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Great review of FALLEN, and fun guest post….

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reviews, interviews, and giveaways from an eclectic reader…

Drey’s Library blogspot asked me to write a guest post on how I get inspiration. This was fun…. Then my novel FALLEN got an “Excellent!” from Drey. Thanks to Drey for the opportunity and the wonderful read!

drey’s thoughts:  Fallen starts off with a bang, capturing your attention right away…

I was flattened against a brick wall, watching in terror as she struggled not to inhale the killing mist that pulsed a few centimeters from her face. If she breathed it in, it would kill her. If she moved into it, or if it moved to engulf her, it would kill her. Dissolve her from within, filling her mind with madness before blistering her cells with heat until she ruptured into steam and water droplets. All that would be left of her would be a splatter of water on the ground and a fine beige powder sifting down from the air.Yikes!!  This is so not a world I want to live in–a mysterious mist that kills, rogue bands of survivors who round up women and children for far more nefarious purposes than you could imagine, dwindling food supplies…

It is in this world that Emma Anderson finds herself in charge of her five-year-old daughter Mandy, and seven other children; trying to survive and keep them safe and alive. When she meets a band of men who are seemingly able to keep the mists away, Emma barters for protection for herself and the children. Before she knows it, she’s healing the camp’s sick and making friends. Well, except for a few of the men…

I like Emma. She’s strong, she’s resolute, and she’s fearless in standing up for those who can’t help themselves–almost to the point of getting herself killed. I like that some of the survivors have acquired a new skill, like Emma’s healing.

The plot is simple (survive), the story is moving. I enjoyed reading Fallen, and the realization at the end makes me antsy to find out what happens in the sequel to this first-in-a-trilogy.

drey’s rating: Excellent!

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How I Get From Inspiration to Ideas to Research to Novel
By Traci L. Slatton,
Author of Fallen

This topic fascinates me, because I wrestle with it every day. I am a creative person and I have a lot of ideas for stories. I’m also hungry. I’m starving to write 100 books before they peel my cold, dead fingers off my keyboard and lay me in a plain pine box. Then there’s another consideration: writing is misery. Every page is agony.

Ideas come and I take notes. If I’m walking, I’ll make a voice memo. Usually characters stuck in tense situations, and bits of their dialogue, come to me first. Sometimes I’ll get a palpable feeling-sense of a relationship: the tenderness and eroticism and playfulness and fierceness of it. I also see my main characters in my mind’s eye. With FALLEN, my recent post-apocalyptic romance, I had a vision of Europe in shambles, and a man and a woman who were both very strong and very tormented. She was willing to do anything to keep some children alive, but she was strongly connected to an absent husband. So the premise came to me first. I had a clear sense of the man as good and bad, a leader, a striated human soul. I could feel his essence.

Usually I won’t start writing until the idea threatens to shove bamboo shoots up my fingernails if I don’t write it. That’s when compulsion has set in. The beginning is great fun. It’s a rush. I’ve never been interested in drugs but I always think that the rush of creative energy when I finally surrender to a story must be like the rush of some potent chemical. It’s intense, it’s alchemical, it consumes me. It’s like falling in love, because it’s all I can think about. I walk down the street with scenes scrolling through my brain. I feel alive in a new way.

After that initial rush, the work sets in. Maybe it’s like a marriage at this point. You know, when the honeymoon has worn off and you’re sick of picking up your spouse’s toenail clippings from the coffee table and you just want to throw a heavy wrench at his head. It’s a lot of unglamorous work. Here’s when I mock up an outline of the story, the main turning points, and the character arc. I grapple with the nuts and bolts of story, and the fundamentals of what I aim to do with this particular one.

Best I’ve figured out, and this is an on-going inquiry for me, story is what your main character wants and how they DON’T get it. All story has a common source: it’s an argument for a specific value. And all good fiction has two qualities: 1, it’s about truth but not necessarily about fact, and 2, it is structured around conflict and obstacle.

So I have scenes, obstacles, disasters, bits of dialogue, and the faces of my characters all jumbled up in my brain, and I sit down and start writing the first few chapters. Then I pause to write an outline. I also figure out what value I am arguing for. I am opinionated and I have strong values, which helps. I write out my value on a sticky note and tape it to the side of my iMac.

I also almost always have a clear sense of the ending of the story. With FALLEN, I saw my heroine riding off without her man. I saw her heart-broken and determined. I enjoy writing stories where the stakes are high, so I tweak the plot points to up the ante. How can I push a scene? How can I turn up the volume on a character’s breaking point?

Writing is an arachnoid process: it’s like weaving an intricate web from the silk in my gut. That weaving happens in the back and forth between the vast, oceanic creative flow and the careful structuring of analytical thought. Both are crucial.

I usually do research as I am writing. I’ll pause in the middle of a page and read six chapters in a book, or google around the internet, or send emails to people I know who might have answers. A small plane flies from Edmonton to Le Havre in Fallen, so I emailed my friend Geoffrey, who’s a pilot, to ask him how that would be done. He had some ideas and he emailed some of his friends, too. When I have my answers, I resume writing. If I need to do further research, then, after a day or so, I’ll keep writing and start reading the necessary texts at night.

The end is another rush, because I get excited to torture my main characters more intensely, and so finish the story. Finally I have a first draft. Here’s where I ask a few trusted friends to read and critique. I’ve also found a free-lance editor who is scary smart, and I have her read the draft. Then I go back and revise, revise, revise . . .

Great review of FALLEN
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Great review of FALLEN

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Good words & a highly intelligent read from The Book Worm’s Blog:

★★★★

…Slatton’s natural storytelling ability takes over and the reader finds themselves engrossed in another well envisioned story world.

This book is very well written, and is another great example of Slatton’s creative abilities. (But the reader is going to want to remember going in that this is the first of a trilogy — or you will find it very depressing, and even fatalistically frustrating.) Slatton has once again allowed her ability with words to develop a post apocalyptic world that draws the reader in, and allows them to work towards the struggle of survival right along side the characters. The characters are compelling and real in that Slatton is not afraid to develop characters that are more than one dimensional. They have weaknesses, and compulsions that are both horrifying and ennobling. Slatton has developed characters that have the courage to face a failing world, while at the same time demonstrating not only everything that is right about mankind, but everything that is wrong, as well. All of these characters are more than they appear on the surface. They are each confronted with a devastating situation that brings out not only the best, but the worst in each of them at the same time. It is all of these varying traits that gives the reader pause, and the opportunity to reflect on what actually makes up an individual, and why we — as a species — are given these vastly different character traits. These vast differences ultimately beg the question why are such emotional characteristics an overwhelmingly important part of the human experience?

Read the whole review at The Book Worm’s Library!

The Yellow Umbrella, a city fable by Bruce Dunn
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The Yellow Umbrella, a city fable by Bruce Dunn

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Product Details

Publishing is in a terrible place. People are buying fewer books, Borders is closing stores after not paying the publishing companies, there is less shelf space, no one knows what the e-book will mean, it is dismal. I personally trace it all back to the death of the mid-list author. Now the marketers and bookselling giants who committed this murder are reaping the results. Because it is the richness and diversity of the mid-list that brings people in to book stores and keeps them browsing. A thousand iterations of the same old vampire, suspense, and romance books gets tedious, and no one wants to look at them anymore.
Editors are freaked out and terrified to take chances. Really great books that don’t fall into neat little categories aren’t being published. Like this one, The Yellow Umbrella by Bruce Dunn.
Fortunately, self-publishing is becoming less expensive, more popular, more respected. Which is a wonderful turn of events. The publishing system is broken, and authors who wait for the old ways to vindicate their writing efforts are waiting for Godot. Bruce Dunn walked into my husband Sabin’s gallery at 300 E 22nd and fell into conversation with Sabin, then gifted a copy of his self-published book to Sabin for our daughter.
And what a great gift. The Yellow Umbrella is charming. From the graceful opening pages, which relate the narrator’s memories of trips into a magical house with a little blond Lina who told stories, until the last moment when a Lady gives Lina back her long-lost, adventure-laden umbrella–it is sweet, absorbing, poignant. The illustrations are whimsical and evocative.
My 6 year old daughter loves it. She’s an advanced reader for her age, but I would put the range of readers for this book as 5 to 9 year olds. So if you are a parent, sibling or friend to kids from 5 to 9–order The Yellow Umbrella by Bruce Dunn from Amazon. It’s a treat for your young friend.
Mating Season by Jon Loomis
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Mating Season by Jon Loomis

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Mating Season by Jon Loomis
Mating Season (Frank Coffin Series #2) by Jon Loomis: Book Cover
The Provincetown Library was closed, so I betook myself across the street to the bookstore. I rummaged around and my curious fingers landed on HIGH SEASON by Jon Loomis. Next to it was its brother, MATING SEASON.
“Great books, FAB-u-lous books,” said the frilly man at the cash register. “So much fun to try to figure out where he’s writing about, here in town! We’re all waiting for the third book.”
So I bought the books. (Attention: I did not have a discount card, go Independent Bookstores!) Unexpected treasures: funny, beautifully written, sharply drawn characters, decently plotted. Loomis is a poet as well as a novelist and his prose is at its finest when he’s describing landscapes and sky, ocean and beach. But the prose doesn’t slouch anywhere. And there’s a strong, sticky sense of place, with the kind of deep saturation usually only seen in a Southern novel–except that Provincetown is not Southern. Provincetown is, well, uniquely Provincetown.
I most enjoyed Loomis’ obvious affection for the foibles and frailties of his all-too-human characters, and the charitable and amused tolerance with which the author seems to regard the human species in general. The protagonist Frank Coffin, with his eye tic and his flaccidity in the face of his girlfriend’s desire to get pregnant, his fear of death after his stint as a Baltimore cop, and his aversion to boats that flies in the face of his seafaring heritage–well, Coffin is rueful and heroic and decent without being either an anti-hero or a Captain America.
Several scenes made me laugh out loud–and I really love to laugh out loud while reading. The murder mysteries are absorbing and reflective of human vice. I recommend these books. They’re great: buy them, and enjoy.
The Power by Rhonda Byrne
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The Power by Rhonda Byrne

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The Power by Rhonda Byrne

Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret and now The Power, is close to people who are close to my husband, so I had the good fortune to meet her. She was lovely, with the contained grace that I associate with people who live from a strong sense of purpose.

Byrne advised me to read The Kybalion by the Three Initiates and The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall. With my insatiable reading lust, I acquired the books immediately. I devoured them promptly. I’m glad I did; the old Hermetic teachings have a lot to offer. The sense of paired, complementary qualities reminded me of the Kabbalistic Sephiroth winding along the Tree of Life. I love these ancient, eternal paradigms of thought!

So, being favorably impressed with Byrne, and wanting to support her because she’s friendly with some of my husband’s favorite people, I ran out and purchased two copies of The Power. One for me, and one for my husband, who refuses to share both food and books. The first bit of territorial prerogative always surprises me. I had my oldest daughter twenty years ago and I haven’t eaten an entire plate of food by myself since 1990. Someone is always sticking a fork in and grabbing a bite. Lunch is my happy time, when I’m alone in the apartment. I can eat standing up and walking around, which I prefer, and enjoy my tuna and peanut butter sandwich in peace, with no grimy fingers trying to steal some.
But I understand why Sabin won’t share a book with me. I use them up. I ravish them. Books are comestibles and I scribble in the margins, apply post-its, and turn down corners. Once I’m done with a book, it wants to take a shower and a nap.
The Power is no exception. It’s juicy and interesting, ripe for plundering. There’s a lot here, most of it good stuff. Opening the mind and heart to love can only benefit people. Thinking in positive ways about what you want is wholesome. When you ride a horse, you have to look where you want to go, and that is subtly communicated to the animal, who then goes there. It’s the same way with your mind and your life. Your mind has to focus on what you want and love, and then the great beast of your life can trot in that direction.
In general, I like this “New Age” the Secret and positive vibrational stuff. It’s got flaws, like everything else in this marvelous, imperfect, blissful, agonizing world. Gossip claims that one of the guys from the original movie of The Secret is in jail. And there’s sometimes a lack of groundedness in these teachings; elements of fantasy creep in. “Blame the victim” arises.
My most serious qualm with this school of thought has to do with karma. As I currently understand it, Karma is a complex law with a long, long arc. I’m not so certain that it works so simply as “Do good and think nice, and because you’re sending good and nice vibrations out into the universe, good and nice will come back to you.” I think that sometimes what you did twenty-five years ago, or twenty-five centuries ago as a temple dancer in Egypt, can come back to bite you in the tushie. Sometimes we reap the fruit of a seed we planted eons ago.
Then there’s the relational dynamic. We have karma not just as individuals, but as members of our family, our generation, our country, our religion. We also have dyad karma. I am stretching the meaning of karma here to apply to the invisible field of thought and feeling, emotion and expectation and communication within which two members of a couple live. Eg, if you’re married to someone who thinks badly of you, or who is convinced that you embody a certain negative trait (which is probably their shadow anyway), it’s hard to overcome the stickiness of that. It’s easy to get trapped like a butterfly in a spider web. It can be just as toxic within a family or any other community, like a school. Structures of thought and connection arise, and they can be cages.
Still, The Power is full of truth and light. It is passionate in its desire to give to the reader and to improve the reader’s lot. I’m writing my personal reservations in the margins, but it’s worth reading. It’s always helpful to return to the fundamental touchstone of life: am I acting out of love or out of fear? That’s the choice. Love or fear. I like to read these kinds of books at night, so I’m uplifted in the hypnogogic state. I like to think that the positive impact on me will be more profound, if words about love and joy and peaceful abundance are sailing through my dreams.
I also recommend Mary T. Browne’s The Five Rules of Thought and Geshe Michael Roach’s The Diamond Cutter. Like Byrne’s book, they give to the reader. What all three books share, though The Diamond Cutter approaches it differently, is the need to discipline the thoughts. We spend decades learning how to read, write, and cipher, but we have to seek out the knowledge of how to use our own minds constructively. The Power can help with that.
Daniel Silva’s THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR
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Daniel Silva’s THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR

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THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR by Daniel Silva
The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva: Download Cover

My former father-in-law, whose qualities of intelligence, groundedness, and sanity have caused me to appreciate him more over the years, called me a week ago to discuss his grandchildren, my daughters. He thinks they’re great, and isn’t that the sweetest gratification for a mother? At the end of the call, he inquired about my writing. Then he brought up Daniel Silva.

“Why can’t you write more like him?” asked the father of my former beloved.
Or maybe he didn’t actually say it straight out–though I never mind when people talk straight to me. Maybe I projected the question into a heavy implication, out of my own writerly envy. My former in-laws, much as I admired them, had a talent for minimizing my accomplishments. Whatever.
Either way, Silva remains one of my favorite writers. This is no small feat: I read everything, literally, everything. I sat once with a literary agent, who, after running through, well, all of the pop culture authors, said, “Yikes, you really do read everything!” I could claim that it’s market research. I could say I’m keeping an eye on my competition. Both are true. Truer still is that I just love BOOKS. BOOKS ARE LOVE.
And I love story. Here is my current working definition of story: story is how your protagonist doesn’t get what he or she wants. The transcendence of story is how we attain enlightenment. In which case: I’ll be seeing you around for another 10,000 lives, because story rocks!
Daniel Silva tells a good story, and he tells it well. Line for line, his prose is wonderful, and it’s getting better with every book. I’ve been following his Gabriel Allon character for years. With every book, the characters get more sharply drawn, the prose gets more musical yet always accessible, and the plot gets more interesting.
Silva is growing with his craft. I love to see that, and I admire it. There’s a lot of drek out there. Most bestsellers are mind-numbingly badly written. If people are reading less, it’s the fault of publishers: why would anyone eat when they are being served crap? They lose their appetite.
Which makes Silva even more of a pleasure to read. Great characters, great story, great writing. And I’m not just saying that because he deals with one of my other passions, the Old Masters. Sure that gives Silva an additional 100 IQ points in my estimation. But I’d read a well-told story about something I dislike–like the IRS. Oops, did I say that out loud? I totally admire the IRS.
Pick up a copy of THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR and be fascinated. Be swept away. It’s compelling reading.