Writer's Blog

Still too much tradition

2011-12-03T14:32:00.000+01:00

Even though it might not have shown recently in my main blog, I am an avid read and enjoy novels of various genres regularly. And, as I also write stories belonging to most genres I enjoy reading, I am also quite aware of the rules, guidelines and traditions of those genres. Here my thoughts on some concerning women in the lead.

Strangely enough, especially the Science Fiction genre still seems to be very traditional. Female leads usually only feature in stories focused on future society. Space explorers and adventurers on strange planets are male, women only come in once a planet gets colonized. Then they might be important or tell what the author has to say about society. The ‘fun’ part, however, is for men only.

Fantasy is very similar, especially the classic high fantasy and the ‘sword and sorcery’ novels. Male leads are active, warrior, thief, wizard or a bit of all. Female leads most of the time are more subdued – or there are no female leads at all. Being evil, however, provides a woman with a more active role, but ensures she will not live to see the end of the story. Choices are ‘weak, but surviving’ or ‘strong, but dying’.

Horror novels traditionally have a weak female lead, but there have been changes over the years. Women take a slightly more active role there by now, female vampire hunters, for instance.

At the same time, horror and fantasy have been undermined by romance novels of lately. By keeping up pretence of being a real horror or fantasy story, the romance has taken over, turning traditional monsters into ‘good’ (or at least ‘not as evil’) versions of themselves, so the heroine can fall in love with the vampire, werewolf, dragon (in human form), demon or whatever, without having to pay the ultimate price. Or, of course, we have the ‘weak’ heroine allowed to fall for the valiant knight.

A different story with mystery and thriller novels. There has always been a place for the female detective in the cosy mysteries. Ever since Agatha Christie, female characters have taken over investigation while the quite often male investigator prove too incompetent or too prejudiced to solve the crime. In thrillers, the female lead does not have such strong a tradition, as the more action-oriented story of the thriller seems to ‘demand’ a male lead. However the team Rizoli/Isles in Tess Gerritsen’s novels proves easily women can do the job, too. The same goes for a host of other novels. The reason? Most likely the fact that more female writers have taken up the genre now.

There are still some traditional structures to break up in some genres, while others have left quite some traditions behind by now. Maybe one day I can help to break up the traditions in other genres.

Confusion about Romance

2011-08-13T14:51:00.000+02:00

I am not an avid reader of romance novels at all. It’s just not my genre, but I respect people who read them for fun. Yet, a discussion has sprung up at the Diving Bell Pub about forbidden love (which is one of your basic romance topics, after all) and I feel compelled to write more about it. As it is a topic of writing and reading, I decided to do so here at my literary blog.

The main discussion isn’t so much the topic of forbidden love – which is sweet and larger-than-life in many ways – but the question of what kind of novel counts as a romance novel.

For me, a lot of those ‘women novels’ which have sprung up in the fantasy and horror genre are romance stories as well. Every story which mostly revolves around the relationship of the male and female lead is a romance novel for me, no matter whether the backdrop is today’s quiet suburb or medieval Paris or a fantasy world yet to be named. It also doesn’t matter much to me whether the happiness of the couple is threatened by another suitor (with more influence and wealth, perhaps), the war between two kingdoms, the denial of the family (or an arranged marriage) or a vampire lurking in the background (which normally will be another suitor in a different way).

If horror, thriller, fantasy or whatever become a mere background for the love of two people, it’s a romance novel for me.

I’m not completely alone with that view in aforementioned discussion in the forum, but still it is hard for me to make people understand I don’t really care for that stuff – maybe because I, too, find it hard to understand the reason.

I never developed a taste for romance stories in my youth. I always liked reading crime and mystery. When I slipped into my teens, first horror, then science-fiction and finally fantasy were added to my tastes. I read the novels, I watched the movies and I enjoyed myself a lot. I rediscovered the thrill I had experienced with fantasy books and fairy tales for kids when I realized they were my entrance door to fantasy and horror. Science-fiction came with my interest in Star Trek and, of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It also came with two anthologies that put Sherlock Holmes into various settings in time and space.

I tried my hands at romance stories during that time, but somehow I could never make it work. Romance stories, melodramatic stories and other ‘normal world’ stuff never really interested me.

A little while ago, I ‘accidentally’ bought one of those ‘women novels’ set in a fantasy environment … and never finished it. I just couldn’t really get my mind around it, the romance was so much in the foreground for me, it simply erased the fantasy part. I’m just not wired the right way to enjoy such novels. Romance as a sub-thread in a crime or mystery story is okay, not a problem with that (both the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Chloe Coyle and the Booktown Mysteries by Lorna Barrett come with romantic entanglements for the female detectives). Romance as a sub-thread in a fantasy, horror or science-fiction novel is okay for me as well. It’s the other way around that troubles me – when the genres I enjoy reading become a mere backdrop for a romance.

Yet I have lately worked on a romance story in a fantasy environment – strange things are happening. Stay tuned for a post about this story, currently dubbed ‘Magical Marriage’ on my computer. I have but a few scenes to do and will take it to Feedbooks once I am finished.

The 20 Rules

2011-06-20T16:12:00.001+02:00

As a reader and writer of mystery stories for most of my life, I have long ago learned about the basic rules of the genre. Every now and then, however, I stumble over a piece of information I find highly useful. Like “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” by. S.S. van Dine.

I stumbled upon this essay by S.S. van Dine while browsing one of my favourite sites for free e-books, Feedbooks (click here to find the e-book). I downloaded it and read it, realizing that part of the rules still are correct while others have changed over time. Let’s have a look at the twenty rules and see how they are today, shall we?

1. The reader must have equal opportunity to solve the crime. That one still is absolutely right. All clues must be visible and all information the detective gets must also be available for the reader.

2. No tricks or deceptions might be played on the reader safe for those also played on the detective by the criminal. That’s very much the same as ‘equal opportunity’ in my books, but it’s right, of course.

3. There must be no love interest in the story. Boy, that one flew right out of the window later, didn’t it? Van Dine argues that a mystery story is a venture for the mind and not for emotions, but I have to admit that a little bit of relationship stuff in a mystery story can surely spice things up.

4. The detective himself or one of the official investigators should never turn out to be the culprit. That one is a ‘yes, but’ case for me. Yes, the detective who is the main character of the story should never turn out to be the culprit. I have, however, read some mystery stories in which one of the official investigators turned out to be the culprit and they worked quite nicely.

5. The culprit must be found by logical deduction, not by accident, coincidence or an unmotivated confession. That one is definitely true. A good mystery story should never rely on accident or coincidence for the solution, it all has to be ‘there’ to be seen.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it (read: a person who detects and searches for clues and logically interprets them). That basically goes without saying, as it were.

7. There must be a corpse in the story, the deader the better. Another of those ‘yes, but’ cases in my opinion. You can start a crime story with something less than a murder, but sooner or later the murder should come. It’s the most interesting crime to most readers and they expect at least one in a crime or mystery story.

8. The crime must be solved by naturalistic (read: scientific) means. This one is definitely right, but a patina of supernatural sometimes goes well with the story. Old-fashioned deduction can go a long way, even with all the help of a modern CSI unit.

9. There must be but one detective. I’ve seen stories with various detectives (adding up to ‘one’ detective) done very well, but there should be, in essence, one detective entity pitted against the reader.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent role in the story. This one is absolutely right. There’s nothing worse than a story in which the culprit jumps out of the shadows at the end and has never been seen before. It falls under the rule of ‘equal opportunity’, by the way – for the reader has to meet all important characters and the culprit definitely is important.

11. Servants should never turn out to be the culprit. Another rule the change of times has done away with. Servants are rare today, outside the houses of the very rich (and usually very famous). As they’re not that common today, there’s no real reason to exclude them from the list of possible culprits.

12. There must be only one culprit. I don’t completely agree with this rule. It should be obvious, though, in some way after a while that there have to be two criminals around. I have read stories that work very well with two or more criminals.

13. Secret societies or criminal syndicates have no place in a detective story. I partly agree here. The culprit should not have a syndicate behind him and secret societies are fit better for a thriller or adventure story. There’s no reason, though, why one should not play a very minor role.

14. The method of murder must be scientific and logical (so it can be detected). Van Dine meant by this that there should be no ominous poison never seen or heard of before. He’s right about it, because otherwise there’s no way the reader can solve the crime.

15. The truth must be visible at all times, provided the reader is clever enough to see it. Clues must point at the right person, if you really think about them. The means of committing the murder must be there, visible to the detective and the reader. That’s absolutely right, of course.

16. A detective story should not contain long descriptive passages. I don’t really agree with van Dine here. I like to slip into the setting, so descriptions of the surroundings and the people are of essence to me. But that one might be off today mostly because we’ve grown more used to psychological solving of crimes than at van Dine’s time. Today, we need worked out characters, so we can see who has the motif on top of the means and also has the right characteristics to kill.

17. The culprit should never be a professional criminal. Yes, that would be too easy. A professional criminal is one of the usual suspects and will be in the focus of the police far too soon. Mystery novels are not about how the police got Mr. X again, they’re about an unusual suspect committing a crime.

18. A crime must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. That one, I think, goes without saying as well. Mystery stories are about solving crimes, not reconstructing accidents or analysing suicides. That does not mean, however, that a crime is not allowed to pose as an accident or a suicide.

19. The motif for a crime has to be personal. That’s still true today. If a motif is not personal, the story is more fit for a thriller (be it about a serial killer or some political murder). The ‘Why’ is the link between the victim and the culprit.

20. consists of a list of devices never to be used in a detective story, such as the evil twin, a false séance or planted evidence. Only the first in the list, finding the criminal by comparing traces from the crime scene to something the culprit has at his or her disposal (van Dine manages cigarette ash) has to be taken off the list. That’s how modern forensics work. Modern mystery stories have to accept this fact as a fact, but the detective doesn’t have to analyze this clue himself (or herself). He or she can be told.

Twenty rules for writing a mystery story. Some might not really be important today, but they’re still worth considering.

Surprising Success

2011-03-29T15:55:00.000+02:00

When I published two stories on Feedbooks (see the links on the side), I hoped for a few readers, but I am very surprised at the number of downloads they have reached now – especially Twin Sisters.

This is actually quite motivating for me. I have started writing more lately – and more regularly as well. If any of you who read this blog have also downloaded the stories, I hereby thank you very much.

Announcement

2011-03-02T19:54:00.000+01:00

… of some kind. If you take a closer look at the left side of the blog, you might realize I have added another link to the ‘posted at Feedbooks’ category.

With “Twin Sisters” I’ve now published my second story, others will follow – both in English and in German. “Twin Sisters” is a story about murder and revenge, quite bloody, but shorter than “Phoenix Song”.

My next project now is to overhaul my very first long story, a German one. Within a week or a week and a half at the outmost it should be ready for publication, too. After this one (a fantasy story), I might edit the large number of slash stories I wrote, both in English and in German, and publish them in two collections.

Keep an eye out for the list, if you’re interested in my stories.

Phoenix Song published

2011-02-15T16:54:00.000+01:00

Yes, I have done a final step with a story I wrote some time ago – Phoenix Song.

Unfortunately, it’s not as great as the title of this post suggests: I merely published the story as a free e-book at Feedbooks.com. So, no big contract and no heaps of money coming in … but people will have a chance to read my story, all the same. No editor to go over the whole thing again, either, so there might be quite some typos left.

On the whole, I was positively surprised, though, with how easy it all was. I registered over there (have been downloading books from the site before – they have a great number of free e-books, both classics and new ones) and soon afterwards, I could start publishing my first story. I will, however, publish other stories over there as well – once I’m done with them. A few short stories are ready for publishing, so they should be up in a few weeks at the outmost. Others are still ‘work in progress’, so they will be published once I’m done.

You might have spied that new and currently rather short list beside the posts. This is where I will post direct links to my stories, once they’re published at Feedbooks, so keep an eye out for updates!

E-Books

2011-01-10T20:24:00.000+01:00

… and me. Up until very recently I thought I would never own an e-book-reader or think about getting one. I love books, you see, the real ones. I love the feeling, the smell, the whole thing. There’s nothing better for me than curling up on my couch with a good book and some lemonade, tea or hot chocolate (depending on temperature and general weather outside). But now I might also curl up with an e-book-reader.

I have quite some .pdf files on my computer’s hard disks which I created myself. Most of them are either my own stories or fan-fictions I have downloaded and converted from various sites for easier reading. Up until now, I have only been able to read them at my computer, so I was looking for a way to read them somewhere else, too. Most of those files I printed out, though, are A4 format, which is quite big, so not exactly a good idea for reading on your way somewhere. Over the last couple of weeks (two months or so), I therefore researched e-book-reader and realized that all of them can also read .pdf files. So, with the money I got as a present from my parents for Christmas, I went to the nearest electronic market and took a closer look last Friday.

I had set my eyes on a Tekstore model – least expensive and they have colour for graphics, not just electronic ink in black, white and grey. Tekstore was out, though, so I experimented a bit with the cheaper Sony e-book-reader, the PRS-350. Unlike the Oyo, offered in Germany by the chain of Thalia bookstores (which I tested in one, some weeks ago), the Sony reacts rather fast. Flicking through pages is rather easy, too, with the touch-screen. So, to make a long story a bit shorter (and not a bit too early), I bought it.

It has turned out that some of my .pdf files (the ones I found through Forgotten Books) don’t work all too well with my new reader. Most of those I did myself, though, are fine (even though I might recreate some for it). But then I did some internet research and now I’m really loaded on free e-books, as I found some pages where you can legally get old classics (books that have been around for 70 years and more) for free. I have by now loaded a couple of books I always wanted to read (including Varney the Vampire and the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer), a couple of books I have read before, but will want to read again (like S.S. van Dine’s Bishop Murder Case and Greene Murder Case) and quite some books I had never thought about reading before (like The Mask of Zorro). There’s so many more books waiting for me, once I have made my way through those I already have…

I have also returned to the old custom of reading in bed. The reader is much easier to handle in bed than a normal book. No 50 pages loss when I’m turning a page, rather lightweight and easy enough to hold with one hand. I still need light (e-ink screens have no light of their own, which is good for energy saving), but I can read much easier – especially as I can also set various font sizes, if I find the regular one too small.

I still love real books and will never completely leave them behind, but an e-book-reader also has its merits.

NaNoWriMo

2010-11-01T21:54:00.000+01:00

…and how I missed it. I have only heard about the NaNoWriMo this year when one of the people over at the Pub mentioned it. And I only investigated the site today, too late to enter the contest this year.

50,000 words (about 175 pages of story) are a long endeavour for me. I have not written any story high above 100 pages in my life – and the longest I’ve written was written in stages, it actually consists of three stories connected by common main characters. When I brought that story together, I changed a few things back in the first story to make sure it all fit together well.

The idea of writing 50,000 words in 30 days (about 1670 words a day) is a bit scary for me. It’s overwhelming, to be honest. Yet I know I can write that many words a day, I know I can write a long story. I have penned out whole novels, but I somehow can’t manage to write them. I have a very strong personal critic in my head. And, just maybe, NaNoWriMo might be exactly what I need to exorcise it. Because this is not about writing the perfectly polished novel – nobody can do that in a month, not even the most productive novelists out there. It’s about writing a mass of text, about letting it all out. It’s about quantity, not quality. And that’s what could help me to finish my novels. If I learn to ‘let it all out’ for the first draft, I know I can write my novels without being afraid of not being ‘good enough’ to write.

Hell, I’m writing a lot of stuff for my blogs, am I not? And all I write here and over at the other two is published basically instantly, is available to every person with access to the internet. So why can’t I just let the stories out and worry about the style and the right wording and grammar problems later on? I don’t really know.

I will try to write along my own NaNoWriMo this year (and maybe enter the contest next year, we’ll see). Maybe this will help me to exorcise the inner critic and become a better writer.

A few short reviews

2010-10-14T15:20:00.000+02:00

After I’ve been ‘missing in action’ for a while, I’m back with a few short reviews of books I’ve read recently. A warning, though: some of the books here are comics or manga!

Gunnerkrigg Court

The online comic/graphic novel by Thomas Siddell is set in a strange and very huge British boarding school of the same name. As Antimony Carver comes to Gunnerkrigg Court for her first year at school soon after her mother’s death, she soon realizes that not everything is ‘normal’ there. For instance, she has suddenly acquired a second shadow…

The story of Gunnerkrigg Court is a strange and very long one (and far from finished) which features robots, demons, strange contraptions and many other things.

Graphically, the series is a healthy mix between Western (European/American) and Eastern (mostly Japanese) influences. The position of the panels is rather conventional, two-sided panels have been missing as far as the story currently goes, but there have been some panels taking up one side completely. The colouring, while also rather conventional, fits nicely with the story, dark colours are dominant (plus the borders around the panels are black), but always broken up by Antimony’s red hair, the white, khaki and lighter green of the school uniforms and the very inspired design of the robots and supernatural creatures that might appear.

Each chapter tells a story of its own and only over time the connecting story behind each little novella emerges from the darkness. The characters show depth and are not easy to see through. New characters join over time, so you never feel overwhelmed by all those new people around. The main characters (Antimony, Katerina, Reynard[ine]) grow in depth throughout the stories, but the same can be said of the supporting characters.

Gunnerkrigg Court can be bought in (currently) two huge volumes at amazon (and other places) or you can simply read the whole story for free at the website www.gunnerkrigg.com.

Black Butler

I’m not completely sure whether or not this manga is also available in English, but I’ll cover it nevertheless. Set in a very twisted Victorian era (where people actually already listen to radio shows, play games on consoles and own cell phones), the story of “Black Butler” by Yana Toboso is centred around the very young Earl Phantomhive and his very unusual butler Sebastian.

Sebastian is a very good butler, actually, with abilities far beyond everything you might normally expect. That’s not much of a surprise, though, because he’s not human. Sebastian is a devil, bound to the young Earl Phantomhive by a contract (about the boy’s soul, no doubt). And the thirteen-year-old boy is not what he seems to be, either. He’s hunting down criminals in the name of her majesty (Victoria, not Elisabeth II. – Victorian era, remember?). And not all criminals are human…

The graphic style of the manga is very traditional: black and white and a lot of raster foil. The artist has a thing for clothes, though, and it shows in her designs. She also has obviously spent a lot of time researching the styles and traditions of Victorian England. Despite the rather cute shojo (girl’s manga) design, there’s also quite some blood and murder and action in the story. (Exactly what I like.)

The story balances out well between everyday episodes (and in a house with a lot of rather … incompetent servants … a butler has a lot of work to do), strong passages driving the story and well-drawn battles (between Sebastian and various enemies, some human, some less so). Within the first three volumes, two stories have been completed (the first one introducing the rather unusual talents of the Black Butler) and a third one has been hinted. I have no idea whether the manga is already finished in Japan or not, but I rather like it so far. It reminds me a bit of Kaori Yuki’s manga “God Child” (one of my all-time favourites) and is done well.

Stolen

“Stolen” is the first Mystery Case Files novel around and set in the town of Blackpool at the English coast (which is a good deal nicer than it’s described in the novels, from what I’ve heard). The novel by Jordan Gray, the first of four novels, is concentrating on the greatest mystery of Blackpool – a train robbery during World War II, during which various people were killed and a huge amount of gold (plus a lot of expensive art) was stolen. The novel also tells me that Ravenhearst, a manor in which two of the Mystery Case Files games are set (so far), is situated just outside Blackpool and might play a more important role in future novels.

I have to admit that for me the style needed some getting used to. Despite the early first murder (much faster than, say, in any Agatha Christie novel), it took me quite some time to really get into the story. The novel presents the characters in a rather quick succession and spins the story along as they appear (or that is how I felt while reading). As a result, I found it hard sometimes to identify the characters or understand what they were doing. The crime story, though, is very interesting and encompasses murder, robbery, forgery and blackmail.

So far, I’m set to give the next instalment of the series a chance, but if things don’t get better, that will probably be it for me.

So, those are three reviews of stuff I read lately. But I also have to admit that I still have quite some novels ahead of me to catch up with my reading. Expect a review of the first Flavia de Luce novel soon, too.

Writing for games

2010-08-18T10:49:00.001+02:00

In a thread at a new forum I spent time in (The Diving Bell Adventure Pub), someone mentioned it might be a good idea to let would-be novel writers create the stories for casual games. I don’t think that would be a good idea and here is why. And it’s here, because it is about writing rather than about gaming.

As a would-be novel writer (and I’ve no problem with that label – I’m not published yet, so I do not consider myself a ‘true’ novelist), I see a couple of problems with that idea. I have, quite some years ago, tried to write and program my own text adventure (I don’t have the necessary graphic skills to create sprites, animations and backgrounds). Even writing the story did not work out well – let alone the programming part.

Adventures and RPGs need very flexible stories that can be pushed and pulled in various directions and still stay in shape. You can do a lot of things differently or at different times in a chapter (or the whole game), so the story has to ‘play along’ with it and allow the game to put in cut scenes in different order (because you first finished chain two instead of chain one, each adventure contains a certain number of intermingling puzzle chains that need to be finished in order to move on to the next chapter – the same is even more true for RPGs with their side quests). A novelist (or a would-be novel writer) on the other hand fights very hard to find the perfect order for all the scenes in a story.

HOGs get a story to motivate the player to go on. You can actually have a HOG without a big story, if it’s a straight HOG (no IHOG, a HOG with adventure elements). But most HOGs tell a story and they do so in dialogues between the levels. That’s not a lot of storytelling, even with the odd cut scene here or there. Unlike adventures, HOGs do not contain puzzle chains that are intermingling, so you don’t have to care about a flexible story that much. But if you dare to put in more than just a few lines of dialogue between levels, half of the players will say ‘that’s a bad game, I don’t like it’, because they don’t like reading that much. (For instance, the game “The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was bashed for containing actual pages to read that continued the story between levels – I found the game and the storytelling great, most people didn’t.) But you can’t tell a very difficult story with lots of plot changes and intrigues in just a few lines of dialogue. So, not a place for a would-be novel writer (or professional novelist), either.

Other casual games (TMs, Match 3 and so on) put even less emphasize on a story. It’s just something that connects the levels in most of them. People want to beat those games, to get an expert score or beat the clock, that’s why they play – not because of the great story.

The only kind of ‘game’ that you need a very good story for – albeit one with a lot of dialogue, but dialogue is good in a story – is the Visual Novel I’ve written about before. It’s a novel you play (and even they need a branching story – a story with different paths towards the end or even different endings depending on the player’s choices), but it’s above all a novel.

In addition, most casual games are made with an option for a sequel, provided the game does well. You can’t really ‘finish’ the story – although there should be some sort of closure – and have to give the player the little ‘this isn’t over yet’ scene in the end. This is something a novelist could work with, but it doesn’t make telling a complicated story any easier.

You can write a novel based on a game, you can make a game based on a novel (such as “The Great Gatsby” which I might cover over in my main blog soon), but you can’t apply the rules for writing a novel to writing the story for a game. Therefore you can’t just take a novelist (or a would-be novel writer) to create a story that works with a game.

Wordl Art

2010-08-17T10:42:00.000+02:00

I was a bit bored yesterday, so I went to the Wordl site and got one for every blog I have. This one is for this site:

Interesting collection of words, isn’t it?

Snark Hunting and Asian Masterminds

2010-08-06T11:39:00.000+02:00

I have already written about “Forgotten Books” and I probably will mention the site and the books I get from there every now and then in the future. This time, I will talk about the first novel I got from them and about a very long, but very interesting poem. I will talk about “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” by Sax Rohmer and “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll.

I’ll start with the Snark, though. Years ago, during my Star Trek phase, I found an excerpt of the poem (in eight chapters) in the novelisation of the second movie, “The Wrath of Khan”. The novel (which was not about a Snark or Lewis Carroll) only cited a few verses, but it was enough to stick in my head. Unlike “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”, though, “The Hunting of the Snark” is not all that well-known in Germany.

Naturally, when I had all those books on the site at my disposal, I went hunting for the Hunting. And I was successful, even though this book merely is a scan (like a few others I’ve found) and thus a bit harder to read than those that have been set anew for the publication as PDF-file. Still, the e-book contains not only the text, but also the illustrations, both of which were taken from the 1876 edition of the book.

I started reading the poem (even though it has about a hundred pages as an e-book, it’s still one poem, not a collection of them), looking for the few lines I remembered about the characteristics of the Snark. (Admittedly, playing a casual game called “Snark Busters Welcome to the Club” before help to remember this poem … ahem.) But the more I read of it, the more amused I was. I read it out loud and found it great. It has its own rhythm to it (but that’s what rhyming is all about, isn’t it?) and flows perfectly.

I enjoyed the poem and will surely re-read it from time to time to be amused (about the Baker who forgot everything, including his name, when he arrived on the ship, about the blank map and about the Beaver and the beaver-specialized Butcher). Thanks to Forgotten Books I have had the chance to get to know it. I really appreciate it.

Now on to someone less benign than the common Snark (when it’s not a Boojum, of course). Gaze, oh gentle reader of this blog, on the cold and scaring face of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

I will start writing about him by admitting that I had my first encounter with the doctor and his methods before I read the novel. I happen to be a fan of Christopher Lee and in the 70s he played the doctor in a couple of movies (most of them with a partly German cast). I own a DVD collection of the movies and it mentioned the original stories in the booklet.

Still, the mention of a novel in a booklet isn’t the same thing as reading the novel itself. The novel was first published in 1913 (though not as a novel, but as a series of shorter stories which now make up the novel). It predates the German equivalent of a dangerous doctor by about ten years, as the first “Doktor Mabuse” story was published around 1923. Still, I found it easier to read than the other story.

It’s not a very complicated story, but a very good adventure. In every chapter (in every shorter story once published separately) there’s the usual action sequence: a threat, a reaction to it, a murder, a dangerous situation, the heroes win, but Dr. Fu-Manchu is not apprehended. This makes it a good, short read.

I can understand why even the contemporaries claimed it was racist, there are a lot of prejudices against people from Asia in the story (not just the doctor himself, but also his helpers, willing and unwilling). But I understand a novel (especially one that close to a penny dreadful) as entertainment. That might include prejudices (older novels include a lot of prejudices against women, for instance, picturing them in a very one-dimensional way) about which I don’t care. This only goes for novels, though, not for any non-fictional work.

As far as novels go, this one is a quick read. The style isn’t glorious, but easily readable, even for someone who can’t claim English as her native language.

Reading old books that are not widely know can have different results. In this case, it had great results and make me look for quite some other books as well. Anyone should at least try it sometimes.

Found a booklover's dream

2010-07-26T18:14:00.000+02:00

Quite a while ago, I ordered a reprint of Bram Stoker’s “The Lair of the White Worm” over amazon. It came from a publisher I had not encountered before, but that happens every once in a while.

Today, while surfing the net and waiting for my desktop pc to be done with a defragmentation, I got the idea of checking the site of Forgotten Books. That was the publisher I got Stoker’s novel from. Now, forgotten Books isn’t just a publisher, they do much more. For a one-time payment, you gain access to their much better membership e-books (pdf-files which you can also read on your computer) of all volumes they keep on their servers. And there’s lots of stuff on their servers... You can download all of them in a low quality without any payment, giving you the chance to read the classics which quite often are hard to get otherwise today. You don’t need space on a bookshelf for them (I love books, but I’m running very, very low on space for them by now). You can check out books without having to buy them, read them on the whole and then decide whether you need a paperback (which you can then buy over amazon).

And it’s not just fiction, there’s also old science texts, philosophical ones and many, many more. Given the fact that the membership isn’t all that expensive, it’s quite an idea for me. A hoard of texts I’ve always wanted to read lie ahead of me.

Evil under the Sun

2010-07-04T10:39:00.002+02:00

Actually, this is my favourite Hercule Poirot story. Most people know “Murder on the Orient Express” better, but I prefer this one. It has a lot more to offer and there’s a lot more to take into account when solving this crime.

“Evil under the Sun” takes place on an island (well, in the novel it is a land tongue that is cut off from the main land at all times but low tide), so the stranger who arrives unseen to murder the victim is out of the picture quite soon. Apart from only be reachable for a short period of the day, there’s a guard at the path people have to take to get there.

This, of course, leaves the reader – and Monsieur Poirot himself – with enough suspects on the island who have a reason to kill Mrs. Marshall, the murder victim. There’s the former lover from whom she has taken an expensive jewel. There’s the husband who knows she’s cheating on him. There’s the stepdaughter whom she bullies at every chance she gets. There’s the current lover’s wife who has to watch the two of them flirt. There’s the owner of the hotel who is secretly in love with the husband and could want the wife out of the picture. They all have alibis – but one must have done it.

I will not spoil the solution here and tell you who did it (and how and why). If you want to find out, either go and read the novel or watch the very good movie with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I will, though, give you a few hints if you want to solve the murder yourself:

First of all, the time of death is not as clear as it might seem.

The bath which nobody took is important, as is the bottle that almost hit one of the guests on the head.

Some of the guests are great actors.

Not all alibis hold up to a good test.

The reason for the murder is not the one everyone is expecting.

Always keep in mind the first thought about bodies on the beach that is uttered in the novel.

But now back to the story itself. Why do I like “Evil under the Sun” more than the big classic, “Murder on the Orient Express”? There’s various reasons.

First of all, in the big classic you have a very classical setup (a wider variety of the locked room). The murderer has to be someone on the train, because nobody could have entered or left it unseen and without traces during the time at which the crime occurred. It plays a lot with the question of “who did it?” and then gives a surprise solution: everyone (except for Poirot, of course) did it. And they all appear to have no reason to kill the man – until Poirot finds the motif and all falls in line.

“Evil under the Sun” presents the reader with a lot of possible suspects and a victim that surely has done nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Arlene Marshall is not a nice person, she is vain, self-serving and rude towards others. Still, even she doesn’t deserve being strangled. (And compared to the kidnapper and baby murderer killed in “Murder on the Orient Express”, she’s a nice person, indeed.) Despite the same cut-off setting, “Evil under the Sun” has a different scenario. We’re not talking about a train wagon here that holds room for fourteen or so people. It’s a complete island with a hotel on it, three beaches and a lot of free space. People will find it a lot harder to have an alibi on a island than inside a train wagon that’s stuck in the snow. Still, at first all of them have an alibi, it seems. The hotel owner has seen the husband type, the stepdaughter has been swimming by a beach on the opposite side of the island from the crime scene, the wife of the lover was with her. The guy whose jewel she took is the only one without an alibi, it seems.

As the story unfolds, the alibis mostly disappear. Everyone, it seems, has either lied or was mistaken. So, who was it? Why did she have to die?

The solution Poirot presents at the end of the story is logical, even though most people might overlook one clue or two. As with many mysteries, the secret of solving them is paying a lot of attention to details.

The same, of course, goes for writing a mystery novel (which brings us back to why this post is in the “Writer’s Block” blog). You can’t just pull the solution out of a hat like a stage magician. You need to know it first, then build the story around it. You need to drop hints for the reader, even though they might not recognize them at first. You need to make all of the characters interesting – including the victim, the investigator (whatever his or her job might be) and the criminal. You need to create false leads (red herrings, as they’re called so nicely in English, German misses such a nice word for them). You need to give the reader various suspects, give them all good reasons to commit the crime. There will be false alibis and true ones (and people without one).

At the same time, try to stay away from clichés – unless, of course, you want to play with them. The locked room has been used a lot and most readers will know the obvious solutions (such as stabbing through the keyhole or locking the room with a strange device while leaving or the victim locking the room after being attacked or a device inside the room killing the victim). If you can find a novel way to use one of those concepts, go ahead and use it. Just don’t recycle old ideas and think people won’t realize.

Writing a mystery is a lot like solving one: You need to look at everything from every angle and pay a great attention to details. But if you like that kind of thing, it’s a great way to spent some time.

Characters

2010-06-28T16:00:00.001+02:00

I’ve been reading “Bullies, Bastards & Bitches” by Jessica Page Morrell in stages for a couple of weeks now. Unlike most other books about writing I’ve read, I never managed to just start at the beginning and then read it till I reach the end. I’ve browsed through the chapters, finding all of them so interesting I couldn’t wait until I reached them ‘the normal way’. Now I force myself to read it from beginning to end.

The book is extremely fascinating to me, because I believe it’s much closer to my kind of writing than all the other books about the topic I’ve read so far. I have never found it hard to create new characters. I usually start with a character, not a scene or a concept for a story or something like that, and then think about what kind of story could happen to that character. Where one character appears, others usually follow, enemies as well as friends and allies.

Up until I stumbled over this book, all the books about writing I’ve read concentrated on story. I work out story lines, chapters, scenes and so on once I know where the characters are going, but usually, I don’t start with a scene or a basic story. So I always felt a bit left out, because as ingenious as for instance “First Draft in 30 Days” is, I never needed that much time with the story. Once I knew who would be in it, sketching out the story was just a minor problem and often happened (with the basics at least, I like the adventure of filling out the scenes as I write them) within a day.

Most books about writing are rather secretive when it comes to creating characters. You get the basic tips, such as ‘stay with real-life characters’ (ever met a vampire or werewolf in real life?) or ‘stay away from stereotypes’ (which should, indeed, be avoided at all costs).

“Bullies, Bastards & Bitches” concentrates on the characters, on the characteristics of different types (especially the darker ones, but you get the hero by turning it all upside down then … or back on its feet). Wherever I have opened the book, I found interesting things I wanted to read immediately – which is why I have owned it for quite a while, but haven’t completely read it by now.

I’ve by now read about dark heroes and anti-heroes and I have glimpsed chapters about villains and female dark characters (heroes or otherwise). I just can’t wait to finish the book.

Corpses on my hard drive

2010-05-24T10:09:00.000+02:00

Yes, I admit it. I do have two old corpses on my hard drive. If they were humans and had just been left somewhere in a cellar, they would be skeletons by now. They’re old – they’ve been around longer than I have had my own flat so far.

They’re stories – novel material, even – and I just seem unable to finish them. Why? Can’t I think up to the end? Far from it. I know how they’ll end. I have a concept for each of them, with the main characters and a complete line-up of the story. Yet they are not finished and out there to find a publisher. Why?

I really can’t answer that question, to be honest. When I started them up, I really liked them. I still like the stories and the characters, but I can’t bring myself to write them down completely. (I also have devised a complete story line for a slash version of “Dracula”, but I haven’t finished it yet, even though it’s good…)

It’s the concept, I think. Knowing how it will end takes quite a bit of the adventure out of writing for me. I know that’s stupid – I can’t write a novel without having a concept first. I can’t finish that long a story without knowing where I am going. And I know I will enjoy writing the scenes, making them come alive inside my mind (my very own mind-movie theatre inside my skull). But I can’t continue.

This ends now!

I have read over most of one of the stories so far and will continue to write it. It’s a mystery story (they both are) and I will finish it, even if it kills me! “Der Fall des Cornwall-Vampirs” (“The Cornwall Vampire Case”) spans over 100 pages already (and is good for about 200 more). I’m about one-third through the story and just about to introduce the real villains. Maybe that’s the point. I’m going to change my point of view for the first time in the story and I’m a bit worried about that. I’m good at looking into a villain’s mind, so that’s not the problem. By now I’m out of the story, too, but that can be remedied by reading through the story again a couple of times. The Cornwall Vampire is not going to get away, that much is for sure!

This time I will hang in tight and finish the story. I promise!

Beat the Reaper

2010-05-13T10:18:00.002+02:00

By pure accident I picked up “Beat the Reaper” by Josh Bazell yesterday while browsing though my favourite bookstore.

After I’d read the first two or three pages – which actually feature the first fight in the book –, I decided to buy it. Once I was back home, I started to read the novel and didn’t really stop it until I had finished it.

There are quite some gruesome scenes in the novel, as the main character once was a hitman for the mob. While the story alternates between past (how he became a hitman and why he decided not to be one any longer) and the present (a day at the hospital at which he works as an intern), it gives quite some interesting insights in both medicine and the mob.

Still, the story is full of blood and murder (and information about how to kill someone in approximately 35 ways or so). I mean, how tough do you have to be to make a knife out of your own bone? (I mean that, towards the end the hero of the story does that, in order to survive.)

One of the reviews in the book describes it as a mixture between House (“House, M.D.”, not the music style) and Jason Bourne – surely a good description. There’s a lot of philosophy about humans and what it means to be a human in the book, quite some information about sharks, too (you’ll learn about the reason for this towards the end of the book…). There’s a lot of insight in the works of a hospital, too, and they are far from “Grey’s Anatomy” or “General Hospital”, believe me.

The book really is a page turner. Once you’ve started reading and are past the first few pages, it becomes extremely difficult to put the book away in order to do something else…

Danse Macabre

2010-04-12T11:19:00.001+02:00

After I mentioned Stephen King’s book about horror, “Danse Macabre” in my main blog, I thought I might just as well do a review of it over here.

The book is quite old by now, the first edition was published in 1981. It covers horror films and horror movies from the 1950s into the late 1970s and very early 1980s. But it also covers the basics of horror: vampire, werewolf, ghost and ‘the thing without a name’ (you might call it Frankenstein’s monster or the creature of the black lagoon or even Grendel). It also covers quite some autobiographical stories and a few points about being a writer (and especially a writer of horror novels).

I own a rather used English copy and used to own a German copy before (which was basically disintegrating when I bought the English one). I also used to check out the German version at the local public library quite regularly before I got my own. The book has accompanied me through most of my teenage years and has given my quite an insight into both the world of a person growing up in the US during the ‘hot phase’ of the Cold War and the basics of horror stories. But while modern Stephen King novels do no longer really interest me, I still pull this book out of the shelf every now and then and read a few chapters. (I still own three Stephen King books: “Danse Macabre”, “Salem’s Lot” and “Needful Things”.)

But what is this book really about and why do I review it here? The book is about horror. About the movies, the novels and, most importantly, the brain. Because that’s where our fear comes from, in reality.

It’s not the huge spider on the screen that makes us afraid. It’s our own fear of spiders that makes us scream or stare or hide behind the back of the guy in front of us. The huge spider is, to us in the movie theatre, harmless. It’s just a picture and can’t harm us. And most of the time, the huge ones are neither as huge (watch “Eight-Legged Freaks” to see some really big ones) nor as dangerous as the movies tell us.

Making people afraid is just as difficult as making people laugh, because both humour and fear are very personal things. And so Stephen King gives us many a personal insight while writing about the field in which he has worked successfully then (and still works successfully today). He writes of his own horrors as well as of the horrors of his generation (the kids born in the USA during or shortly after World War II). Those are not the same horrors my parents faced (who are about his own generation) or I faced as a kid growing up, basically, after the time described in his book.

His analysis of the basics of horror, the Tarot, as he calls it, is extremely well done. He takes four classical novels and a few from the time he writes about to show the basics of vampire (represented classically by “Dracula”), the werewolf (represented by “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) and the thing without a name (represented by “Frankenstein”). He also writes, using various stories, about the ghost, which is such a mainstream topic of horror it has a chapter to its own.

But even more interesting to the modern reader is his look on the horror stories that have been produced between his childhood in the 1950s and the publishing of his book in 1981. People my age or younger have only seen the movies on TV (or video or DVD), never on the ‘big screen’ at all. And the horror described in the novels is not our horror. Because most novels use scenarios that are horrible at the time they are written, but not necessarily afterwards, you see.

Still, the book is great reading material. Stephen King, used to writing novels, writes a very fluid style, even when writing non-fiction. You learn a lot about the history of horror in the Cold War while being really entertained. Give it a chance if you stumble over it.