Are you on Goodreads? Do you want a free copy of Cannon Fodder? For the next few weeks, I’m giving away free copies of Cannon Fodder on Goodreads in exchange for an honest review. If you’ve been on the fence about picking up a copy, and you like being opinionated about books, here’s your chance.
Check it out here on Goodreads.
I’m pleased to announce that the formatting and publishing of Cannon Fodder went smoothly, and it’s now available for purchase at most mainstream e-book sites. Check it out:
Smashwords
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
I also got a news spot written about me and the book.
Hey, guys? I have exciting news. My last ebook, The Confederacy of Heaven, was published in the fall of 2010. Now, after three and a half years, I’m finally ready to publish another ebook.
Kelsey’s concept of what the book will look like.
It’s called Cannon Fodder, and here’s a taste of how it goes:
The good guys always win – and Alec Nightshade isn’t going to take it anymore. Alec’s a fifteen-year-old member of the Norgolian Society of Evil Overlords, which means not having much of a life expectancy. When a hero hunts down and kills his aunt, the Viper, he sets off on the first evil scheme of his life to set things straight.
Starting an evil scheme proves to be harder than it looks. Alec catches a break when a friend tips him off about the Eggbeater of Doom, a device that can summon a kiloton-sized elder god with a grudge against those puny hairless apes. If Alec blabs about the Eggbeater, gets a hero to go after him, then kicks the hero’s ass, he can break the cycle of prophecy that dooms his side never to see the age of fifty. He doesn’t mean to hurt anybody else. But when another overlord steals the Eggbeater with the intent to actually level a city, Alec knows what he and his gang of minions will have to do: save the day. He will never get to live this down.
Like the sound of it? I’m running a Kickstarter campaign starting today to raise money for professional cover art. I’m working with Kelsey King, a local artist who’s illustrated my other ebooks. If you preorder a copy of Cannon Fodder through the Kickstarter, not only do you get to help support the cover art, but you’ll get the book at a discount.
Check out the Cannon Fodder Kickstarter campaign.
Want to know more about the project? Drop me a line. I’ll keep you guys posted about the campaign’s progress now through the end of March.
Happy Fourth of July, everybody!
The other day I was cruising about The Mad Reviewer, Carrie Slager’s very prolific book review blog. If you haven’t seen this blog before, check it out. If a YA book exists, chances are that Carrie has read it and has something to say about it. I asked her what she thought about the recent trend of steampunk books, and she replied with this guest post:
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So Margaret asked me: “Hey what is your opinion on the sudden hotness of the steampunk genre? Do you thin kit’s going to last? I remember having a conversation with some friends last year, and they said that the problem with steampunk is that nobody’s written anything serious in the genre, only frivolous books. Could you write a blog post about that?”
Why yes I can, Margaret. Yes I can.
Do you guys remember when pundits were predicting the death of the Western? How about science fiction? Fantasy? Historical fiction? Romance? The book itself? My point is that although so-called experts have predicted the disappearance of practically every genre, they’re still here. Steampunk is definitely a fascinating sub-genre and I suspect that it’s here to stay, no matter what literary experts say.
However, that’s not to say the trend won’t cool off. Genres go through trends, just like music, movies, clothes, you name it. Steampunk is on a current high, but it will drop as people tire of it and move on. Remember the huge paranormal romance craze after Twilight’s success? That’s mostly died down now and general fantasy and steampunk have replaced it temporarily.
Contrary to what some of Margaret’s friends and many pundits seem to think, steampunk is a serious genre. As for the claim that no one has written anything serious, define ‘serious.’ If you definite serious as ‘a sweeping epic that questions our fragile mortality and the futileness of it all in a Margaret Atwood-esque style’, then you won’t find anything mainstream, let alone steampunk. However, if you use a less narrow definition like ‘it’s meant to entertain and may or may not impart some important life lessons’, then yes, there is a high volume of serious steampunk.
Take Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy, for example. It’s set in an alternate version of 1914 Europe and I really don’t think there’s anything not serious about how the First World War started. Alek and Deryn, the novel’s two main protagonists, are serious characters because they get into very real danger and suffer very real consequences. There may not be many grand themes you can over-analyze in typical novel study-like fashion, but that doesn’t mean they’re not serious books.
So yes, steampunk will cool off but it’s here to stay and yes, it is a serious genre. Literary snobs and my fellow self-appointed critics, you may begin writing your hate mail now.
Ever since the second book of the Abarat series was published in 2004, I’d been eagerly awaiting the arrival of its sequel. For those who aren’t familiar with the books, let me tell you that the Abarat series is a strange beast: kids’ stuff by Clive Barker. Yup.
Barker held back a bit with the weird and creepy stuff for the first two books as he told the story of Candy Quackenbush, a girl from Minnesota who finds a portal to a magical dimension. But in the third one, Abarat: Absolute Midnight, all Hell breaks loose. I can’t really describe the plot to you. In third books of five-book series, plots are hard to describe. But in a nutshell an apocalypse has come to Candy’s Abarat.
We haven’t just got Mater Motley now. We’ve got eldritch abominations fighting other eldritch abominations.
Highlights include the gorgeous, Barkeresque language, the full-color illustrations every few pages, and Rojo Pixler, who’s like every creepy rumor you’ve heard about Walt Disney.
Romantic spoiler alert: Who the heck is Gazza? He shows up halfway through the book and instantly he and Candy fall in love with each other. I was rather rooting for Candy/Malingo. Although it would have been disturbing, Candy/Carrion or Candy/Finnegan Hob would have made for an interesting story, too.
Well, it’s been said that you can learn how to become a better writer both by reading great books and awful ones. Turns out that you can learn from reading books that are just sort of okay, too.
Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market. It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack. Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back. It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society. (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin. But I digress. That was the illustrator’s fault.)
I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it. There’s nothing at all wrong with this book. But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next. The answer: It’s only a made-up story. Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him. When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.
Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead. Okay. And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter. Okay, but where is the evidence for this? Does he do anything to show that he’s sad? No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest. He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”
I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.
I must be turning into a grouchy old lady. I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – you know, that hit YA fantasy that’s scheduled to be made into a movie next year – and all I could do was cringe at the diction.
The story is nice enough, if not entirely original. In a dystopian future, the government forces children from each of the twelve Districts to battle each other to death on live television. When her little sister gets chosen to be this year’s contestant from District Twelve, Katniss Everdeen, warrior girl, volunteers to take her place. There is also a subplot in which Katniss has difficulty deciding between two boyfriends.
I shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff, but what bothers me the most about this book are the adverbs. Katniss is forever doing things “quickly” or “slowly.” Not a semicolon in sight, dozens of places where one should have been. Collins even goes so far as to word “actually” in a non-ironic fashion.
We are expected to believe that Katniss Everdeen likes dresses. Katniss the pragmatic survivalist. Katniss, who is reported to break out of the electrified fence surrounding the compound where she lives to hunt food for her family. Okay, she’s a kid. I liked dresses too, briefly. When I was eight. But you can’t move around in a dress and you can’t afford to spill rabbit guts all over it.
What is it with kids these days?