Review: Rescuing Jack by Caitlin Ricci

A solid hurt/comfort but the ending is rushed. 3 stars

I love a good hurt/comfort story and Rescuing Jack is a great entry for this genre. It's a werewolf story where the paranormal is just a side-note to the character-driven focus. Marius (werewolf) who works and owns an animal shelter has a talent for pairing animals with new owners. Jack (human), recently sexually assaulted, thinks he needs a guard dog to keep the world at bay.

I enjoyed the details of Jack and Marius' progressing relationship and the reflection of Jack and Missy's trust issues. The biggest disappointment for me, however, is how quickly the sexual recovery happens. The majority of the progress Jack and Marius make in this book occurs over a 12 hour period maybe a week after they've met.

The external consequences of the attack (a video, extortion) are also treated like window dressing. The situation never felt very dire for me as Marius simply calls in his brother to take care of the issue.

I'm fond of the characters in this story. Everyone is distinct and running their own lives beyond Jack and Marius. Each voice remained clear and I'm particularly fond of Marius' brother even though he only got a few pages of screen time.

I feel like the book ended before it needed to. Jack grows rather dependent on Marius and the timeline doesn't provide enough room to show him growing into his own. I would have liked to see more of Jack standing on his own feet and knowing he could make it. Marius' brother also stirs up the comfortable relationship Marius and Jack have established but the book ends before any of that can be explored to resolution.

Over all, a solid book that I enjoyed in a single afternoon. Characters are relateable, the violence in Jack's past is handled realistically, and I'm fond of the animal shelter backdrop. Marius tries his best to do good, makes mistakes, and owns up to them.

TL;DR: 3 stars. Not much closure at the end, but an interesting character drama nevertheless.

P2P: My War Against Had and Was

Photo by Anonymous

Arguably one of the easiest ways to tighten up prose and bring a punch to your settings or action is to strike out most mentions of 'had' and 'was.' These words crop up to indicate complex past tense states that are, on the whole, unnecessary for clear prose.


Past Perfect Tense

• He had faltered up the steps.
• She had sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all had left a mess of the balcony.

The past perfect tense indicates a time period before a time in the past. It frequently crops up in past-tense fiction when referencing something that has already occurred. Since the story is written in past, the past perfect tense offers a double past indicator.

In almost every instance, had is unnecessary for the understanding of the sentence, slows down the scene, and takes the punch out of the verb that follows it. Also in almost every instance, all you have to do is remove it.

• He faltered up the steps.
• She sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all left a mess of the balcony.

Tighter, stronger. The reader doesn't need a double past indicator to understand when something is happening before something else. Context within the story provides that information as does simply placing the earlier event earlier in the draft of the story where it would have happened.


Future-In-the-Past

• They were going to visit his Aunt.
• He was planning on skipping stones on the lake.
• She was going to cut vegetables for the stew.

Was/were is a little trickier as it's used for two different past tenses. The future-in-the-past tense indicates a plan for the future from a point of view in the past. There is an implied 'but something happened' in a future-in-the-past tense. 'She was going to cut vegetables for the stew, but traffic made her late.'

This tense format is useful in fiction, especially for close points of view. But 'was' tends to be a habit of unplanned prose as it's the context of the scene or a previous scene that tells the reader what the characters plan on doing. The writer shouldn't need to specify directly, it takes all the showing out of your story and places the sentence firmly in the telling category. 

The fix is not simple, unfortunately. If you've spent chapter one establishing that Boy's mother wants him to run the basket of apples to his Aunt in the woods, it's unnecessary to open chapter two with 'They were going to visit his Aunt.' But usually a rejigging of the paragraph is needed if the information isn't already obvious to the reader. 

Cutting vegetables, for instance: Sally slumped against the window of her bus seat. She couldn't drum up a smile for the little boy waving at her in the car next door. Traffic snarled in every direction and she checked her watch for the third time. Seven oh six. Mother came home to unchopped vegetables. 

Past Progressive and Gerunds

• She was skipping with us.
• He was throwing the ball.
• They were cutting, taping, and gluing their craft projects.

 Past progressive tense indicates a thing that started in the past and continued for a while (either specified or vague). Again, there's an implied clause that something occurs to interrupt  the event that was happening. 'She was skipping with us until she fell down the hole.' 'He was throwing the ball until he hit a window.'

In conjunction with 'was' the following verb is forced into a gerund format, a verb that acts like a noun. They're easy to spot with 'ing' at the end of them. All verbs in the sentence that follow a 'was' or 'were' need to adopt this gerund status to maintain the correct subject/verb agreement.

But a verb that's forced into a noun isn't a strong verb at all. The easiest way to change this is simply remove 'was' and convert the gerund back into a verb in the simple past tense.

• She skipped with us.
• He threw the ball.
• They cut, taped, and glued their craft projects. 

Notice that the sentences still work if the event in question is interrupted. 'She skipped with us until she fell down the hole.'


More Past Tenses

If you want to look into even more varieties of past tense, I recommend this post from Daily Writing Tips. They give good examples and decent explanations of each tense (though no cool visual timelines).

As always, editing guidelines are 1) subjective and 2) not set in stone. Great writers break rules all the time, but you should always know what the rule is for so you can break it deliberately.

Review: A Taste of Vanilla by Leigh Ellwood

Cute motif, but the craft isn't practiced. 2 stars

A Taste of Vanilla starts off well with a basic meet-up-for-sex premise. The vanilla/chocolate motif is a cute way to highlight the interracial pairing, but the writing itself was inconsistent. Only a thousand words into the story the POV becomes very muddled. Chapter one is supposed to be from Hailie's POV while chapter two is from Cecile's, alternating from there, but once the action moves from conversation to intimacy, the POV falls apart and it becomes very difficult to figure out who is doing what.

The character voice of both chapters is the same, despite a shift in POV. This only muddies the POV problem further, as I couldn't rely on vocabulary or dialogue differences to clue me into each character. For some reason, two supporting characters had almost identical names: Thora and Thea. With how difficult to was to keep just the main characters straight, this was unnecessary to manage as well.

I did enjoy the details of Thora's cooking and some of her backstory, but I feel like I know her better than the main characters! An entire opportunity to explore them is glossed over with 'Cecile felt she learned quite a bit about Hailie' telling rather than showing the reader their development.

TL;DR: A sexy story is buried in POV/voice issues too deeply to enjoy. 2 stars

Review: The Condor by Isa K

The Condor is a book that presents unglamorous life with its human complications. It does this with grace but without celebration. 4 stars

I like The Condor. This book takes its reader on an interesting, but not dramatic, cruise along the countryside of the sex industry. It doesn't try to cover the grimy corners with polish or hold aloft its sex scenes as if to say, 'Look! Who cares if lives are falling apart, the sex is great!' The Condor puts its reader in the roll of quiet onlooker, 'See here as the whore preens in his native habitat, surrounded by fellows.'

This book doesn't sensationalize its content nor its characters. Everything is considered evenly important, from a new hire's first trick to the manager's heartbreak. I'm used to a romance introducing the love interest from chapter one and anticipating the 'how do they get together' moment from the start, but The Condor doesn't have a traditionally romantic plot. I didn't have any notion of where this story could take me, but nor was I clawing for more at the edge of my seat.

Instead I soared, gently, like the book's namesake, through the lives of these characters wanting to know more about what made them who they are now. This will never be a story that grabs readers by the throat demanding attention and that's a risky move. It's so heavily character driven that I frequently forgot to wonder what all of this was leading up to.

TL;DR: 4 stars. The Condor is a cozy M/M sex-industry novel. Quite possibly alone in its genre.

Review: Omorphi by C. Kennedy

What to say about Omorphi but why don't you own this book already? 5 stars

Omorphi, at its most broad is a story about abuse and the way that trauma follows a person. It's about learning how to support someone who has been abused, how to work through it, and recognize that love doesn't just fix the problem. Indeed, love is the reason to persist on the path toward healing and sometimes it's the only thing a person knows for sure while the world crumbles around them.

I honestly only had one reservation about this novel and that was the prologue. It gave additional context to the remainder of the story, but it wasn't necessary plot-wise and stylistically speaking, felt distant. The second scene in the prologue had a different POV that was not the main character and he didn't reappear until the climax of the novel. I don't think it detracted in any way from the flow of the story, but it wasn't necessary for understanding.

Omorphi is long. Almost 500 pages. Kennedy builds the characters slowly, deliberately, and every interaction provides additional insight into the lives of these people. The supporting cast is varied and strong. Not all of them were interesting or likable, but not every person in life is either. I felt like I was watching a select group of very smart young adults at the edge of their high school years deal rather well (most of the time) with the trauma of entering the adult world, coming out to parents and friends, the thrill of first relationships, and the chaos that Christy brings with him from Greece.

Kennedy doesn't once cop out on the plot or the characters. People don't do dumb things (ok, jumping a fence with a dislocated knee is stupid, but there's a solid supporting lead up, there) for no apparent reason. Arguments aren't simply resolved like magic. The drama isn't over 'does he like me, or doesn't he', the definition of a relationship, or even boys wearing lacy things. It's about things that matter, that persist over time, that change a person.

Abuse doesn't go away in chapter two.

Omorphi is a hurt/comfort story about two young men from completely different backgrounds finding common ground together and dealing with the wretchedness of humanity.

TL;DR: 5 stars. Trigger warnings all over the damn place, but if you can, read this novel. Then go paint something.

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P2P: Twitter

Original photo by USFW

For those uninitiated, Twitter is a short-form, global, public conversation with a million participants all talking at once. A planetary hive-mind of ideas and experience that happens in real-time. It's text messaging for the web with your texts limited to 140 characters.

The hivemind is filtered by the symbol #, also known as a hashtag (or octothorp if you're a writing nerd) and with it you can both broadcast to a specific group (#novel) or narrow your focus to a limited audience (#SoCal). It's also a tool to indicate an emotion or opinion, usually at the end of your text (#tmi #IDontWana #EndRant). Hashtags cannot contain any punctuation, but they're indifferent to capitalization. 

So. As an author you'll find twitter is a great place to both find an audience and connect with a lot of other authors, readers, agents, publishers, and other industry pros. The best way to introduce yourself and meet like-minded people is to hunt down a twitter chat that is in your genre. Attend and participate, you'll find friendly people and more contests than you can shake a stick at.

I use twitter to connect with and follow some of my favorite authors. I announce new blog posts there, seek out people to interview for my newsletter, and let everyone know when I have a new book available. I'll pop in during the day to see how other people are doing, I frequently haunt the #amwriting tag to give encouragement or answer easy questions people run into during their drafting process.

Here's a list of sites that have already done a great job collecting all kinds of writing related hashtags. 

205 hashtags for authors

40 hashtags for writers

the best twitter hashtags for writers and readers

100 twitter hashtags every writer should know

And a list of twitter chats:

twitter chat database

twitter chat schedule

20 twitter chats for the library crowd

tweetchats by day of the week

Finally, a website I use to figure out popular hashtags that are related to the ones I already know about:

hashtagify

Find me on twitter under @tamiveldura and let's talk! I'm frequently involved with #wschat and #genrechat.

Review: Cut & Run by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

I liked this novel over all, but not enough to fall in love: 3 stars.


Cut & Run ended up on my to-read list because it's won several awards and is consistently among the recommended books I find scattered around the internet. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't wow'd either.

I felt both the main characters were very strongly developed. From the beginning they have distinct and fun personalities that naturally clashed; the best kind of setup for an 'opposites attract' story. About half way into the novel I'm hooked, the characters are connecting with each-other and the plot is getting tense.

When things fall apart between them, the story also takes a turn for the worst. The characters develop to a point that they effectively swap stereotyped rolls which I found to be very appropriate given their experiences. And the relationship between them also faltered as it should.

However, there was no time dedicated to the characters in their new personalities in order for me to re-connect with them or to make their romantic re-connection believable. The story never recovers from this. The romance is appropriately stilted from the trauma of the plot but there was never enough time to settle into their new reversed and/or damaged personalities. It became all about plot and significantly less about characters.

Also, this book is co-written between two people and it really shows. The point of view is all over the place, often switching without warning from one paragraph to the next. This breaks the flow of reading and also causes some awkward pronoun issues. It constantly bothered me. The POV issues really stuck out in the second half when the personalities changed so dramatically that I couldn't rely on body language or dialogue content to clue me into who was doing or saying what.

These two issues really prevented me from getting lost in the world and devouring this story, which is unfortunate! The worldbuilding is excellent and the character dynamics were consistent throughout the novel. I very much enjoyed the investigation procedures (even thought the 'ah, ha' moment was deus ex machina). I thought pacing and tone were excellent across the bar. There are a lot of great things going for this story.

TL;DR: 3 Stars. There are some big craft issues but the important stuff was done right. I'll pick up book two, but I'm not sold on the series.

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Amazon