• …
  • About
  • Vampire Month Alumni
  • World Book Night

Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: literature

A tale of World Book Night

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bites, books, D.A Lascelles, Ed Fortune, Joy Phillips, Judge Dredd, literature, Ninfa Hayes, Oblivion Storm, R.A Smith, World Book Night, World Book Night event


So, this Tuesday gone was World Book Night and yours truly was there in Costa Coffee Prestwich for a night of books.

The lucky recipients show off their acquisitions

The lucky recipients show off their acquisitions

It was actually quite a while ago, on one of our regular writers’ group meetings that R.A Smith suggested that we do something for World Book Night. The plan: All five of us apply to be Givers on the WBN webpage and we organise an event together in a local library in order to give them away. At the same time we would do readings and give aways and other things to keep the punters amused. We support the cause of spreading the love of reading, get some local community kudos and maybe a bit pf publicity for our own projects as an added bonus side effect.

So, with alacrity we set this plan in motion by us all logging into the WBN website and submitting our applications. We each applied for different books as our first choices and enough variation in second and third choices in order to hopefully avoid any overlaps and began to discuss the event itself.

Our initial plan of using libraries fell a little flat. We got no response from any of the libraries in Stockport, where a good number of our members lived, so at a quite late stage we had to expand our search to other areas. Being selfish and lazy and not wanting to travel more than a short distance, I offered to check out the possible venues in Prestwich, all of which are only a short walk from my house. Prestwich library were very helpful when I visited them and told me that they were closed on Tuesday afternoon (insert rant about local council budget cuts and their impact on local services here…) which was why they could not host (unless they could find a member of staff willing to work overtime for no pay) but suggested that I talked to the Coffee shop just over the plaza from them as they sometimes hosted events for them. I did just that and very soon we had a venue set. All that remained then was publicity…

The books laid out ready

The books laid out ready

Another problem was when we got the notification of what books we had got. We found that only three of us had been appointed givers (myself, Joy Phillips and Ed Fortune) which was more than 50% which was good. However, despite our careful planning, we got two batches of the same book. This meant we had 40 copies of John Wagner’s The Dark Judges and only 20 of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. Nevertheless, this gave us the challenge of having 60 books in total to give away to anyone who wanted them…

On the day itself, we got to the coffee shop by 530pm to be ready for a 6pm start. We laid our books out on one table and on another we put all our publicity stuff – bookmarks and leaflets and so on. Ninfa Hayes had thought to provide a double sided A4 sheet with extracts from two of her stories on it which I thought was a nice touch and we’d also each thought to bring along copies of all our in print books for guests to browse through. Since Transitions is not (yet) in print, I had a copy of Pirates and Swashbucklers for this.

I had been concerned that we had not done enough publicity, that no one would bother to show up. However, these concerns were soon dispelled as people began to filter in. Some people we already knew, friends of ours who lived locally, but there were also a good few who were not known to us who had been drawn here by the leaflets and posters. There were discussions, with each of us drawn off into small groups to talk about the books or our books or publishing in general and while there was an initial mistrust of the ‘free books’ (a number of people asked how much they cost…) they were soon snapped up by all there. The ‘demo’ books were also much read, being passed around from person to person. It is to be noticed that Oblivion Storm is not shown in the photograph of the ‘swag table’ This was because it was at the time being ardently read by someone. Ninfa was even nice enough to let one of the guests take one of her paperback copies of Bites away with them – signing it for her too.

We ended the event with two readings, both done by R.A Smith. One was from Oblivion Storm the other from Bites. I had intended to do a reading from Transitions but realised that the only copy of it I had on my Kindle was actually a pre-edit copy and so not the best for a reading.

By 8pm, the official end of the event, the pile of 60 books had been reduced to a much smaller pile. We had only a couple of copies of

The swag

The swag

Noughts and Crosses and about 15 of The Dark Judges. Several of these were snapped up by the event guests as they left. One copy of each was taken to be put into the library of a local school (which I personally consider a win) and several of the rest were grabbed by some friends of ours to give out to random people they saw on their way home (at least one copy was given to the staff of the chip shop we all stopped at for dinner). At the end, we were left with 8 copies of the Dark Judges and none at all of Noughts and Crosses.

I hope that all those out there who took books will enjoy them… I do feel proud of what we achieved on that day and I think a number of the event guests enjoyed the event a great deal. Next year we plan to do the same again and this time make it bigger and better!

As for the 8 books we have left… well, they are there to be given away and we *could* just give them away to people we meet in the street or leave them in a pub or on a train or something like that. However, we have discussed it and decided to run a competition to decide who gets the books. Therefore, myself, R.A Smith and Ninfa Hayes will be taking at least two of the books each and will be announcing how you can win them very soon…

Vampire Month – Seeking fresh blood

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ann Rice, books, Bram Stoker, entertainment, guest blogging, guest posts, Jason Petty, Joss Whedon, literature, Ninfa Hayes, Rachel Caine, Rebeka Harrington, Skyla Dawn Cameron, Stephenie Meyer, Vampires


It has been an age old tradition of this blog, dating back all the way to March 2012 (yes, all those many months ago), for the month of March to be assigned ‘Vampire Month’ and to be taken up with guest posts and interviews by writers who work in genres involving nightstalking bloodsuckers. Last March we had some wonderful posts by Diana Hardy, Skyla Dawn Cameron, Ninfa Hayes and Jason Petty covering subjects ranging from muses to book buying and now it is almost time to get things organised for this March…Vampire

So, with this in mind, I am putting out a call. I need fresh blood to fill the pages of Vampire month this year.

If you are a writer of something which could be construed in some way to be ‘vampire fiction’ or you know a writer who is and can contact them without stalking them I would be very interested in speaking with you. Contact me via this blog, Twitter, Facebook or my email address (dalascelles-writing@yahoo.co.uk) and tell me all about yourself or the author you think you can contact for me.

Of course, while I’d love to be able to get Ann Rice, Rachel Caine, Stephenie Meyer and similar on board for this (or even Jos Whedon or Toby Whitehouse) I am equally happy to accept less famous writers so long as you can do an interesting blog post and answer some interview questions. I would not, of course, say no to any of the above. However, if you contact me claiming to have exclusive access to Bram Stoker, I’d tell you to put him back where you found him and that Grave Robbery is so 1800s, darling…

[AW blog chain] Otherworldly

19 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write, books, contemporary literature, google images search, Gritty realism, literature, Otherworldly, Real world, realistic portrayal, supernatural elements, writing


This month’s blog chain title is sort of inevitable, Otherworldly talks about things beyond our ken, creatures from other worlds or dimensions. Ghosties, ghoulies and long leggity beasties. It can also refer to alien worlds or wyrd dimensions. There is a lot if scope in this topic.

With all this Gritty Realism about, it is best to have a BIG gun to hand

A question I always ask myself is ‘how finely can you slice alternate dimensions?’ At what point can you say that a particular setting is ‘the real world’ rather than some alternate dimension where things are different?

The answer to that may seem easy – the ‘real world’ is where things happen exactly as they would in the real world. There are no supernatural elements, it is a contemporary setting and the writer has taken great pains to represent a realistic portrayal of the world as it is. This is certainly one possible argument and one which has a lot to support it. I imagine most people reading this will have no issues with this interpretation and to be honest, neither do I. However, I do have an alternative opinion I would like to present:

There no such thing as ‘reality’ in fiction.

Think about that for a while. Yes, writers have striven to represent reality in various different ways. We have had ever darker and grittier portrayals of various aspects of life, all with the aim of ‘showing things like they really are’. However, you have to ask how real that really is. Writers are first and foremost entertainers and entertainers have to entertain. As a result of this requirement, reality sometimes has to take a back seat or even be replaced by something claiming to be it. Just try to type ‘Gritty Realism’ into a Google images search and see what you get. The results may surprise you. It certainly gives an insight into what creative types beleive ‘realism’ is – guns, drugs and, bizarrely, Super Mario…

Douglas Adams put it rather well when he told us about Arthur Dent’s morning in one of his books… Readers do not want to hear about how a character brushes his teeth or how she combs her hair or any one of hundreds of minor acts everyone performs every day in the course of thier lives. They do not want that level of detail unless, and this is important, there is something unusual about that activity which may have a bearing on the plot. If, for example, a character picks up the wrong toothbrush and another character notices this and has paranoid thoughts about whether they really are who they claim to be.

Too much reality, therefore, is an impedence to entertainment. A writer should only be presenting to the reader the things that are relevant to the plot, interesting things that happen. The reality of many people is not interesting enough to portray in writing. Novels, films and TV shows use a ‘normal life’ as a contrast. Our hero begins the story in relative normalcy and then is quickly taken from there into whatever adventures the plot has in store for them. Ideally, you want to make these periods of normal life relatively short lest the reader gets bored waiting for the plot to happen and also insert the occasional little sting to hint at the things to come in order to keep them reading. Arthur Dent’s normal life lasts for approximately two paragraphs before a bulldozer tries to demolish his house and it is not many pages from there to a surreal conversation with Ford in the pub and teleportation onto one of the ships sent to destroy the earth.

And it does not end with sci fi and fantasy. Even in contemporary literature you never see a character undergoing a normal day. There is always some imperative to drive them forward such as a death in the family or a messy relationship which means that they are not undergoing the same sort of normal day the rest of us poor non-characters in literature endure. This is not only the case with literature but also with any narrative form such as TV, movies and theatre. Which leads me back to the original question – these ‘realistic portrayals’ are in fact nothing of the sort. Each universe presented is an alternate dimension to our ‘real’ one. The differences may be explicit (the earth being destroyed by an alien construction fleet) or subtle (the existence of fictional characters in a world otherwise identical to our own) but they are there. The presence of ‘gritty realism’ does not make your fictional world any more real and in fact may make the contrast ever more obvious by highlighting an issue such as drug abuse, rape or violence and exaggerating it for the purposes of entertainment.

So, it may be time to accept that while art may reflect life, it is always going to be a rather distorted reflection as we emphasise elements we consider to be ‘entertaining’ and devalue those which are considered mundane.

OK, chaps, this is a blog chain and so you have to do your duty by God, King and country by contributing to the other blogs on the list. If you don’t, then we will come round your house and kidnap you and put you in the Big Brother house or, worse, on X Factor. You can then experience all the Gritty Realism you like…

Participants and posts:
Ralph Pines: http://ralfast.wordpress.com (post link here)
randi.lee: http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com (post link
here
)
Aranenvo: http://www.simonpclark.com (post link here)
pyrosama: http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com (post link here)
hilaryjacques: http://hillaryjacques.blogspot.com (post link here)
meowzbark: http://erlessard.wordpress.com (post link here)
slcboston: http://fleasof1000camels.blogspot.com (post link here)
areteus: https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com (post link
here)
bearilou: http://theglassopossum.wordpress.com (post link
here)
dolores haze: http://dianedooley.wordpress.com (post link
here)
SuzanneSeese: http://viewofsue.blogspot.com (post link here)
bmadsen: http://hospitaloflife.wordpress.com (post link here)
Linda
Adams: http://garridon.wordpress.com (post link here)
Alynza: http://www.alynzasmith.blogspot.com (post link here)
Orion
mk3: http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (post link
here)
BBBurke: http://awritersprogression.blogspot.com (post link
here)
SRHowen: http://srhowen1.blogspot.com (post link here)
Damina Rucci:
http://thegraypen.wordpress.com (post link
here)
CJMichaels: http://christinajmichaels.blogspot.com (post link
here)
wonderactivist: http://luciesmoker.wordpress.com (post link here)
Lady Cat:
http://carolsrandomness.blogspot.ca (post link
here)
xcomplex: http://arielemerald.blogspot.com (post link
here)
debranneelliot: http://www.debragrayelliott.blogspot.com (post link here)

[Review] Dodge and Twist by Tony Lee

05 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Artful Dodger, books, caper, characters of oliver twist, Charles Dickens, dickensian london, Dodge and Twist, epublish, epublish a book, literature, Oliver Twist, reviews, Tony Lee


Over at the epublish a book site I review the ebook of Tony Lee’s Dodge and Twist – an exciting caper set in Dickensian London and following the fates of the characters of Oliver Twist years after Dickens left them.

Follow this link to read the review: http://www.epublishabook.com/?p=5690#axzz1zl9rwsqi

Feel free to comment here if you have any to make.

[Vampire Month] Buying Books in 2012

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

books, buying books, Dianna Hardy, guest blogging, guest posts, Libraries, literature, Reading, Vampires


Buying Books in 2012

by Dianna Hardy

I’ve written so many blog posts about my writing over the past two weeks, that (following a suggestion from a friend) I thought I’d change tact and write about reading.

I was an avid reader from early childhood – in fact, I don’t remember not having a book nearby ever since I could read. As soon as I got my library card, I would be there every single Saturday and would borrow my full quota of books for the week (I think it was seven books back then). I would devour them, and then go back the following week for another seven. This went on for years. It stopped when I “grew up” and had to do things like socialise (if I wanted to have any friends at all), followed by study for exams and get a job. In short, I stopped reading.

No, don’t cry, it’s okay … you see, it all worked out in the end, because now, I’m doing the thing that I actually love more than reading – I’m writing 🙂

So, my friend asked me to write a blog post about what makes me want to buy a book nowadays, and I really had to think about this answer. When I was, say, twelve, the answer was simply because I loved reading. I’d buy almost any book as long as it sounded vaguely interesting, and like something I could get into. But nowadays, reading for leisure does take a back seat to writing, and reading for reviews. I don’t do a lot of reviews, but occasionally I do, and it’s mostly for indie authors (and yes, I have a backlog). In those rare moments when I can actually say, “I’ve got some free time,” the thing that makes me buy a book is based solely on what I want to read right now. The answer is usually something paranormal (though not always), definitely something modern, something quirky, edgy or different, and often with a bit of steam to it.

If I don’t have time to look for something that’s very specific to my tastes, I’ll buy something based on recommendations that have come my way over the past few months, that I’ve logged to memory as ‘interesting’.

Most of the time, I don’t want a heavy read – just something with a smooth, flowing writing style that I can pick up whenever, and get stuck into.

I’ll usually buy eBooks first nowadays, and paperbacks only if I LOOOOOVE the story; if I know that I’ll read it every year and exhaust the paper it’s printed on.

I rarely buy books that I loved when I was younger. That was then and this is now, and I have changed so much, that I know I wouldn’t get the same things out of the books I used to love – I’m all about the new reads and moving forwards to discover new authors, new ways of writing, and new books that can press the buttons that belong to who I am now. Because next year, I’ll be a different me all over again 😉

Please feel free to comment below and let us know what inspires you to buy books (paperbacks and eBooks) nowadays. Is what you look for in a book different now to what it was ten years ago?

And here’s my little promo bit (’cause really, I should fit it in somewhere):

The Witching Pen series is due out in paperback form very soon for a very affordable £5.95 each – http://www.thewitchingpen.co.uk/p/buy-paperback.html

And A Silver Kiss (Vampire Poetry) is available in a neat little paperback format – http://www.vampirepoetry.co.uk/p/silver-kiss.html

Thank you David, for having me on your blog once again 🙂

Dianna Hardy is a multi-genre author of paranormal things, dark things, poetic things, sexy things, taboo things, and sometimes funny things. Writes about witches, demons and angels. All info can be found on her website DiannaHardy.com

 

Twitter Updates

  • The Elementals: Russell A Smith interview. #knoxpublishing #theelementals dalascelles.co.uk/2021/01/06/the… 1 week ago
  • New Year Dog dalascelles.co.uk/2020/12/31/new… 2 weeks ago
  • The Elementals: Heather Young Nicols interview #kindle #knoxpublishing dalascelles.co.uk/2020/12/15/the… 1 month ago
  • Just entered the Wet hair competition on @PurplePort #photo #competition #PurplePort purpleport.com/competition/vi… #NSFW 1 month ago
  • The Elementals: Jared Lain interview #theelementals #knoxpublishing #kindle dalascelles.co.uk/2020/12/03/the… 1 month ago
Follow @areteus

Like me on Facebook

Like me on Facebook

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join the Lurkers

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,003 other followers

Recent Posts

  • The Elementals: Russell A Smith interview.
  • New Year Dog
  • The Elementals: Heather Young Nicols interview
  • The Elementals: Jared Lain interview
  • Release day tomorrow!

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy