July is Discover Fantasy month

Welcome to July.

Ok, we're not quite there yet, but I'm quite excited about it so I couldn't help myself.

You're probably asking what's so special about July. For my friends up north it's probably stinking hot, while for me down south, it's miserable, cold and wet.But July is exciting for me because July is now officially Discover Fantasy month.

So what is Discover Fantasy? (geez he asks a lot of questions). Discover Fantasy is a terrific new event set up to raise peoples' awareness of fantasy as a genre, and demonstrate how broad it can be. We want to show you that fantasy is not just about wizards and elves and magic - there are lots of different types of stories, lots of different moods and styles, which can all be considered to be fantasy.

Joining me in this event are two other fantastic writers:

• David M. Brown - who writes broad, sweeping dramatic fantasy, with nary a witch or dwarf to be seen
• Jeremy Rodden - who takes you into the world of Toonopolis, where Saturday morning cartoons become real.

I really hope you'll join us in this fabulous event, organised by the amazing Donna Brown. Please check out the Discover Fantasy Website for details on the event, the authors involved, and the schedule. 

Why I write magic realism: guest post by Tahlia Newland

Today I'm delighted to have a visit from my friend, Tahlia Newland author of You Can't Shatter Me, a new young adult novella with an inspiring and empowering message for solving bullying. Tahlia writes magical realism and contemporary fantasy for young adults & adults. She has two short stories available free on kindle for a limited period, Not Me, It Can’t Be from 28th June to the 2nd July and A Hole in the Pavement from 3rd to 7th July.

Why I write magic realism 

 

Magical Realism is a genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. They’re written as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the “real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought. In my writing, the magical elements take the form of analogies or extended metaphors for character’s inner experiences.

Sometimes the lines between magical realism and fantasy can become blurred, but the writing is more powerful if the genre stays within its boundaries.  The difference between the two genres is that fantasy uses ordinary metaphors in a magical or fantasy world, whereas magical realism uses magical or fantastic metaphors in a real world. The magical aspect is a way of illuminating reality, rather than taking us into an unreal world.

I started out writing fantasy then realised that because my fantasy elements were often analogies for real things, it bordered on magical realism. I wrote a couple of magical realism stories for my short story collection A Matter of Perception and after readers raved about A Hole in the Pavement, (available now as a separate ebook on kindle) I thought I’d try my hand at more in the genre.

The beauty of magical realism is that it allows you to highlight and emphasise aspects of ordinary life in a highly imaginative and evocative way. I’ve always been fascinated by the mind and how it shapes our perception, but in a normal novel, if you spend too long on a characters thoughts and feelings, it can get boring.

With magical realism, I can express the character’s inner experience in a more interesting and powerful way by providing a visual image. For example when Dylan, the main male character tries to decide what subjects to choose for school the following year, words fly around the room and attack him, and when Carly, the female lead, battles doubt in herself, she uses laser light from her heart to destroys a huge purple doubt dragon.

The subject matter for You Can't Shatter Me is bullying, which could be too real for some, but if you turn it into fantasy, it becomes too unreal to relate to people’s lives. Writing about real kids in a very real situation but with magical elements to illuminate the character’s inner development was the perfect choice for You Can't Shatter Me.

Synopsis: You Can't Shatter Me

Sixteen year old Carly wants to write her own life and cast herself as a superhero, but when she stands up to a bully, the story gets out of her control. Dylan, a karate-trained nerd who supports her stand, turns out to be a secret admirer, and Justin, the bully, makes Carly his next victim. While romance blossoms, Dylan faces attacking words, an unreliable movie director, a concrete habit that requires smashing, and an unruly Neanderthal. Meanwhile, the bully’s increasing harassment forces Carly to deal with flying hooks, unflushable cowpats, and deadly dragons. An old hippie shows her an inner magic that’s supposed to make her invincible, but will Carly learn to use it before the bully strikes again and Dylan resorts to violence?

Book Links for You Can’t Shatter Me

 

Book trailer

http://youtu.be/ysXMYoJUsO0 

 

Purchase links

 

Ebook

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Shatter-Me-ebook/dp/B008DME8PA

Files for all devices: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174488

 

Paperback

If you’d like to be notified when the paperback is released please fill in the form here.

 

Author bio & links

Tahlia is an avid reader, an extremely casual high school teacher, an occasional mask-maker and has studied philosophy & meditation for many years. After scripting and performing in Visual Theatre shows for 20 years, she is now a bone-fide expatriate of the performing arts. She lives in an Australian rainforest, is married with a teenage daughter and loves cats, but she doesn’t have one because they eat native birds.

Weblog 

Happy Honkers Blog

Facebook

Twitter

Goodreads Author page

Amazon Author page

Smashwords author page

Don’t forget to pick up one of Tahlia’s free short stories for your kindle, Not Me, It Can’t Be from 28th June to the 2nd July and A Hole in the Pavement  from 3rd to 7th July.

Enough already from those dead authors

I discovered something interesting this week.

I did a bit of a review of the traffic here at Dag-Lit Central and made a fascinating discovery. By a mile, the posts that get the most traffic are the ones where I whinge and complain and am generally grumpy. In contrast, the ones where I'm cheerful and happy don't seem to do anywhere near as well.

So with that in mind, as much as I like being cheery and optimistic, I've decided I'm going to go back to grumpy mode and have a good old rant.

The subject of my rant is going to be dead authors.

Dead authors, I've totally had enough of you. Don't get me wrong, I reckon you were fantastic when you were alive.  You wrote some of my all time favourite books and for that I'll always cherish your memory. I just have one thing to say to you. Enough is enough. It's time to stop writing new stuff.

You'd thing this wouldn't be an issue. You would think that the state of being dead would be enough to put a pretty sizable dint in somebody's writing career. But apparently that's no longer the case. Being stuck in a coffin and buried six-feet under no longer seems to be the hindrance that it was.

Take Enid Blyton for instance. Now a lot of people seem to have it in for her, but I'll always have pleasant memories of reading her books as a kid, and my children love them now. The thing is, there are now far more Enid Blyton books out there than there used to be, and some of them have suspiciously recent publication dates. You have to look pretty closely at the front cover to realise that it's not actually Enid Blyton that is written there, it is Enid Blyton's, with the apostrophe and s much smaller than the rest of the text. And, of course, there's no other author listed on the cover. You have to look inside the book to see a "special thanks to..." in order to discover who actually wrote the book.

Now I don't know about you but I reckon that's a really sneaky trick the publishers are trying to put over us. Most book buyers wouldn't look that closely, they'd just think, "Gosh there are another 25 stories in the Magic Faraway Tree series and 314 more Wishing Chair ones." They wouldn't expect that they were actually being swindled.

And how the hell are us new writers, you know the ones who are actually trying to come up with something new and original, meant to compete? It's hard enough trying to make yourself seen as it is. But if the competition is a never ending stream of copy-cat work purporting to be from long-dead household names. Well it really gets my gander up.

That's all for this week. Next week I may be a bit cheerier. But I doubt it. 

Blog ahoy for an argggh-some Launch Party

Today I'm going to have a lot of fun.

Today is going to be a really awesome, oops, I mean argggh-some post. Because today my friend, David Brown is launching his argggh-some new book, A World Apart, and to celebrate, there are some great prizes on offer at the Book Bloggers Collective. But the best part is that I get to be a pirate for a day.

And believe me, I need no convincing to be a pirate. Pirates are way cool. At least the kind I'd like to be. I'm sure that in real life I wouldn't like to meet an actual pirate at all. But, in my imagination, there would be nothing better to be than a blow-me-down, shiver-me-timbers, avast-me-hearties sort of pirate, sailing over the seven seas in search of adventure.

So that's exactly what I'm going to be. Ok, so maybe I'd be a quiet kind of pirate. I'd probably sit at the back and ask politely for the bottle of rum, and then take a very measured and polite little swig before wiping the top of the bottle with my hankie (in order to prevent germs) and passing it on.

Come to think of it, I would probably be the sort of pirate who would stay on dry land as I tend to get seasick. But in my imagination, I'd be off on all sorts of adventures. I'd be sailing the seven seas, searching for new ideas to turn into stories. Sure, I suspect I'd be stealing and plundering some of those ideas from others, but lets face it, which of us doesn't do that?

And at least this way, I don't get to walk the plank. Although, come to think of it, there are times when I feel like I'm hovering over the edge of the oceans. And what are those shark-like creatures darting around just below the surface? Surely not a bunch of reviewers waiting to stick their fangs into me. Yikes, now I definitely want to stay nice and safe and dry.

All right, so maybe I wouldn't ever make the most convincing pirate.But if you want to be off on a real pirate adventure, you could do a lot worse than take the journey to A World Apart. It's sure to be argggh-some, and I'm not just saying that because I like how it sounds.

Blurb for A World Apart

Demetrius makes his first mistake when he lets his best friend Halcyon marry Eleyna, the love of his life, without saying a word. On the day of the wedding, he walks away from the Elencheran town of Dove's Meadow and joins the army.

He makes his second mistake when the pirate Black Iris tricks him into letting dozens of men, women and children die in a fire. Demetrius is imprisoned in grief and disgrace.

But he can atone. The Black Iris is dead. The Ivory Rose has risen to the top of the pirates and is leading brutal raids on the coast. If Demetrius can capture and kill her, he'll win his pardon.

And then Demetrius discovers the Ivory Rose is Eleyna. He must decide which will be his third mistake: losing his last chance at a pardon, or destroying the one woman he's ever loved.

Hey you - lay off my title

This post is about something I thought was pretty funny that happened a few weeks ago. But I'm not going to tell you what it is straight away. Today is the first day of a lovely long weekend, and I'm feeling a bit laid back and lazy, so we're just going to meander a bit first.

The topic of this posting is titles - ie book titles, not Sir or Mr or Your Reverence (though I reckon I wouldn't mind of somebody did call me Your Reverence).

Titles for my books are something that I both struggle with and also like to have a bit of fun with (if that doesn't sound totally contradictory). When I start writing, I usually have no idea what the title will be. I usually think of my books as "the fantasy story" or "the insect story" but I know at some point I'll need a title, and I know that title will need to be catchy and interesting while also capturing the essence of the book.

My strategy for title selection is inspired by one of my all-time favourite bands, R.E.M. I've mentioned before how much my writing is "influenced" (I hate that word - sounds so pretentious - but can't think of a better one) by music. R.E.M. is a band that always had fun choosing their song names. I wondered for years why one of my favourites of their songs had the odd title Country Feedback even though that seemed to have nothing to with the song lyrics, till I discovered it's actually a reference to the two guitar styles used in the song. And I love how they could take a catchy little song recorded in 1989 and just title it Pop Song 89.

I began playing with my titles when I started writing short stories. While I was taking a writing class years ago, I wrote a modernisation of the fairytale about the shoemaker and the elves - in this version, a computer writes stories while a writer sleeps - but to maintain the reference I titled it A Shoemaker's Tale. It was interesting to see that while a few fellow students picked the fairytale reference in the title, not one was able to recognise the original source.

I've already gone on a bit in other forums about how my novella Doodling received its title.  A number of readers have criticised it as a choice but to be honest I could never think of anything better - using something like Neville in the Asteroids or Stop the World just wouldn't work for me.

When I choose my titles, I also make sure that they're as original as possible. For Flidderbugs, I did a bunch of Googling to make sure I could find a word nobody had used before. Ditto for Magnus Opum, as I wanted it to be original and catchy. Which is where the funny bit comes in...

Barely a month after Magnus Opum was published, after all the work I put into coming up with an original title, someone else has published a book with the same name. There are now two Magnus Opums on Amazon. I have to say I'm not super upset - it's a free world and you can't copyright a title. And maybe somebody looking for that book will find mine instead. But I do know one thing for sure.

I had it first.

Have a great weekend. 

Introducing the Alexandria Publishing Group

Good news.

Today (for a change) I'm actually not in apologising mode.

Today I've got an exciting announcement to make. I'm a little bit late because actually the big launch was yesterday (curse this time difference) but as I'm not the sort of person who likes to miss out, I'm going to shout out about it anyway.

As of the 1st of June, 2012, a new venture in publishing has arrived - the Alexandria Publishing Group.

The Alexandria Publishing Group is a publishing collective. We're a group of independent writers who have banded to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. We have created a brand that we hope will show to readers that we independent writers care just as much about quality, whether that be quality of story, quality of editing, quality of presentation, as any writer at a big publishing company. And we want to show to all others out there in the writing world, whether that be bloggers or reviewers or even other publishers, that we know how to behave in a professional manner.

As for me, I'm not the sort generally that likes to crow about how great my books are - the next time I make a fuss about how perfect my writing is, I'm likely to find half a dozen readers all pointing out errors that they've found. What is really gratifying about being involved in this collective is that I wasn't the one who made that call. A group of my peers, who are familiar with my writing, invited me to join the group, which I took as a terrific compliment.

Of course, credit where credit is due. I have to thank Valerie Douglas for all her work in setting this up, and also Kai Wilson whose technical expertise and endless patience has resulted in a fantastic looking site.

So if you're looking to find some great writing in a variety of genres, please come to our site at http://alexandriapublishinggroup.com.  Check out the books on offer and learn about the writers involved.

And if you're quick, there are also a bunch of books being given away over the next couple of days, including two of mine. Check out our press release for more information.

Hope to see you there and happy reading.