Yes, that’s right. For the second time in my life, I decided to join in and try to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. I succeeded, hitting 50k on the 28th, and as of this post I’m over 53k. What’s pretty amazing is that I missed four days at the beginning of the month due to my New York trip, and three more over the course of the month due to preexisting social obligations. So I actually wrote 50,129 words in just 21 days, which is an average of 2,387 words per day … which is a lot! Big thanks to my lovely wife for keeping me on track and spending a lot of weekend mornings at the local coffee shop with me.

I think the story’s actually pretty good, too … definitely worth a second draft. It’s about a young girl who is attacked by a werewolf but manages to kill it and is subsequently recruited into a school of monster hunters. You can read an excerpt over at my NaNoWriMo Page if you’d like.

Unfortunately, all the writing and paperwork (not to mention Thanksgiving and our one-year wedding anniversary!) hasn’t left me a whole lot of time for other activities, like updating this blog or promoting The Blood That Bonds. Both of these things will be addressed in December, although I’m also going to try to keep writing on a regular basis, AND we’re celebrating Christmas in LA FRANCE this year, so there will be traveling and such getting in the way as well.

There’s just not enough time in the day, week, month and year, you know?

Much ado has been made over the current “vampire trend” and its potential longevity. People are curious: why and how have vampires become so popular? What has caused them to capture the fancy of the mainstream public after years of being appreciated mainly by fans of the horror genre? The answer to that question lies in the slow move from terror to sympathy that people have made over the past few decades, due in large part to the efforts of many authors, screenwriters, directors, and other artists.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, vampires were the bad guys. Remember those days? Dracula bending menacingly over a delirious Lucy Westenra; Kurt Barlow and his servant Mr. Straker slowly bringing the town of Salem’s Lot to ruin; Keifer Sutherland and his cronies menacing Corey Haim’s family … vampires were nearly always portrayed as voracious, evil killers …

If you’re interested in reading the rest, you can find it at Reading with a Bite. I think it’s a pretty solid essay, and of course I get to plug my book, The Blood That Bonds, as well! Thanks very much to Lindsay for the opportunity.

Oh, and the control to turn off the music that starts when the site loads is over on the right, a little bit down the page. ;)

]]> http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 0 http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/ http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:51:26 +0000 chris http://www.cerebraldebris.com/?p=1365 As some of you may know, but most of you don’t, The Blood That Bonds just spent a year in submission over at St. Martins Press. The editor to whom I had sent it recently got back to me, and they unfortunately won’t be buying the book – the basic gist was “you can certainly write, but it was a little dark for me.” So that’s a bit of a bummer, but I’m not angry or anything … this is how the print industry works; you have to find the right editor and publisher for your work, and it can be a difficult and time-consuming process just to get your voice heard over the crowd, let alone by the right people.

I’m not giving up on my dream of print publication for The Blood That Bonds, or my other work. I’ve wanted to have a book published since I was eleven years old, and there’s no reason to stop trying until it happens or I’m dead. However, I’ve decided to use the skills I possess that other authors perhaps don’t in order to help the people who might want to read it, find it. There are a lot of people out there who’ve written a vampire book … but how many of them are professional web designers and developers with over a decade of experience? Probably not too many. Why not leverage those abilities to take a route less-traveled to getting the book out there and noticed?

Which is why I registered TheBloodThatBonds.com and have spent my free time creating an entire website to promote the upcoming free release of the novel, in eBook formats (PDF, Kindle, iPhone and more), to whomever wants it. The site’s not quite done yet and is still locked down under a username and password, which is why I didn’t link it, but it’s very close to finished and I anticipate it will launch in mid-August. I’m really excited about this project, as I think it’s a chance to get my writing out to a much wider audience than it’s previously seen (I’ll be doing heavy promotion of the site and the book, trying to get blogs and sites all over the internet to link it, review it, etc). Hopefully some of that audience will be people with ties to the print industry who might want to publish the book in print … but if not, hey, at least people will be reading, and that’s the goal, right?

It’s time to get this thing out there. :)

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m going to go ahead and guess that my review of Twilight is going to sway neither the book’s legion of fans, nor its serious detractors. In all honesty, I’m kind of torn about reviewing the book at all. Its first-person protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl, and the book is very clearly angled at girls in their early-to-mid teens. I am a thirty-two year-old man, and thus am not exactly what one would call the target demographic.

I read the book because my wife advised me to, because I am author who is trying to get his vampire novel published, and she rightly figured that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book, and see what it does well. There ARE things that it does well, despite what some negative reviews might say. There are also many things that didn’t work for me, but may be right for the target audience. Then there are a few things that I think it does legitimately poorly … we’ll get to those.

So. What I liked:

I think — and again, I was never a girl, so I can’t be sure — that it does a good job of expressing the all-consuming strength of a young woman’s first love. Bella’s absolute obsession with Edward is driven home over and over (to the point of tedium for me). Less well-explained is why Edward feels so strongly for her, other than that she smells good, but you still at least get a strong sense of his desire both to love her and to chomp down on her neck, which creates some fun dramatic tension.

I also liked that each vampire had a special little power of their own, something they brought with them from their human lives. I thought the book got stronger as it went along, with the last sixty pages or so of the book, not counting the epilogue, being legitimately exciting and fun to read.

What I didn’t like:

The first 350 pages of the book are nearly a straight teen romance novel, and the first 100 pages or so are brutal even accepting that fact. There’s absolutely nothing happening, action-wise. Bella comes off as bitchy and unlikable. The writing is stilted and hasn’t yet found any sort of voice other than said bitchiness (few sentences have anything resembling stylistic flair). Again, this improves as the book goes on, almost as if Meyer is becoming more comfortable with her characters and the world she’s creating.

I also felt that Edward was too perfect. I realize the novel is more a romance than it is anything else, and this is a common approach to romance novels, but it makes him a less-likable character because basically his only flaw is that he can’t accept that he’s in love and just deal with it. I don’t mind him being gorgeous, or powerful, or intelligent, or charming, or witty, or sensual, or telepathic, or even some combination of these things, but all of them together create a character so flawless he’s hard to relate to.

The epilogue is hard to believe. I find it midly improbable that Bella’s dad would be easily forgiving of either She or Edward after what he had to go through. Also, Bella returns right back to being oblivious and kind of bitchy, as if she’s learned essentially nothing from her experience. I was hoping for a bit of character growth for both of the leads, but there’s little to be seen.

Overall, I think the book does a decent if unspectacular job of conveying a fairly typical first love story with a rather important twist. The last sixty pages or so, where the real meat of the action is, are better than the rest of the book. I have no plans to read the other three in the series, so I went ahead and read their synopses on the internet, and doing so basically reconfirmed that I’m not interested enough to read more. It seems, though, like Meyer understands her audience and has put together a series which they clearly enjoy.

If you’re old enough to drink — and not an aspiring author of vampire novels who likes to keep abreast of what’s happening in that genre — Twilight’s not terrible … but it’s probably not the right book for you.

View all my reviews.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like many Americans, I saw the movie version of Let the Right One In before reading the book, and enjoyed it quite a bit. This led me to pursue the book and, as is almost always the case for me, I liked it even more than the film. For the most part, I think the film made good cuts, and it retains the overall plot/theme very well, but it’s hard to put as much depth into a two hour movie as one can put into a five-hundred page book.

Many of the more minor characters (and one central one – Hakan) are much more fleshed out than they were in the film. There are more sub-plots and we learn a great deal more about Eli’s past, though great chunks of it are still left in the dark. We also learn the full truth about Eli’s sexuality and some rather disturbing information about the vampire mechanism works (turns out there’s good reason to destroy the heart).

I’ve read a great many vampire novels and short stories in my life, and this is one of the better ones. It finds interesting twists on old legends and presents us with believable, morally ambiguous characters. No one in this book is exactly good, or exactly evil. They’re all flawed, like real humans, and like real humans, they’re all trying to survive.

Two things kept this from being a five-star book for me. First, while I thought it was enjoyable and extremely readable (I tore through it over the course of two days), I found it in some ways less moving than the film. This was probably due in part to the film’s two child leads, who were incredible, but also partly because of the other reason I knocked off a star: the book seems to fizzle at the end just a bit. Things are wrapped up a little too quickly, especially amongst some of the minor characters. Additionally, there seems to be less of a sense of love between Oskar and Eli than there was in the film, which I felt was important in establishing why the story ends as it does.

Overall, though, a very enjoyable book. Lindqvist’s book is more interesting, more atmospheric, and more original than the vast majority of commercial vampire fiction. Give it a read.

View all my reviews.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hubert Selbey Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream is a hard book to read … not due so much to its sensitive subject matter, which is frankly riveting, as to Selby’s unconventional, stream-of-consciousness prose. The guy barely believes in basic punctuation marks, let alone quotes, paragraph breaks, or dialog attribution. It takes a while to get into it.

Once you do, however, you’re rewarded with one of the more honest (and bleak) looks at addiction and the downward spiral it causes in people’s lives. This is not simply a book about junkies, or about people who have no options in life and thus turn to drugs. Selby’s characters are young, enterprising … some are well-educated, cultured, experienced. By no means do they all fit into the stereotypical expectations one might have of a heavy drug user. Yet all of them find themselves inevitably pulled into similar situations.

I’d seen the movie version before reading the novel, which certainly reduces the suspense while reading the book. However, my main complaint with the film was that I didn’t feel like it spent enough time letting us get to know and like the characters, which in turn made the downward spiral less powerful than it could’ve been. This is much less a problem with the book — Selby spends a good deal of time on characterization, and it helps keep the novel interesting and compelling throughout.

I strongly recommend Requiem for a Dream. It may be disturbing to some, but you’re not going to find a better depiction of dangers of substance abuse and addiction.

View all my reviews.

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
One has to remind one’s self, while reading the Harry Potter series, that they’re meant for children in the 10 – 14 range, give or take, and not for a married guy in his early thirties who’s simultaneously reading Hubert Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” …

In other words, while I enjoyed the third Harry Potter book, it was hard not to notice that it’s a little bit shallow in comparison to some other works out there. Yes, the series is beginning to get a little darker, and the character development a little more complex (although certain characters like Malfoy and even Hermione are still pretty thin — Rowling seems to enjoy fleshing out her professors more than her students), but it’s still a light read, and it’s still mostly about Harry being great almost despite himself.

I enjoyed the new Professor Lupin character and I liked Rowling’s use of the rat, Scabbers, as a more central character than anyone might have suspected. She’s also very good at giving hints early and having them pay off late, which is tougher to do consistently in writing than one might think — you have to tread the fine line between giving away too much and not making the hint memorable enough so that at the end of the book you have the reader going “oh yeah!”

Couple minor quibbles: I had a hard time getting in to the book initially because it felt like a carbon copy of the beginning of the first two. Harry’s miserable, the Dursleys are jackasses, and then something crazy goes down which ends with him making his way to Hogwart’s for the year. Then there’s some quidditch. Then Gryffindor wins the house cup again. As I said to my wife last night: if they win for a fourth time in the next book, I’m going to be annoyed. When is Ravenclaw going to get their due? Hell, when is Hufflepuffle (who I constantly want to call Jigglypuff … god help me) even going to get MENTIONED? The latter are like the retarded cousins of the Harry Potter world – bumbling and well-meaning but largely ignored. It’s all Gryffindor and Slytherin, with an occasional Ravenclaw love interest who doesn’t even get any dialog.

I was very excited when it seemed briefly like Harry might spend the summer with someone else – I won’t mention who for fear of ‘spoiling’ a book that’s been out for five years – but that possibility is rapidly yanked away. Alas, it means we’ll get another opening with the Dursleys.

When Rowling puts her mind to it, she spins a nifty mystery tale, and at the core that’s basically what each of the Potter books has been so far. They just take a while to get rolling. I’m interested in the series enough to continue with it, but am hoping that in book four she finds a way to do something a little more interesting at the beginning, so I can get wrapped up in the story right away.

View all my reviews.

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

His Majesty’s Dragon is a tender story about the beautiful, homosexual, inter-species love between the protagonist and his gigantic black dragon.

Ok, so that’s not really what it’s about, but seriously … the homoerotic undertones in what is otherwise a fun, if not particularly challenging, historical fantasy are pretty amusing. Not only does the main character basically forgo women entirely in favor of his dragon (with the exception of a single night spent with a fellow “aviator” who basically forces herself upon him), but he frequently refers to the flying beast as “my dear” and at one point apparently engages in some accidental dragon masturbation while stroking the creature’s whiskers.

The premise of the book is basically “What if everything about our world, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was exactly the same … except there’s dragons?” It makes for a unique fantasy setting, as the great naval battles of that era are now expanded to include aerial battle as teams of dragon-handlers scurry along the backs of their giant flying friends, firing at the enemy, dropping bombs, and occasionally even sword-fighting enemy boarders.

Our hero starts the novel as a ship’s captain, but is shortly removed from that post forever when a dragon egg his crew has captured hatches, and the dragon imprints on him. Dragons, you see, fall in love with their future master almost immediately at birth, and few can ever be persuaded to fly with any other. Older than most new aviators and not well-trained, the captain nonetheless throws himself into learning this new life. What follows is the description of his training, along with several battles with the French, leading up to a final climatic scene.

The book is a quick, easy read, enjoyable enough that I’m unsurprised there are several sequels. I may pursue the next volume in the series sometime this summer, when I’m looking for more of the type of “beach reading” that the series provides.

View all my reviews.

I’ve managed to put together all of Chapter 6 for you, starting with Page 53. You can find it in the Writing section, or just click one of those there links. Therein you will find the continued adventures of our ragtag band of misfit superheroes.

Come back tomorrow for more!