A couple of things:
1. Ignore my last posting - DO BUY THE EBOOKS!
2. But wait for my next posting - I've finished all five of the series, but I'm in the process of re-editing. Should be done in a week or so, and there will be all new, lower prices, and a new cover for Return.
So rush right out and - er - come back in a week or so! (Ha ha ha!)
I'll send out notices when they're all done.
BTW, let me know what you think - comments are possible, so don't be shy....
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
DON'T BUY THIS EBOOK!
What? Has he gone crazy? You may well be wondering....
I figure I've already told you why you should buy my story, so let me play devil's advocate for a few lines here and try to talk you into buying by showing you why someone else should not. (Did I lose you? Stick around, it will become clear enough.)
1. You don't really like fantasy adventure stories.
Good enough for me - what are you doing here anyway?
Oh, heck, I can't give up that easily. Have you ever read a fantasy adventure story? A classic myth? A fairy tale? If you have and you didn't hate it, give Return a shot. Ebooks are not that expensive, and you can read them on your computer, your laptop, your netbook, your ebook reader, or you can do it the hard way: print it out and read the hard copy. (Okay, that pun was not intended, but it's there, I'm not deleting it!) Now, if you have an inkjet printer, this could take some time. Even my laser printer takes a while to print the whole book. "But it's 232 pages!" you protest. Yes, it is. It's also a PDF, so you can print it out in multiple pages per sheet, though I wouldn't recommend anything smaller that 2 pages side by side unless you also have high quality magnifying lenses....
2. You don't like ebooks.
It's available in print, too. Come and visit and follow the link! I should warn you, though, it's a lot more than the ebook (I have no control over the publisher's price). If you want to wait another month or two, it will be available from Amazon.com, probably at a discount. I'll announce that here and elsewhere when it is (big time!). If you don't mind a wait, I'll be collecting orders for discounted sales in a few days - visit the web site and check occasionally.
3. You don't like game-based books.
Frankly, I don't blame you. In the more usual case, you're entering a fantasy world created by one or more other people, then reading someone else's filtered view of that world. It's like reading a story that takes place in Middle Earth, not written by J.R.R. Tolkien, or a Narnia story written by someone other than C.S. Lewis. Sometimes this works, but....
Fear NOT! This is different. I wrote the game, and only about a dozen people have ever played it! Not only that, it isn't published, so the only point of view you are stuck with is mine. In fact, the game has little to no impact on the story - you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy the book. I could just as easily have written the story without the game, it just so happened I wrote the game first.
4. You don't like series stories.
Me either. "Oh, right! You always write things you don't like!" you say. Let me ask you this - do you think that The Lord of the Rings is a series story?
The Zentek Ascendant series is really one, long story broken into five reasonably sized, conveniently separated volumes, and you don't even need to read all five (although it is best as a whole). You could buy Return and stop there. You could start with Minx and stop there. I'll admit that the last three really do depend on each of their predecessors, more than the first two, but, if you don't mind starting or landing in the middle of a long story, they're all good on their own. In my (not so) humble opinion, of course!
5. "So, you think you're as good as Tolkien, or Lewis?"
You tell me - buy the book, or the whole story (all five books), and tell me. I wouldn't undertake such a comparison - I've been told that my writing is good, but that's from a fairly small, pretty friendly and sympathetic select non-group of readers, and a lot of it is NOT about these books at all. I could tell you that my books are the best you'll ever read, and they might be, but I have no illusions on that score. Again, you tell me. Please. :-)
6. Why should you feed my ego?
Not one good reason comes to mind. I didn't write the books to get an ego boost. I wrote them because I couldn't NOT write them. There was a story inside me, bursting to get out, and I had to write it down. I enjoyed it so much, I wanted others (like you) to have the same experience, or better. For all I know, your imagination will take your experience of the book way beyond where it took me.
You could also hate it - not all fantasy is for everyone, and I may just not be your cup of fantasy-tea. The nice thing about books is that, if you don't like one, you can pass it on to someone else (maybe with a little compensation for your initial expense in buying it). You might not like it, but you have a friend or two who might.
So, to sum up, don't buy this book.
Really.
Buy the whole story! Share it with your friends!
Most important of all, enjoy yourself.
I figure I've already told you why you should buy my story, so let me play devil's advocate for a few lines here and try to talk you into buying by showing you why someone else should not. (Did I lose you? Stick around, it will become clear enough.)
1. You don't really like fantasy adventure stories.
Good enough for me - what are you doing here anyway?
Oh, heck, I can't give up that easily. Have you ever read a fantasy adventure story? A classic myth? A fairy tale? If you have and you didn't hate it, give Return a shot. Ebooks are not that expensive, and you can read them on your computer, your laptop, your netbook, your ebook reader, or you can do it the hard way: print it out and read the hard copy. (Okay, that pun was not intended, but it's there, I'm not deleting it!) Now, if you have an inkjet printer, this could take some time. Even my laser printer takes a while to print the whole book. "But it's 232 pages!" you protest. Yes, it is. It's also a PDF, so you can print it out in multiple pages per sheet, though I wouldn't recommend anything smaller that 2 pages side by side unless you also have high quality magnifying lenses....
2. You don't like ebooks.
It's available in print, too. Come and visit and follow the link! I should warn you, though, it's a lot more than the ebook (I have no control over the publisher's price). If you want to wait another month or two, it will be available from Amazon.com, probably at a discount. I'll announce that here and elsewhere when it is (big time!). If you don't mind a wait, I'll be collecting orders for discounted sales in a few days - visit the web site and check occasionally.
3. You don't like game-based books.
Frankly, I don't blame you. In the more usual case, you're entering a fantasy world created by one or more other people, then reading someone else's filtered view of that world. It's like reading a story that takes place in Middle Earth, not written by J.R.R. Tolkien, or a Narnia story written by someone other than C.S. Lewis. Sometimes this works, but....
Fear NOT! This is different. I wrote the game, and only about a dozen people have ever played it! Not only that, it isn't published, so the only point of view you are stuck with is mine. In fact, the game has little to no impact on the story - you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy the book. I could just as easily have written the story without the game, it just so happened I wrote the game first.
4. You don't like series stories.
Me either. "Oh, right! You always write things you don't like!" you say. Let me ask you this - do you think that The Lord of the Rings is a series story?
The Zentek Ascendant series is really one, long story broken into five reasonably sized, conveniently separated volumes, and you don't even need to read all five (although it is best as a whole). You could buy Return and stop there. You could start with Minx and stop there. I'll admit that the last three really do depend on each of their predecessors, more than the first two, but, if you don't mind starting or landing in the middle of a long story, they're all good on their own. In my (not so) humble opinion, of course!
5. "So, you think you're as good as Tolkien, or Lewis?"
You tell me - buy the book, or the whole story (all five books), and tell me. I wouldn't undertake such a comparison - I've been told that my writing is good, but that's from a fairly small, pretty friendly and sympathetic select non-group of readers, and a lot of it is NOT about these books at all. I could tell you that my books are the best you'll ever read, and they might be, but I have no illusions on that score. Again, you tell me. Please. :-)
6. Why should you feed my ego?
Not one good reason comes to mind. I didn't write the books to get an ego boost. I wrote them because I couldn't NOT write them. There was a story inside me, bursting to get out, and I had to write it down. I enjoyed it so much, I wanted others (like you) to have the same experience, or better. For all I know, your imagination will take your experience of the book way beyond where it took me.
You could also hate it - not all fantasy is for everyone, and I may just not be your cup of fantasy-tea. The nice thing about books is that, if you don't like one, you can pass it on to someone else (maybe with a little compensation for your initial expense in buying it). You might not like it, but you have a friend or two who might.
So, to sum up, don't buy this book.
Really.
Buy the whole story! Share it with your friends!
Most important of all, enjoy yourself.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
What's so great about this series?
That's a presumptuous question. How can I tell you why my own work is so great that you just have to put everything else down, get it, read it, enjoy it, and spread the word?
Heh, heh - I just did! :-)
Seriously, I looked over an article yesterday that talks about what's wrong with modern fantasy epics - mostly series, game based, badly written, old plots, flat characters and so on. For what it's worth, these are not particularly specific to fantasy epics at all - pretty much anything that has been written can have these flaws. They do tend to be more pronounced in fantasy epics because, in these, you're entering a different world, one that is fairly close to the author's heart and most likely quite personal, even if it takes place here and now on Earth.
Little things like consistency of the world, the scenes depicted therein, how complete the world creation is or was, can make a novel more or less worth reading depending on their quality. If the world is internally inconsistent, or there are holes in the presentation, these can hurt worse than just bad writing. If the author is just spinning a tale to make some money, or for any other surface reason that is not related to a deep commitment to a good story on a world that is as real to them as they want it to be to you, the reader, it won't fly.
One of the most sensitive of these sore spots is old plots. Even the greatest works of fantasy literature use or reuse old plots, some older and more used than others. J.R.R. Tolkien used themes from mythological bases and older works of fantasy, in addition to the very real experience he had just completed, having lived through the most horrendous event of his day, World War II, in creating the Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis used one of the older and more popular themes in western civilization for the background of the Narnia series - Christianity. The successful writers in fantasy epics find new ways to tell old stories, mixing them in different ways with new approaches, etc., etc.
You already knew all that, right?
What I've been beating around here is my own work (surprise!). My primary work so far is a five book series, collectively entitled Zentek Ascendant. If you've been reading any of this, you already know that this is a game-based series of books. Uh, oh, that's two of the potential pitfalls of a good fantasy epic. I'll get to the others shortly.
The world I used for my backdrop was from a game I wrote. That's just how it happened. My original intent in creating the game was to play a really good game that had some new features in it I hadn't seen in other games, and eight or nine other people helped me play-test it for almost seven years. Then I had this crazy idea that if I wrote a book based on the game, I might have better marketing luck with the game. (That has nothing to do with marketing - don't try this yourself!) The advantage that this created for me was a consistent world with "natural laws" I could follow when creating a story about it. The game is not published, or even available in any form right now, except these books. As much as I like it, I like the books far, far better.
I've also found that series can get really tired after a while. I've burned out on several of them myself, mainly because I became accustomed to the author's style and didn't see enough in the continuing (never-ending?) stories that was of value to me. There were a few that I stopped reading because the stories went off in directions I didn't like.
So, why on Earth would I write my own? Am I nuts? Maybe. Originally, I just wanted to write a story that followed a game-driven adventure, and it was awful - really, truly awful. It was hard to read, hard to follow, stiff, contrived and so on. I wouldn't even consider trying to sell that - thing - now. It was so bad that I had to try another story, one that would be easier to read, even for me. I started writing something else - a continuation of the first book, but from an entirely different perspective. This time, I was just going to tell a story, from my head onto paper (okay, into a computer), and see where that took me. Six books later, I had a monster on my hands. I wanted a trilogy and instead wound up with seven books of widely varying lengths and content. I've reorganized, edited and re-shaped it several times, and the pentology it now comprises is the best way to read it.
In case you're worried about book 1, you can rest assured that I have edited it for years, probably close to a hundred times. When I read it, I enjoy it - I think it reads well, is interesting enough and paced to keep your attention all the way to the end, even though there is more ahead. It has none of the original flaws any more, and editing it for publication was more fun than I expected. (Yes, it's available in print.)
What does all that mean? I have one story to offer, it just takes five books to tell properly and completely. Is it well-written? Of course! How can you ask? However, I can't judge my own work from a sufficiently impartial objective to say. I can tell you that I've read it through dozens of times, and I enjoy it all the way through. When I go back and look at one of the books and say to myself, "Ugh - another edit? Why do I do this?" that feeling goes away within a page or two, and after that it's hard to stop and make a change.
Are there old plots? Almost certainly, though I made no conscious effort to include any. I've read enough mythology, fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction that some of this comes out in my writing. That said, this work is all original, both in the themes and the way the characters handle them, with enough connected subplots to keep the story grounded in (a fantasy) reality. Life is not just one simple story that fits together end-to-end. Are the characters flat? Not to me - they are quite real, and they are not based on any other characters in any other stories. (Okay, there are a number of conventional inter-character relationships that have been used before, but all in new ways. Trust me! :-)
Zentek Ascendant means "zentek on the rise," which does kind of encapsulate the main thrust of the story. I also thought it was a catchy name. The five books are Return, Minx, Festival (which are all available as ebooks), Metamorphoses (which should be finished this month, I hope) and Reckoning (which is awaiting a final proof-read once Metamorphoses is done). Take a look and see how much you like them. Return is priced low so you won't be out too much money even if you hate it, and you won't.
Enjoy!
Heh, heh - I just did! :-)
Seriously, I looked over an article yesterday that talks about what's wrong with modern fantasy epics - mostly series, game based, badly written, old plots, flat characters and so on. For what it's worth, these are not particularly specific to fantasy epics at all - pretty much anything that has been written can have these flaws. They do tend to be more pronounced in fantasy epics because, in these, you're entering a different world, one that is fairly close to the author's heart and most likely quite personal, even if it takes place here and now on Earth.
Little things like consistency of the world, the scenes depicted therein, how complete the world creation is or was, can make a novel more or less worth reading depending on their quality. If the world is internally inconsistent, or there are holes in the presentation, these can hurt worse than just bad writing. If the author is just spinning a tale to make some money, or for any other surface reason that is not related to a deep commitment to a good story on a world that is as real to them as they want it to be to you, the reader, it won't fly.
One of the most sensitive of these sore spots is old plots. Even the greatest works of fantasy literature use or reuse old plots, some older and more used than others. J.R.R. Tolkien used themes from mythological bases and older works of fantasy, in addition to the very real experience he had just completed, having lived through the most horrendous event of his day, World War II, in creating the Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis used one of the older and more popular themes in western civilization for the background of the Narnia series - Christianity. The successful writers in fantasy epics find new ways to tell old stories, mixing them in different ways with new approaches, etc., etc.
You already knew all that, right?
What I've been beating around here is my own work (surprise!). My primary work so far is a five book series, collectively entitled Zentek Ascendant. If you've been reading any of this, you already know that this is a game-based series of books. Uh, oh, that's two of the potential pitfalls of a good fantasy epic. I'll get to the others shortly.
The world I used for my backdrop was from a game I wrote. That's just how it happened. My original intent in creating the game was to play a really good game that had some new features in it I hadn't seen in other games, and eight or nine other people helped me play-test it for almost seven years. Then I had this crazy idea that if I wrote a book based on the game, I might have better marketing luck with the game. (That has nothing to do with marketing - don't try this yourself!) The advantage that this created for me was a consistent world with "natural laws" I could follow when creating a story about it. The game is not published, or even available in any form right now, except these books. As much as I like it, I like the books far, far better.
I've also found that series can get really tired after a while. I've burned out on several of them myself, mainly because I became accustomed to the author's style and didn't see enough in the continuing (never-ending?) stories that was of value to me. There were a few that I stopped reading because the stories went off in directions I didn't like.
So, why on Earth would I write my own? Am I nuts? Maybe. Originally, I just wanted to write a story that followed a game-driven adventure, and it was awful - really, truly awful. It was hard to read, hard to follow, stiff, contrived and so on. I wouldn't even consider trying to sell that - thing - now. It was so bad that I had to try another story, one that would be easier to read, even for me. I started writing something else - a continuation of the first book, but from an entirely different perspective. This time, I was just going to tell a story, from my head onto paper (okay, into a computer), and see where that took me. Six books later, I had a monster on my hands. I wanted a trilogy and instead wound up with seven books of widely varying lengths and content. I've reorganized, edited and re-shaped it several times, and the pentology it now comprises is the best way to read it.
In case you're worried about book 1, you can rest assured that I have edited it for years, probably close to a hundred times. When I read it, I enjoy it - I think it reads well, is interesting enough and paced to keep your attention all the way to the end, even though there is more ahead. It has none of the original flaws any more, and editing it for publication was more fun than I expected. (Yes, it's available in print.)
What does all that mean? I have one story to offer, it just takes five books to tell properly and completely. Is it well-written? Of course! How can you ask? However, I can't judge my own work from a sufficiently impartial objective to say. I can tell you that I've read it through dozens of times, and I enjoy it all the way through. When I go back and look at one of the books and say to myself, "Ugh - another edit? Why do I do this?" that feeling goes away within a page or two, and after that it's hard to stop and make a change.
Are there old plots? Almost certainly, though I made no conscious effort to include any. I've read enough mythology, fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction that some of this comes out in my writing. That said, this work is all original, both in the themes and the way the characters handle them, with enough connected subplots to keep the story grounded in (a fantasy) reality. Life is not just one simple story that fits together end-to-end. Are the characters flat? Not to me - they are quite real, and they are not based on any other characters in any other stories. (Okay, there are a number of conventional inter-character relationships that have been used before, but all in new ways. Trust me! :-)
Zentek Ascendant means "zentek on the rise," which does kind of encapsulate the main thrust of the story. I also thought it was a catchy name. The five books are Return, Minx, Festival (which are all available as ebooks), Metamorphoses (which should be finished this month, I hope) and Reckoning (which is awaiting a final proof-read once Metamorphoses is done). Take a look and see how much you like them. Return is priced low so you won't be out too much money even if you hate it, and you won't.
Enjoy!
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