Enter the August Give Away

It's August! Time to enter the Give Away for a digital copy of Tales from the Fountain Pen.
To enter send an email to: elynnh2write (at) gmail (dot) com.

* the fine print: give away open to all countries. Emails will be deleted after contest closes Aug. 15th. Emails will not be used for any other purpose. The email box will go away after contest closes.

Good luck!

The Big August Give Away

I know it's still bright, sunny July, but it will be August in day or two more and I want to let you know about the give away I'm setting up for August.

Due to the 'miracle' of technology my book links are finally active again on Goodreads.com and to celebrate I'm giving away one digital copy of my novella 'Tales from the Fountain Pen'. All you need to do is send an email to : elynnh2write(at)gmail(dot)com with Give Away in the subject line before August 15th. (After that the email box goes away)

On August 16th using some fancy, honest, randomizing method, I will pick one lucky winner.

So if you're in the mood for an atmospheric journey back to WWII the Netherlands where a young woman, Maggie (age 17 almost 18), is trying to navigate the challenges of growing up in a time of war, enter the give away!

Also, in the month of August I will be taking questions on Goodreads, so if there's anything you've ever wanted to know about my writing, future books, how to survive rejection, etc. please feel free to ask.

And reviews on Goodreads are of course always welcome.

Conference Lessons

This past weekend was the annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) conference. It was the first time I signed up for this one, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. My initial impression on the first day was that the atmosphere seemed subdued, but I quickly realized my error in judgement.

The writers conferences I’d attended in the past had been SCBWI (society for children’s book writers and illustrators) conferences and had a far more playful feel to them because we’re talking about children's books. 

My main reason for coming to the PNWA conference was not so much the breakout sessions, though they were interesting, but the opportunity to interact with agents and editors, and to meet new people. 

A writer, any artist really, grows stale if he/she doesn’t step out and meet new people, have new experiences, and look at things from a different point of view. Of course stepping out is not always easy for a bunch of introverted artists, but the PNWA was a huge success in that sense. 

Whenever I sat down somewhere to take a few notes or quietly practice my pitches someone would join me and offer to help, though it invariably turned into a wonderful conversation. There were people there from all over the country and even some from outside the country.  

I feel I learned the most from those people because we shared a common interest, though we came from completely different backgrounds, and through that common interest we were able to start a conversation about writing, publishing, and life in general. 

Sometimes a question as simple as ‘what kind of writing do you do?’ opened the door to real depth and a human connection. 

It reminds me of something I observed and try to incorporate in my encounters with others. A brilliant marketing lady I had the good fortune of working with many, many moons ago at a non-profit I wrote grants for, had the ability to make people feel at ease and open up simply by finding one thing to complement them on in the first 5 minutes of meeting them and then really listening to their response. (Thank you, Carrie!)

I wonder what the world would look like if we all took the time to even for 5 minutes put our egos aside and found something good in another? 

But now I’d better get back to putting together submissions to the agents who expressed interest in my manuscripts! Wish me luck!

July Book Review

The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel 

by Jasper Fforde 

I tried to finish this before heading to Europe but ended up taking it on the plane to finish. Thank goodness my offspring had room for one more book in his carry on. Though I had my e-reader loaded with other books, this one was still a nice old-fashioned paperback. You really can’t beat the joy of traveling with a paperback book, but they do add a lot of extra weight to already overstuffed luggage.

The Eyre Affaire is an odd blend of science fiction, fantasy, murder mystery and maybe just a hint of romance. Though entertaining and written well enough that I wanted to know the end, it did at times leave me confused and wondering where the author actually wanted to go. Or what the book was supposed to be. 

It features a female protagonist, Thursday Next, who tracks down people who tamper with books. A Literatec investigator, and a veteran of a very protracted conflict in the Crimea with Russia. So an altered history timeline has been thrown into the mix as well. 

A master criminal has taken a rare original manuscript and using an ingenious device designed by the protagonist’s uncle, adding a personal stake to the mystery, is lifting characters from the book and killing them. 

The first half of the book was better than the second where I felt the author rushed the story and didn’t do the characters justice. Or maybe I was reading it too fast in between the turbulence bumps on the flight across the Atlantic. Either way, I’ll give the sequels a miss.  Though I will admit that I did enjoy the literary in-jokes and was pleased to find I had read enough classics to keep up.  

The Blog Tour, My Writing Process

Theo dictates when I take a break!

Thanks to my friend and fellow author Lynne Kennedy for inviting me to participate in this new blog tour. It’s kind of like a virtual studio open house tour. I’ve not yet met Lynne in person, but we talk online and discuss historical fiction, the process and dogs. She has also given me a lot of information about the process involved in self-publishing using Amazon. 

But before I get sidetracked here is my contribution to the tour. 

WHAT AM I CURRENTLY WORKING ON?

I’m currently working on a work-for-hire screenplay project for a client with a great idea. That’s about all I’m allowed to say about that. Hopefully he’ll be able to sell it so I can talk about it. I’m also working on a historical fiction novel for teens set in WWII Strasbourg, France (well it’s France now, it wasn’t then). And I’m editing my novel “Out in the Dark” with the idea of self-publishing it. That decision kind of depends on where this feud between Hachette Book Group and Amazon goes. 

HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE?

Those of you who have read my novella “Tales from the Fountain Pen” will have some idea of what I mean when I say that one of the main differences in my stories is the emotional component. A sense of feeling what the characters are feeling and making an at times difficult era very real, making you feel like you are there. Often my characters are quite ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances and having to make difficult choices, not only for themselves, but choices that will affect others. 

HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?

I’m not so sure I have an actual process at this point. It’s really about showing up and sitting down at the computer every day. Most of my stories or books start with either an idea, or simply the first line. There are times when I’m playing with a thought or feeling and trying to figure out how to put it into words. From there the story either flows or it doesn’t, if it doesn’t it goes away for a while till some other time. Sometimes I start handwriting a story because the very act of writing by hand stimulate a different part of the brain than typing does. 

But if you want me to get technical on what my writing day looks like:

After the morning chores such as driving off-spring to school & walking the dog & feeding the cats then letting them out, letting them in and maybe letting them out again, I’ll make a large cup of tea and fire up my laptop. 

First there is the pure and unadulterated pleasure of reading an email from a very dear friend overseas, then a quick check of the news headlines - why is it always bad news? - and after these morning rituals I get to work until lunch time. After lunch I’ll work some more, often there’s a translation that’s due in that time too so I’ll take a break and work on that. The change in work can help refresh the writing, and the rewriting, and the editing and polishing. 

UP NEXT:  And now I hand you off to another one of my writing friends, Richard Hardie of the Temporal Detective Agency series fame, all the way in England. 

The High Ground

I’ve been following the spat between Amazon and Hatchette Book Group with interest and  growing concern. Actually at this point it’s not a spat anymore, but a full blown battle. What started as a disagreement, has now become a nasty business of one company undermining another company. 

At first Amazon took the big 5 publishers and Apple’s iBooks to court over E-book price fixing. Stating that the prices these big publishers set for E-books were too high and detrimental to sales and authors.  The judge sided with Amazon. Which made sense as the overhead on E-book production is very low, and therefore it follows that the profit margin is higher already. The author as well as the publisher should be seeing a larger royalty too. But that wasn’t quite how it went. I secretly suspect that publishers hoped this whole E-book thing would fizzle, which is probably one reason a number were late adopters. 

But things have turned ugly. Information is coming out of Amazon’s bullying tactics toward publishers on setting prices not only for E-books but also for paper books. Now Amazon are delaying shipments to customers of books published by Hachette or simply refusing to stock them. 

I won’t go into the details as they’re easy to find online, but what concerns me is: what will the ultimate fall out be? How will this have an impact on people who choose to self-publish through Amazon? Will it lower their chances of being picked up by a traditional publisher even further? Will they get blacklisted for - supposedly - siding with either Amazon or Hachette? 

What will happen to those of us who have good books written, but can’t get through the door with publishers, for whatever reason, or just don’t want to wait the years it can take to crack open that door, and who opt to self publish? 

Because of this growing battle are we authors suddenly at risk of having career opportunities cut short? Do we as authors continue to send out submission after submission, that may or may not, reach the person we hope to reach? And then wait sometimes 6 months to a year for a form letter informing us that we don’t fit the current needs of the publisher? 

I’m not trying to put down any side in this deliberation, as I’m a very tiny cog in an overwhelmingly large machine, but I do wonder. And I would very much like to see some discussion around this particular issue, because many of the writers I know are very serious about growing their careers, and if one - perceived - wrong choice cuts them off at the knees, it means we all lose. 

What high ground can I take here and still grow my career? 

Maybe I’ll join my cat, Seymour, on the roof for a bit to contemplate this issue. 

June Book Review

The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer

I read this book in April, but as you know, May was a little busy with boxes, moving and cleaning, so no time for a book review. I’d like to say I’m all settled in but that’s not quite true, there are still plenty of boxes that need to be emptied … or maybe just donated? Not my books of course, they’d be hard to give up.

The Cairo Affair was perfect for those airport lounges and long plane flights in April. Nothing too strenuous, but a very enjoyable, intricately layered, spy yarn. What starts with a murder leaving an 'innocent' expat American widow, slowly unravels into a big web of intrigue, double cross, more murder and cross-border shenanigans. 

Sophie Kohl has just confessed to her husband, a career diplomat, that she had an affair while they were stationed in Cairo when he's suddenly shot dead in the restaurant in Hungary where they're having dinner. 

Since Sophie was told that it was Stan, the CIA agent in Cairo she'd had the affair with, who had told her husband, she calls him and confronts him. Stan, still very much in love with Sophie, wants to help. But both of them lie to each other, as does everyone else in the story that follows, and we learn that not all is as it is portrayed. Who works for whom? Who's double crossing which organization? And who's paying for what exactly?

The author has an excellent grip on current affairs and seamlessly blends past and present events across the globe, including Egypt, the former Yugoslavia and Libya. In a time when we no longer have the iron curtain and the cold war, we now find ‘freelance’ spies selling information to the highest bidder in an effort to raise capital for a cause in their own countries, of course with disastrous consequences. 

There were a number of unexpected, though very plausible, plot twists, and the characters were drawn in a fine enough detail to come alive without have been labored over. 

My only objection was a rather brutal description of war crimes, and some heinous crimes against women in particular. It seems to be the season for that, if the news media is anything to go by. A very sad state of affairs which almost made me stop reading. It seemed unnecessarily detailed for the flow of the story, but that's my personal opinion.

I will probably seek out more books by this author, especially since there are a few more airport lounges and long plane rides coming up later this month. And there's just nothing like a spy novel to liven up international travel!