Book Banter -- Kushiel's Dart

Title: Kushiel's Dart
Author: Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 701 pages
Plot Basics: As a child, Phedre is sold to as an indentured servant to Anafiel Delaunay, a mysterious nobleman. Delaunay uses Phedre to help him gain information about the politics in the land and through her spying, Phedre learns a secret that threatens the entire realm. To prevent the land she loves from being destroyed, Phedre along with some dutiful companions takes on a mission to the far reaches of the world.
Banter Points: First, let Word Nerd just get this out there... WOW! This book was incredible. The scope of the world that Carey creates (which looks strikingly like an alternate western Europe) is wonderfully rich in detail. Adding to the fascinating world is a cast of intriguing characters that Phedre interacts with. This book has it all: intrigue, politics, some romance, some fight scenes and they blend together to keep the reader hooked.
Bummer Points: Apparently, all the books in this series are this long, so Word Nerd's in for the long haul to read the next four that are released.
Word Nerd Recommendation: Fans of George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan take note. Word Nerd gives Carey's books higher marks than Martin or Jordan. For those that feel that Martin's cast of characters is too big, Carey's is more manageable and for those that got frustrated by Jordan's going-nowhere-fast tomes, Carey's book keeps the action at a good pace.
Bonus: Tune in Wednesday when Carey is the featured author in Author Answers.

Overwhelmed

Is it possible for a bibliophile to be overwhelmed by the number of books she is waiting to read?

She's currently in the middle of two books.

And the stack on the floor? Growing. Daily, it seems like.

Here's a glimpse at what Word Nerd at least hopes to read, based on what she has checked out/borrowed/bought:
--Our Man in Havanna, Graham Greene
--Murder in Clichy, Cara Black
--The Body Farm, Patricia Cornwell
--Over Sea, Under Stone, Susan Cooper
--Kushiel's Chosen, Jacqueline Carey
--Glass Houses, Rachel Caine
--Thin Air, Rachel Caine
--Gossip Girl, Cecily von Ziegesar
--Whistling in the Dark, Lesley Kagen
--Lady Friday, Garth Nix
--Wicked, Gregory Maguire
--The Blood Books, vol. 1, Tanya Huff
--Labyrinth, Kate Mosse
--Lying with Strangers, James Grippando

Something after Potter?

USAToday has a story about the book that's bumped Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from it's number one best-seller spot.

And it's not what you might think.

It's a young adult novel. About a vampire. And the third book in a series. Oh and the author, Stephenie Meyer never intended to be a writer. Sound familiar?

The full story is here.

Word Nerd saw the huge end-cap for this book at Barnes and Noble over the weekend and several teens (mostly girls) picking up this book.

Curiousity got to Word Nerd and she's put the first book on hold to see what the hubbub is about this series.

Author Answers with Michelle Rowen

This week's author is Michelle Rowen, author of the "Immortality Bites" series. Her second book in the series, "Fanged and Fabulous" just hit shelves in July.

For more on Rowen, check out her website.


WN: Your second book in the "Immortality Bites" series came out last month. With lots of vampire books on the market, how is yours different?




ROWEN: Vampires are very popular right now, and I’m so glad because I love stories about them. The good thing about writing stories with characters who have fangs, is there’s so many different directions you can go.
When I got the idea for my first book, BITTEN & SMITTEN, I had decided I wanted to do the opposite of what seemed to be the normal conception of vampires:make my main character a non-evil one who thought drinking blood was gross. The slayers in my books are the evil (or mostly misguided) ones and the vampires are the good guys. While in paranormal romance there are a lot of romantic vampire heroes, at the time there weren’t too many everygal vampires that readers could relate to.

WN: What can readers expect in the rest of this series?
ROWEN: The Immortality Bites series will be five books. Four of those will be from my heroine, Sarah Dearly’s point of view as she comes to terms with what it means to be a vampire and still try to lead a "normal life,"including the second book, FANGED & FABULOUS, that was just released in July. The third book, LADY AND THE VAMP, which will be out next April is more of a spin-off and takes a character who has been in the first two books – Quinn, the vampire-hunter-turned-vampire – and gives him a chance to be the hero. When we return to Sarah in Book 4: STAKES & STILETTOS, she will be attending her ten year high school reunion (with her 600-year-old boyfriend in tow) and realizing she’s not the only one who has changed drastically during the last decade.

WN: And you are also writing a suspense-type book that comes out next summer? What is that one about?
ROWEN: Under the pen name Michelle Maddox I am writing a speculative romance (which is basically a futuristicthriller) called COUNTDOWN (June ’08). It takes place in the near, dystopic future, and revolves around a street thief who finds herself on a reality TV show where death is the consolation prize with a hardened criminal as her partner. It’s much darker and sexier than my Michelle Rowen titles and I’m having a ton of fun writing it!




WN: What's your writing process like?
ROWEN: Back when I was an aspiring writer I would take lots of time to write. My first book took me two years from beginning to end, so I would write when I felt inspired. Now that I’m published and I have deadlines to deal with, I’m finding that I’m writing every day – even when I have writer’s block! Luckily I do write from an outline...I know what’s going to happen for the most part in the book. I admire writers who can sit down with no plan and tap away at a book. I used to try to write that way but felt that I definitely need a map. Sometimes characters or situations in the plot will take me in different directions, but a loose outline definitely helps make the trip easier.

WN: Were you a reader as a kid... what turned you on to reading/writing books?
ROWEN: I read voraciously as a kid. I loved Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, Judy Blume. I never read much until I was in fourth grade and our teacher would read us a chapter a day. I found that I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next and I can attribute that to sparking my interest in reading. I was probably most influenced to be a writer early on by Enid Blyton’s Adventure series because they were about normal kids having wild and exciting adventures.




WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you?
ROWEN: I love writing "The End." No, really. It’s the best part, and you get such an incredible rush from it. All of your imagination, all of your hard work is down on paper, and being publsihed I know that eventually (it usually takes a full year from that point until the book is available in book stores) somebody will read what came out of my crazy imagination. I have the coolest readers, too. They write me lovely notes telling me how much they enjoyed my books. What isn’t to love about that?




WN: What's the most challenging part of writing for you?
ROWEN: Getting to "The End." Ha ha. It goes without saying that a book has a lot of pages. And within those pages you have to have everything make sense. It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. Characters need to grow and change and fall in love. And sometimes, even if you know where you’re going with the story, there are some HARD days along the way getting to the end. And the doubt sets in – maybe this isn’t a good story, maybe I’m not such a good writer – but you need to push through that, because once you finish, there’s no other feeling in the world. For a while, anyhow, because then you have to start revising the thing to make it better!




WN: What's next for you as a writer?
ROWEN: I am contracted for two more books in my Immortality Bites series to finish the five books off. I’m still writing my futuristic romance. I have a couple of young adult novels written that I want to revise because I’d love to branch out in that direction.
Luckily I have about a hundred ideas for books I’d like to write, so the well isn’t going to run dry any time soon.

WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
ROWEN: Wow, tough question! Two great books about writing that come immediately to mind are ON WRITING by Stephen King, and BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott. Very inspirational and every writer, either published or aspiring, should have them, well dog-earred, on their book shelf. As far as a novel that has inspired me, it would have to be a really lousy novel that I read once, that after I threw it at the wall I decided that I could do better. Sometimes we don’t have to be inspired by great art. Sometimes something lousy can kick that muse into action, because if they could do it then so could I. And better! At least, I’m giving it my best shot.

Book Banter -- First Among Sequels

Title: First Among Sequels
Author: Jasper Fforde
Length: 362 pages
Genre: literary/comedy/mystery
Plot Basics: It's almost 14 years since Thursday Next's last adventure. During that time, she is maintaining to the world that she's done with Spec-Ops (which has been disbanded) and done traveling into the BookWorld as a Jurisfiction agent. Of course, she's really still doing both. The BookWorld is facing a major crisis as the ReadRate is plummeting as people are watching more reality TV instead of reading books. Thursday is trying to figure out how to stop it while meanwhile, training two new operatives -- Thursday1-4 and Thursday5, the fictional versions of herself from the books in the series. And facing herself could be the biggest challenge to date.
Banter Points: Only Jasper Fforde could likely write this book and pull it off. Literary puns, time-travel, merciless humor at the expense of popular books and a cliffhanger to boot... The Thursday Next books just keep getting better and better.
Bummer Points: The above-mentioned cliffhanger.
Word Nerd Recommendation: Hilarious for anyone's who's a bibliophile. Fforde is imaginative and clever and unique. But, don't start this series in the middle. It's far too complicated to be read out of order.

Quotable

This is from Jasper Fforde's "First Among Sequels." For the bibliophiles out there, Word Nerd thought it was worth passing on.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the writer might have died long ago.

Top Poet

The nation has a new top poet.

The Library of Congress last week named Charles Simic as the new poet laureate for the country. He's written 18 book of poetry. He replaces the previous laureate, Donald Hall.

For more about Simic, check out the Library of Congress information on him here.

For another interview with him, check out NPR's chat with him, which includes Simic reading a poem.

Book Banter -- A Crazy Little Thing Called Death

Title: A Crazy Little Thing Called Death (A Blackbird Sisters mystery)
Author: Nancy Martin
Length: 280 pages
Genre: mystery/chick lit
Plot Basics: Nora Blackbird stumbles onto another murder -- though this time it's not a body she's finds, but just a severed hand. When she finds the hand, she's again in the company of mob-family heir Michael "Mick" Abruzzo, who's once again, a suspect. When the police give up on Mick as the murderer, Nora takes it on herself again to solve another case of foul play in Philadelphia's upper crust.
Banter Points: The revolving cast of characters in these books is fantastic. While Nora and her two sisters, Libby and Emma, and Mick are staples, some of the minor characters like Nora's friend Lexie Paine are the best. Lexie's role is interesting to see in this book and Martin also introduces some new minor characters (like food critic Crewe Dearborne) that Word Nerd hopes wil be back in future books.
Bummer Points: This is the last (so far) of the published Blackbird Sisters books.
Word Nerd recommendation: Word Nerd is recommending that Martin write more in this charming series and meanwhile, if you are a fan of Evanovich, read this series in between the numbers and you might find that like Word Nerd, you like these better.

Priorities

Word Nerd likes (ok, loves and relies on) the hold system at the library.

That said sometimes this happens.

This afternoon she discovers that the copy of Jasper Fforde's "First Among Sequels," the fifth and newest book in his Thursday Next series that she's had on hold since May before the book ever came out is ready for her to pick up.

This should cause glee.

Except for this.

She's only 150 pages into Jacqueline Carey's fascinating and captivating "Kushiel's Dart" (which is 700 pages long with small-ish print).

So what to do? Stop reading Carey for Fforde? The Fforde book is two-weeks only and Carey has the option of renewing which makes it Septemeber before Word Nerd has to take it back. If she stops reading the Carey book, will she remember all the political intrigue going on?

This is the dilemma of a bibliophile.

Who else grapples with this?

Author Answers with Ed Lynskey

This week's author is Ed Lynskey, who's second novel, "The Blue Cheer" is out currently. He's also been a book reviewer, having reviews appear in The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review.

WN: Your new book, The Blue Cheer, is out. What's the story about?
LYNSKEY: Frank Johnson, needing a break, retires to the West Virginia mountains, an impulse almost everybody experiences once in their life. Only Frank acts on his impulse. Of course he plows into big trouble, or there’d be no yarn to spin. A few critics have reacted to the local populace, characterizing them as rough-hewed and provincial. Not really. Frank gets a big boost from several locals and most are just regular people. The bad guys are actually only a core few in the hate cult. But Frank adheres to Chandler’s P.I. code of ethics in that he’s seeing things through to the end, no matter how much things heat up..


WN: What kind of a character is Frank Johnson? You've got him in West Virginia in the new book...how does that change a detective story when the PI's not in Chicago, New York or another big city?
LYNSKEY: Setting becomes important, surely. If you make your detective “a fish out of water”, then he has to react to and keenly feel his surroundings. A stranger to a place sees and feels things more intensely than a resident does. It’s like going on vacation to a different locale. While there, you relax but maybe not so much. You drink in the local color, but you also pick up the vibes, good and bad. Since a detective is an observant soul, a foreign setting will dictate how he behaves. Frank in The Blue Cheer doesn’t go down the mean streets but into the mean boonies. In the fourth title, Troglodytes Frank flies off to Ankara in Turkey on a caper. So, he’s no stranger to large cities.



WN: What's your writing process like?
LYNSKEY: You know, I’ve found lately that it varies. The output and goals -- creating and editing words -- are the same. But the actual act of writing changes. The laptop enables me to unplug and go to different spots. Wireless Internet is a bane. I hate it. It’s too tempting to keep piddling on the web. Time is too finite.



WN: Having tried your hand at writing non-fiction and fiction, what's different in how you approach writing each?
LYNSKEY: Fiction (novels) certainly has a longer gestation period involving multiple edits and patient waits. I haven’t written that many long pieces of non-fiction. I’ve written paid reviews (for many years now) which I approach as any serious job. I offer my opinions and observations, trying to stay judicious and balanced in my remarks. My review editors often come back to me asking questions. The reading is enjoyable, but it’s tough to be an honest critic at times. Having written and published my own novels, I now understand and sympathize over what sweat and blood goes into their creation.



WN: Were you a reader as a kid... what turned you on to reading/writing books?
LYNSKEY: Great question. I liked to read as a kid, oh yeah. Some slow day, I’m going to drive out to the small town where I grew up and take a stroll down the aisles of fiction in the local library. That way, I can recall a list of the books I checked out back then. I’m certain all of those titles haven’t been weeded out. I flagged a few titles that I do remember on my book reading lists on Amazon. One I liked was Rifles for Watie, a historical Civil War novel by Harold Keith. It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville has stuck with me. I have nothing respect and awe for authors who write YA titles. In the mystery realm, I guess I was first turned on by reading the Happy Hollisters, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, and the Hardy boys.



WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
LYNSKEY: I’m not certain I can fix on any one book and say it influenced me more than any other title has. Over time your tastes as a reader can change, too. Books I enjoyed as an undergraduate on rereads have fallen short. One of my bugaboos is the labels slapped on different types of fiction that lead to adversarial comparisons. You know, “literary” v. “genre”, or “hardboiled” v. “cozy”. I believe any restless, intelligent reader will sample from a wide array of fields. Why restrict yourself?


WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you? What's the most challenging part of writing for you?
LYNSKEY: For me, writing the first draft to a novel is euphoria. It’s so cool to do the initial plot. The days fly by. But the time comes to do editing and revising, the most challenging phase. A close second to editing novel manuscripts is trying to promote and market the published titles. Or thus far, that’s been my experience. I also enjoyed the opportunity to talk about writing.

Book Banter -- The Deep Blue Alibi

Title: The Deep Blue Alibi
Author: Paul Levine
Length: 457 pages
Genre: legal/comedy
Plot Basics: Defense lawyers Steve Solomon and Victoria Lord are together again for their second big case. The law partners (in and out of the courtroom) are snagging some time at a beach when they are almost run over by an out-of-control boat. The boat, they discover, is piloted by none other than Victoria's "Uncle" Grif, her father's former business partner. They also discover a dead man in one of the cabins of Grif's boat and he hires Solomon and Lord to clear his name. But representing near-family, they find out is tougher because of the skeletons that are unearthed.
Banter Points: It was neat to see the thread for all the characters of how their parents' choices were influencing them now and how they reacted to things their parents had kept from them.
Bummer Points: This book felt more like two separate books at times. There was the story of Victoria and her work on the case with Uncle Grif and then there was Steve's story about trying to get his father reinstated to the Bar. Granted, those plots intersected some, but it would have been nice to have more of the banter between Steve and Victoria.
Word Nerd recommendation: This is another good beach read or airplane book. Still funny, still really good legal procedural.

July Bibliometer

Another month gone, another month of reading stats.

Here's the data from July's Bibliometer:

10 books
3,995 pages
averaging 129 pages/day

YTD:
51 books
17,820 pages
Average book length: 349 pages.

How July went and what's next for August

July's writing goal was 20 pages because of the craziness that happens every year in that month.
Twenty pages turned out to be do-able and actually Word Nerd went past that so here's the final look at the page count meter for July.

24 / 20 (120.0%)

(Word Nerd doesn't know why this graphic looks so choppy. It doesn't look that way at all in the screen for composing or previwing posts...)



That done, of course it's time to move on to August's goal. For August, the new page count meter is set again at 40 pages, like it was for June. Forty that month turned out to be quite manageable and also felt like significant progress.

Word Nerd recently plotted out the rest of her story and there's a bit more left than she first thought. Without agressive pages goals, it just feels like it's never going to get done.

Author Answers with Eric Stone

This week's author is Eric Stone. Stone has worked as writer, photographer, editor and publishing consultant. His first novel, Living Room of the Dead, is out and his second book comes out next month.

For more about Stone, see his website or his blog.

WN: Your second novel featuring ex-pat journalist-slash-detective Ray Sharp ("Grave Imports") comes out in September. How and why did you decide to do a series of books?
STONE: Actually, in the second book Ray has given up journalism and taken a job with a corporate investigations firm. I figured that would give him greater scope for getting involved in, rather than simply reporting on, the sort of investigations that might lead to interesting stories. It allows him to be an immediate participant, rather than simply trying to affect change through reporting his observations.
As a reader, I've always loved series books, at least to a point. I like seeing how the characters develop and change from book to book. If I like the character, or even if I don't but I find them interesting for some other reason, I want to know what's going to happen to them next. People are more interesting to me than the specifics of a crime or whatever tale they get caught up in. I'm mostly interested in crime or politics or economics or anything else, from the standpoint of what impact it has on people, or on a specific person.
As a writer, a series is a real challenge of my skills to try and keep it fresh. I want my characters to learn from their experiences and be affected by them as the continuing personal saga progresses. There's nothing worse than a static series character, or one who is bogged down by all the baggage they bring along from previous books. It's a juggling act to give a series character a personal life - which is important in order to give them context - but not have that get in the way of the story. I might have to kill off some girlfriends or colleagues along the way. I don't know if I'd be capable of doing that after a dozen or so books, but I'd be happy to find out. I figure that people buy series books because of the character, but they like each book in the series because of the story and how it affects the character.
As for how the series came about, the first three books (I just finished the first draft of the third one) and the planned fourth book in the series are all based on true stories that I covered as a journalist, or know well from my work as a journalist, in Asia from 1986 to 1997. I wanted to fictionalize the stories in order to better show the impact of these big, real events and issues on regular people. Making them a series, with a central character to act as the eyes and ears of the reader, gives them a continuity and focus that I think makes them more accessible and entertaining to a broad range of people.

WN: What kind of character is Ray Sharp? What kind of reader will really like him?
STONE: Ray is a smart, open-minded, but confused guy. He's a long time expatriate (an American in Asia), and he understands that he's an outsider in the world in which he's chosen to live. He knows that he can never be fully part of that world, but he'd like to understand it as well as he can. At times he can be morally ambiguous because he wants to respect things the way they are and knows better than to try and impose his cultural or personal judgements on them. But he also wants to do the right thing and sometimes his idea of the right thing and respecting the local ways of doing things, come into conflict with each other.
And sometimes he overthinks these dilemmas. He has a prostitute for a girlfriend and he can't bring himself to condemn what she does or even to ask her not to do it. In some ways he even sort of likes it. But at the same time he clearly sees the terrible economic and political forces that have pushed her and other women into it, and tries to do what he can to fight the people who exploit women like her.
In some ways he's too smart for his own good, and so he never quite knows what to make of things. When he acts, it's often on instinct, or to help a friend, because when he's thinking, his intellect often paralyzes him. Still, he's good at thinking his way out of bad situations.
He doesn't much care for violence, but he's seen more than his fair share of it. He's not any kind of expert in any of the violent arts, but he's willing to do what it takes to protect himself and the people he cares for. He's dogged and loyal. He likes to drink, a lot. He likes sex, and is happy to have it with hookers, as well as with women he has actual relationships with. (Although his longest current relationship is with a hooker.) That said, he avoids sex in the second book (GRAVE IMPORTS), having been traumatized by what went on in the first book (THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD.)
Ray's an everyman, he's not a superman. He's confused sometimes, inconsistent. He judges himself but tries not to judge others. He's honest in ways that bother other people sometimes. At his core he has a very good, deep heart. And he's smart and funny and observes a whole lot of really strange, quirky stuff that he describes well. What's not to like? I think some readers might disapprove of him, might want to slap him around from time to time, but I think that makes some people like him even better.

WN: What’s your writing process like?
STONE: I write every day, even on weekends if I can. Even if I'm not working on something specific I make a point of writing something just to keep in practice. Even if it's only for an hour. When I'm working on a book, I usually write for three to four hours in the morning, then desperately look for someone to have lunch with so as to talk with a real human being. Then in the afternoon I do research and editing. (My brain is too swamped with all kinds of thoughts to be very creative in the afternoon.)
I don't outline, although I do usually end up with a few sheets of notes to keep track of who's who and what's what and bits of research that I want to sneak into the story somewhere.
I've now written four books, and with each one there has come a point where I almost felt as if the book started writing itself. That's usually somewhere from half to two-thirds of the way through. By then the story and the characters have all built up their own internal logic to the point that they've come alive in my head and I feel like I'm simply reporting on them. It can get strange. In the third book, the one I've just finished writing, one character unexpectedly hauled off and shot another character toward the end. I hadn't planned it that way. And when it happened it made me change a whole lot about what I had planned for the end of the book. But, there I was, innocently writing, when all of a sudden it just made perfect sense that the shooting would happen. And so it happened. And so that changed how I ended the book. But it was better that way, a lot better. Damn characters can get uppity that way sometimes.

WN: Having tried your hand at writing non-fiction and fiction, what’s different in how you approach writing each?
STONE: For non-fiction I do enormous amounts of research, until it reaches a critical mass at which point the book (or article - I've written one non-fiction book, WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL, but hundreds of articles) kind of writes itself. I rarely do any more research once I've started writing. Occasionally something I write in non-fiction will spark a question and I'll have to look it up, but generally it's a well-defined two part process.
The easy thing about non-fiction, too, is that it doesn't have to make as much sense as fiction. You can rely on simply reporting the facts. If you've done your research and got your facts straight, it doesn't matter how bizarre or illogical the story is. If that's the way it happened, so be it. If a non-fiction reader comes across something that doesn't make any sense to them, but you've done your research, they might react by saying, "Wow, that's sure strange. Truth really is stranger than fiction."
But you can't get away with that in fiction. If a fiction reader comes across something that doesn't make any sense, they might say, "Yeah, right, what's wrong with this idiot," and throw the book across the room. (At least that's what I tend to do.)
I can also speculate more in fiction, which makes it, in my mind, a better medium for getting ideas across. When I was a journalist I adhered very strictly to the concept of non-advocacy journalism. I would never go into a story thinking that I wanted to make such and such a point with it. I'd just report it and let the chips fall where they might. If there weren't fully documented, usually with at least two sources, facts to report, I wouldn't report them. You can get away with a lot more in fiction. In THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD, some of the most gruesome scenes take place in a brothel on an island in the South China Sea that is either run by, or certainly tolerated by the Chinese Navy. Such brothels exist in real life. And they exist with the knowledge and sometimes participation of the Chinese Navy. I know it, every reporter in Hong Kong, Macau and southern China knows it. But that's not enough to write about it in a non-fiction book. If you want to do a conscientious job, you'd need actual, on the record or eyewitness sources to back you up. I can get away with writing about it in my novel. It's fiction. (Yeah, right.)

WN: Were you a reader as a kid… what turned you on to reading/writing books?
STONE: Reading was one of my favorite things to do as a kid. In part it was because I always hated sleeping and I had a good flashlight that I kept fresh batteries in - for reading under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep. My parents are both huge readers, and I think that's what set me off. I learned to read fairly young and never much cared for kids books. My favorite books, starting when I was about five or six, were a series called Landmark Books. They were history and biography and some science, written for kids, but not in a particularly childish way. My parents were both also great story tellers. Our family would go on drives to explore the city - Los Angeles - or other places around Southern California and my parents would spin yarns about all the places we'd see. That led to a lifelong addiction to urban exploration and learning about and telling stories about new places. Writing just always seemed like part of it. I've been writing stories as long as I can remember reading them. Once again, it was something my parents always encouraged.

WN: What’s the best part of being a writer to you? What’s the most challenging part of writing for you?
STONE: I can't imagine doing anything else. Most writers will tell you that they'd do it for free, or even pay to do it if they had to. And I'm like that. It sounds dumb. But after breathing and food it feels like the most natural thing I do. I love the sound of it in my head. Sometimes I'll be writing and I'll be tapping my feet to the rhythm of it, or laughing and shouting and carrying on at some of the things that are coming out of my brain, or cackling with glee over some particularly swell (so far as I'm concerned) turn of phrase.
There are also physical reasons why it's so great. I work at home. Even in L.A. I almost always avoid traffic because I can pick and choose when I go places. I can wear shorts and a t-shirt or sweatpants and no shoes to work. Strangely, and maybe this will change if I ever become a really famous writer, but I also love the promotional side of it. I love driving around to bookstores and libraries and talking with people about books, especially my books, and other subjects that pop into my head. I'd do that happily anyhow. And now, sometimes I get paid for doing it.
It can be challenging. When I'm actually writing, it's a solitary enterprise. Email is both a good and bad thing. Send me an email in the middle of the day and I'm likely to respond to it immediately - because I want the human contact. Whenever I email a writer friend in the middle of the day and they email me back right away, I know they're trying to write. But then I email them back right away and before long an hour can be shot with exchanging emails. Actually knuckling down and doing the job and not getting distracted is tough. There are times when my house is way cleaner than it needs to be. Or I cook a much more elaborate and complicated dinner than I might have otherwise. Discipline is the tough part.
For most writers, money is the toughest part. They need to find time to write around their day job. I'm lucky in that I don't, at least for the foreseeable future, need a day job. If I needed to go to an office to earn a living every day, I'd still write, but I wouldn't have as much time for it and I'd have to sacrifice a lot of other things to do it.

WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
STONE: MOBY DICK. I read it for the first time when I was about 10. I'm not sure I fully understood it, but one of the things I love about it is that I don't think it's a book that can be fully understood. It is so rich, so full of things at every level, that I don't think I'll ever entirely get it. I reread it about once every 10 years and it seems fresh to me every time. It's a great adventure story. It's full of history and science and folklore and mysticism and philosophy and all of that is enhanced by the sheer, powerful, raw emotions contained in it. It's full of remarkable characters - the people, of course, but also the whale and the ship and the ocean and even the seabirds, all of which are some of the best realized characters in literature. I think the problem that some people have with it is that they can't quite catch onto its rhythm. "Call me Ishmael." is one of the greatest opening sentences ever written because it immediately sets out a tone and a tempo for the book. (And it does it in only three, perfectly chosen words. When I was a kid I loved Mad Magazine's version of it, that started: "Call me Fishmeal.") If you can hook onto that tone and tempo, it's like hooking your car up to one of the tow hooks in a carwash, you just get pulled straight through.

Book Banter -- Stardust

Title: Stardust
Author: Neil Gaiman
Length: 248 pages
Genre: fantasy/YA
Plot Basics: Tristran Thorn makes -- like young men who are in love do -- a rash promise to the girl of his dreams, the very beautiful Victoria Forester. To win a kiss, or may her hand in marriage or maybe his heart's desire, Tristran agrees to go retrieve a star that they saw fall. Tristran's journey takes him deep into the world of Faerie and he's not the only one looking for the star. Additionally, a witch-queen, a murderous heir-to-a-throne and his ghostly brothers seek, the star as well. And the star? Angry, hurt and insolent, she's not so thrilled about Tristran's plan either.
Banter Points: This was the first Gaiman book Word Nerd ever read (sometime after it came out in the late 90s) and loved it.
Bummer Points: Word Nerd thinks this book is too short. Seriously. Ther could have been plenty more story here about Tristran's adventures and it wouldn't have gotten old to Word Nerd.
Word Nerd recommendation: Since there's a movie coming out of this book, if you at all inclined to see the movie, read the book first. Gaiman has had quite the hand in working on the film, but it's just never quite the same, going from a book to a movie.

Book Banter -- Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too

Title: Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too (A Blackbird Sisters mystery)
Author: Nancy Martin
Length: 260 pages
Genre: mystery/chick-lit
Plot Basics: Nora Blackbird (again) is the one to happen across the latest dead member of Philadelphia's upper crust. This time, it's Zell Orcutt, owner of the new restaurant Cupcakes (think a Hooters-type establishment here) and all-around-dirty-old-man poised to inherit (read, rip off) an old-money family, the Fitches. Nora starts snooping and comes up with plenty of suspects. And plenty of cases of morning sickness as well, leaving readers with more than one mystery as Nora tracks down the case and deals with who is the baby's father?
Banter Points: This series is great. Nora and her sisters are riot, the old-money society is perfectly quirky, bordering on truly nuts, Nora's got great friends and her hunky mafia-connected on-again-off-again boyfriend Mick Abruzzo doesn't hurt either. The mystery hangs together well with a great twist at the end and the humor is laced throughout the book. And the best part? The characters in this series change. Nora and Mick's relationship changes, characters get older and try new things (like Nora's nephew Rawlins).
Bummer Points: Martin tends to leap some in time between titles and then fills in what the reader misses through backstories.
Word Nerd recommendation: If you liked the early Janet Evanovich stuff before every one of her titles became the same, these books are for you.

Book Banter -- Deliverer

Title: Deliverer (Foreigner series bk. 9)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Length: 357 pages
Genre: sci-fi
Plot Basics: SPOILER ALERT

Bren Cameron, diplomat and human advisor to Tabini, the head of the atevi world, is back on the planet after several years in space and a mad-cap race back to the capital to put Tabini back in power after a coup and hoping for life to settle down. Tabini's young son, Cajeiri, who went with Bren to space, finds his new life in the capital exceptionally boring. But the political adversaries who want Tabini out of power make one last try, this time it's Cajeiri they target and Bren is again called upon to put the situation to rights.

Banter Points: Cherryh writes several chapters from Cajeiri's point of view which were excellent. It was a wonderful break from the long internal thinking sections from Bren's POV that had dominated the other eight books in this series.
Bummer Points: Book eight, in Word Nerd's opinion, would have been a much better place to end the whole series. The ending was tighter, more dramatic and resolved things almost as well as the ending of this book did.
Word Nerd recommendation: All in all, a good series. It's not the best series for a reader who wants non-stop action; there's a lot of introspection on Bren's part throughout the books. But, if you want a good series with a race of aliens that act alien and don't just have bumps on their foreheads, these books are great.

Book Banter -- Prince of Chaos

Title: Prince of Chaos (Amber Chronicles, bk. 10)

Author: Roger Zelazny
Length: 225 pages
Genre: fantasy/sci-fi
Plot Basics: Family politics are on the move, but this time, it's not the royal family of Amber that's dogging Merlin's steps, but the other side of his family in the Courts of Chaos. Turns out, the last king of Chaos has kicked it and Merlin's surprisingly third in line for succession. But just who's pulling the political strings is tricky and Merlin doesn't want to be anyone's puppet.
Banter Points: The Courts of Chaos! Wow. What a strange place. Laid out on way lines with hidden rooms and places that fold over each other. It's an amazingly executed vision that Zelazny was able to get this very strange place across to his readers.
Bummer Points: The end. This is the final book of Zelazny's Amber Chronicles and for the amount of upheaval a reader goes through with both the Amber courts and the Courts of Chaos, the end kind of drops off after a very fast resolution.
Word Nerd recommendation: Word Nerd's said it nine more times before this for the rest of the books in the series, but she'll say it again. Fantasy fans: Zelazny is one of the masters. Read him.

Author Answers with Dave Zeltserman

One more author to keep your eyes open for when prowling around the new books in the bookstore is this week's author, Dave Zeltserman. His latest novel, "Bad Thoughts" recently came out.

You can catch up more with Zeltserman on his blog.

WN: "Bad Thoughts" comes out this month... what's this story about and what kind of reader will it appeal to?
ZELTSERMAN: At one level “Bad Thoughts” is a thriller that’s a blend of horror and crime. Recent murders eerily similar to his own mother’s murder twenty years earlier has homicide detective Bill Shannon questioning his sanity as evidence piles up that points to him as the killer. On another level, the book is about survival—specifically surviving tremendous emotional and physical abuse as an adolescent without letting it destroy you. As far as what kind of reader the book will appeal to, I’ll quote from a few of the reviewers for Bad Thoughts so far. According to Midwest Book Review, Bad Thoughts is a must read for thriller fans. According to writer Bill Crider, it’s for anybody looking for a hardboiled anybody-can-die-at-anytime book that’s a change of pace from the usual. Booklist calls it “a compellingly clever wheels-within-wheel thriller... An ingenious plot, skillfully executed.” The book is an intense read, but it’s fast-paced with lots of twists and I think readers looking for something a little different as far as thrillers go will enjoy it.


WN: It sounds like you worked on "Bad Thoughts" for quite some time. What made you stick with it?
ZELTSERMAN: It wasn’t so much that I worked on the book for a long time as that I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it for a long time. Back in ’97 I wrote Bad Thoughts and back then I was able to get an editor at Warner Books to look at it. He liked it and we ended up going through three informal rounds of editing before he submitted it to his editorial board where it got rejected. In January 2006 I took Bad Thoughts out of the drawer and sent it to Five Star who ended up buying it. If nothing else I’m persistent. In 2004 I sold my first novel, Fast Lane, which I had written 12 years earlier—first to an Italian publisher and then to Point Blank Press in the US.

WN: What's your writing process like?
ZELTSERMAN: I’ll write a detailed outline of a novel before I begin. 6-7 pages will usually translate to 75,000 words. Once I start writing I almost always make detours from the outline—subplots develop, new characters show up—sometimes major ones. The book becomes something organic, taking on a life of its own, but so far I’ve always navigated back to my outline no matter how far off track the detours might’ve taken me.

When I’m working on a novel I try to write each day—usually 1-2 hours each night, and 5-6 hours each weekend day or holiday. Sometimes it’s a struggle to get 300 words done for a day, sometimes the writing flies and I’ll get 3,000 words. After each 50 page chunk, I’ll spend some time editing that chunk before working on anything new.

The most important part of the process is when I’m done. My wife and a core group of readers will read the book and help with editing. That’s the phase where the book gets tightened up and becomes something I can send to my agent.

WN: Were you a reader as a kid... what turned you on to reading/writing books?
ZELTSERMAN: I was a voracious reader as a kid. I started off in 1st grade reading the Freddy the Pig Detective series, at some point moved onto comic books, Mad Magazine, then fantasy books, including HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard’s Conan series, and then sci-fi, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series (my dad had all of them), before discovering crime fiction. I was 12 when I first read “I, the Jury” by Mickey Spillane, and I was hooked. A friend later introduced me to Hammett and Chandler, which I quickly devoured, and then I discovered Rex Stout, which I loved. By college I had read most of the classic mystery/crime novels. By then I was reading close to a book a day, mostly classics. My school library had a complete collection of Edgar Allen Poe (which is massive), and within a month I had it read.

I started writing occassional stories back in high school, and had my first story published in my high school’s literary magazine, but it was mostly a lark. I was always more of a math guy, majored in computer science and math in college, and thought I had no right writing fiction. But it was something I always enjoyed and gravitated back to. The last four years I’ve been taking it very seriously.

WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you? What's the most challenging part of writing for you?
ZELTSERMAN: The best part is when I’m writing. When I get completely immersed in what I’m writing it’s the best feeling in the world—probably when I feel most alive. I love the creative part of it. The most challenging (worst) part of it is the waiting. As a writer you’re always waiting. Waiting to hear back from an agent. Then when you get an agent, waiting for your book to sell. The worst is when you hear an editor wants your book and then you have to wait to see if she can get it through her editorial board (the first 10 or so times with me, the editors struck out getting my books through). Then once you get the offer, waiting for the contract, then waiting for the book to be published, then for the reviews. You’re always waiting, and as a writer it can tear you up. What works best for me is to dive into another project. When I’m working on something the waiting doesn’t bother me.

WN: What's next for you as a writer?
ZELTSERMAN: Serpent’s Tail is going to be publishing a trilogy of noir books of mine—Small Crimes, Pariah and Killer—that are based loosely on a “man just out of prison” theme. The first of these will be out next March, and I’m very excited about this.

WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
ZELTSERMAN: Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. The book completely changed my view of writing. This was probably the first unreliable narrator that I came across-in this case what appears to be a down-on-his-luck decent guy who turns out to be out of his mind. The way Thompson suckered you into this guy’s private hell was remarkable, but more than that I never saw a book before that took the kind of chances that this book did. It opened my eyes to the fact that there are no set rules if you can make it work. The ending was mind blowing—the train of thoughts coming from both sides of a schizophrenic personality as they intersect. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Thompson was one of the great pure writers of the last 50 years. Reading that book changed my whole outlook on writing, and really freed me to write the way I wanted to.

Word Nerd gets her book

One of Word Nerd's newspaper colleagues snapped this photo of her Friday night (or make that Saturday morning) around 12:20 a.m. right after she got her copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

This is Word Nerd in costume (yes, she was a Slytherin on Friday with that green striped shirt under her robe) with book, book pass, souvenir Marauder's Map, photos from the Wizards' Feast and librarian pal Sandy Joseph from the Oshkosh Public Library.

Yep. Excitement over a book.

Book Banter -- The Hunt

Title: The Hunt
Author: Allison Brennan
Length: 391 pages
Genre: romantic suspense

Plot Basics: Twelve years ago, Miranda Moore was the lucky one. After she and her friend were kidnapped by a serial killer that the press dubbed The Butcher, Miranda managed to escape. With the help of Special Agent Quincy (Quinn) Peterson, Miranda helped the FBI piece together a lot of the evidence on the Butcher, but never enough to find him. Now, working in Search and Rescue, Miranda has dedicated her life to finding the killer. He's struck again, and Quinn Peterson also comes back to work the case. But being back around Quinn also does a number on Miranda's heart

Banter Points: This book was definitely better than Brennan's first (The Prey). The plot was tighter, the romance more believable, etc. Word Nerd could really get into the characters of Miranda and Quinn and see how this one case had affected them so much.

Bummer Points: Brennan still is repetitious. She repeated facts over and over from the backstory. Maybe it's just Word Nerd, but the repetition was a tad insulting as a reader, like Brennan didn't trust her readers to get it the first time.

Word Nerd recommendation: A good beach book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Wow.
Again, wow.

Word Nerd spent the day reading and with the emotional roller coaster of the book, was tired, tired, when she finished.

So as not to ruin things, she won't go into the plot and who lived and died and all.

But she's got to say this one thing: Snape. Amazing.

HP Minus 14 hrs and 40 minutes

Yeah, Word Nerd is just the teensiest* bit excited about the release of the final Harry Potter book at midnight tonight.

*Teensiest here means: can hardly contain the excitement and anticipation.

Oshkosh, where Word Nerd is, is decking out the downtown for a huge event today. Forget Main Street. Today it's Diagon Alley.

Word Nerd is on the Harry Potter beat all day and you can join her in a special forum chatting about the boy wizard and the downtown event throughout the day. We'll hash out predictions for the book, best-loved moments, most favorite characters, and more as we anticipate midnight and finding out all about the Deathly Hallows.

Reaching the end

Unless you're living off the grid, there's probably no way you haven't heard that the final Harry Potter installment comes out at midnight tomorrow.

The midnight release will undoubtedly launch of a flurry of all-night (or all-the-next-day, for those who are a bit older) readers who will devour the ending of the popular series about the boy wizard.

Word Nerd is obviously going to be one of those one-day readers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But reaching the end of the series brings a twinge of ambivalence. It's the end. After this, no more wondering what will happen to Harry at school in his next year. No more Quidditch matches. No more dreaded Potions lessons. This is it.

And Word Nerd's not only facing this with Harry, but with two other series as well.

Her current book, "Prince of Chaos" is the last of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles. Next on deck, C.J. Cherryh's "Deliverer," the ninth and final book in her Foreigner series.

Word Nerd didn't plan the timing to come out this way. She started reading Cherryh's series back in October and Zelazny in November.

But now, she's going to be saying a goodbye of sorts to not just Harry, but also the royal family of Amber and Bren Cameron (Cherryh's human protagonist.)

Granted, being done with some series opens the door for picking up a new series and finding other enchanting characters to spend months with.

Meanwhile, there is this sort of impending sense of loss. Obviously, for some people, this will be foreign idea... they are book characters, for crying out loud. But as a reader, when you've spent months (or in Harry's case, years) with these characters, watched them learn and grow and change, it's hard to let go.

Does anybody else relate to this feeling? Are there characters you were sad to leave when a series ended?

Author Answers with Jon Armstrong

Jon Armstrong, this week's featured author, didn't start as a writer. He was a travel agent for a while, worked for Pan Am for a while and then became a graphic designer. "Grey" is his debut novel.

For more on Armstrong or to read the first chapter of the book, check out his website.


WN: What kind of a story is "Grey?" Where did the idea for this story come from?
ARMSTRONG: "Grey" is a Romeo and Juliet love story set in a future where everything has become entertainment, where pop culture has gone completely to seed (yes, I'm sorry to say I don't think we're there yet), and corporations have completely co-oped celebrity for their own needs. We follow Michael Rivers, a wealthy, handsome former child star who, when the story begins, has rebelled from the bright, gaudy, narcissistic world in which he lives, only to be dragged back by a crisis with his family's business when he meets Nora and falls in love.

The idea came slowly over many years and rewrites. Originally the idea was a reversal of teenage rebellion. Instead of the kids being into loud rock and roll and counter culture, I wondered, what if in the future the world became so loud and neon the only way to rebel was to become quiet, subdued, and grey?


WN: How did working in a travel agency and in graphic design contribute to writing a novel?
ARMSTRONG: It paid the bills and helped keep me sane. Which is to say that nowadays, as I both work and write at home, I sometimes miss the water cooler camaraderie of work in an office.
Grey was not the only novel I have written. I have a metaphorical drawer full (of course that's really a hard disc full). But I kept going back to Grey, looking it over, liking the language, but feeling it needed something more, until last year, that is.


WN: You've done some promo videos for the book, a new trend lots of authors are trying. Is it working for generating buzz or interest?
ARMSTRONG: It is. I was thinking of doing many more movies when I began, but I found my ideas soon outmatched my video abilities and I got bored with the idea of me sitting before an unblinking camera and just talking. Also, I have mixed feelings about the videos as it was just about impossible to find or make images that I thought fit, and I am also aware that my vision of the book may differ from that of the readers and, since I don't consider myself a video artist (I don't actually consider myself an artist at all—but a craftsman—however that's another interview!), I decided to stop after just a few.


WN: Were you a reader as a kid… what turned you on to reading/writing books?
ARMSTRONG: I read a strange assortment of things: lots of Buckminster Fuller, Jack London, O. Henry, and James Michener to name a few. However, in junior high and into the beginning of high school I wanted to be a painter and saturated myself in Matisse, Picasso, and later other abstract painters. But when I felt like I was finally developing my own style of painting, my interest was diverted by a wonderful drama teacher and I turned to improv, comedy, and writing. But I think that painting, and later work in the graphic arts, informed and nourished the visuals in my writing.

WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you? What's the most challenging part of writing for you?
ARMSTRONG: The best part of being a writer is the writing. It's the worst part too. When things are going well at the computer, it's fun, thrilling, funny (I admit to making myself laugh at times), and an adventure. When things aren't going well it's painful and depressing. Many writers would probably say the same.

Sometimes the most challenging thing is staying focused. I get ideas for new things all the time. I saw some titles of songs the other day and wanted to start a new book with them as chapters. I overhead a couple talking on the subway and thought they would be great characters! My wife told me a story about her job and I wanted to write about that.

WN : What's next for you as a writer?
ARMSTRONG: I am working on a sequel to "Grey" called "Yarn". It actually starts about fifteen years before "Grey" and follows Mr. Cedar, one of the characters from "Grey".

I'm looking to continue to flesh out the world of "Grey" of the super rich and super poor, and delve farther into possible future fashion fads and their harrowing consequences.

WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
ARMSTRONG: This is difficult, as I have several books I love and reread often, but I'll go with Witold Gombrowicz's "Kosmos". The original translation, which, I understand isn’t quite as accurate as the new one, but unlike the adage, lost in translation, I found the language of the original better. Anyway, I've read it at least four times and now that I'm thinking about it again, feel like I'd like to reread it again soon. It inspired me in the way it mixed humor, the macabre, insanity, and banality.

Book Banter -- Knight of Shadows

Title: Knight of Shadows (Chronicles of Amber, book 9)
Author: Roger Zelazny
Length: 251 pages
Genre: fantasy/sci-fi
Plot Basics: Merlin, a sorcerer is his own right and son of Corwin, one of the Amber Princes, is still trying to untangle the death attempts on him over the past few years. And in his seeking, he's been caught up in a plot between Amber and the Courts of Chaos. The magic -- the Pattern and the Logrus -- that controls both places wants to claim Merlin for their own, since he's descended from both. But Merlin has other ideas... ones that generally involve living when the Pattern and the Logrus might want him dead.
Banter Points: Zelazny's travel-and-then-fight plotline works again in this book as it has in the eight previous without seeming overly repetitive. Many of the familiar characters and magical items are back.
Bummer Points: Like one of the books in this first Amber cycle (books 1-5), this one gets into very hard to follow images as Merlin tries to navigate where he is. The images are jarring because they are so unlike anything a reader will have really seen.
Word Nerd recommendation: Still a must-read series for anyone who says they are a fantasy fan.

Book Banter -- Solomon vs. Lord

Title: Solomon vs. Lord
Author: Paul Levine
Length: 576 pages
Genre: legal/comedy
Plot Basics: Victoria Lord is the newest prosecutor hoping to make it big by working in the D.A.'s office. That is, until a case about smuggling animals lands her across the aisle from defense lawyer Steve Solomon whom she despises... and in jail in contempt of court. After that case goes to the birds, Lord teams up with Solomon to defend a rich trophy wife accused of murdering her husband. Solomon is hoping the case will make him rich -- and appear stable -- so that he can win custody of his autistic nephew, Bobby. But as Solomon and Lord work on the case, their love-hate relationship may either get them disbarred or find them disrobed.

Banter Points: When the blurbs on a book promise it's going to be funny, Word Nerd's often a bit skeptical since one person's definition of humor is different from anothers, but this time, they got it right. Solomon vs. Lord actually had several laugh-out-loud moments, reminiscent of a Carl Hiaasen novel. As if the banter between Solomon and Lord isn't good enough on it's own, Levine works some heart into the novel as well with the relationship between Solomon and Bobby.
Bummer Points: ... er... A few times, the outbursts from 11-year-old Bobby were very adult and a bit jarring.
Word Nerd recommendation: This is perfect summer reading material. Pick it up before the season's over and be glad that Levine has turned this into a series. Perfect for fans of Carl Hiaasen, Janet Evanovich or Dave Barry.

Author Answers with Jay MacLarty

This week's author is Jay MacLarty, author of the Simon Leonidovich series. His latest book in the series is "Choke Point," and he's also working on a stand-alone novel.

For more about MacLarty, check out his website.

WN: You've got four books out featuring Simon Leonidovich. Where did the idea for this character come from.
MACLARTY: I conceived the idea with a colleague. We intended to collaborate on a story, and were brainstorming ideas, trying to come up with an unusual profession that would thrust our protagonist into unexpected problems and perils. An international courier fit that criteria. Ultimately, we found working together to be impossible, and I ended up taking over the project.

WN: And what kind of guy is Leonidovich?
MACLARTY: He is not one of those Teflon-skinned superheroes. Simon is an average guy with an abundance of street smarts, who struggles with his weight and feels insecure with women; which, of course, they find endearing. Women – who are not the typical thriller audience – love him, and love the books.

WN: You had a variety careers before turning to writing novels. What else have you done and how has that helped with the writing?
MACLARTY: I started in the hospitality business, putting together a nation-wide chain of restaurants and nightclubs. Burned out by the age of thirty, I created a computerized handicapping program, then “ran away to play the ponies.” That was too much fun, so I decided to do something more serious, and ended up working for a year on a presidential campaign. What can I say, the guy lost, and I had to find real work; so, turned my attention to the organizational business, and a chain of retail stores. Along the way I managed to start a small software company, and write The Courier. The rest, as they say, is history.

These work experiences have helped – especially the political and technological background – but more than anything, it is the wide range of “life experiences” that has given me the building blocks for storytelling.

WN: What's your writing process like?
MACLARTY: From a planning standpoint, I work within the framework of a loosely constructed plot chart. I know where I'm going, but don't define the story to such a degree that I stifle the creative process. From a physical standpoint, when I'm working on a book, I always work seven days a week – no exceptions. I get up around five in the morning, eat breakfast and try to invent some excuse not to work. This stall may last from thirty minutes to two hours, but eventually, and always, I'll force myself to face that ugly blank screen. Once I'm at it, I work nonstop until the creative juices dry up, usually around three in the afternoon, then I go to the gym. After that I may edit for an hour or two, but I'm never able to move forward creatively once I hit the wall.

WN: Were you a reader as a kid?

MACLARTY: Yes. I started with the Hardy Boys, and graduated to adult novels.

WN: What turned you on to reading/writing books?
MACLARTY: I don’t really remember, but I’m sure reading offered an escape – that, and not having a television.

WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you? What's the most challenging part of writing for you?

MACLARTY: Just sitting down every day and doing it, which is, by far, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. The best part is the satisfaction of touching reader’s lives – hopefully in a good way – and hearing about it.

WN: What's next for you as a writer?
MACLARTY: I’ve made the hard decision to step off the series juggernaut and move on to what I consider “bigger” stories, with more provocative underpinnings. I’ve just finished A Child of Fate: the story of a young woman searching for her place in the world, who suddenly finds herself trapped in the Canadian wilderness with five male colleagues, and facing the ultimate test of her leadership, and her womanhood. A small excerpt is now available on my website: jaymaclarty.com

WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
MACLARTY: That’s a tough one, there have been a few, but to pick one, I would have to say Trinity by Leon Uris; not because it was the best book I ever read, but because the story sparked an idea for a novel which led to my writing career – a novel I’ve been working on for nearly twenty years.

Book Banter -- Damsel Under Stress

Title: Damsel Under Stress
Author: Shanna Swendson
Length: 306 pages
Genre: chick-lit/fantasy/urban fantasy
Plot Basics: The bad guys – rogue wizard Phelan Idris and bad fairy Ari – keep interfering with non-magical Katie Chandler’s dates with heartthrob wizard Owen Palmer. Or maybe it’s really Katie’s meddling fairy godmother, doing her magical best to help Katie and Owen’s relationship along. Either way, Katie and Owen are tasked with doing what they can to unravel what Idris is up to, all while going home to visit the parents at Christmas and finding costumes for New Year’s Eve.
Banter Points: Charming and enchanting, Swendson delivers another perfect literary potion of comedy, plot and romance. Any girl who’s ever thought she’s had a disastrous date can relate to Katie and Owen’s efforts that are routinely thwarted.
Bummer Points: If this is the last of these books, it would be a bummer.
Word Nerd Recommendation: If you need a great beach read/airplane book or just a one to make you smile, go get the first one “Enchanted Inc.” and the second one, “Once Upon Stilettos” and fall under the spell.

Why procrastination is bad

So, it's been a whole week of July already before Word Nerd has figured out her July writing goal. And during that week, was she cranking out the pages?

Hardly.

The story was right where she left it at the end of June.

So, getting back on track here, the new July meter is up. 20 pages is the goal. With the number of things happening in July and a week in to the month already, that's going to be an ambitious goal. But, hopefully, this will be a good motivator to make progress when there is time, to adapt to the days of the month where it will be hard to write.

Funny, that last July, the goal was something like 55,000 of 85,000 words and Word Nerd's not working much on that story anymore.

Nevertheless, it's important enough just to get words on paper. Or 20 pieces of paper, as the case is for July.

Book Banter -- Pretender

Title: Pretender (book two of the third Foreigner series/book 8 of the total Foreigner series)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Length: 327 pages
Genre: sci-fi
Plot Basics: Interpreter, diplomat and human Lord of the Heavens Bren Cameron is once again caught up in the machinations of atevi politics. Reunited with the atevi lord Tabini, Bren is anxious to give his report about what he found in the trip to the space station, but Tabini is more interested in reclaiming his political position, drawing a confused Bren into a race for the capital.
Banter Points: Cherryh has a meandering style that delves deep into Bren’s thoughts that sometimes bogs down the books in this series, but not this one. The race for the capital and the political back-and-forth is page-turning excitement. Again, Cherryh’s insights into what makes us human shine forth as the reader follows Bren through an entirely alien environment.
Bummer Points: To finish out this series, there’s one more book, but this one seemed to have a fairly definitive ending, leaving Word Nerd wondering what’s next that deserves a whole book. Word Nerd Recommendation: This series is truly a political space opera, deftly played out with only a few dips in quality along the way. When Cherryh isn’t at her peak though, she’s still writing well above others and this series is well worth the commitment to nine books.

June Bibliometer

June was a bumper month for page count, given the two long Harry Potter books.



Here's the official bibliometer reading:

8 books

3,932 pages

131 pages/day



YTD:

41 books

13,285 pages read

Author Answers with James Grippando

With the holiday falling on a Wednesday, Word Nerd decided to move the weekly author Q&A up a day so it didn't get lost.

So, give a welcome to this week's author, James Grippando. Grippando writes the series of Jack Swyteck legal thrillers and recently wrote his a book departing from that series, "Lying with Strangers."

For more on Grippando, check out his website.

WN: Your latest book is a departure from your Jack Swyteck series. What's it about and why did you take a break from the series?
GRIPPANDO: Lying with Strangers is the story of Peyton Shields, a high-achieving young doctor who seems to have it all-until series of strange, increasingly dangerous events take their toll on Peyton, her career, and her marriage, moving her closer to a terrifying stalker who seems to know her every move.
It wasn't so much a break from the Jack Swyteck series as it was a story that evolved over a period of years. The seed for "Lying with Strangers" was planted in 1998, when my son spent the first eight days of his life in the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit, and we had to monitor him closely after he came home. Luckily, I had a friend who had graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Medical School and who had just been named Chief Resident at Boston Children's Hospital. Dr. David Weinstein was in the most coveted position at the best pediatric hospital in the world, but he always found time to take my calls. During one of our conversations, I told him-only half-jokingly-that I ought to write a novel about a pediatrician. Later, he phoned and said, "Why don't you come up to Boston Children's and shadow me, see what hits you?" I couldn't get there fast enough.
During my stay at his house, David told me about another pediatric intern-a brilliant and beautiful young woman who had been stalked by a patient's relative. A light immediately went on, and Peyton Shields, the lead character in "Lying with Strangers," was born. I realized, however, that I was building quite a challenge for myself. My editor and I were about to
launch a series for HarperCollins featuring Jack Swyteck-a man who is a lawyer in Miami. The story in my head was about a woman who was a doctor in Boston. We went with the Swyteck series-the right decision-but Peyton Shields was never far behind in my heart and mind. I wrote it while writing the next five Jack Swyteck novels. So I never really took a clean break from Jack Swyteck-I just hung out wit Peyton every now and then.

WN: Swyteck is a lawyer and you are a lawyer. How much of your real experiences have turned up in print as Jack Swyteck's experiences?
GRIPPANDO: A few things in my own life have reappeared in Jack's fictional world, but it's really the overall experience of being a trial lawyer that has benefited me most in my writing. As a trial lawyer, you see the best and worst of people. You see victims of crimes who have the courage to come into a public courtroom, look their attacker in the eye, and work through the emotional pain of telling a jury exactly what happened. Just as courageous, you see third parties with no personal stake in the case come forward-sometimes at the risk of their employment or personal safety-simply to make sure that justice is done. So, in some sense I see the world as filled with unlikely heroes. On the other hand, you deal with the snakes who can't give an honest answer to a simple question. You deal with some lawyers who think litigation is just a game and that the rules are for losers. That overall perspective that I've gained through personal experience is written into every chapter of the Jack Swyteck novels, and into "Lying with Strangers" as well.

WN: How hard was it to transition from legal writing to fiction writing?
GRIPPANDO: It took me six years to become and "overnight success," so what does that tell you? Becoming a writer was never a goal for me-it was a life-long dream. In 1988, I was five years into the practice of law and tired of the fact that no one-including judges-seemed to be interested in any of the legal stuff I was writing. I also noted that the hottest show on television was L.A. Law, and the hottest book in the country was Scott Turow's"Presumed Innocent." There seemed to be this insatiable public appetite for stories about lawyers written by lawyers. So I started writing, nights and weekends, still practicing law full time. Finally, after four years, I had a 250,000-word monster in the box that no publisher wanted. But my agent assured me that I had received-get this-the most encouraging rejection letters he had ever seen. With his encouragement, I wrote "The Pardon" over the next seven months, and it sold to HarperCollins in a weekend. It's now all over the world in 26 languages. Don't you love happy endings?

WN: Were you a reader as a kid... what turned you on to reading/writing books?
GRIPPANDO: The first book I remember buying was "Bambi," and I was hooked ever since.
I'm sure that my love of books was an important part of becoming a writer, but the way I grew up was also a huge influence. Loon Lake in Antioch, Illinois-my boyhood home-is a little lake at the end of a dirt road. It's where I spent hours playing ice hockey in the winter, swimming in the winter, and doing all those things that parents worry their children might be doing. I mean really - does anyone actually fish inside an ice fishing shed? I had a great deal of freedom as a child, and I think that freedom-or at least the desire to be free-is what nudged me toward creative writing.


WN: What's the best part of being a writer to you? What's the most challenging part of writing for you?
GRIPPANDO: The best part is the freedom to write whatever you want, wherever you want. I live in south Florida, so I write in my backyard. My outdoor office has these essentials: a patio table and chair, a big shade umbrella, a laptop computer, a hammock, a hot tub, and a swimming pool. The cell phone is optional. If I get tired of writing about Jack Swyteck, in Miami, I can
write about Peyton Shields in Boston and spend a summer in Martha's Vineyard. But mentioning Peyton does highlight the most challenging part for me: Writing from a woman's perspective. It helps to be married to an English Literature major. But even so, I can still see my wife looking up from the early drafts of "Lying with Strangers," rolling her eyes, and telling me "A woman would never say that!" Now, the feedback from women readers is glowing, so it was worth sweating the details.

WN: What's next for you as a writer?
GRIPPANDO: "Last Call" (Swyteck #7) will be released in January 2008. In 2002 "Beyond Suspicion" (Swyteck # 2) introduced readers to Jack's colorful sidekick, Theo Knight. Theo is Jack's investigator, bartender, best friend, and confidante, and of all the death row inmates Jack represented, only Theo was truly innocent. In "Last to Die" ("Swyteck #3) I mentioned that Theo's mother was murdered when Theo was a child. In "Last Call," Jack and Theo finally find the killer-and readers will see a side of Theo Knight they have never seen before. I'll be touring for "Last Call" in early 2008, while putting the finishing touches on my 2009 release (Hit and Run). As time permits, I'll continue to visit schools and libraries across the country to
promote my young adult novel, Leapholes.


WN: What is the best/most influential book you have ever read and why did it inspire you?
GRIPPANDO: It's not technically a book, but I read the Pulitzer Prize winning play "A Man for All Seasons" in high school, and it's unforgettable. It's the story of Sir Thomas Moore, who was tried for treason and beheaded after he refused on principle to sign an oath approving the marriage of King Henry VIII to Ann Boleyn. It stuck with me throughout my career as a lawyer, especially early-on, when I was young and naïve and appalled to discover how many witnesses lied under oath. People complain that lawyers are always trying to trip them up with their clever questions, but in my experience witnesses too often had to be tricked into telling the truth. In my most cynical moments as a trial lawyer, I'd go back to Sir Thomas Moore and the sanctity of an oath.