Book Review: Year of the Knife

A few months ago, Meerkat Press had giveaway running: sign up for their newsletter and get a free ebook. I signed up and got a copy of The Year of the Knife  It sat on my kindle for a while, on my growing list of things to read. After a big stretch of reading YA, I finally wanted to read something “adult” again, so I picked up this. I started it just before dinner and finished a little after midnight. 

I loved the explosive magic, a hard boiled lesbian witch main character, and the fast paced plot with a mostly well set up twist. The magic system in the book was my favorite kind.It had well established rules, limits and costs, and an almost mathematical set up, but the way the author showed it on paged in a way that didn’t bore me with the technical details of actually showing all the calculations. There would be a sentence or two more focused on what was going through Sully's head while she did calculations, but the reader didn't actually see the numbers or symbols.  

  Speaking of the main character, Sully, is quite the badass. If you ever read the Dresden Files, picture if Harry Dresden and Karin Murphy were actually one character only more Irish and queer. Throughout the book, Sully is following a string of murders where victims don't stay dead. The middle of the book, when Sully is knee deep in zombies and demons, was my favorite part. Sully was strongest when her back was against the ropes and she was grasping for leads. 

  The opening wasn’t fantastic, but it did its job. It showed Sully's strength and battle madness with one serial killer hunt, set something up for the end, and then introduced the case shortly after.  I was a little disappointed that the one non-binary character, the only character with a they/them pronoun, was in the book for a few pages then died.

 There were frequent mentions of the sexism the Sully faced, but it never seemed to affect her much, and just seemed there for the sake of being there.

 Most pieces of the twist and the end were well set up for, but a couple things seemed a little too convenient, and one thing I was expecting never happened, even though a few things early on almost promised me it would. Still, there are two more books in the series, so perhaps some of the breadcrumbs left uneaten are just setting up for things yet to come. I'm willing to wait and see. I really am looking forward to the next installment in this series, which comes out later this year. 

 So if you read Year of the Knife now, you won't have too long to wait!

IWSG Day: Writerly Questions: The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward

 

  The first Wednesday of every month, the IWSG posts an optional question, encouraging members to read and comment on each other’s blogs. January 2: What are your favorite and least favorite questions people ask you about your writing?  

The Good:

I love answering questions about writing and publishing. How did you decide to write a book? What did you have to do to get published? What type of things do you do when you revise? What are your favorite editing strategies? What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

 The above questions are among my favorite conversation topics. I love talking about the hows and whys of writing and publishing. As a writing teacher, I've spent a lot of time thinking about and researching how to help people (including myself) improve their writing. I've found one way to do this is to develop a good writing process, and as a result, I spend a lot of time observing, analyzing and tweaking my writing process. I love hearing how other people write as much as I love sharing what I do, what works about it, and what bugs I am still trying to work out. Publishing is another topic I've spent countless hours researching. I still have a lot to learn, but I have a good base of industry knowledge that is growing every day and love answering questions about it. Whether I'm talking about process or publishing, I find that I learn though explaining.

Answering questions helps come to new  realizations and see things I didn't know I knew. It prompts me to fill in gaps in my knowledge, to look at things from different perspectives, and to synthesize in new ways.

The Bad:

How is your book doing? How many copies have you sold?

 If you have a writer friend or relative you care about, just do not ask them these questions. It might be okay if the book is on the NYT or USA Today Best Seller List. In any other situation, it probably sucks.

 First off all, the writer probably doesn't really know how their books are doing, especially if they are not self-published. Amazon tells the "publisher" how many copies were sold, so if a writer isn't self published, they have to wait for monthly, or in some cases, quarterly statements to see how many copies sold in a set period of time. It's frustrating enough not knowing how many copies I have sold. It's worse when I constantly have people asking me about it.

 Friends and family have been asking me about Power Surge's sales since a few days after it came out in the begining of October. I can make some guesses based off of the Amazon sales rank. For example, if I looked on Amazon and saw Power Surge ranked around 100,000, I could assume I sold one book today on Amazon. However, I have no clue if someone buys a book from iBooks, from Barnes and Noble, from my local indie book store, or directly from the publisher's website, until I get my royalty statements.

The Awkward:

In the face to face world, I get pretty awkward pretty fast when people ask my what my book is about. Online, if asked the same question, I can refer people to the blurb or take my time adapting a pre-made pitch for the question. But ask me face to face? You get mumbled fragments about teenagers, Maine, and Demon Hunters, and my most awkward of all: "paranormal things." I'm pretty sure I'd sell more books if I got better at talking it up to the people at the dog park.

 However, the most awkward questions of all are things like: Are any of the characters based off of yourself? What parts? Is anything in the book based off of something that really happened? The main character self-harms. Is that something you do? Now, a more general question, like "what inspired you to write this?" is perfectly fine. However, when people start trying to use the book as a way to learn private things about my personal life, it gets very very awkward.

 I know by calling the book "own voices" I am acknowledging that some the things that marginalize the narrator are also things I've experienced, but that doesn't mean I want people walking up to me at a party and grilling me about which parts, especially if they are family. The last thing I want is people to think is that they can some how psychoanalyze me through my fiction.

Wrap-Up

If you want to talk to me about writing, I'm always happy to answer questions about writing itself, about the process and different ways to publish. I'm working on getting better at pitching Power Surge face to face. However, I prefer not to have to answer questions about sales I can't really answer, and don't want people using my fiction as an excuse to pry into my personal life.