Water in the Desert

I stumbled across this review for Game Quest the other day. It's always kind of delightful to come across reviews for my self-published work. Partly because I had no distribution model other than Amazon and my own site, so the chance of Game Quest being read, let alone reviewed, is very very small. Game Quest has kind of had a life of it's own. One of my first orders was to Abu Ghraib (yes, that Abu Ghraib - insert your jokes about my book being a good implement for torture due to its size, weight or content here) and though I've stopped promoting the book years ago, still sell ~3 copies a year on Amazon and the ebook version sells quite well - about 1 a month. Despite being the most daunting (for most people) of my books in both theme and size, it seems to have found some tenuous foothold in the underculture. Anyway, so it's extra great when you find out that someone read it and actually took the time to review the book. In this case it was particularly nice because I could tell that the reviewer engaged with the book, understood it on a deeper level and had some interesting things to say about the work.

I'm not sure what most author's motivations are for writing. Mine is a desire to communicate. I don't particularly enjoy the editing, the printing and, especially, the promotion that goes into translating a story from something cool in your head to something real on the page. All that effort is a LOT of work and the end goal is to present it to the world and hope to hear back from them on what they thought. I don't really care if it's good or bad (of course, good is preferable), I just like to hear what people thought to see how and if it engaged them. Reviews are my favourite part after coming up with the idea in the first place. It's like getting the chance to reread your book from the POV of a reader...and loving it, or excoriateingly tearing it to shreds. Which, in turn, makes the hardest part about being a small-beans author is you don't get a lot of that. But boy does that water in the desert taste good!

Incidentally, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea also just got reviewed (huzzah!) by the University of Lethbridge Student newspaper, which you can read here.

It's a review!

Sort of. It's a paragraph, at least, by someone other than me telling you to pick up a copy! Check it out!

Letter from a friend

A friend of mine (finally) read Bad Attitude (when did I publish that, 2007?) and wrote me this little review. I like hearing what people think of my books, whether they like it or not (as in this case.) Anyway, I thought I would share it with you:

I just wanted to tell you that I read your book “Bad attitude”. And…

Well, you really are too much of a communist. I always knew it, you non-catholic, false Irish!

No seriously, that wasn’t my (main) point. But I’ve got to tell you honestly:

Yes I read it but I’ve got to tell you that I wasn’t really content with it (not that I HAVE to be satisfied of it, I’m fully aware that you didn’t write a book for me). I did really prefer “Game Quest”. Maybe I missed something but this one was a bit too straightforward: always in the store, few characters, too much of a good vs evil plot and a very unappealing main character.

What a punk he was, though I have to admit Tom was also an appealing hatred magnet and I’m always for anything that’s against Future Shop.

Anyways, I wanted to tell you that I read it and that I did have a good time reading it but that I was a bit disappointed because you really rocked my world with “Game Quest” and not so much this time.

If there was some kind of superb irony about it, please tell me.

Zeus delayed!

Yes, he got held up at the airport, and coffee got spilled on his brand new tunic, dammit, and then, well, you know they took issue with him packing his lightning bolts as carry-on. So he’s on the next available flight, which should arrive Spring 2011-ish.

That’s a ways away, sadly, but sometimes books take up to 2 years from acceptance to publication, so I’m still short of that. Its giving me time to work on new stuff, though, which is nice.

But there’s also some good news. A while I ago I mentioned that Zeus got overwhelmingly positive feedback from the reader reviews (Athabasca sends out manuscripts they’re considering to other published authors for their opinions before making a decision) and that I’d share them here if I could. Well, I’ve been given the ok to do so, so from now until the book is out I’ll put up some quotes.

Starting with:

‘McGinnis is funny, witty (he says he’s facetious and thinks he might go to hell for his Gandhi poem(…)I don’t think he will go to hell, at least not for this, and if Gandhi’s there then hell is a hell of alot different than we are given usually to think), but he’s not cynical. He has bite and performs irony right to the end, to a good end, which is to say it’s not all simply irony. The language (..) is crisp and witty and entirely appropriate to the narrative intent, its allegorical or logopoeic purposes.’