News. Usually you get an answer pretty soon, but this time it was way better. I had an email in the morning, from someone I did not know. "I flew off those carriers - what would you like to know?" was the entire content. It was written by Wells Norris, a WW2 pilot in his eighties, but keen on the Internet and willing to work with me. Wells answered every question I could think of, and used his network to find out the few answers he did not know. He said he wanted an autographed copy when I released the book, and I promised him a seat in the dedication for his help. Imagine that - a veteran discussing the Pacific Air War with a Finn who was writing something that might or might not become a book. I was therefore very happy when I could send his daughters a copy of the early version of Tulagi, which I published on my own in May, 2009. It sold a staggering 23 copies. However, I had fulfilled my promise to Wells with it, and the new version has the same dedication to my family and Wells. In September 2008, at the urging of my old friend Tim Wright, I uploaded the book to Authonomy, the HarperCollins website for new authors. I was issued the ID number 1726, and I expected it to float to some 500 and then fade into obscurity. To my great surprise, it went to #15, very close to the coveted Editors' Desk, but I lost interest in battling for the seat - it didn't look like it would do me any good. But what did look good was, I made some friends on Authonomy who went on to form Dragon International Independent Arts, or Diiarts for short. It was seen as a mutually beneficial thing if they'd take Tulagi Hotel on and publish it. With a massive effort of both Diiarts people and my friends in Finland, Tulagi Hotel was purged of excesses, expurgated of silly errors, and given a thorough makeover. Therefore the version that will hit the streets on Monday, April 12, 2010, is a better book than the one I put out myself. (Which is to say, hold on to your POD copy - they will fetch millions in the rare books auctions in the 23th century.) All that remains now is for the readership to get this book, and judge it on its merits. Remember, when you read it, tell me if you do not like it, and tell everyone if you DO like it. |
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► One week to go
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:54:00
| Today it is one week until the book hits the bookshops, Amazon and Goldsboro Books in the vanguard. Maybe it is appropriate to take a few turning points from the long route it has taken to get here. I wrote the first chapter in April 1996. I can't be bothered to dig out the first archival CD I stored the early version on just to see the date, but I seem to remember it was late in the month. In any case, I was at the office. I had no computer at home those days, and I was working on a very large translation project (> a million words). For some reason I hit Ctrl+N and got a blank file, and I stared at the screen for a while. After that I have no recollection of what happened, but some forty minutes later, the first chapter was on the screen. Not knowing what to do, I saved it as CHAPTER 1. I had no clue what I had written, but reading it a few times gave me clues as to what to do next. I returned to the project (not a book project, just a bunch of interconnected texts) at intervals, gathering bits of information and figuring out what would happen. Then, in 1998, I needed to know a technical issue, and I asked the question in Usenet News. Usually you get an answer pretty soon, but this time it was way better. I had an email in the morning, from someone I did not know. "I flew off those carriers - what would you like to know?" was the entire content. It was written by Wells Norris, a WW2 pilot in his eighties, but keen on the Internet and willing to work with me. Wells answered every question I could think of, and used his network to find out the few answers he did not know. He said he wanted an autographed copy when I released the book, and I promised him a seat in the dedication for his help. Imagine that - a veteran discussing the Pacific Air War with a Finn who was writing something that might or might not become a book. I was therefore very happy when I could send his daughters a copy of the early version of Tulagi, which I published on my own in May, 2009. It sold a staggering 23 copies. However, I had fulfilled my promise to Wells with it, and the new version has the same dedication to my family and Wells. In September 2008, at the urging of my old friend Tim Wright, I uploaded the book to Authonomy, the HarperCollins website for new authors. I was issued the ID number 1726, and I expected it to float to some 500 and then fade into obscurity. To my great surprise, it went to #15, very close to the coveted Editors' Desk, but I lost interest in battling for the seat - it didn't look like it would do me any good. But what did look good was, I made some friends on Authonomy who went on to form Dragon International Independent Arts, or Diiarts for short. It was seen as a mutually beneficial thing if they'd take Tulagi Hotel on and publish it. With a massive effort of both Diiarts people and my friends in Finland, Tulagi Hotel was purged of excesses, expurgated of silly errors, and given a thorough makeover. Therefore the version that will hit the streets on Monday, April 12, 2010, is a better book than the one I put out myself. (Which is to say, hold on to your POD copy - they will fetch millions in the rare books auctions in the 23th century.) All that remains now is for the readership to get this book, and judge it on its merits. Remember, when you read it, tell me if you do not like it, and tell everyone if you DO like it. |
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► A view on Writing Technical Stuff
Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:35:00
| Tulagi Hotel is a novel of fiction. It has World War II as its background, and of all the different modes of warfare, it is set in the air arm of the US Marine Corps. This by default makes it necessary to have references to types of planes and guns and ships and whatnot, and there's always the risk of alienating readers with technology. To offset the war, there's a modicum of romance, humor, pranks, relationships, and even hotel business. It has been a major goal of mine to balance the different features so as to create a coherent package with a wide appeal, from the aviation enthusiast to the reader who expects deft handling of relationships. Writing technical stuff is easy for me, as I used to work in translation and technical writing. I've written manuals and user instructions for quite complex machinery and software, and I liked doing it. In a novel, technology can have useful functions as background material and as facilitator of events, but there is no excuse for letting it run the show, as happens in many novels of late. When I read a book like this myself, I am not a great fan of the type of book where technical matters obstruct the story. In the very first versions of TH, there were references to pilots attempting to air start a certain type of engine, and long sentences laden with technical terms. At the time of writing them, I thought I was Tom Clancy. But when I read these later, I found the technobabble got in the way of the story; was it of interest how Jack started the engine while plunging a six thousand feet a minute in his plane, or was it interesting that he got it started in the first place? Therefore I went back and had a critical look at every technical bit, and I weeded out those that were there for their own sake. (Well, a few may remain, but you can skip them if you like.) I also streamlined the flying bits. They have to be there, as they form such a central part of Jack's person and are important to understand why he does what he does. Yet another change concerned the order of chapters. At one point I had a long streak of warfare, but I was told it was too much to take. Hence, the current book has seen a split in the flying and fighting, and I believe it is now lighter to read. There's another inherent danger in indulging in technobabble: there's ample room for mistakes. I wrote some pretty incongruous stuff, such as having a land plane take off from the sea, and listing the number of guns wrong on a classic fighter plane. I am aware of the fact that I will be scrutinized for my writing anyhow, and having obvious mistakes such as these kicks the whole book off its soap box. Luckily I have friends who went through the book and found many of these in time, and I corrected them. Still, there may be one or two for eager beavers to pinpoint and whoop about. I'll leave it up for the readers to find them. And in any case, the reader is free to concentrate on the bits that seem most relevant to him or her. Let's see how that goes. |
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► The Inaugural Message
Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:40:00
| A journey that took almost 14 years to the day is coming to an important milestone. On April 14, I will go to London to attend a press launch of my book, Tulagi Hotel. I began writing it in April 1996, without a clue of the amount of work that would go into it, or what would come out of it. I say it's a milestone as I would not want to see the journey end there. Getting it published by the small but vibrant publisher, Diiarts, is a dream come true, but the biggest wish I have is that the readership would embrace the book and pass the word. Writing this 380 page novel was sometimes a burden. There were times when I had absolutely no clue as to what would happen next, or what should happen next. At some points I was ready to commit the files I had created to an archive CD and forget I ever started it. But I never did send the files away from the hard drive; instead, I let it simmer for a while and then went back to it with fresh ideas. Then there were times when it was easy to write, days when I could produce 2,000 words a day and not have to edit at all. (Until later, when most of the words would be cast aside and replaced). And all this toing and froing finally produced a book that got its name on that April day, fourteen years ago. I showed the book to some people who encouraged me to go on, then found kind readers who edited it on their own initiative, and finally, found a publisher who believed in me and the book. Now, my dear friends, it's your turn. It's now up to you to see whether my story lures you in and makes you turn page after page, until you see what finally happened to Jack, Kay, Martin, and all the rest of the cast. I hope it entertains you. |
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