About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Free ebooks in return for reviews: Some results

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Richard Bowker

It’s becoming harder to get customer reviews for books nowadays. That’s probably related to the general downturn in the ebook market. Here I mentioned a program, run by my epublisher, to give away ebooks in return for honest reviews. Once you sign up, you start getting a weekly eZine containing a list of books you can download for free. Download a book, read it, and leave a review.

This model seems to be OK with Amazon, which has cracked down on some aspects of the customer review racket. It appears to be a requirement to state that you got the book for free in return for an honest review.

Anyway, the approach is working for my novel Where All the Ladders Start. Most reviews are pretty terse, like this one:

I received this book for an honest review. I loved this book. The plot and characters were amazing.

Well, what more do you need to say? But wait! It turns out that Laura Furuta has more to say! Namely:

When I first started reading this story I was not really sure what to expect. I read the description and was thinking it was just another mystery book. I was wrong! This is a story about a P. I. who works in an America that has been changed. Not only that, also there are forces at work that are determined to see he fails with his latest case. I really enjoyed the story from the first chapter to the very ending page. It has the right combination of mystery and plot to keep you guessing. The characters also really shine as well. The main characters are very well written and even some of the secondary ones you will remember and love. This is one book that I recommend if you love mysteries. It will keep you guessing. I received a copy of this book from eBook Discovery in exchange for an honest review.

Even better! Now all I need is a few more sales . . .

Here’s the cover, in case you forgot what the thing looks like:

Writers in the movies: “Trumbo”

Posted on July 10, 2016 by Richard Bowker

One more in an apparently very occasional series.

Trumbo, of course, is the movie about Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted screenwriter who wrote Roman Holiday, Spartacus, and other major movies. The film mostly focuses on his time on the blacklist, when he had to cobble together a living by writing scripts anonymously, with the screen credit going to fronts.

Bryan Cranston is fine as Trumbo, and I guess he deserved his Oscar nomination, but Trumbo struck me as being a very bland movie. Trumbo is presented as a secular saint, with his opponents–Hedda Hopper, John Wayne–presented as purely evil. The only flaw we see in Trumbo is when he gets cranky with his kids for not wanting to deliver some of his rewrites to a movie set–but he quickly repents and goes off to apologize to his daughter, who, like him, is devoted to the cause of justice for the downtrodden. Couldn’t we at least have had a scene where he explains why he’s still a communist despite what was then known about Stalin? Life and politics in the 1950s were more complex than this movie lets on.

If Trumbo soft-pedals its hero’s politics, it pretty much ignores his writing. We see a scene from Roman Holiday and another from Spartacus, and we learn that Trumbo likes to write in the bathtub, but there’s virtually nothing about the craft itself. Well, there is a scene where he and a blacklisted co-writer (played by Louis CK) discuss the plotting for a quickie called “The Alien and the Farmgirl”. Why does the alien fall for the farmgirl? Because he reminds him of his girl back home. OK, then.

Too bad. Trumbo seems like an interesting guy, and the blacklist is certainly an interesting subject. They deserve a better movie.

Is the word “cachet” losing its cache?

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Richard Bowker

Here is a Boston Globe article about the Donald Trump scandal of the day: buying a Tim Tebow helmet with funds from his charitable foundation, apparently in violation of IRS rules. But why isn’t it on display in photos of Trump’s sports memorabilia?

One possible reason: the Tebow gear has lost some of its cache. In hindsight, Trump’s famous eye for a good deal seems to have deserted him on the night of the auction: as it turned out, he was buying Tebow gear close to its peak price.

What the heck is the word “cache” doing there? Obviously they meant “cachet” — presumably they thought “cache” was like “cliché”, with an acute accent over the final “e”.

Turns out this isn’t random: Here is Fox Business wondering if the American Express Black Card is losing its cache. They liked the word so much it appeared in the article’s title. This Chicago real estate publication wonders if Park Tower has lost its cache. It’s interesting, though, that the Globe article is reprinted from the Washington Post, which uses the correct word (online, anyway).

This (mis)usage isn’t anywhere near as common as the similar use of cliché as an adjective, on the model of passé. That’s so cliché! Here’s a grammarian who is OK with this:

By now, I think, “so cliche” seems normal to a lot of younger speakers and writers. And I have a soft spot for it myself, as I confessed in that 2003 column, because it’s such a natural choice:

Though cliche came into English as a noun, it retains its French form — and that form is a past participle, perfectly happy to be used as an adjective. English is full of such French words, some used as nouns (divorcee, souffle, negligee), others as adjectives (passe, flambe).

For me, that usage is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Sequels

Posted on June 26, 2016 by Richard Bowker

I’m finally getting around to reading Funeral Games, the last volume in Mary Renault’s trilogy about Alexander the Great. It is wonderful. And it addresses some issues I’m trying to solve while starting up my new novel, which will be a sequel to my upcoming novel Terra (which by the way, should be available in a matter of weeks.)

The first problem with writing a sequel is that you have to treat it as a stand-alone novel. You shouldn’t assume that the reader has read (or has remembered) the book to which it’s a sequel.

But there’s also a deeper problem. Why are you breaking the story in two? Why not write one long novel? The sequel really needs to be somehow different.

What Renault did in Funeral Games is something I’ve decided to try in my own sequel. The predecessor to Funeral Games, The Persian Boy, is a first-person narrative, told by a young eunuch named Bagoas who grew close to Alexander at the peak of his glory. But in Funeral Games, which tells the story of what happened after Alexander’s death, Renault gives us a panoramic multiple-third-person point of view. We are now inside the heads of characters whom before we only saw from Bagoas’s point of view. And Bagoas is now seen from their point of view. The effect is to immediately deepen and broaden the story. And changing the point of view also helps with the first problem — we get to experience events from the first two books in the point-of-view characters’ memories, so the backstory is established effortlessly.

Anyway, this is exactly what I’m trying to pull off in my new novel. We’ll see how successful I am. Renault set the bar very high.

The Salem Lyceum

Posted on June 19, 2016 by Richard Bowker

A few weeks ago I had dinner in a restaurant housed in the former Salem Lyceum building. Lyceums were to mid-nineteenth-century America what TED talks are to our America. Here’s a nice summary of the history of the one in Salem. Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Daniel Webster . . . the intellectual and political heavyweights of nineteenth-century Massachusetts all showed up here.

As the article points out, the Salem Lyceum is most famous for an event that was technical, not intellectual — Alexander Graham Bell’s first public demonstration of “long distance telephone conversations” in 1877:

Technology marches on. I took this photo on my iPhone, which automatically sent a copy to my Dropbox account on a computer somewhere in the cloud. Then I used my phone’s global positioning technology to map out the route back to my hotel. I didn’t use the phone to talk to anyone.

Is the period on its way out? (Also, apostrophes?)

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Richard Bowker

Here is another article about the disappearing period, this one from the New York Times. The article cleverly makes its point by omitting all periods:

“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” Professor Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, said in an interview after he expounded on his view recently at the Hay Festival in Wales

“In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”

I’ll just point out that generally the author achieves his non-periodness by writing one-sentence paragraphs. Periods are less important at the end of a paragraph than they are in the middle of a paragraph. So maybe this indicates we’re on our way to changing the way we view paragraphs. Wouldn’t surprise me.

But I also wanted to point out the decline of the use of the apostrophe in tweets and text messages. Here is Marco Rubio during a tweetstorm back in May:

If you can live with a Clinton presidency for 4 years thats your right. I cant and will do what I can to prevent it.

In Florida only 2 legitimate candidates on ballot in Nov. I wont vote for Clinton & I after years of asking people to vote I wont abstain.

On a smart phone, adding the apostrophe requires you to do an annoying switch of keyboards. Why bother? The fact is, losing the apostrophe doesn’t make the tweets much more difficult to understand. Once you leave the apostrophes out of your tweets and text messages, it’s harder to add them to your emails. Next thing you know, Donald Trump is president, and civilization has ended.

That sinking feeling, redux

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Richard Bowker

After My Name is Lucy Barton I decided it was time for something different, something manly. No one is more manly than Jack Reacher. So I tried the latest in the series, Make Me. I soon started getting that sinking feeling when you realize that the Jack Reacher novel you’re reading is just like all the other Jack Reacher novels. A setting deep in the heartland, far from the police. Personality-free female sidekick. A dark conspiracy that, when finally revealed, makes little sense. A super-villain with no name, no past, no particular motive for his bottomless evil. Complicated set pieces in which Reacher kills or maims multiple foes due to his understanding of firearms, fighting, human psychology, etc.

Maybe I need to go back to the beginning with Jack Reacher. I’ve read about half a dozen of these books, and the best of them was The Enemy, an earlyish novel written in the first person and set back in the time when he was still in the military, before he began his lonely wanderings blah blah blah.

In the meantime I have started re-reading Emma by Jane Austen. No sinking feelings so far.

Bob Dylan is 75

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Richard Bowker

. . . so we might as well listen to “Visions of Johanna”, from Blonde on Blonde, which is now half a century old.

Here’s one of the stanzas. No one can write like Dylan.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Terra, Chapter 2

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Richard Bowker

Here is the second chapter of my novel Terra. (Here’s the first.) I’m still not sure if I want to post the whole thing; let’s see where this goes.

=================

Chapter 2

I stared at her. She was tall and slender, with short black hair. I’m not really good at telling how old people are, but I guessed she might be about thirty. She was wearing jeans and a down vest over a plaid shirt—the same outfit she’d been wearing at the 7-11. She was very attractive. She spoke English with the slightest bit of some kind of strange accent—just enough to tell you that she wasn’t from America.

Stranger danger, my mother would say.

But I felt safe—safe enough, anyway. The woman’s eyes told me what I needed to know. “Who are you?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.

“My name is Valleia,” she replied.

“And . . . you’re not from here.”

She nodded. “I am not.”

“Why do you need my help?”

“Do you remember sitting in a dark church last Christmas Eve? It was not far from here, but at the same time . . . it was not here. And a stranger appeared. He explained some things to you, and he told you how to get home, when you thought you would never be able to.”

I remembered. The preacher. The traveler. When I first saw him, he was giving sermons to people who weren’t very interested. And then there was that Christmas Eve. Listen to your heart, he had told me when I was trying to figure out whether I should leave that other world, or stay with a family I had come to love.

“Is he in trouble?” I asked.

Valleia nodded. “He is. Do you have time to listen to the story?”

“Sure,” I replied.

She got down on the ground and sat crossed-legged on the soggy leaves. I sat opposite her. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them. “His name is Affronius,” she began. “Affron, for short. Did he tell you anything about the world he came from?”

“Just a little. He was a kind of priest, he said. He and the other priests used the portal to go around to other worlds, other universes—’imparting wisdom,’ he said. But they tried not to interfere, even though they knew how to cure diseases and everything.”

“Well, yes, that’s true, although Affron is much more interested in imparting wisdom than most of the rest of us.”

“He was kind of…odd,” I said. “I liked him.”

“Many of us like him,” Valleia replied softly.

“What’s going on? Why is he in trouble?”

“Because of his oddness, I suppose. Larry, let me tell you about Terra.”

Terra. I must have come across that word somewhere in my reading, because it didn’t seem totally unfamiliar. But the word sounded so different, hearing it spoken by Valleia that afternoon, sitting on the damp ground in the woods behind my house.

“Terra is the name of our world,” Valleia went on. “A big part of our world is ruled by a priesthood. Affron is part of that priesthood; so am I. Some of us travel to other worlds; many others stay behind and govern our empire on Terra. This has been going on for centuries—ever since Via was discovered, really.

“What’s Via?” Like Terra, the word seemed familiar.

“Ah. I’m sorry. That’s our name for what you call the portal Anyway, there is a rule—Affron says he told you about it—that we are not supposed to change the worlds we visit. We don’t tell them how to build weapons; we don’t cure their diseases; above all, we don’t talk to them about the portal.”

“Is that why he’s in trouble? Because he talked to me?”

Valleia sighed. “That’s what he’s accused of. But . . . it’s complicated. This shouldn’t really get him into trouble. Others have done far worse things, without punishment. But Affron has powerful enemies, and they see this as a way of defeating him.”

“Is he on trial or something?”

“Yes, Larry. And Affron would like you to speak for him at the trial.”

“You mean . . . go to Terra . . . in the portal?

Valleia nodded. “To Terra. Just long enough to tell your story. Affron has told it to me—you were trapped in another world, cut off from your family, with no hope of return. It’s a powerful story. Perhaps it will move the judges. They are not easily moved, but we have to try.”

“What will happen to Affron if he’s found guilty?” I asked.

Tears suddenly began to swim in her glittering eyes. “We cannot let that happen,” she said. “We cannot let Affron die.”

“They’re going to put him to death? That’s ridiculous!”

“I know.” she said. “And we must do whatever we can to stop it. Affron’s life—and the future of Terra—is at stake.”

“The future of Terra?”

“Ah, Larry, it is too complicated to explain, and we don’t have much time. His trial is today. We must leave now, if you are going to help. I wanted to talk to you yesterday—to give you a chance to think about it—but I didn’t have a chance. So I came back.”

I could feel my pulse racing. This was the chance I’d been dreaming of—to get back in the portal and visit a different universe. The preacher’s universe.

But I remembered when Kevin and I had stepped into the portal last time. What could possibly go wrong, Kevin had said. And then, of course, everything had gone wrong.

How did I know I could trust this woman? Obviously she knew the preacher—Affron—but so what? Should I risk my life on her say-so?

Valleia’s eyes were studying me, and I suddenly understood that she was scared. Scared that I’d turn her down.

“Would I be able to come back at the exact moment I left?” I asked her.

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“You know, like no time at all passes here in my universe, even though lots of time passes in the universe I go to. That’s what happened before.”

“No,” she said. “No. That’s not what happens.”

Now I was puzzled. “Sure it is,” I replied. “I was gone for like three months before—I was in the other world from September to December—Christmas Day, actually, if you know what that is. But when I came back, it was the exact same time I left. Like I’d never been gone.”

Valleia shook her head. “I don’t understand—it doesn’t work that way. We’ll get you back here as soon as possible. But time flows at the same rate in every universe. If you stay three hours on Terra, you’ll return three hours later here on Earth.”

I didn’t understand either. I knew what had happened to me. “Maybe Affron did something?” I suggested.

She shook her head again. “It’s not possible,” she stated. And then she looked scared again, like she was losing the argument with me. “You won’t have to stay long, Larry. I promise.”

This was weird. I had just told her it was possible. Didn’t she believe me?

Knowing that I wouldn’t get back at the same time I left made it even harder to imagine going with her to Terra. She could promise all she wanted, but it didn’t sound like she was in control of things. If I didn’t get home till late at night or next morning, my mom would be a wreck. She’d call the police. She’d issue an Amber Alert or whatever it was. Volunteers would be searching the conservation land. I couldn’t do that to her, even to save Affron.

And when I finally did come back, what would I tell her and everyone else? I’d have to make up some kind of excuse. But what would it be?

It just didn’t make any sense. I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you.”

“A few hours of your life, Larry,” she said. “To save someone who saved you.” She sounded desperate.

I shook my head. “I just can’t,” I repeated.

We sat there on the leaves staring at each other. And then Valleia started to cry. Not in the histrionic way that Cassie cried, like whatever happened to her was the worst thing ever and we all had to pay attention—no, these were silent tears leaking out of her eyes. Like she couldn’t help herself.

She didn’t wipe them away.

I thought: maybe she’s in love with Affron. But that wasn’t my problem, was it?

I thought about my family. Matthew would be playing his video game, just like yesterday. Cassie was at rehearsal; Mom was in her home office; Dad was at work. Pretty soon Mom would start making supper and Dad would come home, and we would talk about the day in the same old way. Just like yesterday. Just like tomorrow. I hadn’t realized how much I loved my family until I almost lost them, back in the fall when Kevin and I were stuck in that other universe.

The universe that Affron had rescued us from. Shouldn’t I rescue him?

That wasn’t what made me decide. And it wasn’t Valleia’s tears. And it wasn’t curiosity, exactly. What was Terra like? I’d love to find out, but . . .

It was the sudden sense that right here, right now, I was deciding my entire future. I could go home and live my life in the usual way, and maybe it would be a great life. Maybe I’d be rich and famous and happy and never cause my mother to worry.

. . . and I would regret forever that I didn’t take this one final risk.

I had this dizzying sense of choices being made everywhere, by everyone—universes splitting and splitting again as people decided which kind of Doritos to buy, whether to bike to the harbor with Vinny or go home and write your composition, what show to watch, what college to go to, who to marry, where to live.

So many choices. So many chances for regret. I had to close my eyes to keep from falling over under the weight of the choices.

When I opened them, Valleia was still staring at me, puzzled. She had wiped her tears away. What had happened? I sensed that maybe a lot of time had passed.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I felt okay, I thought. Maybe a little weird. “Did you just . . . do something to me?” I said.

She shook her head. “I did nothing, Larry. You seemed to go into a trance.”

I’m not sure why, but I believed her. This had all been inside me somehow.

It is only by living in doubt that we can reach certainty, the preacher—Affron—had told me.

It is only by setting out that we can finally return home.

I still didn’t know exactly what he had been talking about in his sermons. But I know that he had been talking to me when he said: Listen to your heart.

I stood up. I still felt a little dizzy, but I wasn’t going to lose my balance. I was going to be all right.

I brushed some twigs off my pants, and then I said, “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go?” Valleia repeated.

“To the portal,” I said. “To Terra.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

She got up from the ground, smiled, and hugged me. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Then she led me silently through the woods. Finally she stopped in a clearing.

“Is it here?” I asked Valleia.

She nodded. “It’s here.”

She walked slowly forward. She let go of my hand, and then she stretched both of her hands out in front of her.

Something glowed a light blue beneath them.

This wasn’t what had happened to me when I entered the portal. It had been completely invisible from the outside.

The blue light faded after a second and a long dark shape appeared, extending down to the ground.

“Are you ready?” Valleia asked.

Was I ready? No, of course not. I would never be ready. But I nodded.

She went first, and I followed, leaving the woods, and my universe, behind.

When I had used the portal by myself, or with Kevin, its interior had been all foggy, like a bathroom after you’ve taken too long a shower. But this time I thought I could make out curved walls, a little out of focus. The air inside the portal was a little warmer than the air in the woods.

Valleia made some motions with her fingers, as if she was typing or playing the piano, using invisible keys. The opening we had walked through disappeared. On the opposite side of the portal, another opening appeared.

She touched my arm. “Thank you, Larry,” she said again.

And then she reached out her hand to me. I took it. She led me out the opening in the far wall of the portal, and into her universe.

That sinking feeling when you realize that the novel you’re reading is about an author with an unhappy childhood

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Richard Bowker

I liked Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (although I liked the HBO movie better). Her new novel is called My Name is Lucy Barton, and the reviews I have seen have been luminous. “It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom” raves the Washington Post, for example. Maybe I’m the wrong audience.

“A book of withholdings” is another way of saying it’s short (193 pages, actually). The narrator (who’s about 60) is sort of telling you the story of her life, but she mostly skips over stuff like why her marriage failed and what her books are about; she names characters almost grudgingly, as if naming them would force her to pay more attention to them. She focuses on her childhood, but she does this by setting up the narrative voice at two removes: she is remembering a long hospital stay in the 1980s when her mother flew into New York and stayed with her, and they ended up talking, often elliptically, about their shared past. Turns out it wasn’t that great. Nothing much flows from this, as far as I can tell; no conflict and no resolution, except in the sense that the narrator seems at peace with what she has had to endure. The complex narrative structure doesn’t seem to accomplish much; telling a story in a non-linear fashion doesn’t necessarily make the story more interesting.

I do want to say that I listened to the book, and the narrator was just wonderful. If it weren’t for her, I probably would have given up.