Sequels and sixth-graders

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Richard Bowker

So I walked into the auditorium for my talk to a bunch of sixth-graders, and one of them is helping to set up the AV. I tell him my name, and he says, “You wrote The Portal?”

“Yep.”

“I loved that book! Have you written a sequel?”

“Well, it just so happens…” And I pull a copy of Terra out of my briefcase.

“Cool!”

By the end of my talk, though, I was beginning to worry a bit about getting these kids to read the sequel. The protagonist of The Portal is in the seventh grade, and he’s already interested in girls. In Terra, he’s heading in to the eighth grade, and things are heating up a bit. He meets a girl. They are thrown together in a bunch of adventures. He kisses her. He sleeps with her snuggled up against him. He sees her naked. He has… reactions. Who am I to say if this is appropriate fare for a sixth-grader?

And, I have to say, those particular sixth-graders looked awfully young. The teacher told me that each class has a personality, and this year’s group was on the immature side. He didn’t seem worried about pushing them a bit towards maturity. But I sure don’t want to have to explain myself to their parents if they find any of this stuff objectionable.

It’s tough being a writer.

Sixth-graders are the best people in the world!

Posted on February 18, 2017 by Richard Bowker

I posted this photo on Facebook already, but here it is again for my blog. I was invited to give a talk about The Portal to the sixth-graders of the Gateway Regional Middle School in western Massachusetts — maybe about 60 kids in total. A bunch of them had already read the book, and were really enthusiastic. Yikes, I have some fans in western Massachusetts! Here are a few of them after the talk, along with some of my show-and-tell items:

They were all great — funny, curious, and friendly. I was going back to a classroom after the talk, and those two girls on the right offered to carry my books for me! I was honored. I’m always a little skeptical about people asking for my autograph–who, me?–but these kids honestly seemed happy to have me sign a scrap of paper for them. Glad to oblige!

Here, by the way, are their current learning objectives:

How would you do on those? Maybe I could write a persuasive five-paragraph essay, but I’d probably be pretty cranky about it. I’ve got nothing on brook trout. I can’t do those conversions, but I know how to get Siri to do them for me. And that last one–create a replica of a famous monument–would make me hang my head in despair.

Still, I’d happily be part of that class.

That sinking feeling when…

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Richard Bowker

… when you realize that the alternative-universe young-adult adventure story you’re writing is turning out to be about Donald Trump.

Trump is ruining everything.

New PORTAL cover?

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Richard Bowker

My publisher liked the cover we came up with for TERRA. (They also seemed to like the uppercase letters.) So they suggested coming up with a comparable cover for The Portal and change its title to PORTAL, which was okay with me because that’s the title I came up with in the first place.

Anyway, here’s the new cover design, courtesy of Jim McManus:

The paperback version of Terra is now available!

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Richard Bowker

It’s $14.99 and worth every penny! Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (I have no idea how there is already a used copy for sale from a bookseller on Amazon.)

By the way, we’re in the process of coming up with a new cover for The Portal to give us continuity in the series. I’ll post a draft when we have it.

First customer review of Terra

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Richard Bowker

And it’s a good one!

A really intriguing and rather different coming of age story. Alternate universe, strange portals to travel through and a planet called Terra. Earth, but not Earth. A place where the Roman Empire never fell, although with some very big differences. The first being that power resides in the hands of the priests, who control the portal, the Via. A schism has developed in the priesthood with the head priest (pontifex) attempting to corrupt the ideals of the finder of the portal and original priest of the order.

This is the second book of the series, having not yet read the first story of Larry and his portal hopping I was concerned it would be difficult to follow. It wasn’t. There were enough explanations to give one a basic understanding of what had occurred in the first episode so that the characters motivations could be understood, without destroying the suspense and giving away the previous storyline.

The combination of alternate universe travel, the Roman Empire still existent, some wonderfully complex characters, a high level of suspense and many twists made for an edge-of-the-seat read.

Highly recommended.

One of the many tough things about writing a sequel is trying to make the novel intelligible on its own. I’m glad to see this reader enjoyed Terra without having read its predecessor.

Points of view

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Richard Bowker

Here’s an article from the Times Book Review about the return of the omniscient point of view in fiction:

Most 19th-century novelists didn’t try to hide their authorial presence. With modernism’s emphasis on the self and the rendering of individual consciousness, omniscience became unfashionable. Twentieth-century realists moved closer to their characters and wrote in the first person or limited third.

I have been thinking a lot about point of view lately. All my novels to date have been told either in the first person or limited third-person (where you can have multiple points of view, but you’re only in one person’s point of view for any one scene). All of them, that is, until Terra, where ninety percent of the novel is told in the first person, and then in the final chapter I switch to limited third for two different characters. I worried about doing this, but I did it to set up the next novel in the sequence, Barbarica, which I’m working on now.

Barbarica is structured as a kind of kaleidoscopic limited-third novel — that is, we shift constantly from one point of view to another as the story progresses. Will this work? Dunno. My writing group, which is experiencing this in real time, is getting antsy to see something from the point of view of my original narrator, Larry Barnes. So, I have finally reached him in the sequence I’ve vaguely laid out, and suddenly I don’t know how to proceed. Should I go back into his familiar first-person narrative style? Or should we encounter Larry for the first time in limited third? I think the decision will be fairly important to the reader’s experience of the story.

So now I’ll end this blog post and make the call.

Writing is hard, by the way.

“Terra” is now available from Amazon!

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Richard Bowker

It took longer than I expected — but Terra is finally here.

Terra is the sequel to my novel The Portal; it extends and deepens the story of Larry Barnes and the cosmic gateway he has discovered to parallel universes. Here’s a summary, along with the first chapter.

The ebook will be available on Barnes & Noble and other online vendors before long. A print version will show up shortly thereafter.

By the way, if you read the marketing description of Terra on Amazon, you’ll notice a reference to the next book in the series, which is called Barbarica. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to appear, though; I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft.

The Bad Sex award

Posted on July 31, 2016 by Richard Bowker

The Bad Sex award for 2015 was given out last December. Guess I missed it. Here’s an interesting article in The Guardian about it. The British award is given out for badly written erotic passages in otherwise good novels. The winner was the singer Morrissey for a ridiculous passage in his novel List of the Lost. The article makes the point that fear of being nominated for the award may actually be having a beneficial effect on literature, at least in the UK:

Grandees of the English novel are now hardly ever shortlisted because even the likes of Ian McEwan and Howard Jacobson now eschew sexual description, quite possibly in part due to awareness that such scenes could be performed to a baying, champagne-guzzling audience at the In And Out club the following December; and newcomers emerge from their creative writing degrees equally convinced that they’re best avoided.

I find writing a sex scene to be difficult. Here’s the problem: a sex scene in most novels tends to be important; something major is happening to central characters. (If they’re not central, why are you showing them having sex?) Important scenes require vivid writing; you can’t just say: “They went into the bedroom, took their clothes off, and made love.” So you want to ramp up the prose. But what can you say about sex that hasn’t already been said? You start reaching for metaphors, and before you know it you’re heading towards a Bad Sex nomination.

The thing to do, I think, is to focus on the characters’ reactions to what is happening, their emotions, rather than physical description. Because the characters are what matter, after all; not the sex. So sex scenes become exercises in characterization, not description.

By the way, Lee Child wants no part of writing sex scenes in his Jack Reacher novels. He usually summarizes them briefly after the fact. It had been good, Reacher thought. It had been very good. This is actually a good approach for Child. A very good approach. I wish he’d use the same approach for exploding brains and the like.

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: