Moving to My Own Domain

Click here for ChristopherKellen.com!

The past six months or so here on WordPress.com have been pretty great. I love the interface and pretty much everything about it.

Unfortunately, my continued growth and the need to do more things (like host file downloads, etc) have convinced me that it is time to move to my own site.

I probably should have done this to begin with, but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Now that I know for certain that I’m in this for the long haul, I decided that it was time.

The new site is also a WordPress blog with all of my previous posts and content already uploaded. I will no longer be updating this site as of today – all new content will be available at christopherkellen.com.

See you there!

Review: The Congregation by Aric Mitchell (@aricmitchell)

(Format Note: I read The Congregation as an ePub review copy kindly provided by the author.)

Now, I’ll say up front that I’m not usually one for horror. I normally stick to my tried-and-true genres of science fiction and fantasy whenever possible. The last time I branched out into horror was when I read Brian Keene’s City of the Dead and found myself both revolted and fascinated by the bleakness and absolute worst of humanity. The conflicting feelings were so strong that I’ve sort of skirted the genre since, but since I love indie fiction so much, I jumped at the chance to review Mr. Mitchell’s debut horror novel and give the genre another try.

The Congregation is dark, intense, disgusting, hideous, and bleak. In other words, it’s exactly what it set out to be.This isn’t horror in the traditional sense, with creepy things waiting to jump out of the shadows and lots and lots of suspense. This is somewhere halfway between the kind of horror where everything is implied and nothing really happens and the splatterpunk horror made popular in many cult zombie films. The setting is the Arizona-Mexico border, the time could be anywhere from the 80s to now (given that there’s very little modern technology referenced… I don’t even remember if anyone had a cell phone) with an ensemble cast in which only a couple of people are genuinely likeable and you expect them to die at every turn.

Beyond the blood and gore, though, there actually is a pretty cool story at the center of this novel, which is what I was hoping to find. It’s not just pointless violence and nasty-gross bad guys and possession, but an interesting take on an old story that really ties the whole thing together. It’s a competent narrative, for which I was pleasantly surprised.

There were times when the prose could have used a bit more editing and/or proof-reading,  mostly for tightness – some of which may be personal preference – but I noticed very few scattered typos and minor errors. They did not overly distract from the reading.

Overall I felt that The Congregation was a strong debut novel, from an indie author who’s probably got a lot of good things coming his way. For near-perfect professionalism I would suggest one more editing/proofing pass to reword the occasional confusing sentence, but since we live in a world of ebooks, I’m not deducting much for formatting/editing unless it’s egregious. The fact was that when I started reading it, I felt like I was watching a train wreck – it was not so much that I had to turn away, but instead stared, riveted by the horror until I hit the final page, the twist… and was satisfied.

Final Score:

KDP Select, Amazon, and the Value of Free

It seems like ever since Amazon launched this KDP ‘Select’ thing, where you can add your books to a ‘lending library’ for Prime members and make your book free – for up to 5 days! – that this is now the only way in which they believe in free.

My novelette The Corpse King has been free at all other outlets since I released it, but Amazon still wants $0.99 for it. Why? I have no idea. No matter how many ‘lower price’ notices they receive, it seems they are no longer price-matching to free.

Look – if I didn’t want my damn book to be given away, then why would I be doing it? Amazon.com is a distribution platform. My short story Dutiful Daughter was downloaded thousands of times after I made it free. That means thousands of people had the opportunity to read that story, simply by virtue of the fact that it was available for free on the largest e-book distribution platform known to man.

Do you know what that’s called?

MARKETING.

It’s freakin’ marketing, people! As an indie author, very few people are going to take a chance on spending money – even the impulse-buy $0.99 – unless they know for certain that they’re going to like the work! Instead of buying ads, because my pocket change is sparse, I want to spend the money that I would otherwise make selling that novelette on showing people that yes, I really can write and tell an engaging story!

There’s a reason I chose The Corpse King as the free one: it’s most representative of what I want the stories of Eisengoth to be like: dark swords & sorcery where the characters understand the bleakness of the world they live in, and still rise above that to make the best and most heroic choice available.

I realize that Amazon is not going to change their ways, but I think more people should understand that free does not mean free. If I choose to write a story and then offer it to the world for the low, low price of $0.00, I am doing it for a reason. This is why, despite the fact that its reach is limited, Smashwords is the superior distribution platform for ebooks. Unlike Amazon, they have an understanding about what it means to be an independent author, with no marketing machine and no massive funding behind you.

The only way to gain traction as an author is word-of-mouth. Someone must like your work well enough to recommend it to their friends. Some people still find their books randomly browsing in a bookstore, but those days are waning, and it’s not an option for the indies.

Here’s the thing: nobody’s going to recommend your work if nobody reads it to begin with. FREE is one way to unbalance that equation, and get people reading your work, even if no one’s ever heard of you.

Sadly, I cannot host downloads directly from this blog. In the future I plan to be hosting my blog on my own website, but as of now this is merely a wordpress.com special. So if you’d like to sample my work, Smashwords is the place to do it.

I hope you enjoy The Corpse King. If you do, check out Elegy at Amazon or Smashwords.

If not, come on back here, tell me why it sucks and what I can do to improve it!

Review: Once We Were Like Wolves by M. Todd Gallowglas

(Format Note: I read Once We Were Like Wolves via the Amazon Kindle Select Library, as I am an Amazon Prime member.)

Once We Were Like Wolves is the second book in the Tears of Rage series (see my review of First Chosen here).

Mr. Gallowglas turns everything up a notch in this second entry to his Celtic-feeling fantasy series. The world he has created is rich and vibrant, featuring: tricky gods, warring factions who all increasingly hate one another, ancient history that feels alive, and truly engaging characters that draw you straight into his narrative without letting go until the end.

Being that I am currently writing a ‘Book 2’ of my own, I entirely understand the difficulty involved in that process. One has to pull threads through from the first entry, while raising the stakes and expanding the scope but without sacrificing the feeling that made the first one connect with readers. It’s not just about continuing the narrative, it’s about extending the feelings you forged in Book 1 while simultaneously making everything grander.

I believe that Mr. Gallowglas succeeded on every point. We see our main characters begin to grow into the roles they have been forced into, the story introduces new twists and turns driving us toward the final conclusion while being immersed in frenetic action. Most of the second half of the book is a rocket-powered ride of genuinely enjoyable action, filled with imagery that’s still stuck in my head, slowing down just barely enough so that you don’t break your neck when you arrive at the end.

M. Todd Gallowglas is a writer to watch. Speaking as an author myself, his rich storytelling, excellent characterization and frankly amazing world-building makes him the kind of author that I would love to have a chance to collaborate with.

So, the final score for Once We Were Like Wolves:

For fantastic world-building, an engaging story, haunting imagery and excellent characterization. Also, for addressing (whether purposefully or not) my major issues with Book 1 and providing a story that gets going from Page 1. This is well-worth the read and you would be missing out if you didn’t.

The Sword & The Sorcerer

So, when you hear the words swords and sorcery, what do you think of? What’s the first image that comes to your mind?

It’s a Frazetta painting, isn’t it? Or is it Boris Vallejo instead? Go on, you can say it. It won’t hurt my brain too much.

Okay, I lied. It will and it did hurt my brain.

Not that Frazetta wasn’t a talented artist or anything, and Boris Vallejo certainly knows his stuff, but this is why the swords and sorcery genre is on life-support! What started out in the 1930s with Kull (NOT Kevin Sorbo) and Conan (NOT Arnold Schwarzeneggar) and Solomon Kane degenerated into a mess of beefcake and T&A. The imagery became associated with it, mediocre writers clambered aboard like so many rats aboard a ship, and slowly eroded its legitimacy until the phrase swords and sorcery became synonymous with crap fiction that resides at the bottom of a used bookstore’s 50-cent bin.

I’m sure my view of history is skewed. Maybe the crap writers got on board first and the imagery came later, but there is an undeniable curl of the lip and sneer that comes on the faces of even the most geeky fantasy readers when you say those three words.

I like swords and sorcery. I love the old Conan stories (you can find Howard’s novel, Red Nails, for free on Project Gutenberg), Moorcock’s Elric stuff is good, and my absolute favorite is the Kane books written by Karl Edward Wagner, who was a true disciple of the genre.

What makes swords and sorcery different from other fantasy fiction? Epic fantasy suffers from ‘farm-boy’ syndrome, where the son of a blacksmith or some other ‘lowly’ profession turns out to be a great hero and grows up to save the world. (Read the backs of some fantasy books the next time you’re at a bookstore. It’s almost sort of revolting how many of Book 1-s carry this description.) It’s full of sprawling plots, monstrous casts, world-wide travels, and world-changing conclusions.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with epic fantasy. I happen to love it a lot – well, the good stuff at least. (There’s not nearly enough good stuff.) I’m just trying to draw a contrast here.

S&S, on the other hand, is tightly-focused. The cast is smaller, the stage is smaller. If epic fantasy is a Broadway show, S&S is a quiet municipal theater putting on some stunning drama with actors you wouldn’t know from anyone else on the street. S&S focuses (usually) on one central character, the hero, who undergoes his trials and suffers but comes out on top because he’s the hero, dammit. Conan of Cimmeria became King of Aquilonia but quit when it got too boring. He killed dinosaurs, discovered the ruins of ancient civilizations, met disadvantaged deities and more. Wagner’s Kane, on the other hand, was cursed by an insane god to live forever, and live forever he did among forgotten civilizations, brewing wars and fighting the machinations of dark gods, all for his own gain in the end. Kane was a Chessmaster (WARNING! WARNING! THAT LINK GOES TO TVTROPES.COM – if you don’t know what it is, do NOT CLICK unless you’re prepared to spend several hours not accomplishing anything) in the most basic sense, twisting everything and everyone toward his own ultimate goals.

In the past year or two, I have seen the tiniest hints of a revival of the S&S genre. I read Andy Remic’s Clockwork Vampire Chronicles and those definitely have the flavor, and a few other books have been described that way as well, though I’ve yet to have the chance to read them. I hope to see more of it, because I see fiction drifting away from the hero. With the success of George Martin’s Ice & Fire we’re starting to see more muddled, political fantasy which doesn’t really have a hero. Now, I like Mr. Martin’s work a lot, but it still makes me long for a real hero. Unfortunately (SPOILERS, SPECULATION) I believe that hero was Rhaegar Targaryen, and he died at the Trident.

Now, to tie it all back to me like any good narcissistic blogger: The Arbiter Codex is not strictly swords & sorcery. Elegy could be classified as such, because it is solely D’Arden’s story. Others may not possess all of the necessary qualifiers, but one thing’s for sure, that heart of adventure – strange places, strange things, and the struggle of a hero against impossible odds – will continue to be there.

SOPA: The Internet Protests

This will be short. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Wikipedia, Google and other major sites across the Internet are protesting a bill in Congress known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

This bill threatens to make 3rd parties liable for user-created infringing content, threatens the DNS protocol that the web uses to turn http://www.google.com into an IP address so you can get there, and supplant the already-abused DMCA takedown process in favor of unilateral censorship of websites when they are accused of even linking to infringing content, all because the entertainment industry keeps having their best years ever… Uh, I mean, keeps getting ‘destroyed’ by piracy.

I’ve previously given my stance on piracy, so I won’t repeat it here. As an independent content creator, this bill scares the daylights out of me. Why should I be liable for comments made on my blog? What if my work should become popular (a guy can dream, right?), and somebody with deep pockets decides they don’t like me making money and accuses me of infringement, killing my way to connect with my readers?

Sure, that’s an extreme scenario (and a fairly unlikely one in my case) but the bottom line is, though the provisions of this bill are targeted at ‘rogue’ foreign sites, there is a fair amount of precedent for well-intentioned laws to be abused. The provisions of SOPA (and the matching Senate bill, PROTECT IP) go too far in their desperate quest to drive more money into the coffers of large media conglomerates. The Internet is the greatest invention in the history of humankind since the printing press, at least. Corporate greed should not be allowed to put an end to this wacky, wonderful, crazy thing that we’ve got here, with all its cats and rants and the bugs and the amazing people who create just for the sake of creating – can-fiction authors who know they’ll never see a dime, hilarious pweb videos and both the best and worst of the human race all put out there for everyone to see.

OK, so this wasn’t as short as I planned. Anyway, I stand in full support of Wikipedia, Google, Wired and more when I say these bills must be stopped.

Good day.

Amusing

So it seems that a post I made a few months ago – My Dungeon, Your Dragon – an essay I wrote on cooperative storytelling via D&D – is quite close to the name of a new web series, causing my blog to get a lot of what I assume are unintentional hits.

I find this unexpectedly hilarious.

I just hope the series is actually good, so I don’t get people leaving comments telling me about how the show sucks, when I actually have nothing at all to do with it. xD

Progress on Legacy continues forward. I’m really enjoying everything that Scrivener has to offer, and so far it’s done a bang-up job keeping me on track. I did discover an entire subplot to help build momentum at the beginning, but I am still heading along the path which will follow the outline of scenes that I devised, which is a vast improvement in my eyes.

I will be interested to see what happens when I am looking back at the completed project. How close will I have been to the outline? Were there any scenes I simply decided not to use?

This project is really also a process of discovery for me, trying to bolster my weaknesses as a writer and utilize my strengths to their highest potential. Can I pull it off? Well, it’s going pretty well so far. Let’s hope it stays that way!!

2012, Goals and Observations

As I type this, is it almost halfway through the first day of 2012. I have never been a big fan of the ‘New Year’s Resolution’, mostly because it seems to be part of the ‘Resolution’ process to abandon them approximately 5 1/2 days after making them, all the while cursing yourself and moaning about how it’s too hard and maybe you’ll try again next year, maybe. I made a resolution a few years ago not to make any more New Year’s Resolutions, because of my observing this very trend in so very many people.

Instead, I’ll choose to lay down some goals. Unlike resolutions, goals are something you generally strive to obtain because it’s something you want to achieve, rather than a (flimsy) resolve to stop doing something that you’re already doing. It can be a goal to do something like that, but it’s simply a better context as a goal.

I have some personal goals as well, but I’ll share here my writing goals for 2012.

– Complete, edit, revise & publish Arbiter Codex 2 (by 2nd quarter 2012)
– Write & publish at least one new short story, two novelettes & one novella (by end of year)
– Learn at least 3 new things about writing (by end of year)
– Win NaNoWriMo 2012 (November)

That’s what I’ve got so far. I’ll update the list in the future should I decide to add more, but given that I also have a family and a professional life to manage, not to mention school, I think that’s a pretty good list.

There’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about. Like any good author, I have a Google Alert set for myself, so that I can see when Google’s web-spider-bots index something relating to my name. Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that my books are popping up on underground ebook download sites. In essence, I’m being pirated.

Honestly, this doesn’t bother me. I’m a firm believer in the idea that obscurity is a greater threat to an indie writer like myself than piracy. I also know that no matter what anyone does, piracy can’t be stopped – at least, not completely – which is why I don’t put DRM on my work. There’s no point, because all DRM does is make it more difficult for people who paid for my work to actually read it. It doesn’t stop pirates; never has, never will.

Obviously, I put a lot of work into my writing, and I believe that it’s worth something, which is why I’ve chosen to put a price tag on it. However, the fact that my books are being pirated at all means that I’ve accomplished something – somebody actually likes my stuff well enough to copy it! This makes me feel more flattered than anything else.

So, all I ask is that if you should come to my books via an unauthorized download and you like them, please buy a copy from an authorized source. Failing that, please tell all of your friends to go buy copies from an authorized source. xD

As a side note, I have decided to take today’s gorgeous weather (~50′ F here in the Northeast New England) as Mother Nature’s promise that 2012 won’t suck as badly as 2011.

Well, at least until the world ends.

Writing Update

After my unsuccessful attempts at writing a worthy sequel to Elegy earlier this year, I took November off to work on a science fiction NaNo project and sort of clear my head. During that time, it became clear to me – for a number of reasons – that in order to be successful this time, I was going to have to do some outlining.

Normally, I do not outline. I just start with an idea and see where the story carries me. However, after spending nearly 75,000 words chasing an idea that simply didn’t pan out, I realized that another effort of similar magnitude that went nowhere was going to put me off writing for a long time.

Outlining is a strange beast, but I found that Scrivener is really helping me to keep everything in order. I have a folder which is full of nothing but short scene lines on the “index cards” on the corkboard, with short names that remind me what they are. They’re in the order I decided on, and they’re really only brief highlights of plot points. The story itself is expanding between them – I’m right now writing a sub-plot that was nowhere on my outline, but will serve to both get the story rolling and provide an obstacle right off the bat.

If I’m not too much mistaken, this version of Arbiter Codex 2 is going to be long. I’m standing at 7600 words in two and a half chapters, I’m excited about the plot that I’ve devised, and there’s still a lot of highlights left to go. Like… almost all of them.

My intent is to get it right this time. It’s going to take longer than I expected, but it’s going to be good, and I’m going to be proud of it at the end. That’s the goal, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with everyone when it’s completed.

Who knows… maybe now that I’ve figured out an outlining process that actually seems to work for me, I’ll get more reliable output! That would sure be nice.

On a side note, I am now reading Once We Were Like Wolves by M. Todd Gallowglas, and there will be a review up once I’ve finished it!

 

Review: Halloween Jack & The Devil’s Gate by M. Todd Gallowglas (@MGallowglas)

(Note: I read HJ&TDG via the Amazon Prime KDP Select lending option. My reading device was a combination of Kindle for PC and Kindle for Android.)

To be up front, I read Halloween Jack because I am a huge fan of Gallowglas’ First Chosen, which incidentally was named one of my Top 5 Books of 2011. I am also what you might call ‘friendly’ with the author on Twitter, who’s a great guy and I always love to read his tweets.

Halloween Jack and the Devil’s Gate is, at its heart, a folk tale. It stirs up feelings of stories featuring other characters named Jack – like Jack & The Beanstalk, for example. This is a story of whimsy and hearkens back to an age of storytelling when history was a murky blur and legends ruled and had power.

In fact, the power of myth, story and legend is one of the central themes in HJ&tDG. The mythical figure Jack o’ the Lantern (who keeps the demons away from Earth, chasing them back into Hell after they are allowed to come out on Halloween) loses his power, and it’s up to his distant descendants to do something about it.

The characters are larger-than-life, as they are in any good folk tale. This tale of the triumph of human ingenuity over adversity is a rollicking good read from beginning to end. John and Moira are heroes you can really root for, and the supporting cast (including my favorite side character, the ogre named Mickey) lends great color to the story.

The story has a steampunk-esque feel to it – the Devil’s minions use something called Steam Soldiers as part of their world-conquering army, which seem to be Victorian-esque robots, though they are never described in great detail. There is a gas-lantern feeling about the whole story, which covers locations such as Boston, rural Ireland, London and even ranges all the way out to Texas. A folk tale with globe-trotting heroes is exactly what this story sets out to be, and it accomplishes that task with panache and daring.

I do have to deduct minor points for a few technical issues – namely, editing ones. More than once, there is a homonym confusion. The most prevalent one is “heals” to refer to the back of one’s feet – the correct word is, of course, “heels”. There was one other homonym confusion I noticed which I do not now remember.

On the more technical side, I only encountered one actual typo, and for a ~40,000 word work, that’s excellent.

One of the joys of indie publishing is that all of these things could easily be fixed with a quick edit and re-upload to the sites, and nothing is committed to a massive print run where these minor mistakes would be set upon parchment in indelible ink.

With that, I award the final score for Halloween Jack and the Devil’s Gate:

For a great and engaging folk-tale about the terrors of Halloween and the triumph of human ingenuity, marred only by a few minor editing mistakes, I award 4 1/2 stars.

Note: Because the story itself is fantastic and editing errors can be easily fixed, in places which do not allow half-star reviews, I will be awarding 5 stars.

Thanks once again to Mr. Gallowglas for a great story; I am eagerly awaiting the next installment in his Tears of Rage series!