Review of Tales of a Texas Boy

"Tales of a Texas Boy" was originally self-published through Lulu. As I've said before, trying to get an agent or publisher for a thin volume of short stories is as likely as me being chosen to go on the next flight to Mars (I'd also love to do that).

The Lulu Review of Books blog just posted a review of Tales. It's a nice review, and I'd like to share it with you.

Review: Tales of a Texas Boy

An excerpt of the review, written by Linda Welch, author of Along Came a Demon:

I think Tales Of A Texas Boy by Marva Dasef will appeal to both children and adults. In fact, the large print is particularly suited for children and senior citizens whose eyesight is perhaps not as good as it once was. Marva Dasef skillfully brings her colorful characters to life, “a different life than any of us will ever know”, and I could have happily read another one hundred pages and another twenty Tales Of A Texas Boy. I’ll just have to read it all over again. And again.

Can't get much better than that.

Note: The book is available through Amazon in a several formats. A trade paperback has normal print, and there are two different large print editions.

Did a book ever really bug you?

I was getting ready for bed and my nightly reading session. The book I'm reading is from the library, so it's a hardback. It also happens to be 900 pages long. Don't know if that has anything to do with it, but when I picked up the book I saw a couple of ants crawling across the page ends. Then, I noticed that there were ants crawling across my bookshelf-style headboard.

I looked closely at the bottom of the book and noticed a slightly lump in the pages and an ant crawling out.

I took the book into the kitchen where we keep the ant spray (unscented) and after squashing a as many of the ants as I could see, I gave the book a light spray between the book's cover and the wrap-around outer cover.

I opened the the book to the page with the lumpy part and found a chunk of something white and hard. Glue? Don't know, but I pried it off, and resprayed the book. Lightly, mind you. I'm not one for destroying books.

This is definitely a very weird experience considering a story I wrote recently having to do with ants invading a home. Not just your average annoying ants, but ants bent on revenge (at least in the addled mind of the main character).

I'm returning the book to the library without finishing it. I'll get a copy later in paperback. I'll also examine the book closely before purchasing. Oh, the book? Anathem by Neal Stephenson (see the post below).

Freaky.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

This is not a review.

The reason that it isn't is because I'm on page 29 of the 935 page book, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish it. I will plow ahead, but I have to say that I'm already disappointed in it.

I love Stephenson's books. I'm a huge fan of Cryptinomicon and the Baroque Cycle. Both of these are huge tomes, so the length doesn't faze me.

What bugs me in Anathem is that I feel like I'm reading another language in which I am ill-versed. This is frustrating. I really, really want to love this new book of Neal's, but I'm afraid it will be returned to the library unfinished. When it comes out in paperback, and I can buy a used copy I will most likely give it another try.

But, for now, I'm thinking I should just return it to the library so that someone else can have at it.

I'd be interested to hear from others who have read the book. It might reassure me that either 1) I'm being silly and should plow ahead, or 2) this is incomprehensible unless you're into getting a Ph.D. in Stephenson Arcana.

Chateau Lorane Fine Arts and Wine Festival

I'll be selling books at the Chateau Lorane Winery on Memorial Day, May 25th. I'm looking forward to another Authors event. It's fun to touch base with other local authors and talk to a bunch of people who've just swilled a lot of wine. They do tend to impulse buy.

Chateau Lorane is located south of Eugene in the Lorane Valley, the winery is world-famous (that's what they claim anyway). Oregon does have some primo wines, so I'll take their word for it.

I sure hope the weather's decent. I'm not sure whether the authors will be outside or have some cover. In Oregon, it's as likely to be 80 degrees and sunny or 50 degrees and rainy on Memorial Day.

I'll post more detailed information closer to the date. If you're in Oregon, though, think about coming to the event. Supposed to be great fun.

Here's their website so you can check it out.

If Fonts were people

If Fonts were people

Posted using ShareThis

Making a Fool of Myself

Adam Lambert - Ring of Fire

Adam Lambert - Satisfaction

The most talented person to ever appear on American Idol.

Sorcerous Signals Anthology

I was just contacted by the editor of Sorcerous Signals that my story "The Cursed Valley" will appear in the 2008 Best of anthology. I'll provide more details (as in release date, etc.) when they become available.

For right now, all I can say is WOO HOO!

Fifty Reasons

You've probably already read this one, but why not read it again.

On the Bookgasm blog:

Fifty Reasons Why Nobody Wants to Publish Your First Book

Here's some of the fun reasons out of the middle of the post. You should really want to go read the other 47 reasons.

20. You’re actually the 139th person to submit a conspiracy thriller
involving the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, entitled THE MICHAELANGELO
CIPHER.

21. And the 78th to submit a chick-lit manuscript about an attractive
woman’s sweet tooth and affection for footwear, called CHOCOLATE AND
SHOES.

22. You know the part where the protagonist stuffs those puppies into
the wood chipper? It’s not quite as funny as you seem to think.

March Spotlight on Books

Poetry is the flavor of the month. Check out Dianne Salerni's monthly Spotlight. March is for poetry! It is really, really hard to find publishers for poetry, so this month's selection highlights those works that are ignored by the agents and mainstream. Hey! If you're a poet, you're going to have a hard time find a publisher. That does NOT mean your poetry is unworthy. Check it out.

Some of the books for your reading pleasure are:

Mugging for the Camera by RJ Clarken

A Viking's Prayer by Aidan Lucid: This one sounds very interesting to me. Love the historicals!

Gems of Yesterday by Bee Lewis, edited by Erwin A Thompson

Organic Hotels by Matthew Abuelo

Sightlines by Janet Grace Riehl

Night Moves by Edgar Henry

Next month: Murder Most Foul! I can hardly wait. Detective, crime, neat stuff.

All past Spotlights are linked at the bottom of the page.

How to Write a Book Review by Bryan Catherman

My good friend Bryan Catherman gives some helpful hints on how to write a book review.

A good book review usually tells as much about the reviewer as it does about the book although the reviewer should seek balance between the two.

What is a book review?
A book review is a reader’s opinion that serves as advice or a recommendation to other readers. In our world of limited time and competing books, a review should help others sift through the marketing. However, one review is just one review and not anything to be taken too seriously.

Elements of a book review:
At a minimum, a good book review should include a brief synopsis of the book itself. It should be fair. Try to accurately describe the book’s plot, argument, or reason for its existence. Even if the book is terrible, try writing this synopsis factually. For example, “Joe Author attempts to explain….” Another example might read, “The Great American Novel is a fictional novel about…” WARNING: Never give away twists or the ending. DO NOT spoil the book for others. (Many reviews, especially on amazon.com, will leave out the synopsis altogether. I advise against doing this in the event that a reader has never heard of the book and has no idea what it’s about.)

The next element necessary for a good book review is the reviewer’s opinion. This is an opinion so it’s not necessary to include statements like, “I think,” or “in my opinion.” But stay fair. And whatever you do, do not use vague, unsupported adjectives like boring and fantastic. Try to explain why you feel the way you feel about the book. Simply saying, “This book is great and everybody should read it,” or “this book was a waste of money,” doesn’t help anybody. Try to explain in detail. Support your statements. Give examples. You can also recommend that people read or not read the book, but your explicit recommendation is not a requirement of a good book review. (Many reviews stick with the implied.)

That’s it. Reviewing a book is not as tough as people make it out to be. There’s nothing to be scared of.

Additional (but not required) items to include in a book review:
A grading system is popular. Give the book a grade or rate it with stars or spoons or something. (I recommend not using a thumbs up or down because that’s an all-or-nothing proposition. A five-star system is good but a ten-star system allows for a greater depth in rating.) Try not to make the grading system complicated; the entire reason for the grade is to simplify the review. And stay consistent in the grading process.

A history of the book or of the author can be informative if it doesn’t clutter or bog down the review.

A counter argument is warranted on occasion, but only if the book is a non-fiction argument. However, your book review is not a counter argument; it’s a review. Include the mandatory items and then include your counter argument only as an expansion of the review.

Pictures often enhance book reviews. The cover is the most obvious choice.

Author background if interesting or relevant to the book.

Sales history if it’s meaningful. Did the book do poorly for a long while and then something changed? Why?

How about an interview with the author if you can get one?

Additional media is nice if it’s available. Websites, videos, trailers, sound bites.

Sampling of the first couple of pages or a chapter helps the reader get a feel for the author’s style. (This is normally done with permission to avoid sticky copyright issues.)

How about comparing and contrasting the book you are reviewing with other books? This works well when reviewing books in a series and the comparison is made against an earlier book. “Book three was not as well written as the first two books….” This also helps readers understand a book they haven’t read by comparing to one they have.

Providing a location or link where the book may be purchased is always appreciated by the author and publishing people. (Even if you give the book a poor review.)

Is the author something other than an author? Does she wrestle tigers or is he also a religious leader or whatever. This may be worth including.

Be creative and make the review fun and informative for the reader. Otherwise, you’re wasting their time in a world where the review is meant to help save time.

Stimulus Watch

What is your state planning on using stimulus dollars for? Check it out at:

http://www.stimuluswatch.org/

Sort by priorities or whatever criteria you think important.

Amazon Merchant

Anybody who wants can sell books on Amazon. Those are the folks who make up those New/Used lists of sellers.

I'm a merchant for my own books. My value added is that the buyer gets a signed copy of the book and I ship with confirmation, so the buyer can track their purchase.

The supplier for the large print edition in the 8.5x11" trim size raised their prices a while back and I didn't think too much of it, until I decided to order a few more copies to have on hand. I found that I was losing money selling at the price I selected to undercut Amazon's price. The book retails at Amazon for $13.95. I sold the book for $11.95 + $3.99 S/H. Seems like I'd be making a profit, eh? Well, not quite.

My cost for a book from my supplier: $9.72 which includes the shipping to me.

Amazon's piece of the action: $3.85.

Customer pays a total of $15.94 and I get $11.86. Once I mail the book to the customer, my total cost is $12.70. And that doesn't include the cost of the envelope, label, etc. Just the book and postage. Something is wrong with this picture.

The result is that I had to up my Merchant price to $12.95. Amazon takes a few cents more, but I can be on the profit side with this price.

This sucks since I would love to give my direct buy customers as good a deal as I can. Unfortunately, my supplier has made it virtually impossible because they raised their printing price.

I'm considering switching suppliers, but I can only go directly to Lightning Source to get a better cost. To take the book to LSI, I have to cut off my original supplier entirely. This is a process that takes months to get through. Then, when I've gotten them to release the book, I still have to pay another $79.50 in setup fees. How long to make that up? I haven't even run the numbers.

I am thinking my best recourse is to send customers a different book from the one they ordered. This is not a bad thing for them. The other book has all the same text and illustrations, but is a smaller trim size, more pages, and some typo corrections the original doesn't have. That book costs me $3.00. As you can see, I could cut the price to the customer and still make a profit. But is it ethical to send the customers a different book than they ordered even if it's better and they wouldn't be missing a thing?

Thoughts?

February Spotlight on Books

February is the month of love and romance. That and President's Day. However, Dianne Salerni's excellent Spotlight on Books this month is romance and not presidents.

Dear Jane Letters by Amanda Hamm
Waiting for Spring by RJ Keller
Second Chance by Joy Collins
Mozart's Wife by Juliet Waldron
My Splendid Concubine by Lloyd Lofthouse
Love and Brimstone by Lesli Richardson
Dear Heart, How Like You This by Wendy J. Dunn
Pemberley Remembered by Mary Simonsen

Dianne provides covers, a summary, and links to the books. Go see if there's something that strikes your fancy.

Review for "Tales of a Texas Boy"

A new review has been posted on Amazon. Thanks to Al Past, author of the Distant Cousin series.

Just for the young? Not necessarily!, January 28, 2009
By Al Past (Beeville, TX USA) - See all my reviews

Tales of a Texas Boy is a collection of 21 reminiscences of rural life in the Texas panhandle during the Depression, told in the voice of an eleven year old remembering his childhood as an elderly man (modeled after the author's father). Each tale is short and complete in itself, and all add up to a convincing evocation of what life was like during those days in that area of Texas.

The boy, of course, would not dwell on hardship, deprivation, or lack of creature comforts. From his point of view, he had regular chores to perform, a loving, fairly strict family to live with, and various spells of an interesting or exciting nature to experience.

These include adventures with snakes, a man who had a pet bear, a livestock auction, driving his father's Model A pickup truck, a wild jackass, various odd neighbors, going on an old-fashioned cattle drive, dogs, skunks, fishing, chickens, and his little sister, to name a few. Each story is preceded by a few sentences of authorial scene-setting--a nice touch--and a small black and white photograph, not credited or explained, but adding a pleasant visual accent to the pages.

The prose style has a countrified flavor, but not excessively so. Each story is well narrated, with the right details in the right place and usually a satisfying and appropriate conclusion.

Tales of a Texas Boy is intended to be a young adult book, but I see no reason younger children wouldn't enjoy it too, or adults, for that matter. I enjoyed it myself, and I am very far from a young adult. It reminded me of some of the stories J. Frank Dobie, the grand old man of Texas folklore, used to love. In fact, parents who are in the habit of reading bedtime stories to their children (an excellent idea) might find children as young as five would be entertained by them--the length of the stories is about right, and they offer a fine opportunity for parental dramatic reading. Indeed, the point could be impressed upon the child that daily life, however prosaic it might seem now, is worth gathering and writing down for the interest it might have in the future. It's easy to imagine a sleepy child asking why the Texas Boy never watched television. Calling grandpa and grandma!

(Al Past is the author of the popular Distant Cousin series and reviews for PODBRAM.)

Interviewed at Christine Fonseca's Musings Blog

Christine Fonseca is an up-and-coming YA writer, working hard to find an agent, get published, and go on Oprah. For now, she's doing what every writer should do: blogging on writerly subjects. She wanted to post about self-publishing. She knew I self-pubbed one book, so kindly asked for my opinion (as if I knew anything).

Excerpt (Read the rest of the interview here)

Christine (CF): How long have you been writing?

Marva (MD): The “all my life” answer that writers usually give here seems a bit disingenuous. Personally, I did not pop out of the womb with pen in hand. The better question is: how long have you been writing for publication? I wrote technical documentation for thirty-five years. I started writing fiction for publication about three years ago. Before that, I wrote stories for fun. The good part is that I dredged out a few of those old stories and have done well sending them out as individual stories. Three of my oldies eventually became books. Lesson: Never throw anything away. Those old ones were on paper only.

Bram Stoker Award Preliminary Ballot

The preliminary ballot has been released for the prestigious Bram Stoker Awards for horror writing. Ellen Datlow posted the complete list of works receiving enough recommendations for the preliminary ballot. I saw it on her LiveJournal posting.

I'm not (usually) a horror writer, so I'm not too disappointed my name isn't on it. However, my publisher, Sam's Dot Publishing, has several works. I'm proud of my little ol' publisher getting so many mentions. Hopefully, many of them will make the final ballot, then on to a win.

Superior Achievement in a Collection:
Little Creatures by Michael McCarty (Sam's Dot Publishing)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection:
The Phantom World by Gary William Crawford (Sam's Dot Publishing)
Virgin of the Apocalypse by Corrine De Winter (Sam's Dot Publishing)

Congratulations to the SDP writers for making it to the prelims!

Just a reminder: SDP published my books, First Duty and The Seven Adventures of Cadida, both available at The Genre Mall.

* Thanks to Ellen Datlow for stopping by to correct my errors on this post.

Inaugural Costs

I got to thinking about those costs so I had to do some investigating.

Yup, a total of $150,000,000 for Obama's inaugural. Cost to the government: $49 million. Yup, that's a lot of money. But notice that that is only 1/3 of the total cost. The rest is supplied by donors.The other thing you'll hear on Faux (Fox) news is that Bush's inaugural only cost $47 million. Wrong! That did not include the cost to the government. Total cost of Bush's inauguration? $150 million.This seems to be the amount spent on inaugurations. The good part, as I stated, that much of this cost goes to people in the form of wages. Security, catering, flowers, all the other partying stuff.

The vast majority of it (in either inauguration) goes to paying wages to tax payers. Money well spent on boosting the economy.Your $8 million figure was a tad low. However, it's like the space program to me. People bitch and moan that the space program costs so much money. They seem to think they load up money from the Mint and blast it into space. No. They buy lots of manufactured goods and services and pay a lot of people decent salaries. Yeah, they leave a bit of junk in orbit, but that's miniscule compared to the good done right here on earth.

People get confused and addlepated by these huge (to them) numbers. Supposedly, Everett Dirkson said, "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money." That's not the exact quote, since the Dirkson archives claim it didn't happen.

The concept, however, is something that your average wage slave (all of us) find hard to comprehend. In the Greatest Nation on Earth (the one and only thing I agree with Hannity the Nutcase about), we are perfectly capable of affording a grand party for a new president. In Bush's case, it was a waste of money, time, and energy. With Obama, this is more than just another inaugural. It's a turning point in US history.

Some people don't like it one bit. To them, I say: I didn't like your guy being proclaimed president by a bought-and-sold Supreme Court, so shut your face up about my guy.

Book by Ardyth DeBruen

A good friend of mine, Ardyth, has a cool book coming out on January 20th. A great day already made yet greater.

Check out Ardyth's website here.

"Chosen Sister" is published by Wild Child Publishing. They put out an eclectic bunch of books. I've had stories in a couple of their anthologies, so I gotta like them.

Buy Chosen Sister in ebook format for $5.95 at Wild Child.

When the Gold Wizard comes looking for the Child Warrior in Reina's village, it's no surprise he's only looking at the boys. However, when the wizard magically selects her younger brother as the warrior prophesied to defeat the Red Wizard, Reina has mixed feelings—jealousy and concern. Austyn is only six.

Allowed to accompany her brother, Reina soon finds they're in deeper trouble than she thought. The Gold Wizard's fake beard is ripped off by attacking harpies, revealing he's only seventeen, not to mention his magical demonstrations tend to go awry. Unfortunately, with the Red Wizard's harpies and snakewolves on their trail, finding a new (and better) wizard mentor is hardly an option. If anyone's going to find a way to track down the elusive Sword of Chivalry for Austyn and get him into the Red Wizard's castle to fulfill whatever the obscure prophecy insists must be done, it's got to be Reina.

So, You Want to Get an Agent

Well, I'd also like to fly to Mars. Both events have approximately the same likelihood of happening.

However, if you are determined to track down and capture the elusive agent, Query Tracker is the best place on the net to get the most up-to-date information on agents, plus super search functions to find just the right agent.

Check it out at QueryTracker.net

There is a companion forum filled with writers sharing information, helping each other write the very best query letter possible, and provide support for your sagging ego when you receive rejections like machine gun bullets.

Patrick, the site developer, is a very nice person, too.

Seven Adventures of Cadida

Read The Toasted Scimitar interview where I blather on about my writing and talk a bit about Cadida!

Seven Adventures is now available from The Genre Mall.
150 pages
18 interior black and white illustrations.
$10.60 + $3.00 handling.

Cadida's in trouble again. But then, when is Cadida not in trouble?

First, she gets captured by raiders and thrown into a cave to be sacrificed to a demon, which turns out to be a djinn named Bascoda, a rather clumsy genie who adopts Cadida as his mistress. Cadida manages to escape despite Bascoda's "help," but later returns to the cave to see if anyone else had been captured. She finds instead of a prisoner a rather lonely and pathetic demon who needs a new home. Then Baakir, a fire-breathing, talking, flying horse tells Cadida that his beloved Barika has been captured by pirates. Baakir is only somewhat helpful because he is not yet fully in control of his magic. Oops.

Oh, yes, there's much more . . . but you'll just have to turn the pages and find out what kind of trouble this bored little rich young lady can get into.