Amber Stults – Book Reviewer and Author

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These statistics are all for short stories, poems, or contest entries. Book reviews are not included.

1. Sales in January: 0
2. Rejections in January: 0
3. Submissions sent out in January: 0
4. Total stories/poems/contests pending responses: 3

I’ve been working on a new poem to submit to the annual poetry contest held at an Ohio art museum.

No new updates from the Unsent Letter Market.  I’m thinking despite the best of intentions, the editor is still stuck on reviewing items from April 2009, the month before I sent in my submission.

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About a week and a half ago, my Palm T|X fell from our phone cabinet and my keys went with it.

The screen itself appears to be holding together but there’s funny business going on underneath.  Where you see yellow in the picture, the dead grey pixels are slowly taking over and spreading out.  It’s getting difficult to see people’s addresses and phone numbers in my contact list.

I started off with a Palm V.  I’d play Mahjong while waiting in long lines.  There are years of Palm archives on my computer that contain contact and calendar information.  If an appointment wasn’t on the calendar then it didn’t exist.  It took me a long time to figure out how to use Graffiti so my letters were recognized.  I bought a keyboard for it thinking I would write story ideas into the memos but the keyboard never worked right.

When I thought my Palm had been lost in a recliner I bought another one to replace it.  After a week or two, I really dug into that recliner and found the original one.  I kept the one with the better buttons and sold the other one to my friend Rob.  He loved having it, but left it on top of his car one night after work and drove off without it.  Rob was distracted when he answered his cell phone.  He did find it, but it was in such bad shape he bought another used one.

A few years ago my husband decided I needed an upgrade.  He knew I wouldn’t do it myself.  My Christmas present was this Palm T|X.  It had color!  Sound!  Wifi!  Bluetooth!  I could no longer play Mahjong during long waits but I could read books with the Adobe Reader.  Or check my email at the airport.  Or figure out from imdb.com what movie my family was watching while at the Topsail Beach house.  One of the really cool things was color coding all my calendar entries.  If it was Orange then I was going to see a movie.  If it was Pink, then I had something writing related to do.

Palm stopped making the T|X in March 2009.  A few months ago the Palm OS stopped on mine and I had to upgrade to a higher version.  I found out the hard way it couldn’t setup recurring tasks like the old OS.  Put a check mark in the box and it would not generate the same task for the next week; I missed that feature.  And the desktop calendar didn’t show the color coded entries.

It looks like an iPhone is my near future.

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Earlier this week I found out about Write Your @ss Off Weekend hosted by Moonrat and I forgot to share the news.  It’s a day to devote to writing tasks but putting that behind in the chair is also encouraged.

Much of Ohio is under a snow emergency so this would be a great weekend for me to participate.  If I get my writing stuff done on Sunday I will let you know.

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Yesterday was the official release date for Shades of Green by Rhonda Parrish.  She was kind enough to agree to be interviewed by email about it.  You can learn more about Rhonda and her work on her web site at http://www.rhondaparrish.com.

Amber: Shades of Green takes place in Aphanasia in 1690.  This is a world you created.  How many stories have you currently written about Aphanasians?

Rhonda: A lot. I’m not trying to be vague, but I’m not actually sure of the number. In addition to Shades of Green only three others have been published (Sister Margaret, There’s Always a Catch and The Legend of the First Reptar) but I have more sitting on my hard drive.

Amber: How far along Aphanasia’s timeline do your stories take place?

Rhonda: There is a very long span. The Legend of the First Reptar takes place prehistory, as you noted Shades of Green takes place in 1690 and my current WIP takes place a couple hundred years after that. It’s a lot of fun to be able to write a story set in different points of a world’s life cycle. I hope to eventually have something written that is set in all the major time periods of Aphanasia.

Amber: The novelette mentions swamp fever, battles between races, and a curse that reanimates the dead.  Is there ever a Golden Age in Aphanasia?

Rhonda: What fun would that be? :) The truthful answer is, not in any sort of universal way. Like in reality certain aspects of life, or specific races might have a golden age, but the whole world is never sharing in one great utopian period. The Reptars’, for example, lived their golden age long before the time period in which Shades of Green is set. At that time they were the most technologically advanced race in Aphanasia but now…well, things don’t look too good for them.

Amber: I enjoyed reading the scenes of the Reptars’ everyday life – they clean their dishes and eat dinner together as a family.  Did you purposely try to not make them foreign or alien-like?

Rhonda: I don’t know how conscious those things were, actually. I did want the Reptar to be somewhat relatable so I didn’t want them to be too foreign, but I don’t remember sitting down and actually thinking about ways I could achieve that. Perhaps I should have LOL The problem with a good interview question is that it makes you think, and now I’m wondering if perhaps I might have made them a little bit too human. Hmmm. Thanks, Amber, this one is going to be plaguing my brain for a while to come.

Amber: The main character, Z’Thandra, is the last Swamp Elf.  Did it ever occur to her to try and find other types of Elves or was Aphanasia only inhabited by Swamp Elves?

Rhonda: There are other types of elves in Aphanasia, but I don’t think Z’thandra could survive on her own outside of the swamp. It’s all she knows. She would be lost in anywhere else.

Amber: How did you come up with the brilliant title?  It refers to so many things in the story including the jealousy felt by Orga.  I think most readers can identify with that feeling.

Rhonda: Oh my goodness, the title was such a huge pain in the butt. Seriously. There’s a pretty long story there. When I first submitted it the story was called “A Love Story”. It wasn’t a title I was particularly happy with, but it seemed appropriate and referred (to me) to more than just the obvious ‘love’. My publisher, hated it. From the start he was like “I love this story, but the title? It has to go.” We batted some ideas back and forth and eventually settled on Shades of Green. I’m glad we did, I think it’s better suited to the story than “A Love Story” was and you picked up on exactly why. It touches on so many parts of the story, the colors of the swamp, or people’s eyes, or reptar’s scales as well as more intangible things like Orga’s feelings for Z’thandra. I’m glad you liked it

Amber: Many writers say the real writing begins with editing and multiple drafts.  How long did you work on the novelette before you decided to find a publisher?

Rhonda: Shades of Green was revised less than most of my work, but even so, I’d been working on it for quite a long time. It started out as ¼ of a novel-in-stories I’ve been working on for a couple years. I wrote the first draft as a NaNoWriMo novel in 2007. After revising the novel-in-stories I decided that it didn’t work in that format and tore it apart and re-revised it to be four separate pieces (including Shades of Green). It was after that point I decided to find a publisher for it and was incredibly lucky in that it was accepted by the first one I sent it to. There’s always micro-revision that goes on as well, of course, right up until the time it goes to the printers.

Amber: Your writing is available in various lengths and formats (short stories, novels, poetry, and so on).  Does the variety keep you energized to keep pushing ahead?

Rhonda: It really does. I have stories I want to tell, and if one format doesn’t suit a particular tale it’s fabulous to be able to move on to a different one that does. Also, I tend to have a short attention span so being able to do shorter pieces while I’m working on a novel, for example, keeps me (usually) from becoming distracted by a new novel idea and dashing off to write it while leaving the WIP to gather dust.

Amber: Are there any upcoming publications in the near future?

Rhonda: I have a short story, “Share”, which will be included in the Trafficking in Magic / Magicking in Traffic anthology from Drollerie Press. I’m incredibly excited about that because Drollerie has long been on the list of publishers I wanted to work with, and I’m pretty fond of my story too.

Amber: Is there a new project you’re working on?

Rhonda: There are three major ones at the moment. The first is a chapbook of zombie poetry, the second are extensive revisions on another ¼ of the novel-in-stories Shades of Green was once a part of. Lastly, I’m working on the first draft of a novel I’m very excited about. It’s also set in Aphanasia and is currently titled See The Sky Again.

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A big thank you to Marcia at The Printed Page for hosting Mailbox Monday.  This week was a big one for me since I went to Toronto for a few days and tried to pick up some books by Canadian authors while there.

Not shown in the picture is Unearthed: An Anthology of Suspensein e-book format from Edmond Cheng.  Novellas included in the anthology are “Last Fragment” by Shawn McPike, “Help Me” by David A. Stelzig, “Crown of the Earth” by Seth E. Lender, and “Illusion” by Edmond Cheng.

Miriam with the Hachette Book Group sent me a copy of When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson.  A fitting arrival since I finished One Good Turn over the weekend. 

The other books were all obtained on my trip.  The Manual of Detectionby Jebediah Berry.  Though he’s not Canadian, I found this book on a table and found the blurb from The New Yorker irresistible.  “From the classic tropes of the detective procedural, this debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka.”  (more…)

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Title: Shades of Green
Author: Rhonda Parrish
Publisher: Sam’s Dot Publishing available at The Genre Mall
Source: Author

Z’thandra, the last swamp elf in Aphanasia, lives with the Reptar, a fierce race of lizard-people, most of whom resent her presence and want her gone from their village. When she discovers a human in the swamp and falls in love with him she must face the most difficult decision of her life. Will she pursue a life of happiness with the man she loves and in doing so condemn the Reptar to extinction, or will she chose to sacrifice her future to offer them hope? In the end the choice she makes will affect the Reptar for generations.

I believe the cover does a good job matching up with the synopsis.  It shows Z’thandra with the man she loves and a Reptar in the background.  I’m not sure if the Reptar is angry or fierce-looking but I would think twice before purposely crossing paths with one. 

Z’thandra has no choice though.  Her adoptive parents are Reptars so she sees them every day.  They do give her a little more attention than their birth daughter but Z’thandra does them kind favors in return.  She doesn’t take them or their love for granted. 

The Reptars were once a technologically advanced race.  Z’thandra’slife would be a little bit better if they would fix the indoor plumbing.  She bears all her hardship with more grace than the Reptars who barely tolerate her presence.  The wounds caused by racial wars have not healed. 

By the time Z’thandra meets Dorian, the human, and falls in love with him, it’s easy to see Z’thandra’s future with the Reptars is a bleak one.  Without her adoptive parents’ protection Z’thandra may not even have a future with the Reptars.  The reader really wants her to be selfish and run off with him.  It doesn’t matter that she would be running from something instead of to something even though such romances usually don’t end well.

The ending is a bit of a surprise but it’s what sets the story apart from similar tales.  It ties things up neatly in a way that isn’t obvious on a first reading.  If you want to lose yourself in the story of the last Swamp Elf for an hour or two this is the novelette to pick up.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Rhonda Parrish to learn more about Rhonda and Shades of Green.

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On Monday I’ll have a review up for Rhonda Parrish’s Shades of Green.  Then on Tuesday you can read an interview with her about the novellette.  In the meantime, between now and February 1st Rhonda’s holding a contest giving away a copy of Shades of Green.  It’s easy to enter so don’t miss your chance to win it.

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In October 2009 I was fortunate to meet, very briefly, one of the smartest and prolific authors of my time, Francine Prose.  She was in town to talk about her latest book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.  The format for her visit, she said, was different from her other stops to talk about it.  She would discuss the book and research for it, read some passages, and then take questions.  Honestly, it felt like a master class to me and I envied her students.

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife is not the book she originally set out to write at all.  Prose wanted to write a novel with a teenager as the main character and what better source could there be but Anne Frank? (I’ve had Prose’s Reading Like A Writer on my TBR pile for years but I promise this is the year I will read it!)  From there she got so caught up in Anne Frank as a writer that she wrote a different book altogether.  Many multiple published authors believe if you want to write well that it’s good to know why or how other writers were able to pull off an idea or theme successfully.

The last week or so I’ve been taking mental notes on Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn. I know this will not be my first reading of it.  Back in November 2006 I wrote over 15,000 words of a novel originally titled Untitled 2006 for lack of a better name.  As always, I thought an appropriate title would spring up along the way.  In One Good Turn Atkinson has one event happen seen from multiple points of view and then slowly all the people who witnessed the event are tied together.  They’re strangers so they don’t know they’re connected.  In Untitled 2006 I had one event happen and then began writing a chapter about each key person who witnessed or was part of the event but overlooked the extraordinary thing about it.  But I ran out of steam after a while mainly because I didn’t know what that extraordinary thing was.  After several years I still don’t know but that doesn’t mean the day won’t come when I will have that answer.

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A big thank you to Marcia at The Printed Page for hosting Mailbox Monday. Until the end of January 2009, Marcia is donating 50 cents to Book Wish Foundation’s holiday campaign for every link left for Mailbox Monday.

My mailbox has been empty.  I’ve used the time for reading and have added to my pile of undone reviews.

What arrived in your mailbox this week?

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It’s my pleasure to share an interview with J.R. Tomlin conducted via email earlier this month.  Author interviews are always interesting  because you never know what they have to say about their work or their work style.  Here’s my review in case you want to know more about A Warrior’s Duty before reading the interview.  You can visit Ms. Tomlin online at http://jeannetomlin.blogspot.com/.

Amber: Do you have any writing practices or rituals? 

J.R. Tomlin: Not really. I spend two hours a day writing new material and aim for at least 2000 words a day, but can’t say I’m always successful at the word goal. For me, it’s just, as they say, BIC at the keyboard.

Amber: I understand you’ve written short stories in addition to your novel, A Warrior’s Duty.  Did you change your writing practices for novel writing and editing?

J.R. Tomlin: I don’t feel that I’m very good at short story writing although I’ve had four published. I mainly concentrate on novels. The practices are the same, but all my short stories tend to get the same reaction from readers: That’s nice as the first chapter of a novel!  *sigh*

Amber: What was the inspiration for A Warrior’s Duty?

J.R. Tomlin: I have wondered about that. Maybe it’s that as a country we’ve spent so much of my life at war. We tend to not think about the costs and I often question when war is justified and when we really do have a “warrior’s duty”. But it wasn’t anything straightforward either since I tend to start my stories with a character. The first time I met Tamra was when she was in bed with Jessup–what was at one time chapter one. It soon became obvious that they had a story I wanted to tell.

Amber:  Several characters journey on horseback to get from one destination to another.  Did you have a sketch or a geographical map as reference when writing those scenes?

J.R. Tomlin: Yes, I did map the world. It’s hard for me to keep things right if I don’t do that. I don’t make as detailed maps as some writers, but distances and time of travel is important.

Amber: Did you have a playlist or listen to specific music when writing Warrior’s Duty?

J.R. Tomlin: I almost always listen to music when I write. It helps keep me in my “writing mode”. I can’t listen to anything with lyrics though. I listen to the LotR soundtrack and the Soundtrack to Last of the Mohicans among others.

Amber: Tamra, the warrior referenced in the title, is a pragmatic lady.  Why do you think she lets herself fall in love?

J.R. Tomlin: Interesting. I never thought of her as pragmatic. She experiences a lot of emotion in the terrific losses she goes through. But I suppose she is in that she tackles what she has to do. I’m not sure “letting herself” was quiet how she thought of it. She always knew that she shouldn’t love Jessup–he is such a classic bad boy in many ways. I had several beta readers who suggested (rather strongly) that he should be killed.

Amber: Was there one character you identified with the most?

J.R. Tomlin: Oddly enough, I don’t think I identify very much with my characters. I can frequently feel their emotions when I’m writing from their PoV but they aren’t “me”. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt I wrote a character that was based on me.

Amber: Your battle scenes are detailed but still easy to follow.  Do you have any experience with swordplay or archery?

J.R. Tomlin: Thank you. That pleases me more than I can say to hear.

I’ve done both, as a matter of fact. I strongly advocate at least trying out any weapon you write about using. So many people get it totally wrong–the concept that swords are very heavy is one that annoys me as a reader. Swords are not particularly heavy –although they feel it after you swing if for a few minutes. But the typical long sword only weights about 3 pounds!

Amber: When you’re not writing what do you enjoy most?

J.R. Tomlin: I’m an omnivorous reader, not surprisingly. I think that’s typical of writers. I hike also and do horseback riding when I can which isn’t as much as I’d like since I no longer own a horse.

Amber: Are you working on any new projects?

J.R. Tomlin: Well I co-authored a novel (Talon of the Raptor Clan from E-press Online) with C. R. Daems that is out and he and I have a novel which will be published by Double Dragon Press later this year. I also have another solo novel that is being “pitched” by my agent in a different genre. Meantime I’m working on two new novels. Well, three if you include the one that is finished but needs to be edited. ~chuckle~

I try to stay busy.

Amber: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

J.R. Tomlin: I just hope people enjoy my work. For writers out there, I recommend reading and abiding by Heinlein’s rules. It’s a tough market but worth the struggle.

Pleasurable reading to everyone.