Tuesday, June 22, 2010

5 Star Review!!


In looking at some of my book sites over on Amazon, I found a very nice review on Book 5: Quinta Essentia.

Since this blog will not allow pasting, I will paste a link so that anyone interested in reading the review can go and look at it. It's a five star review and I'm very proud of it.


Saturday, June 12, 2010

Is it me or is it Memorex? More like T-Rex

I found a new thread on the Kindleboards author forum this morning and thought it would be fun. I checked out several parts of my latest novel up for editing in the Red Cross of Gold Series for gender identification. The Genie supposedly analyses blocks of text and identifies the gender of the author. After putting five different blocks of text from "The Company of Women" (strangely this title seems to match this idea), I learned that I am neither male nor female, but both. When I write dialog with a female character in it, invariably, the Genie says a woman wrote it. I figure this is because the female POV dominates the conversation as the women of old were wont to do. I would never say that of modern women for fear of being tarred and feathered. However, when I put in blocks of text from dialog between males, the author was said to be male. From battle scenes, male. This made me feel a little better.
But I started thinking about this as I read the posts from the other authors on the forum. It seems that we are all just about 50/50 male/female in our writing.
This brings up an interesting point. Authors, good authors, want the feminine characters to retain their femininity and they want their battle scenes to be Mars-like (I won't say 'male' because of the above mentioned tar and feathers). I thought that this Genie thing might be a good tool for judging whether we had caught the correct POV for our scenes, be they love scenes or otherwise.
An interesting concept and one that I shall surely make use of in the future.
I have just ordered the proof copy of the 13th book "Children of the Temple" which is available on kindle at the moment.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Here be piranhas...


I'm going to venture out into the world of Amazon forums and try a few postings as soon as my account clears. For some reason, Amazon keeps telling me that I can't post because I haven't bought anything which is ridiculous. I've bought numerous things from Amazon.

As I was comtemplating the idea of trying a post or two there in the promotion threads, it occurred to me that Amazon is an apt name for those forums. The Amazon river is also full of vicious predators in the form of piranhas and other nasty critters. From what I hear, it is poster beware over there. I guess I'm used to being treated like a real human being over at the Kindleboards threads where the moderators actually moderate all the threads and the trolls and bashers are soon weeded out.

The last time I tried posting anywhere outside of KB, I soon found myself talking with someone who had the mind of a nine-year-old boy. The conversation started out well enough, but soon degenerated into a mindless stream of "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" Very disturbing and I imagined all sorts of images in my head not the least of which pictured me as the rear end of a jackass who had the audacity to think that the person on the other end of the cyberthread was an intelligent human interested in conversing about writing... oh, well. I'm hoping to do better at Amazon. I promise to obey the 10,000 rules for authors posting over there and hope for the best. Wish me luck.