I’m off at a conference for the weekend, so my reading and posting will be limited. I look forward to being back on Monday!
Thoughts
I love how our generation has blurred the lines of film-making and book-selling.
I recognize that this is out of necessity, and that there have been television ads for books in the past, but, to me anyway, the whole idea of a video trailer for a book is relatively new. And brilliant.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Watch this YouTube video from Strange Chemistry, advertising an up-coming release:
I think this is awesome. I am immediately hooked and am already looking forward to this release. Clearly Strange Chemistry thinks this is an important release from their catalog, to start this sort of promotion already.
If you’ve been following any of my reviews, you may have noticed that I’ve become a fan of Strange Chemistry and their imprints. Their selection of titles and authors (generally unkown to me until I read them here) are consistently top-grade.
This isn’t just some fine day … it’s July 1, 2014.
I live in Minnesota. Brrrrr…I know.
Today is May 2 and it’s snowing. I mean… SNOWING. Snowing enough that not only are the schools closed in the five surrounding counties, but the nearby Interstate is closed. My half hour commute to work usually takes me along that Interstate for about four miles, so…I guess I’ll stay home today.
I’ve got some work I can do from home (darn you Google Drive, Skype, Dropbox, and email!), but chances are, I’ll spend a little time reading as well.
I’ve got a back-log of new books to read for reviews, but I really want to watch my BluRay set of Game of Thrones Season Two — but I haven’t read the book yet.
What to do, what to do?
If you had a sudden, unexpected snow day, what book, or type of book would you want to curl up to and read?
It’s always nice to know that a blog is being read. Even nicer when, as a reviewer, the blog is read by the one you are reviewing!
I am very pleased to have a guest blog post by one of my new favorite authors: SEAN BENHAM. Sean is the creative (perhaps slightly wicked) mind behind the highly original Blope, which I reviewed earlier this week.
He looks so…normal… there on the right, doesn’t he? Where the heck did Blope come from? Ah, well… thanks for stepping in here, Sean. Take it away …
* * *
Write what you… No! Don’t!
By Sean Benham, author of Blope
When it comes to fiction writing, one of the things English teachers on television always tell their students is to ‘Write what you know’. I have to qualify this with ‘on television’ because I went to a technical high school; my English teachers taught us about torque and oil viscosity. I have a feeling TV English teachers are a gang of masochists, because they’ll have to read what those students write and that advice is bound to elicit some dull writing.
Most lives, mine included, are a banal slog from point A to point B and back, peppered with drunken water-skiing on the weekend. (OK, so my life doesn’t include any water-skiing. Stop rubbing your fancy boat in my face already!) Even the most elegantly composed book, article, poem or blog post about the intricacies of the average daily grind is going to suck. This, of course, is opinion. Luckily, my opinions are invariably correct, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of cross-checking them against your own or the opinions of others.
Now, some people do lead extraordinary lives. The thing is, when people want to read about these extraordinary exploits, they generally want to read about what really happened, not a fictionalized account. Interesting people write autobiographies.
Remember when that guy wrote a book about covering his hand in sprinkles and then Oprah got really mad at him? He was writing a fictionalized account of what he knew and he got called out for lying. He never actually covered his hand in sprinkles; only a mad man would do something like that.
As you can tell, my logic is airtight and this point requires no further analysis. On top of that, the very notion that ‘write what you know’ can be interpreted as ‘write from your own moral compass, expand upon your experiences’ is disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself.
When I wrote Blope, my debut novel, I made a point of making everything up, right down to the names. Billy? That’s a Sean Benham original. Jonathan? Whoa, slow down Sean, that’s pretty radical…
Seriously though, what I know is awfully far from what I wrote. My first hand experience with plastic surgery, forced segregation, extreme religion, cave pornography, Taiwanese dictators and self-contained stratospheric flight is limited to say the very least. If you were hoping for details about my drive to work, where I like to grab lunch or my personal preference in laundry detergent, I’m afraid Blope isn’t the novel for you.
If you do happen to receive the ol’ ‘Write what you know’ as writing advice, here’s what you should do: transfer to a technical high school. There, you’ll learn skills applicable to the real world, like what to do if the crankshaft in your antagonist breaks or how far you can push the amperage in your dialogue before you overload the circuit.
Sean Benham is a Toronto-based entertainment industry professional who has worked as an art director, graphic animator, writer and producer on everything from Emmy award-winning children’s television programming to heavy metal music videos.
Blope is his first novel, and available for purchase in both paperback and e-book formats via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu,Kobo, iTunes, Sony and Smashwords.
Website: http://seanbenham.biz / http://www.blopenovel.com
If you consider yourself a reader… someone who truly enjoys a good book … then you undoubtedly have a favorite author or two. I sure do.
But what happens when that author stops producing? Or if your favorite author is from a by-gone era and hasn’t written anything in decades? You probably scrabble and claw for those scraps of writing that some relative or agent uncovers and releases. But after that … well, sometimes the outlook is bleak.
For years I was an avid sci-fi reader (back in the days when the term ‘sci-fi’ was considered insulting). Most of my true favorites were writing in that genre, but more and more, the output is less and less. And then I felt that the sci-fi market was glutted with hackneyed writing and nothing but serials. Serials and series’. Really? Does no one write just a book any more?! But let’s be honest… most of that probably came from publishers, trying to capitalize, not from the writers themselves.
So how do you find a new favorite?
For me, it’s just a matter of reading a lot. If I read a short story I like, I search the author’s name on Amazon and Goodreads and wishlist their books. Sometimes I discover the new author through recommendations of friends. And of course there are the blogs… reading posts by other readers has been a great way for me to find new favorite authors.
And sometimes you get lucky and chance upon a book or story that wows you and you want to read everything they output. That happened to me recently when I was reading the nominees for the Hugo Award (science fiction’s fan-based reader awards).
And now I may have run across a new favorite. You’ll hear more about him in the coming days. Watch for a few new reviews and see if you can figure out who my new favorite is. In the meantime, tell me…how do you find your new favorite author?!
Looking for a good book? …Always!
I like to read. You do, too, or you probably wouldn’t be here. I also like to write. So…why not write about books? Lots of people do it.
Do we really need one more person writing about books? Well…”need”…? Probably not.
What makes me so special that you should look at my reviews? I have a unique voice and a unique take on the books I read. Okay…the truth is…EVERY writer/reviewer has a unique voice. Maybe you’ll like what I have to say and/or the way I say it. Maybe you won’t. But you won’t know for sure unless you read a few reviews.
Go ahead, give it a shot. It’ll take, what, ten minutes of your internet surfing time?
Thanks for looking!