How To Find A Good Book – Ask A Blogger

Over the past few weeks the press and internet have been full of stories of dodgy goings-on in the frantic world of “buy-my-book”. There was the scandal of 5 star reviews being bought on Amazon and that of well-known authors setting up bogus Amazon accounts in order to give themselves glowing 5-star reviews and (worse to my mind) vicious 1-star reviews to their rivals.

Too many people have as a result thrown the baby out with the bathwater, saying that you cannot trust the free-for-all of the internet and you should stick to traditional print reviews by professional reviewers. But how many books would you discover that way? I have a women’s fiction newspaper in which I pick up the best articles and reviews from across the web and I therefore monitor the major newspaper sites. What I have found is that they all review the same books.

How is this? Is it because the publishers only promote a very limited number? Is it that the reviewers act as a cabal? Is it that newspapers only review books by “established” authors? And dare I say it – does money exchange hands, just as it does to ensure that a book ends up on major booksellers’ three for the price of two tables or even just prominently displayed on the shelves? I’ve no idea, but what is certain is that the majority of books (and I am talking about traditionally published books as well as indies) never get reviewed by these professional reviewers.

What is worse is that the newspapers tend to review only literary fiction and not genre fiction. This of course has an implication for women’s books, which can be dismissed as chick-lit, romance or just women’s fiction. No matter that romance outstrips literary fiction and all the other genres in terms of sales.

Where then can you turn for reviews you can trust? Where can an author go for reviews? The answer is I believe the burgeoning phenomenon of the book blogs. Until I published my first book only six months ago I had only been slightly aware of the wonderful, selfless world of the book blogger. The proponents of the traditional professional reviewers would pooh-pooh the amateur book bloggers (and have done so in various comments I have seen). But they are wrong to do so. Yes, many, but not all, book bloggers have no qualifications (such as English literature degrees), nor do some professional reviewers for that matter. But what book bloggers do have is a love of books. They write reviews in order to share what they have read with you. And some of them clearly do nothing else than read and review. I have a magic realism review site and I just about manage a book a week.

How do you know which book bloggers to trust? Simple – look at their reviews. Have they liked the same books as you and better still for the same reason? Do they provide you with the sort of review you need to make a decision? If the answer to these questions is yes, then start following the blog.

But how do you find the right blogs in the first place? You have a number of options:

• Try a search with two book titles you like and the word “blog” to find a suitable blog.
• Use one of the book blog directories, such as http://directory.kaysbookshelf.com, and http://www.bookblogs.org/blog-list. If you are interested in indie writers try http://www.theindieview.com/indie-reviewers/
• Or you might like to join the book blogs forum on http://bookblogs.ning.com

This post is part of the Celebrating Bloggers Blog Hop organised by Terri Guiliano Long.

Notes from a Story Editor - Structure

This article was first published on the Indie Exchange website

What is a story?
Every story we tell is an adaptation. There is a great deal of discussion and several books on the subject of how many basic plots there. Suffice it to say there are a limited number to choose from. For my novel the Mother of Wolves I chose the revenge story form. But every story will be unique because we make choices in telling it – which characters to use, which events to come out of the underlying story world. But even these are adaptations.

The underlying story world
The underlying story world contains the context of your story – its past, present, and future. It also contains the seed(s) of that world’s potential destruction. The main character reflects this world and indeed has within her the seed(s) of her own potential destruction.

This seed, (which is often a lack), upsets the equilibrium of the world and the central character and in so doing initiates and drives the story. As an author I need knowledge both of my character and her world and of the why – why this story, why told by me, why now,  i.e. I must plant a seed of potential self-destruction in the story world. I need to know the best way of testing the main character(s) so that I can develop the why.

For example for my novel Mother of Wolves although it is a story about revenge, I was interested in the choices one makes and their consequences.

We need to examine the physical and emotional world of the story – the home of the story.
For this we need to choose the main character(s), and their goal(s), the place, the period, the society, the main source of conflict and opposition. To this we add secondary characters and their goals, secondary sources of conflict and so on, until we have people the world.
For example in Mother of Wolves I chose:
1)      to make Lupa, the wife of the King of the Roads, the central character and tell her story
2)      to make the story Lupa’s search for revenge and safety for her and her sons
3)      to place it in a fantasy landscape along a great river bordered by a forest
4)      to set it at in a historical time
5)      to create two societies – the tribal world of the People of the Roads and the settled world of the Others
6)      to make both societies patriarchal and prone to politicking and betrayal, additionally Lupa’s People are subject to persecution by the Others
7)      Lupa’s enemies are her husband’s uncle, who plotted his murder, the Newharbour Guards who carried it out and lastly the Rebel general and his army.

N.B. There is a whole blog post to come about the issue of the flaw/lack in the home world and the central character when I write about the protagonist/antagonist relationship, but for the time being we’ll stick with story structure.

The Timeline
We unfold what we have developed on to a time-line. This is what Hannah referred to as the “Ur Story”. This normally breaks down naturally in to a three-part structure (more of that in another post).
So for Mother of Wolves I decided to start the story with the murder of Lupa’s husband and end it with the defeat of the rebel army. The three parts are:

1. Lupa’s pursuit of revenge against the guards and Uncle and their attempts to kill her
2. Lupa’s pursuit of Jo and the decision whether to kill him
3. The consequences of that decision with the fight against the rebel army.

There are two important things to note. Firstly as writers we do not need to follow the Ur story timeline when we structure our book or film, we can jump around, move backwards and forwards, whatever is best for the narrative, but the underneath it is the Ur story. And secondly the Ur story, whilst being limited by the timeframe, also can contain relevant history and even future.

I find these concepts of establishing the underlying story world and the Ur story extremely useful when approaching a novel. As a result of working with Hannah, I find that I have a novel’s structure in my head before I ever set pen to paper or rather finger to keyboard. As a general rule I don’t find I need to do major structural reworking at second draft.

Lupa – the woman leader, lessons from history

Lupa, the central character of Mother of Wolves, was originally a minor character in a children’s book I wrote (and abandonned). However she had made such an impression on one of my beta-readers that he suggested I write a book about her. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it a good idea, but the book was definitely not a book for children.

In a previous post I wrote about how I was inspired by three Czech 18th century folk paintings of the persecution of the Roma to write Mother of Wolves. As those of you who have read Girl in the Glass will know, I am interested in women overcoming prejudice and discrimination. As a historian I am also fascinated by great women leaders: women who, despite living and ruling in a male-dominated society, commanded the love and/or respect of their people. I first came to the attention of my mentor and junior school poetry teacher with a poem about Boudicea at the age of 8. My first major piece of writing (at 13) was a verse-play about Joan of Arc. Of all my historical heroines Elizabeth I is perhaps the most influential on the character of Lupa.

The book allowed me to explore what makes a successful female leader and what might trigger such a leader to step forward. In Lupa’s case the trigger is the betrayal and murder of her husband and the need to protect her children, but once on the road Lupa becomes the leader her people need in the face of the threat of genocide.

So what are the traits that Lupa shares with historic women leaders? Like Boudica Lupa is spurred into action by a desire for revenge, like Elizabeth I she has a genuine love of her people, like Joan of Arc she has self belief. Like Boudica she pulls together disparate tribes, like Joan of Arc she leads her troops into battle, and like Elizabeth I she surrounds herself with good counsellors. She is both charming and ruthless.

When I was younger some people suggested that as an up-and-coming poet I should study English Literature at university, instead I studied history. I have never regretted it.

Lessons of history - suppression of the women healers Part 2

The main character of my trilogy (Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows, Fear of Falling) is a woman healer. My books are fantasy/magic realism, nevertheless I am by training a historian and the lessons of history inform my writing and themes, so I began to research the story of the women healers.

Having destroyed the educated women healers (see previous post) by the end of the 14th century the authorities turned their attentions to the lower class women healers. As with the educated women healers the wise-women were faced with an alliance between the church and the new university educated (and therefore male) medical profession. The alliance’s motives were financial self-interest, misogyny and social control.

The majority of the population had no access to any form of medicine other than that provided by the local wise-woman. Even if they had, the medicine taught in universities was closer to magic than the empirical approach of the wise-woman. But whether the wise-women were healing their patients was not a consideration, the very act of healing was a crime and that crime was witchcraft. As one English witch-hunter said:

For this must always be remembered, as a conclusion, that by witches we understand not only those which kill and torment, but all Diviners Charmers, Jugglers, all Wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women…and in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver…It were a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially the blessing Witch, might suffer death.

The witch-hunts were not a case of mass hysteria, but organised state persecution. At the heart of it was the book Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which guided the witch-hunters. At the beginning of the hunt a notice was posted in the village commanding that if anyone knew or suspected a witch they should report her to the authorities, failure to do so was itself a punishable. If this resulted in the identification of a witch, she would be tortured to reveal more witches in the community. That torture is detailed in Malleus Maleficarum . The “witch” was stripped and shaved of all her body hair, and inspected for signs of the devil such as moles and marks, although not having such signs was simply seen as an indication that the witch had hidden them. Beatings, thumb screws and the rack, bone-crushing boots, and starvation followed. Soon other “witches” would be identified and so on. On continental Europe these witch-hunts resulted in many thousand executions usually by burning. At Toulouse 400 were killed in one day, 1000 died in one year in the Como area, whilst in 1585 two villages in the Bishopric of Trier were left with only on female inhabitant each. 

Women healers were not alone (there were also some male healers although they make up approximately on 15% of the numbers killed), it is hard to credit now but midwives were also under attack:  
Midwives cause the greatest damage. Either killing children or sacrilegiously offering them to devils. . . . The greatest injury to the Faith are done by midwives, and this is made clearer than daylight itself in the confessions of some of those who are afterwards burned.

The witch-hunts lasted from the 14th to the 17th century. By the time they finished possibly over a million women had died, much of the knowledge that had been acquired by generations of women healers had been lost and women’s roles in healing had been so denigrated that women had to fight even to be nurses.  

Notes From A Storyeditor - Where to start

This is the first in my series of notes about what I learned from my friend and professional story editor Hannah Kodicek. This was first published on the Indie Exchange website. 

The starting point for any story-making is the relationship with the audience. Although we writers may be sitting alone in front of our computer in a garret somewhere, the story exists only in that relationship, otherwise you’re not telling anything.

We start by understanding what we all have in common (audience and writer):

• Curiosity – this is inherent to human nature, it’s the reason we do so many things, one being picking up a book.
• The need to find context – what is it like, how does it fit with what I know/feel, how does it feel like to be someone else
• Need for pattern – again part of our nature, we will look for patterns and order even if they are not there, and there are a load of patterns which we will expect in stories
• Need for balance (equilibrium) – we feel disturbed if things aren’t fair, we want to put it right.
• And conversely the need to upset equilibrium – the need for the unknown, the thrill of risk.
• The need to think ahead causally – this is an extension of our need for pattern,
• But there is also the thrill of the unknown.
• Common cultural context – myths, history, fairytales, belief-systems etc.
• Archetypes – which Hannah described as “deep subconscious forces shared by all” and which are the subjects of numerous books
• The need to relate to others, which for me is the most important.

These commonalities are what we as writers build our stories on, for example every story starts with an imbalance which propels the story forward. We may play with them e.g. encouraging the reader to detect a pattern that isn’t there and so think ahead incorrectly. But the single most important thing is to access people’s emotions. Everything we write will stir some sort of emotional response in the reader. They will be gratified if their curiosity is satisfied or they feel they see a pattern or context. They will be thrilled and scared when we take them to somewhere unknown. But they will be dissatisfied if we promise and do not deliver.

Which brings me to us the writers. There are a number of questions we need to ask ourselves as we approach a story:

• Why am I telling this story? – Why me? Why now? Why do I care? (If you don’t the reader certainly won’t).
• How does the story fit with or challenge the context familiar to my reader?
• What is the emotional key to the story? What touches me most deeply? How will it resonate with the reader?
• What will I and the reader take from the story?
• What tools do I have to do the job?

These then are the fundamentals from which all storytelling flows and I always go back to them when I am working on a story. I find them particularly useful when I am working on the second draft. 

Lessons Of History - The Suppression Of Women Healers 1

I am a historian by training and I use history to give a reality to my books. I deliberately don’t fix the books in a specific time or place, but the subject matter and the details are influenced by my knowledge of and research into events in history. In this blog I intend sharing with you some of those “lessons of history.”

In Girl in the Glass my heroine Judith is warned about the dangers of becoming a healer. In the second book in the trilogy Love of Shadows (which I am writing now) she pursues her calling and puts her life at risk. The subject of the suppression of women healers over the centuries is a fascinating one.

Up to the 13thcentury women traditional healers (wisewomen) were practising their arts throughout Europe relatively without hindrance. Their medicines were born of traditions handed down through the generations and tested by use. In addition they were midwives and bonesetters. They were the only medical help available to most people and they had status in their communities as a result.

Then in the 14thcentury things changed. A new medical practitioner was being created – the university-trained physicians – one whose services were more expensive and elitist. Not better. The university medical training at that time was based on Galen’s concepts of the humours and governed by Christian doctrine. It did not have the empirical approach of the women healers and was mostly mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless the new male (nearly all universities were closed to women) physicians, supported by the Church, pushed for and got laws forbidding the practice of medicine by non-university trained healers. Suddenly women could not legally practice medicine. Of course given the low numbers of university medical students, these laws were unenforceable across the board, but they could be applied selectively.

The first targets were not the peasant women healers, but literate urban women healers who were in direct competition for the male physicians. In 1322 Jacoba Felice was put on trial in Paris – her crime practising medicine illegally. No matter that she produced witnesses verifying that she had cured them where the university physicians had failed, her competence was evidence of guilt.

The court found that: “Her plea that she cured many sick persons whom the aforesaid masters could not cure, ought not to stand and is frivolous, since it is certain that a man approved in the aforesaid art could cure the sick better than any woman

1. Perhaps the true reason for her prosecution and other women like her can be found in
2. Her accuser was a university-trained male physician.

One witness Jean St Omer stated that Jacoba had visited him repeatedly throughout a grave illness, never asking for payment prior to a cure. He affirmed that she had done more for him, and with far less demand on his purse, than any licensed physician. As her punishment Jacoba was excommunicated and fined. Nothing more is known of her. In some ways she was lucky, from then on the suppression of women healers started to a more deadly turn. More of that in a future post.

Notes From A Story Editor - Background

When I started to write novels I was encouraged to do so by a close friend. And not just any friend: Hannah Kodicek was one of the best story editors in the business. Hannah had had a varied and successful career as an actress, director, writer and latterly story editor in the film industry. She was story editor on the Oscar-winning Counterfeiters and occasionally advised friends with their novels – including Danny Scheinmann (Random Acts of Heroic Love) and of course me. 

Hannah was considered such an expert that she lectured on story structure and other aspects of story-making to people in the business on the EU funded ARISTA and MAIA programmes. Many writers will know of The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler – a book which is film industry required reading – which sets out in easily accessible form the mythic form of stories. Fewer will have read the works of Carl Jung and his followers, specifically The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell on which Vogler based his book. Hannah had gone direct to the source, studying myths and fairytales and Jung, Campbell, Von Franz and other Jungian writers. Her lectures therefore had an authority that few others in the business could muster. They also had a practicality and realism, that were important features of my friend.

She was moreover a wonderful educator, which made her work as a story editor all the more powerful. I never sat in one of her lectures, but I had my own private tutorials. We had wonderful sessions talking about story structure and what is more I asked her to read and feedback about my novels. I could tell that at first she was nervous, worrying that I might be sensitive about my babies and that it might impact on our friendship. She needn’t have worried, I loved out sessions. She had a way of not telling me what to do, but rather, like all great teachers, asking questions that made me think. She would send me off spinning unforeseen possibilities. She in turn enjoyed seeing what I then came up with. I was, she told me, the best of all her clients. 

Sadly Hannah died of cancer last year. I was writing Girl In The Shadows at the time and although we discussed it, Hannah never got to read the novel. “Don’t worry,” she said, “You don’t need me anymore, you’ve learned everything.” I’m not sure about that, but I have her notes and my memories of our conversations. Once it became apparent that she was dying, we talked about whether her notes could be made into the book she had always wanted to produce or maybe a website, so that future writers could learn as I did from what she had to say. Again she ran out of time. So I have decided to share with you some of what I learned as a tribute to a great story editor in this series of posts Notes From A Story Editor.  

A few weeks ago I agreed to do a guest post on The Indie Exchange – advice to other indie writers was the brief – the content was obvious, Hannah’s advice on the basics of storytelling.