“Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”
~ D.H. Lawrence. b. 11 September 1885
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Rick Bass: “It’s your duty to lie…”
8 Sep
“As a regular person, it’s your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it’s your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. Make your story big, magical, more meaningful than life is.”
~ RICK BASS
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Kurt Vonnegut: “All the great story lines are practical jokes.”
6 Sep
“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”
~ KURT VONNEGUT
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Harm’s Way enters Top 10 in hard-boiled mystery at Amazon
6 Sep
It’s a mini-milestone! HARM’S WAY has just entered the Top 10 in Amazon’s hard-boiled mystery category. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1992, I revised it extensively in 2012 (see backstory here) and republished it with Amazon and Smashwords.
Since December of last year I’ve offered it FREE on Smashwords to allow people to sample my writing, and thus promote my three other mystery thrillers. During this period, Amazon has toggled the price of Harm’s Way back and forth between free and $0.99. To date, there’ve been almost 15,000 downloads.
So if you like a very fast-paced mystery with a dose of hard-boiled action and dialog, and you don’t get your knickers in a knot over the occasional references to astrology (see that other story here), then scoop up a copy sooner than later.
Have a great day. As for me, I’m celebrating over breakfast with mimosas and — what else? — hard-boiled eggs !
~~~
HARM’S WAY
Montreal investigator with astrologer girlfriend searches for politician’s runaway daughter, only to become embroiled in a plot of corruption, decadence, greed and murder.
(digital $0.99, paper $8.99)
http://www.amazon.com/Harms-Way-ebook/dp/B005LVXIA2
Roald Dahl: “Writing is like going on a very long walk.”
5 Sep
“Writing is like going on a very long walk across valleys and mountains, and you get your first view and write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe onto a hill, and you see something else and write that. You go on day after day, getting different views of the same landscape. The highest mountain on the walk is the end of the book, because it’s got the best view, when you look back and see everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very long, slow process.”
~ ROALD DAHL
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Doris Lessing: “Trust our own judgment.”
4 Sep
“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad – including your own bad.”
~ DORIS LESSING
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Margaret Atwood: “It’s a shark-filled lagoon out there.”
3 Sep
“I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you’ve already done the good writing, you’ll still need the good luck. It’s a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.”
~ MARGARET ATWOOD
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Barbara Kingsolver: “Chain that muse to your desk.”
2 Sep
“I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”
~ BARBARA KINGSOLVER
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Book review Al-Quebeca: “Annand is a master craftsman of reader anxiety.”
15 Aug
A book review of Al-Quebeca recently appeared on the Serenity Now website, written by Val Tobin. Following is an excerpt:
For Sophie Gillette, Detective-Sergeant Homicide of the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), it starts out as a routine investigation of a hit-and-run during a January snowstorm in Montreal. It ends in a terrorist plot to disable the electrical grid, behead a visiting governor, and kill thousands of hockey fans with poison gas. These two events sandwich between them a generous filling of biker wars, arms smuggling by First Nations warriors, militant student activists, drug financiers, and a rogue professor with a doctorate in chemical toxicology.
As if that weren’t enough to keep Gillette occupied, she’s recently suffered the loss of her brother to a covert military operation in Afghanistan, and her mother has turned to the bottle to assuage her grief. She also has to deal with being an attractive woman in a male-dominated work environment. As with author Alan Annand’s other novels, the lead character in his latest offering, Al-Quebeca, has more than a heaping helping of issues with which to deal.
How his detective, Sophie Gillette, follows the trail of brain matter and paint chips from the hit-and-run scene to the terrorist cell makes riveting reading. Annand is a master craftsman of reader anxiety. Much of his magic lies in his painstaking research. As with his other novels, he’s been meticulous in attention to detail, and ensuring what he writes is credible.
He also faced the challenge of writing from a female perspective. When asked about it, Annand says that he’d wanted his protagonist to “face the challenges of discrimination, physical struggle and self-doubt that made the choice of a female lead seem appropriate.” Annand succeeds in not only making Gillette a believable character, but also manages to make the reader forget she was written by a man.
All of the above make Al-Quebeca an exciting, suspenseful novel with well-rounded characters and richness of setting and plot. But what makes it particularly compelling, as well as frightening, is how plausible it all seems. In an April 2013 blog entry, Annand talks about the likelihood of something like this happening, and says, “I wrote the first draft of Al-Quebeca in 2009 and revised it several times since then. Each time it all seems even more inevitable.”
Fans of astrologer/palmist/private investigator Axel Crowe will be delighted to hear that Annand is currently writing a sequel to Scorpio Rising called Felonious Monk. He’s also rewriting his first published novel, an SF mystery set in post-apocalyptic New York, called Antenna Syndrome.
Get Al-Quebeca in Kindle or paperback at www.amazon.com/Al-Quebeca-ebook/dp/B00CHQOY8O
All other digital formats at www.smashwords.com/books/view/309140
Read the full original review at:
http://www.serenitynowgifts.com/resources/articles/al-quebeca_book_review.php
Janet Fitch: “Torture your protagonist.”
11 Jul
“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting bobos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.”
~ JANET FITCH
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