The Passing Place

YA fiction, the fiction of YA

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Mark Hayes

The indie writer scene seemed to be over flowing with Young Adult Fiction. Or YA as it gets referred to in general. In many ways it seems the in vogue thing to write in indie circles, at least if your not writing erotic fiction. Its hard to be critical of this. It is a growth market in some respects, it is certainly the popular genre to be writing in thanks to the success of novels like +Twilight , +The Hunger Games, +Divergence , and +The Maze Runner making the leap to the big screen. YA is seen by many as a road to success, but the down side of this is the ‘many’ have flooded the market place with YA fiction which are now all fighting for recognition among so many books that follow the same patterns and story lines. So many want to be Stephenie Meyer’s are writing teen / twenty something vampire romances, rewriting a genre that dates back to old count Dracula himself. This is not to say there is anything wrong with this. If there are people who want to read the genre then its a good thing there are people who want to write it. The problems with the Twilight Saga aside, given that it portrays and yet romanises a relationship in which a man hundreds of years old stalks a young woman. That it has inspired people to write is a good thing. Just as the Hunger games and Maze runner have there own YA dystopia clones. If there is a problem with YA fiction it is to my mind simply this. YA is not a genre. It is instead a collective genre into which everything gets dropped if it fits the very loose criteria of having main characters who are young. Preferably american high school or collage young.

So your asking, why is this a problem?

Well its a problem because so many of these YA novels fall into the same trap of thinking calling your novel YA allows you to dumb down to an audience which is just as widely read, intelligent and thoughtful as the audience for other genre’s.

The successful YA fictions, by which I mean the ones which really go on to cross over to the main stream are the ones which most ignore there YA tag and write for an audience of everyone. Take ‘The Hunger Games.’ for example. The novels never write down to there audience. It is in fact not YA at all but a real grown up dystopia, carefully constructed and thought out, which never talks down to its audience or dumbs down its writing. It gets described as YA by the marketing department and placed in the YA section of big chain book stores, but it was never written to be YA.

A cursory look around +Goodreads will let you find groups of every description. If you want to join a group which reads YA vampire fiction exclusively it will be there. Indeed there is probably a group for YA blonde werewolves in china fiction which caters exclusively to this tiny sub genre.

Its the tag of YA that bugs me most, and I will admit it is a personal grievance and nothing more. That it seems to be endemic in the indie writer scene is the part which worries me. I have read some good YA and some bad YA. But usually the bad YA is bad because it tries to be a rewrite of something successful or it takes ideas and a concept which could be awesome and waters it down to fit a YA description rather than just write a good story.

If you want to write YA then my advice is try not to think of what your writing as YA to start with. Tell your story but don’t make your characters teenagers just to fit in with the genre. What makes the hunger games so good is the characters are who they are. Rather than carbon copies and cardboard cut outs of generic teenage misfits.

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The Watching : the waiting book 2

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Mark Hayes

Book review The Watching : the waiting book 2

I reviewed the first two books in this series earlier in the year and the first of these can be found here . This, the third book in the series picks up where the last two left off. If you have read the earlier reviews you will know I compare it to a glitzy American soap opera like Dallas in its hay day. A soap opera I named ‘Rivers’ after the hospital where most of the characters worked. So perhaps the best way to think of this novel is season 2, which follows on from the tragic ending of the previous season.

As with the first two books the back drop of Louisiana gives the books a setting which has an exotic flavour at times. While the complex lives and loves of the characters twist, turn and snake back on themselves. The real joy of this series is however the writing. Elizabeth and Marie manage to keep the action moving swiftly along from one character to another. The point of view moves from one section to the next like links in an elaborate chain, with scenes cutting each few pages. It would be easy to have the stories become lost and confused, carrying such a large cast and so many plot lines and yet they manage to weave it so well that you never lose track, and are held in a wrapping of anticipation for the next snippet of story.

The measure of any novel is whether you care about the characters and their lives. No matter how well written a story may be if you don’t care about the characters then you will lose interest along the way. it is perhaps therefore an indictment to how much I cared about the characters that I was moved to tears in a couple of places. I worried about them, cared about them, shared there joys and there defeats. But importantly the characters also grew along the way. Characters who in the first novel were mired in a darkness stepped forward into the light. While they still carry the dark side of them that gave them anti hero status in the first books they are fleshed out with more back story and they change along the way. Events influence the actors in this drama and they develop in ways you don’t expect yet seem natural all the same.

In short these novels are a joy, and indulgent joy of, occasionally like swimming through chocolate.

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The joys of the second come fourteen draft

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Mark Hayes

I’m redrafting after completing the first draft a week or so back of my second novel ‘The passing place.’ Which may or may not be the final title.
This is always an odd process. having broken the habit of a life time of incomplete novels when I wrote cider lane, I have half tried to follow the same ethos with this one. that been write till its done and then and only then go back and edit. The reason been I can edit myself into a corner and get no where all too easily.
I say half tried because in this case it isn’t entirely true. ‘the Passing Place’ was started long before Cider lane was a glint in the keyboards eye. About five years ago all told. Thus the first hundred pages or so have been written for a long time. And as I did not follow the ethos of write it right to the end back then they have been edited and re-edited respectably over the last five years.
So for the first 100 pages or so this is more like a final edit than a second draft. Then it will be a second draft for the other 200 pages of the novel.
Which is all a bit odd, and in truth I should probably have started at the middle and drafted form there. But I always redraft the whole novel start to finish. Which is my advice as an approach to anyone. Not least because that’s how the magic happens I guess. Here’s a secret, all those cunning little twists and turns in the plot , those tiny clues you miss completely until latter on when you realise they were there at the start. Most of the time they weren’t. At least not in the first draft.
I can only speak for myself, but I suspect this is true of most writers, when we go back to do the second draft we put the little clever bits in.
So even though what i am working on at the moment is the fourteen draft of the first third of this novel, I am still adding the clever bits as I did not know they needed to be there till I knew how it all finished.
Which leads me to a favourite quote, “A novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.” According to +Neil Gaiman.
There is still much wrong with this particular novel. But the first third is more or less done at least. Now the clever bits are in there.

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Terry Pratchett, Life is too short not to read Discworld

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Mark Hayes

+Terry Pratchett was one of the most popular beloved authors of my generation, I grew up with his books in many ways. I read the colour of magic way back in 1984 just because the cover appealed to me as I was browsing the Sci-fi section of my local WH Smiths. I flicked through a few pages, found I was laughing in a bookshop and thought what the hell. At the time it was one of only two Terry Pratchett books on the shelves. Fast forward a few years and the bookshelves of my house, (of which there are many) are full of Discworld novels. Forty-one of them in fact, and it doesn’t stop there. I have copies of just about everything he has written, and importantly I also have copies of lots of books he inspired me to read. If not for Terry I would not have read Good Omens, reading that lead me to read Neil Gaiman, of which there are many books on my shelves, but equally the Robert Rankin’s, the Tom Holt’s, and a lot of others. In short, Terry began my love affair with reading, I liked to read before Terry Pratchett. I Love to read because of him.
I have also read the Discworld based science books, which has lead to me reading more complex science books and expanding my knowledge of the universe and physics, because of Terry Pratchett
Finally, I am a writer because of Terry, many other authors have inspired me, or added to my love of reading, Adams, Banks, Gemmell and many more. But it started with Terry, and because of him, I write. There is no direct line between Discworld and Cider lane, far from it in fact. But without one there would not be the other.

Terry as probably anyone reading this will know, died this year.
I cried when I hear, genuinely broke down a little, and was in grief for a man I had never met who I knew was dying a long time before he did and who I had a connection with only because of his writing. I rang my fiancée to tell her the news and cried again down the phone.
I would like to say my grief was genuinely for him, but I think it was in many ways more for me. Throughout my life, no matter how mixed up it might have been, the highs and the lows. There was always if nothing else a new Terry Pratchett novel to look forward to. While I mourned the passing of the man, I mourned the passing of those moments of joy when I got a new Discworld novel in my hands all the more I suspect. Which may be why it has taken me so long to write about it.

Two events have moved me to write this now. The first is the publication of ‘The Shepard’s Crown.’ the last Discworld novel written by Terry. It’s the last new Discworld I will ever read, and I have to admit it made me cry by the end of chapter two. No spoilers, but it’s written by a man who knew he was going to be leaving soon, and I suspect wanted to say something about dignity in leaving, or the pursuit of it. As well as the value of life. He does, and he does so with a masterful hand.

The second is a Guardian article published last week.
The article which you can find here onathanjonesblog/2015/aug/31/terry-Pratchett-is-not-a-literary-genius by Jonathon Jones makes the claim that Terry was not a genius. Which is fair enough, it’s an opinion. Though I suspect it is an opinion expressed to court controversy.
The article irritated me, angered me even, not because I am offended by people having opinions different from my own. But because the writer says that Terry was not a genius and life is too short to read a Discworld novel.

These two points are what annoyed me, the first because the writer says he has never read a Terry Pratchett book. If he has never read them how can he make a judgement as to their worth? These books have sold millions, brought joy to millions, been read by millions. Yet Mr Jones believes he can judge their worth without ever reading a word. I have read the classics or my fair share of them. If I say Wuthering Heights is a sublime work of fiction, I do so from the position of having read Emily Bronte. If I say 1984 can and does teach you much about the world, and while the nightmarish vision of Orwell is a genius, I do so having read Orwell. Just as if I say 20’000 leagues under the sea is a nautical travel log about fish and best skim read, I do so having read Verne.
If you have not read the books of Terry Pratchett, then your opinion has no weight as to their worth. You may not like them, you may not wish to read them, but at the same time, you can not claim they are rubbish till you have done so.

The second point, ‘Life is too short to read a Discworld novel.’ I dislike this phase simply because my life would have been so much less if I had not. My life would have been so much worse without them. They have brought me joy, they have brought me tears, they have brought me knowledge and informed my worldview. They have made me a more well rounded, better read, wiser individual, Less willing to just accept the world around me. I read politics at university because of Discworld, because Discworld is full of political satire, my social views are much informed by Discworld. In fact, much of my worldview is informed by it.

Sir Terry Pratchett wrote books. Through his humour and intelligence, he explained a flat world travelling through space on the back of a giant turtle. In doing so, he explained the world we live upon better and more deeply than may writers will ever achieve.

So go read one, or if 41 Discworld novels is a scary number, read Nation or Dodger first and fall in love with a way of looking at the world.

If you don’t enjoy them, and you will, then fair enough. But read them, life really is too short not to try.

#pratchett #discworld

Posted in fiction, humour, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, writes | Tagged amreading, discworld, humour, opinion, pratchett | 1 Comment

Alice’s Adventures in Steamland, the clockwork goddess

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Mark Hayes

Among other things, I like me a bit of a steam punk. Which is to say i find the whole idea of stream driven tech and mad gadgets in alternative history both wonderfully inventive and alluring.
That said, I am generally firmly rooted in British steam punk, so was not entirely sure what to expect of an American take on the genre. Woven through with liberal amounts of Alice in Wonderland. Though in fairness this may draw form Louise Carol’s classic in places, it does so on over drive in many respects.
All the characters you would perhaps expect to be here are here. Though with dramatic twists to their original selves.
The Mad Hatter, for example is a mad scientist inventor who’s hat is as much a multi story storage device as a piece of head wear.
The white rabbit, who is of course perpetually late, is not one but many, an army of rabbits in fact forming the backbone of the queen of New York’s armies. While the Cheshire cat is in many ways the instant telegram of the realm, its multiple interchangeable copies moving messages between the palace and other nobles, with a smile.
The red queen is mad, the other queen is madder, And New York fights Texas for the wealth of Kentucky coal.
Then there is Alice herself, not the curious school girl of Lewis Carroll’s classic , but a prostitute turned would-be assassin who’s most pervasive talent involves the use of melted chocolate. She gets caught up in a series of bizarre plots to assassinate various major figures, generally for reasons that have more to do with sex than politics.
This is, to put it mildly, an utterly mad novel. It rolls along from one plot point to another and never lets those plots get in the way of the story. It doesn’t so much follow a plot as throw one at you as a way to move the story from one ridiculous escapade to another. There is sex all over the place without it ever been erotica, instead it’s more like slap stick and sea side postcards. it is however undeniably ridiculous fun. Mad, ridiculous fun. It will make you laugh, if you want to laugh. And beyond that you will have forgotten the plot it five minutes after you finish reading it. You’ll probably remember the laughing all the same.

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Ann Girdharry Tales of the unexpected, book review

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Mark Hayes

This is a little unusual as book reviews go because this is actually four separate short stories from the same author. Each available on amazon. They are however artfully crafted and an interesting read if you have a short time to spare and want to lose yourself in a writers story for a while. As they are short stories there is a definite limit to how much I can say about each without delving towards spoiler territory. So the reviews for each are brief. Some of the tales hold a paranormal aspect others are more grounded in the mundane world. But each is well written and well considered.

1 Trading with death

The first of this quandary of tales is a deceivingly simple tale of two sisters and the love between them and the lengths one will go to protect the other. While simple in aspect it weaves a complex pattern around the tale that belies its simplicity. Well written it draws you in to care about the sisters, and the choice one makes to protect the other from that which awaits us all.

2 Sweet Justic

This is a darker tale than the first in the series, if only because it is grounded in the mundane. Again well told and crafted. The art of the short story requires not a word is wasted and Ann wastes none in this tale. A story which could have bene expanded to the plot of a whole novel is condensed perfectly in to the short form. A tale of dark intents and fear, told form the prospective of a victim striving to face the fear that dwells within her home.

3 tell Me A Secret

This tale leads you a merry dance of half clues and snippets that keep you guessing and reading. While its starts with a simple set up it tricks you into a darker stranger path than you perhaps expect at first and draws you along. Again well written and well-crafted throughout and not a word wasted.

4 Written on the Apple Tree

A tale with a delightful twist. As well told as the others and exhibiting the same craft. This is a haunting tale, of loves long lost and yet remembered. It is perhaps slightly weaker than the others but that is only when judges against the authors high standards.

The short form is underrated at times. It is complex and difficult to pull off well. Ann manages to draw the complex and the simple together and tale an engrossing tale. It is something many writers fail to do. I look forward to her forth coming novel if she can write as well in the longer form it should be well worth the read.

her website can be found at +http://anngirdharry.weebly.com/

#bookreviews

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The Funeral, waiting 1.5 book review

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Mark Hayes

The Funeral
The Waiting series 1.5

I compared the first book of this series to a soap opera of a book. Which I consider a fair comparison, the style and pacing of the first book bares this out. As a follow up to the first book the funeral is perhaps therefore a feature length episode before the start of the second season. It is more Novella than novel, and bridges the gap between book 1 and book 2. While setting the scene for the next book by both trying up events at the end of book 1 and introducing some new characters to the mix.
To carry on with the soap opera analogy. One of the major ‘stars’ of the first season was Milli, the heart surgeon. She is perhaps the Joan Collins of ‘Rivers’ the soap opera. Sexy, sassy, and bitchy in ways Alexis would have been proud of. She is the bad girl you can’t help but love, and route for even while your hoping all her plans to fail.
In the Funeral you get to meet those members of her family which were only mentioned in passing in the first season, as they run to the defence of there matriarchal queen after the events at the end of the first season leave her questioning her life and the continuance of it. This extended family are joined by other new characters that are slipped into the mix while the cast from the first season deal with the fall out of the final chapters.
As with the first book Burgess and Hewes manage to make the narrative flow between the different characters points of view. Slipping in the new members of the cast seamlessly, while giving you new perspectives on the cast from the first book. It slides along from one characters to the next with a beguiling ease that manages not to lose you in its wake. A neat trick when dealing with such a complex web of characters and inter relationships between them. While it manages to keep the same style and feel of the first book, it also manages to bring more genuine warmth and depth to some characters who had more minor roles in the previous instalment.
Indeed the novella exhibits a growth in the style and ability of the writers, there understanding of their characters and plots, that bodes well for further instalments to come. While the first novel as a soap opera of a book this is closer to a drama series, crafty and clever with characters that become more real on the page than in the first novel.

My review of the first book can be found here : The Waiting

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Sequel Dreams or inspiration strikes when your least aware

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Mark Hayes

So, I was laying awake last night, when I started to dream.
Well yes.. I know… I was awake.
While it could be considered mildly irritating, it is equally gratifying when people ask about ‘The next one’ when ever they read you novel. The expectation of a sequel to something you wrote as a stand alone is odd to the writer. Well at least it is to me. Cider Lane has a beginning middle and end. A very definite end at that for all I left some things open to the readers imagination. The simple truth of which is I don’t like endings that tie up everything and leave nothing to the readers own mind.
Yet the most common question is always about the ‘next one.’
The simplest truth is I did not have a sequel planned, and did not expect to write one. Even though i am as aware as anyone that readers like to have the ‘next one’ and series tend to do better than stand alone books for the same reason. That reason been I am not the only one who does not like endings.
Instead I have several unrelated projects I am working on already.

The Passing Place a fantasy novel about half written which I started before cider lane and keep going back to.
The Wells of Time a dark steam punk novel of a twisted present.
Maybes Daughter, a lighter steam punk romance written as much for humour as anything else.

With that in mind do I really think I should consider a sequel to a stand alone novel which has yet to prove to be entirely successful after all, for all it is getting good reviews. Well in all honesty up till last night no. Not least because I really did not have any story of any kind to work with anyway. Cider Lane was not written with a sequel in mind. Or indeed even considered.

But then I lay awake in the night and ideas started tossing around in my head and when I finally drifted off to sleep I had a half formed plan. When I woke I scribbled notes furiously on the back of the most convenient piece of paper I could find which happened to be a cig packet. Smoking kills , but the packets are damn convenient when you need to scribble down some notes.

And so now I have a bunch of plot notes revolving around several characters from the first novel, the story of which is new and separate but carries the lives of other characters forwards. Its neat and clever and lets me pick up a couple of years after the first novel and tell more of my story.

The point, if I have one in this post, is that now i have had the idea I almost need to start writing it. it’s like craving a cig, or any other drug, and while i may finish other things first, I am still compelled to start.

So for all those who have been asking ……………..

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Demon Frenzy book review

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Mark Hayes

Demon Frenzy by Harvey Click

First book in the Demon Frenzy series

The thing about Genre books is this, it’s very easy to write an average one. That is to say by their nature they often follow set simple patterns which are easy to detect and replicate. This is not to say they are simplistic or that there is no craft to them. Indeed the reverse is true, in order to write something which will hold the interest of its readers in a field crammed to the rafters, an author needs to craft his work carefully and with all his talent. That is if he hopes for his work to rise above the herd.

Harvey manages to accomplish this most difficult of tricks with an undeniable skill, while following a pattern well-trodden.

I normally avoid spoilers when it comes to plot but I will make a vague exception in this case because of the pattern it follows which is hard to talk about without doing so. Consider therefore this a mild warning.

We start with Amy, a woman of hidden skills, who returns home to the small town of her birth after her brother ceases to reply to her weekly phone calls. What she discovers on her arrival is that her home town had changed in the years she has been away, becoming a darker nastier place all round, and the returning girl is far from welcome.

The first third of the novel covers the first couple of days of her return and the growing sense of unease as Amy gets herself slowly in deeper and deeper to the mystery of her home town’s dark underside.

Then things get nasty in the second third when she is ‘rescued’ by a group of individuals planning to end the reign of terror being perpetrated on the town. Her rescuers are secretive and less than welcoming, even when Amy’s skills seem to grow. All of which leaves Amy between a rock and a hard place, the Bad want her dead, the good side which is at best shades of grey don’t all want her alive either, and she gets the blame when things start to go wrong.

Then everything goes wrong and all hell breaks loose in the final third. Amy’s skills come to the fore but will she prevail…

In many ways it’s a reworking of so many other novels in the genre.

The important thing in all this is however the writing. Harvey manages to pull it together and make a simple genre story and make it seem fresh and initiative all the same. The action moves quickly and is well paced. The characters have a believable quality for all the unreal stuff surrounding them. They are well drawn and have individual qualities, while the setup of the plot has its own interesting quirks which help to draw the reader in.

#bookreviews

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Misdirection, book review

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Mark Hayes

Misdirection by Elizabeth Burges
Book 1 of Counterplay

Books come in many categories’s, many forms, and you never quite know what you’re going to be reading until you start turning the pages. This is perhaps even more true of independently publishes books which are free of the requirement to conform to particular genres. The Misdirection, first book of a series by the same name, is no exception to this rule. It is, however, a book which lends itself to a series because the book itself is a series.

It is probably best described as the novel equivalent of a soap opera. It holds all the elements of an American soap in the same vain as Dallas or Dynasty. I say this without criticism, because if you like the soap opera style then you will enjoy this series, and it will draw you in to keep reading, not only to find out what happens to the characters you love, but to the characters that you love to hate as well, and there are undoubtedly a lot of characters in here.
You can think of the characters as the cast of the soap opera, and the action moves between them in much the way the action of a soap opera would as well. Strolling between scenes as one character interacts with another before the action is carry forward by that character to the next, like links in a chain which sweep you along as they progress. The narrative in this respect is the camera following one then the other, before panning over to follow the next character who wanders through the scene.
In other hands, this technique of many voices each carrying their own story and their own desires forward as they weave in and out of other lives, would swiftly become confusing, if not indeed a mess. Burges and Burgess, however, manage to make the narrative seemly seamless. While a chapter may have one, two, five or even ten different points of view characters in scant few pages it never gets lost in itself or more importantly loses the reader in its intricate web. This in itself is something of a noteworthy achievement because there are a lot of characters in this book.
I am also a sucker for any novel that comes with a playlist at the end. But every good soap opera has a theme tune.
Handily at the back, there is a set of family trees that helps you sort it all out if you do get confused. Though as I reviewed the Kindle version, I was not able to just flip to the back as quickly as I would in a print copy to check just how two characters were related. Yet some who, again in testament to the narrative skills of the authors, I never need to. I was too busy enjoying the story, all be it with a scene of impending doom that is laid out in the first chapter. The narrative carry s you along and carefully remind you of al those connections when you need little reminders without overburdening them.
The first chapter is set around events at the end of the first book. So you know the tragic events you are moving towards. Then the action drops back thirty days, and you learn how the tragic events came to pass. While as a narrative trick it is hardly original it is written well. Importantly by the time you get back towards the looming event you’re invested in the characters and care about them. You want to know who got shot at the beginning, and perhaps more importantly if they are going to survive. To use the Soap Opera comparison, this is who shot JR and a whole season devoted to finding out not only who but why.
No characters are all good, or all bad, there are shades of grey running through them all that even the ones which seem at first nothing but villains you come to care about. Which again is a well-played hand by the authors. It is too easy to make a character all bad, and leave not even a glimmer of light about them. They do however play hardball with their characters from the start. You’ll love some and hate others like any good soap. and like any good soap the nastier the characters may be the more you end up loving them.
In short, this is a book which should be ‘Rivers’ the soap opera. Named for the hospital which holds a central place in the lives of most if not all characters in the book. If it was a Soap, it would be getting its second season after this marvellous opening year. And even a jaded old hack like me who doesn’t much like soap operas and appreciate and enjoy a good one all the same, and this is a great one.