“The Portal” is now free on the Nook!

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

For a limited time only, presumably. Presumably Amazon will follow suit before long and lower its price to zero, but you should probably go ahead and pay real money for it anyway.

Here’s a recent 5-star customer review from Amazon:

In this new entry in the Young Adult fiction category, Richard Bowker explores questions of our relationship to the world we live in by telling the tale of a young adolescent who discovers a portal to an alternate version of that world. By creating that world as one with underdeveloped technology, he is able to paint a vivid picture of what life might have been like in the mid 18th century in colonial New England (even though the portal is not a time-travel device). His characters are well-drawn, and his descriptions of battle scenes between the New Englanders and the Portuguese soldiers are gripping, especially with regard to the angst his protagonist, Larry Barnes, feels about having killed an enemy. In the end, Larry has to make a choice — one that is surprisingly difficult and thought-provoking and which wouldn’t have been anticipated earlier in the story.

Writers in movies: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like An Invisible Woman, Hemingway & Gellhorn is about a famous novelist’s relationship with a woman — in this case, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. This was an HBO original movie and got a ton of Emmy nominations. Unlike An Invisible Woman, this movie has an A-list actress, Nicole Kidman, playing the woman. She’s pretty good! Clive Owen as Hemingway, however, never convinced me the way Ralph Fiennes as Dickens convinced me. Surely the director (Philip Kaufman) could have found an American who’d have done a better job. (At least an American could have gotten the accent right.)

The other major problem with the movie is the script. It never settles down and becomes about anything. It just dramatizes a series of real-life incidents, usually with clever camera work and editing, and that becomes the film.

We do, of course, see Hemingway writing, and I assume they got that right. He types standing up, his typewriter on a dresser, floating discarded sheets of paper in the direction of a wastebasket at his feet. He types as bombs fall in the street outside, and he types after a long night of drinking, while Gellhorn is too hung over to get out of bed. And the script is full of what I assume are accurate Hemingway quotes, such as: “Writing’s like Mass. God gets mad if you don’t show up.” All good stuff. But they didn’t make me like the movie.

Print on Demand reaches “Lore of the Underlings”

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

My friend John Klobucher has created an interesting fantasy universe in his episodic series Lore of the Underlings. He has now collected the first set of episodes in old-fashioned book form:

Print books are great! You can read them in the bathtub, and I’m pretty sure they don’t require batteries. So pick up a few.

Note that John did the cover art. He also creates podcasts of the episodes, where he does the narration and all the voices. Plus he composes original music for them.

He’s a bit of a show-off.

World building

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a bland paragraph from the novel I’m working on:

She was sitting on our patched brown Victorian sofa wearing her patched blue robe. Two glasses of cider and a plate of bread and cheese and apple slices sat on a side table. She had lit a fire in the fireplace, so the front parlor wasn’t as cold as it usually was. She patted the sofa next to her, and I sat down gratefully. She snuggled up against me.

What’s wrong with that? But when my writing group was discussing this chapter, it raised a question from Mary: Where did they get the wood?

This is in the post-apocalyptic world of my Last P.I. series, so it’s not an unreasonable question. But it’s one that has never occurred to me.

World building is in some ways straightforward. For the Last P.I. world, the big picture is easy enough. There was a nuclear war a couple of decades ago; Boston is still struggling in the aftermath. People are poor; they’re still salvaging what they can from the past and figuring out how to survive in the present. And it’s also not hard to come up with lots of details to flesh out the world: people wear patched robes and sit on patched furniture. Auto parts are scarce and valuable; most people don’t have central heat or electricity…

What’s tricky is calibrating the level of detail to convey in the actual novels, from sentence to sentence. A few readers have complained that I haven’t given enough back story about the war. That’s a big picture issue. Mary wants to know about firewood; that’s an issue about the details. My goal is to put in enough detail to make the world convincing and vivid, without piling on so much information that the story’s momentum is lost.

I have some ideas about how to handle the firewood question. But you’ll have to buy the book if you really want to know the answer.

Crocus

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Because it finally feels like spring around here, I thought I’d steal a crocus from Tom Whelan’s Nature Blog:

Writers in Movies: The Invisible Woman

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.

It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.

Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.

Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?

The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.

(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)

The Nicest Guy Who Ever Lived

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

. . . is apparently Bobby Orr, whose autobiography, Orr: My Story, I just finished.

(Notice the Saint Louis Blues’ defenseman Noel Picard joining Orr on the cover. Picard has attained a weird sort of immortaility by tripping Orr as he scored the Stanley Cub-winning goal and subsequently appearing in the corner of this iconic photo.)

Anyway, Orr loves his family, loves every one of his coaches and fellow players, and loves everyone he’s met since retiring at the age of 30. (He was so good that the Hockey Hall of Fame decided, the heck with our eligibility rules, and elected him to the Hall at the age of 31.) The only guy he has some difficulty with is Alan Eagleson, his ex-agent, who basically stole all his money and left him near bankruptcy when he retired. Orr has, of course, forgiven the man, but finds it hard to understand how someone could be that not-nice.

Bobby Orr is so nice that, when his book was published last fall, the Boston Globe felt compelled to publish an exposé of Orr, conclusively demonstrating that he is way nicer than he let’s on — constantly doing secret acts of charity that no one is supposed to talk about. Geez, talk about role models.

Anyway, here’s The Goal:

If that whets your appetite, here is a highlight reel, with local legends Fred Cusick and Johnny Peirson announcing:

The Stanley Cup playoffs have started, and the Bruins are favored, but it ain’t like the old days. Helmets sure don’t help, but the game is also more cautious and defensive — you don’t see anything like a Bobby Orr rush anymore. Probably because there could only be one Bobby Orr.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Novels just don’t get any better than that. I don’t really have much more to say about it, but I feel like quoting its first sentence, which is one of the best first sentences ever:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

RIP, Gabriel García Márquez.

Why Barnes & Noble keeps offering to sell me a book I wrote

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Richard Bowker

As I described here, I’ve been baffled by why Barnes & Noble keeps showing me ads that include a book I wrote. I was finally smart enough to track this down and, as people suggested, it has to do with cookies. Turns out there’s a little hard-to-see link in these ads. Click it, and it brings you to an explanatory page that includes an opt-out option. The company behind the ads is called Criteo, and the technology is called personalized retargeting. It’s been around for years. Here’s a New York Times article about it from 2010:

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

So, my cookies tell the software that I’ve visited the pages for Richard Bowker novels on the Barnes & Noble web site. And the software puts up ads that keep reminding me of these very fine novels until I break down and buy one. This is one of those technologies that is equal parts helpful and creepy. I’m not quite ready to get off the grid, like Jack Reacher, but maybe the day will come.

Let’s try another cover for Summit

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

In the “every cloud has a silver lining” department, my publisher has decided that the crisis in Ukraine might spark some interest in my cold-war psychic-espionage classical-music novel Summit, which has nothing to do with Ukraine but does include several Russian bad guys and a beautiful Russian heroine. Previously they ditched its original cover because they thought the hammer-and-sickle motif was outdated; now they have decided it’s just fine. So here’s our latest cover: