Monthly Archives: April 2012

Author Spotlight M. J. Webb

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mj webM J Webb is a forty-something father of two from Walsall in England. He is a full time worker and writes in his spare time, though he would love to change that fact. So far, he has penned two novels, ‘Jake West – The Keeper of the Stones‘ and the sequel ‘Jake West – Warriors of the Heynai ‘. A third novel (as yet untitled) will complete the trilogy, though it is a work in progress, which should hopefully be finished by the end of the year.

The stories tell of the adventures of fifteen-year-old Jake and his best friend, Ben Brooker. The teenage boys from Lichfield, England discover a box in Jake’s grandfather’s attic, a box that cannot be opened by anyone other than Jake, or a member of his family. Jake opens it by accident for there are no hinges or catches of any description. By doing so, he inadvertently alerts warriors and wizards on distant worlds to its existence.

Now he is being hunted across worlds. An epic journey has begun on which his life will be in peril every step of the way and he is about to learn from his grandfather of some strange family secrets. The action is fast and furious. The stakes can be no higher. If Jake West, the new ‘Keeper of the Stones’ cannot protect them, restore them, he cannot go home and the future of our world and many others is at risk.

You can buy the novels online everywhere and you can check out M J Webb’s site at http://www.jakewest.co.uk.

jake west Trilogy pic There is a facebook fangroup called, ‘Fans of Jake West’ as well as an M J Webb author’s page. He is also on Twitter, Librarything and Goodreads.

For all fans of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings these books are a must. They are a compelling read and the reviews so far have been extraordinary. As with most self-published authors, marketing the novels has been hard for M J Webb, given his limited free time and resources. Without the power of a large publisher and a literary agent behind him, it has been hard to reach the masses and let them know about his books, though they have been very successful for self-published works. Anything to help spread the word is invaluable and greatly appreciated. Check out the great reviews on site or on Amazon. ☺

Sadie’s Top 10 Tips For Mechanical Edits

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I’ve spent my day editing. This is a painful and time-consuming necessity for any piece of work a writer wishes to present to the literary public. I mean it. It’s necessary. Anytime I see a bio or book description in which the author claims to have written the book in a month and spent another month editing before publication, I cringe. There is almost no chance I will read that book.

I fully believe that there are people out there who can write a book in a month. Look at NANO. I do not believe that there are many people who can adequately proofread and edit 200+ pages in a month. It should take that long to find the typos alone, and it pretty much rules out the use of a professional editor (which I recommend for a book destined for publication). Since it is such a difficult thing to do I thought I might share a few of the tips that I use. I don’t mean grammar tips, like avoid the dreaded passive voice or exile unnecessary adjectives to the foul recesses of the metaphoric rubbish heap, though those are obviously important. I mean the nuts and bolts of how to find those pesky errors lurking in every lengthy work.

Of course what works best for me is going to be different from what works best for you or anyone else. This is just my list in no particular order. I’d love to hear your tips too.

1. Give it time. Don’t expect to finish your first draft and then execute a quick fix before sending it off to print. Reading and rereading and then reading again takes time.

2. Step away. This too takes time, sometimes a lot of it. Put your novel in a drawer. Walk away from it for at least a few days, so that you can look at it with relatively fresh eyes. One of the hardest things to do is keep your brain from reading what it thinks it wrote as opposed to what is actually on the screen.

3. Use someone else’s eyes. Beta readers are your best friends. It doesn’t matter if it’s a colleague with a grease marker or a professional; let someone else read it for you. Trust me, they will find the repeat words you keep looking over. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.

4. Print it. I know it feels horribly wasteful to print 200 pages. I personally print two pages to a page and double side it so that I don’t feel like an environmental criminal. But taking the work from the screen to paper forces you to look at it in a different format, enabling you to see different errors. Use coloured pens to circle mistakes, scratch notes, and draw arrows. By the end of this stage my manuscripts often looks more like abstract art than anything else.

5. Use the spelling and grammar check on your computer, but don’t depend on it. A lot of homophones and homonyms will slip right past it. Try cutting and pasting your work into more than one grammar checker. I often write in LaTex, but will paste it into Word temporarily. The two systems find different mistakes. Don’t ask me why, but they do.

6. Learn your own common mistakes. I know from experience that I frequently start sentences with ‘but.’ This is a no-no. It is simply poor writing. So I will give a piece of work at least one read in which all I look for is this one mistake. Find your personal habits and correct for them.

7. Learn your body’s optimal process. I, for example, am creative in the mornings and detail oriented in the evenings. So I dedicate mornings to new writing and the evenings to editing.

8. Remember your purpose. The point is to fix errors not add content. If you come up with some fabulous new arc to follow, make a note to address it later. Stay on task.

9. Start at the end and read backwards. My high school English teacher told us this. It really works. It forces your mind to address the word before it instead of the word it expects to be there. Some people also suggest actually turning the paper upside-down. But I have never tried this.

10. Let the computer read it to you. My husband first suggested this to me, and it is ingenious. You can often hear mistakes you keep reading over. On my computer I just have to convert it to a PDF, open it in Preview, go to Edit and then Speech. voilà

So there you have it, my top ten tips for manual edits. I do every one of them more than once for every manuscript. It is a really slow process, but it is worth it in the end. So what do you do?

Boook Review of Koraly Dimitriadis’ Love and Fuck Poems

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I won this book on Goodreads, and was intrigued by the title. Who has the gall to so title a book, I wondered. After reading it, I know.

Here is the description from the back:
Sexually repressed, separated Greek girl on a rampage. There’s no love here, just fucks. But is she fucking him or fucking herself? Love and Fuck poems. A 52 page story told through poetry. No fluff, no birds and trees, just honest, raw, poetry.

I think to fully appreciate this little book of prose I need to assess the whole package, because it is meant as a work of art as a whole. As you can see it is just a simple bi-fold pamphlet. It reminds me of a church program, or maybe someone’s personal moleskine as much as an actual book. But, I believe this is purposeful. The preface states quite clearly that Dimitriadis wanted it self-published to make a statement about art and the publishing industry, which would be pointless if it wasn’t easily identifiable as not meant the mass market. I like this aggressively indie mentality, though I do feel it is a little compromised by the fact that it is being translated into Greek (and presumably published) by a Cypriot publisher. Why not make the same statement there?

The personal journal feel continues throughout the book. Like the hearts on the cover, there are a number of doodles throughout the book and even a handwritten poem. Dimitriadis’ handwriting looks just like my little sisters BTW. This sense of the personal is the perfect environment for the poetry too. It is deeply personal, and some of them are painful to read. There is no shortage of grit. Many of the women in them (I won’t be so presumptuous as to assume they are all Dimitriadis herself) feel damaged, displaced and very post modern. But there are unexpected tender moments that remind the reader to breathe.

I don’t know a lot about poetry. The back of the book has a number of accolades from other awarded poets, so I trust that those who do know about the art know a good one when they read it. All I can go by is my reactions to these poems. I found about half of them sublime and the rest I neither liked nor disliked. I’m glad to have had the chance to read them, and recommend Love and Fuck Poems  for those who like in-your-face realism in their art. I’m a fantasy writer myself, so…