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Terra is available on Barnes & Noble (finally)
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Points of view
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 now available on Kobo, Google Play, iTunes…
For those of you who like to take less-traveled roads, my new novel Terra is now available on Kobo, Google Play, and iTunes. I’m not sure what’s taking Barnes & Noble so long.
Here’s an article about the market shares of ebook vendors. iTunes has 11% of the market; Barnes & Noble has 8%; Kobo has 3%; Google Play has 2%; Amazon has almost all the rest. Oddly, most of my sales come from Barnes & Noble. I do see a smattering of sales from the other vendors not named Amazon.
I will now start reminding people that customer reviews are the life’s blood of book sales. So far Terra has none. I expect that they may be hard to come by, since the novel will be of most interest to folks who have read The Portal. So it’s all the more urgent for me to browbeat you into both reading and reviewing the thing.
Here’s the plot summary and first chapter.
“Terra” is now available from Amazon!
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
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
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”
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.
Sequels
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.
That sinking feeling when you realize that the novel you’re reading is about an author with an unhappy childhood
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.
Terra, Chapter 1
Here’s the first chapter of my new novel, which is probably a couple of months away from actually appearing in print and ebook format. It’s a sequel to The Portal. It would help to read The Portal first, but I think I’ve filled in the backstory sufficiently that this isn’t strictly necessary.
******************
Home
Chapter 1
I was standing in the snack-food aisle of the 7-11 when I saw her. Somehow I knew who she was—or what she was, really. Even though she looked like everyone else, was dressed like everyone else. There was something about her eyes, her gaze. Something I remembered….
And she knew me, which was very strange. “Larry,” she murmured. “We’ve got to talk.”
But just then my friend Vinny Polkinghorne came up behind me and whacked my Red Sox cap off, and when I had picked it up the woman was gone. “Cut it out, Vinny!” I said, but he just grinned.
I ran to the front of the store, but she wasn’t there, and I couldn’t leave the store without paying for my bag of Doritos, and when I had done that and gone outside, she wasn’t there either. She wasn’t anywhere.
“What’s the matter?” Vinny asked. “Looking for someone?”
“No, I just—nothing.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” Vinny said. “Can I have a Dorito?”
I handed him the bag.
“Let’s go hang out at the harbor,” he suggested, opening the bag and stuffing his mouth full of Doritos.
“Nah, I gotta get home. I just remembered I’ve got a composition to write.”
“Stupid homework.”
“I know, right? See you.”
Vinny handed the bag back to me, then got on his bike and rode off. I got on mine and searched for the woman for a couple of minutes, but I didn’t spot her. So I got off my bike and sat on a bench across from the Glanbury post office. After a minute I took out my cell phone and called Kevin Albright.
I was still getting used to having a cell phone. My parents had finally relented and got us all phones, even my kid brother Matthew, because everyone else in the world but us had one. Also, I think they liked it that we were all getting along so much better, which was mainly due to me and the way I had matured. My parents had no idea why I had matured, of course, and I wasn’t going to tell them.
“What’s up, Larry?” Kevin said.
“I’m pretty sure I just saw someone,” I replied.
“Someone who?”
“You know. Like the preacher. From, you know.”
“The preacher? Where? Was he, you know, preaching?”
“No. And it was a woman. I saw her in the 7-11.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No. But she knew me. And she had those eyes.” Those glittering eyes…
“What happened?”
“She knew me. She said she had to talk, but then Vinny Polkinghorne showed up and started bugging me, and when I looked up she was gone.”
Kevin was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You could be mistaken. It could’ve been anyone.”
Kevin had never seen the preacher. If he had, he’d know I wasn’t mistaken. “What if I’m right?” I said. “What if someone has come back? What if the portal is here again?”
The portal. Our secret. The invisible device that took you to other universes—like the one we lived in but different, in little ways and big ones. The device had taken Kevin and me to a universe where we’d ended up trapped for months, without cars or computers or phones, where we’d fought in a war and Kevin had come down with a strange disease and almost died. And where I found another version of my family, different from mine but somehow the same. A universe in which I had already died.
“The portal isn’t here, Larry,” Kevin said quietly. “Why should it be here? We’ve been back for months, and after we came back it disappeared—they took it away or moved it or something. That’s all over now.”
“I don’t think it’s over,” I replied.
“You don’t want it to be over,” Kevin said.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. I saw that woman. She knew my name.”
“You saw someone. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Whatever,” Kevin said, suddenly sounding bored. “I’ll see you at school.”
“Sure.”
I put my phone away. I was right; I knew that. But I was thinking about what Kevin said. You don’t want it to be over. Was that true? Maybe. I didn’t run away from that woman when I saw her; I went looking for her. That said something, didn’t it?
And I knew that Kevin may have sounded bored, but he wasn’t, not really. He wanted to know what was going, too.
But maybe I wanted it a little bit more.
I rode my bike home. My kid brother Matthew was playing a video game in our room. Mom was in her office, working on one of those grant proposals she gets paid to write. My older sister Cassie wasn’t home; she was in the play at the high school and stayed late every day rehearsing. I sat in the living room and tried to concentrate on my homework. It wasn’t any use, though.
Those eyes.
What did she want? She knew my name. We’ve got to talk.
I thought about the preacher. He had called himself simply a traveler. He was from one of those other universes. They used the portal to travel around to universes like ours and give sermons to people who mostly paid no attention to them. Seemed like a waste of time to me, but I guess he knew what he was doing. He had helped Kevin and me get home, which he didn’t have to do, and for that I was grateful.
I wondered what universe he was visiting right now.
Dinner was the usual—Dad got home around six, and he wanted to know about everyone’s day while we ate spaghetti and meatballs. Of course Cassie didn’t like the meatballs, but she was more interested in telling us about her rehearsal than complaining about the food. She went on and on about who was messing up their lines and who didn’t understand their character and whatnot. She didn’t have a very big part, but she was convinced that she should have the lead. I overheard Dad tell Mom once that drama gave Cassie “an outlet for her histrionics.” After I looked up the word, I decided he was probably right.
Matthew had a long, boring story to tell about his Social Studies project, which he was doing with his friend Zach and involved creating a display of agricultural products from different states. Or something.
And then it was my turn.
“How was your day, Larry?”
“Fine.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing much. Hung out with Vinny.”
“How’s Vinny?”
“The same.”
What could I say? Things were kind of boring. Except for the thing that I couldn’t talk about.
After supper I went upstairs and surfed the net for a while. Matthew asked me what I was doing, like he always does.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I replied. “I’m reading.”
“I know, but what are you reading about?”
“The multiverse.”
I thought that would shut him up, but it didn’t. “What’s a multiverse?”
“There’s this theory that the universe we live in isn’t the only universe that exists. There are lots of other universes—maybe an infinite number of them. They call that the multiverse.”
“But that’s stupid. There’s only one universe. How could there be more than one?”
“Well, some really smart people think that’s not true.”
“How do they know? Has anyone ever seen one? Has anyone ever been to one?”
Sometimes I wanted to tell Matthew about my adventure, but why bother? He wouldn’t believe me. How could he? From his perspective, I had never left—the months I had spent in that other universe had passed in no time on this one. I couldn’t explain how. And I couldn’t explain how the portal worked, when all the scientists said that the best we could do is maybe detect another universe somehow; we couldn’t actually visit one. “No,” I said to Matthew, “no one’s ever been to one. But no one’s ever been to the sun. That doesn’t mean the sun doesn’t exist.”
Matthew pondered that, and then moved on. “Did you know that California produces almost all the artichokes in America?”
“I did not know that, Matthew,” I replied. “That’s very interesting.”
He looked at me suspiciously, sensing sarcasm, and then said, “Well, I think it’s interesting.”
“I’m going to look up some more artichoke facts right after I finish reading about the multiverse.”
“Shut up, Larry,” he said. But I knew he wasn’t upset.
The next day at school Kevin cornered me in the lunchroom. “It’s not here,” he repeated.
“Why do you keep saying that, like you know for sure? You don’t know anything. You’re just—” And then I figured it out. “You’re worried you’ll have to make a choice,” I said. “Go or stay.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he replied.
I had been by myself when I first discovered the portal, and I didn’t know what it was—just some invisible something that let me hide from the annoying Stinky Glover. I used it fast—found myself in another universe, spent half an hour exploring a Glanbury that was kind of like the town where I really lived and kind of not, and then I came back. It had been Kevin’s big idea to go into the portal again, this time with him. And we landed in a very different, very scary place. And it was Kevin who came to regret that decision even more than I did.
“Okay, Kevin,” I said. “It was probably nothing. I just got, you know, this vibe. Plus, she knew my name.”
“Fine,” he said. “But I don’t think you’re right. What are the odds?”
I wanted to argue with him. What did odds have to do with it? The woman was looking for me. Which meant she knew where she could find me. Which probably meant she knew the preacher.
But why was she looking for me?
I decided I didn’t really want to argue with Kevin. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I agree. Sorry I even mentioned it. Let’s hurry up and eat.”
We hurried up and ate, and we talked about other stuff. But Kevin still looked worried.
After school I went home on the bus. I didn’t really feel like hanging out downtown like I usually did. I didn’t have much homework, so I went back to trying to understand the Wikipedia article on the multiverse. Like Matthew, my father had noticed me reading about the multiverse once, and he’d gotten really excited, and he tried to explain to me about Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the wave function collapse and other stuff I wasn’t ever going to understand. I pretended to be interested—and I guess I was, sort of. I knew that what happened to me and Kevin was real, but it was nice to know that there was science behind it—that smart people like my Dad could possibly believe it was real.
Anyway, I gave up on Wikipedia after a while and I decided to take a walk in the conservation land behind our house. This was where I had found the portal back last fall. Now it was spring, and the leaves were budding on the trees and the ground was a little muddy, so my mother would probably yell at me if I didn’t wipe off my sneakers before I went back in the house. She used to be really worried about me wandering off by ourselves in the woods, but she’s calmed down a bit lately. Apparently she has decided I’m not quite as stupid as she thought.
I found the spot where I had stumbled onto the portal when I was trying to get away from Stinky Glover. I groped around to see if it was there. It wasn’t. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. It could be anywhere. The preacher had moved it, back in the other universe. And, like Kevin said, he—or someone—had taken it away from here sometime after we returned. What did I know about portals?
I felt a surge of disappointment, though. And I knew that Kevin was right. I didn’t want it to be over.
And that’s when I heard the voice.
“Larry Barnes.”
It was so soft that at first I thought I was imagining it. I couldn’t bring myself to answer.
“Larry,” the voice repeated.
I turned. And she was there, standing among the trees, staring at me the way she had at the 7-11.
“Larry, I need your help.”
Richard Bowker 