Posts tagged authors
The Obligatory “Best of 2011” Post
It’s almost 2012. You knew that already. On the short list of things you might not know, however, lies the contents of this, our list of our 10 most popular articles and interviews from 2011. We got to know photographers and writers, we witnessed the fall of a bookselling giant, and learned a little bit about programming. We wrote a lot of long-winded articles, and started a number of great discussions. Thanks for reading!
In order from most to least popular, here are your favorite posts from this year:
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1. Books We Love // Poetry! Poetry! Poetry by Peter Davis
I simply couldn’t put down Peter Davis’ Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, a collection of metapoetry that does away with any such pretense. Davis doesn’t hide behind his words and he makes no attempt whatsoever to provide the reader with some kind of theoretical, rosy middle ground upon which his ideas might be engaged. It’s not what the typical reader is expecting going into a poetry reading experience.
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2. Author Spotlight // Dean Lappi
We met author Dean Lappi not at a coffee shop or a pub per our usual procedure, but on the busy wall of a Facebook group. He’s a lover of fantasy, an evangelist of networking and an experimentalist through and through. We rigged up our recorder and turned on our speakerphone for a conversation with Lappi, in which we discussed math as magic, publishing as collaboration and good networking as the lifeblood of the modern author.
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3. Author Spotlight // Lisa Vaughn
People who invest themselves in telling stories are constantly jumping from character to character, from scene to scene, mapping all sorts of different emotions and atmospheres. Perhaps it starts before the pen even touches paper. I can’t say for sure how often I have written furiously out of anger, or rosily out of love. So it’s not surprising that when I sat down to speak with artist and author Lisa Vaughn, I found myself reflecting on the power of love to empower, of fear to imprison, and of grief to motivate.
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4. Hashem Rifai: Finding the Endless Nothing
Hashem Rifai in many ways embodies the tension that defines modern America. In his one person there lies a struggle between the old and the new, between his conservative upbringing and liberal education. His mind pulls him toward medical school but his heart and his eye insist on a simultaneous career in photography. In his work, Rifai searches to reconcile these extremes, inviting others to experience what he calls the “endless nothing,” that intangible quality of good art that is so indicative of this kind of duality that defines the human condition. The result of this quest is brilliant photography with a perspective that speaks to the vast greatness of ancient culture and tradition while making room for intimate humanity in the midst of skyscrapers and subways.
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5. The Oxford Comma: Who Cares?
Lately there has been a lot of buzz surrounding Oxford’s recent decision to change their rules regarding the comma that bears their name. Cutesy introductory paragraphs abound on literary and editing blogs around the world aiming to succinctly both define the Oxford Comma and express their stance on the recent turn of events.
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6. Google’s eReader: A Step Backwards?
If Google is doing anything right (which I think they are), they are dead-on with their leanings toward the accessibility of good web applications and Cloud-based solutions. A long-term investment in the Cloud requires companies like Google to continue pushing toward media that is not centralized and toward hardware that is not specialized. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy this device. Go read the same stuff for free in any browser or on any Android platform and revel in the fact that you’ve avoided supporting a model that needs to change.
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7. The End of Borders: A Positive Development?
The end is here for Borders, and it’s been a long time coming. In the past year, all but 400 brick and mortar locations have been shut down, andit’s just been announced that the rest are set to go by September. Analysts (and customers with common sense) identify a number of factors that have resulted in the company’s failure; customers browsing and not buying (I’ve heard it said that Borders is the Lunchtime Library), a heavy (and outdated) focus on music and movie sales, and an all around poor digital strategy are all potentially to blame.
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8. JavaScript Tips and Tricks: Part 2
Moving on with our JavaScript Tips and Tricks series, I present another set of good practices that I’ve picked up in my experience as a developer. Wield this power wisely, and be sure to share your go-to JS tricks in the comments section below.
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9. Pioneer Profiles // Living Your Story with Rue Volley
Some people are creative on levels that demand a complete surrender. The stories that loop in their minds are so consuming that they demand to be shared with the world. Every memory, every relationship, every clever little thought becomes fodder for the sort of epic tale that can only find its basis in one person’s truest vision of reality, even when that tale tells of the strange and fantastic. Author Rue Volley hasn’t been writing long, but when the mood struck her in early 2010 to look at her own life through a new lens, she’s found herself at the mercy of words.
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10. JavaScript Tips and Tricks: Part 1
As a developer working for a big consulting firm (and as the owner of a web startup), I’m constantly learning new tricks to make my job go more smoothly. When it comes to JavaScript, some of these tricks have proven particularly useful time and time again, so I’m offering them up to you with the hope that they can serve you as they have served me. These tips are by no means a strict guideline, but using the techniques outlined here will help us all write better JavaScript code. That’s a good thing.
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The Democracies and Dictatorships of Literature
RYAN - Karl Marx used to say that governments have a sort of evolutionary ladder. He’d rank democracy somewhere above tribal oligarchies and right below communism in the progressive growth chart of political systems. It goes without saying that most people would disagree with this oversimplified schema. I’d like to think that things tend to move in circles.
This is certainly true of the literary world. It’s like the entire history of the written word has moved in one big cycle. You have your freer moments of written expression (the 1920’s come to mind, at least in the novels), and you have your more prominent periods of top-down control and censorship. Don’t believe me? You try writing about the earth orbiting the sun during a time when the Pope disagrees.
It seems obvious that the digital age defaults to one of those times of “free literature.” Never before could virtual unknowns publish their own work and potentially gather a readership of any kind. The closest historical parallel in my mind would be the numerous independent newspapers and journals that popped up in what would become the United States of America during the Revolutionary War era. Even then, though, the printing press technology alone wasn’t enough to completely democratize publishing. You still needed to have some capital to buy a studio and a press and all the supplies that went into printing. You still needed to hire a delivery boy and feed his horse.
That’s not the case anymore. As I’ve already said, pretty much anyone can publish their work today. Renaissance men and women among us who have a knack for writing and editing and marketing and design can pretty much run the whole operation on their own, and many authors do. This is exactly what drew us at liloQui Digital Publishing together in the first place; we wanted to see what a small press would look like in the digital age. We wanted to see how much further we could democratize the publishing world by helping authors design their works, get them running smoothly online, and virally connecting them to their readers. The name of the game for us was creating audiences for authors that, for whatever reason, couldn’t create audiences for themselves.
Because that’s what publishing is all about, right? It’s been so easy for us to knock the big New York firms because they’ve turned themselves into massive, sky-scraping targets for ridicule. It might not be their fault that the market is shrinking for expensive printed materials, but that doesn’t really excuse the lack of creative and financial ownership most authors actually retain once they’ve achieved their dream of getting published. The big publishers are the King Louis to Amazon’s Robespierre. They’re yesterday’s news. They are on the way out. Their model is broken. Publishing should be about getting every author out there connected with their readers - no matter how few readers they might have - and letting people more freely express themselves. That’s the promise the web makes to us every time we log into Facebook or Twitter. That’s what the commenting section below every article on the New York Times’ website has taught us to believe.
But as we move forward building our publishing platform, these questions keep rolling in my mind. How can we make the publishing world more open while retaining the quality the big guys can bring? How do we make room for the amateur writer to get published while ensuring that the Jonathan Franzens and Neil Gaimans don’t get lost in all the noise? I keep coming back to this point every time I finish delivering a speech about why the publishing ladder to success is missing a few rungs. How can I be an advocate for publishing anyone and everyone who wants an audience while giving the art of the written word its due?
I have no idea.
This is my challenge, and this is yours as a reader, or a writer, or a speaker of language in general. Too often, I challenge the “technological advances” being made by digital publishing firms that focus on shticks like adding soundtracks to books without myself offering a better solution for the application of digital technologies to the written word. I’m writing this to begin the conversation, to ask for your thoughts and opinions. How can we as members of the writing and publishing and reading communities open our world up without losing what matters most? How do we let more people into the inner circle while ensuring that we have truly challenging and provocative books to read when we go home at night?
Such questions are exactly the sort of thing that can turn a working democracy into an oppressive dictatorship. We can’t afford to see that happen with books on the web, so we have to seriously ask ourselves: Why are we writing and publishing and reading in the first place?
Share your thoughts below. We need as many voices in this conversation as we can get.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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Liked this post? Check out a few of our best interviews, articles and editorials:
Innovation: You’re Doing It Wrong
Author Spotlight // Jessica Knauss
When did you first realize that you wanted to write?
I don’t remember a time when I hadn’t identified “writer” as my occupation. Before I learned to read, I would draw a pencil across the page in jagged lines, trying to capture a thought or observation. I took a long detour as a student and I’ve been employed as a librarian and a Spanish teacher, but those were always in addition to writing.
What do you write?
I now write in two veins. The most recent one will result in what I hope is a thrilling series of historical novels based on medieval Spanish epics. I’m hard at work on The Seven Noble Knights of Lara, and if no other roadblocks stop me, it should be ready to submit to publishers in September 2012. The other vein is the result of long years of tapping into an untamed muse, usually categorized as “magical realism.” A beta reader said my work goes along almost normally and then throws you for a loop, which amused me no end! All of my published work so far is from this vein. It includes: 1. A novella, Tree/House, about a woman who is only able to start putting her life together after she’s had extensive advice from a vibrant vagrant and slept in trees while there’s snow on the ground. 2. The short story collection, Threads Woven, with women’s fiction ranging from an unusual friendship, to a bizarre revenge fantasy, to two sentences about house slippers. 3. Sail to Italy and Sail From Italy are probably the most accessible. They’re short, humorous adventure stories in the tradition of The Princess Bride.
How has your work evolved over time?
I’ve always included unusual details in my writing, the result of looking at the world through a twisted lens. During the formative period of my late teens and early twenties, my writing was highly imitative of what I was reading at the time, most notably Hemingway, The Princess Bride, and the magical realists. Over time (thank goodness!) it’s become less derivative and much more my own. I found a way to bypass the styles I was reading and get my own style on the page.
What is your wish for your readers as they read your work?
I hope that they enjoy the story, and that they’ll welcome being treated as intelligent, thoughtful readers. I never underestimate my readers, knowing that they’ll rise to any occasion that stimulates them.
What inspires you?
I’m hugely inspired by old stories that have stood the test of time. Otherwise, I seem to grab onto a random piece of information and process it subconsciously for a while so that it comes out as a story idea just as I’m waking up. I’d be lost without a bedside notebook! That’s the main process I call my muse.
What are your goals for your career in the future?
I hope to complete and publish The Seven Noble Knights of Lara and to get a lot of exposure for it so that there will be readers waiting for the next book about medieval Spain. I hope to achieve a stable income so I can dedicate myself to writing and let that crazy muse loose.
You’re on a desert island, and you’ve got three books to read for the rest of your life. What are they?
The Princess Bride by William Goldman (not to forget S. Morgenstern), El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, and either the biggest encyclopedia ever printed or a hugely comprehensive guide to world literature with a complete edition of the works of Alfonso X el Sabio… Or my monthly subscription to National Geographic… How long do I have to decide?
What’s the one book you never want to see again?
The only reading assignment I ever remember hating with a passion was Lord of the Flies, not only because it had disgusting events, but also because it was so cynical. I much prefer fiction to have a foundation of optimism, even if it’s a tragedy, so Lord of the Flies is the book that comes to mind when you ask that. Most other books have some redeeming value, and if I had to read Lord of the Flies again, I would look for the good qualities it must have.
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Find Jessica Knauss on Facebook and at her blog, and be sure to check out some of her work online. Her publishing company, Acedrex Publishing, can also be found online and on Facebook.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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Liked this post? Check out a few of our best interviews, articles and editorials:
Author Spotlight // Sinead MacDughlas
Author Spotlight // Max Ellendale
RYAN - Good literature is an escape. Whenever I crack open a book and find myself wandering through a strange and fantastic landscape, hand in hand with unusual characters and great conversation, the pages soak me in like so much spilled water on the coffee table. Our fantasies tell us who we are, and it’s no surprise that those created by Max Ellendale, creative writer and therapist, do more than offer respite from the pains of real life. Ellendale’s stories hold a mirror up to the human condition and invite the reader to come along for the ride as her characters find the strength to face their challenges head-on.
“I started writing my first story when I was in sixth or seventh grade, and I guess it was just my experiences with people that inspired me. I had some tough experiences with some of my friends growing up. One girl in particular had some issues going on in her family, and it affected me as a kid, because I really didn’t understand it. So I used the creative medium of writing to work through those feelings. I wrote a story about two best friends, and the protagonist found out that her best friend had some trouble going on, and there was some domestic violence in the family. I didn’t understand that because it wasn’t something I was exposed to, so I processed those feelings through writing.”
Ellendale’s love for literature stayed with her as she grew, and it was her deep desire to understand the human experience that led her to examine her world not just through the eyes of a writer, but of a therapist, as well. She studied psychology in college and went on to get her master’s, and she’s now turning her attention back to the world of books.
“The arts have always been appealing to me, and I studied psychology because everyone told me that there’s no money in the arts. I was told that I couldn’t make a living as a writer, so I’d have to choose a career, so I decided to study the human mind. To me, it’s all about understanding the human experience, whether I’m writing a book or talking with a client.”
I’m drawn in by Ellendale’s unique perspective on life as a human being. As she speaks about her passion for storytelling and the care and trust she shares with her clients, it becomes clear that there isn’t a lot of separation between the two endeavors in her mind, and that makes sense. Exploring an individual’s life story, helping them to make sense of their past and their present and the relationships that define them, is really no different from the art of creating characters and telling their stories, is it?
“If I’ve taken anything away from my experiences as a psychologist and a mental health counselor, it’s that sometimes, when people experience horrible things, they have a difficult time integrating themselves back into the world. That will be a theme that runs through some of my books, with a protagonist who is troubled, who is trying to figure out where to go from here, and how to heal from this. Maybe it’s through werewolves, or vampires, or witches, or goblins, or fairies. It doesn’t matter. It’s just how they are able to navigate through their world and live a satisfying, meaningful existence. And that’s very true to real life.”
And her desire to hear and tell stories isn’t held just to the clients she meets in a therapy session. She finds characters worth exploring everywhere she goes.
“I’ve been known to visit a traveling carnival, walk up to one of the carnival workers and say, ‘Tell me your story.’ The first time I did that, my sister was with me and she was just like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I just said that I had a feeling that this was a person who had something they wanted to say. So my sister just wandered off, and she was thinking that I was losing it, but I listened to that carnival worker. She told me her story, about how she ended up in a traveling carnival. People have stories to tell. You just have to ask the right questions. There are characters in this world that are worth capturing, even if it’s in a snapshot.”
Mark Twain once said that “[o]nly one expert…is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist.” He went on to describe the ways in which someone from a particular part of the world, dealing with particular kinds of people, could impart far more truth in their novels than any census worker or sociologist. Of course, he was referring to novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stories that effortlessly recreated (and satirized) the experience of living, in this case, in America’s South before the Civil War. He wasn’t necessarily talking about science fiction or paranormal romance.
But if there is any truth in what Twain said, then we can find proof positive in the work of Max Ellendale. She has dedicated her life to understanding why we do the things we do, why we feel what we feel, and how we make through life. Her stories aren’t just an escape from a reality, but a reflection of it. The trials of her characters remind us that we aren’t alone in our struggles.
Because really, when all is said and done, her characters are us.
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Max Ellendale is working on a number of projects, including an Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance series and a Young Adult novel called “Witch Way.” Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter, and stop by her blog to keep current with her writing career.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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Liked this post? Check out a few of our best interviews, articles and editorials:
Author Spotlight // Teric Darken
Author Spotlight // Sinead MacDughlas
Image Credit - Dave J. Ford
RYAN - You wake up and you’re living in an apartment, or a rented house, or a new home. You’re a marketer, or a designer, or a door-to-door salesman. It seems like your life is in a constant state of flux, and why shouldn’t it be? There’s a world of opportunity out there - so many places to live, so many people to know, so many hats to wear. Some people spend their whole lives in the same town, working the same job, living the same life. Sinead MacDughlas is not some people. I sat down with MacDughlas recently to learn about her writing and the many roads she’s travelled to get where she is today. Our conversation left me checking my own assumptions and wondering about the awesome stories that must come from a woman who has lived a thousand lives.
When we were doing the necessary work of setting up a good time and method for our conversation (being in two different countries makes for some limited options), MacDughlas warned me straight-off that she’s got kids who might split some of her attention away from the interview. I, of course, told her that I didn’t mind, and we settled on a time. That’s when my mind began to race and my vision of how the interview would play out started to take shape. It’s no secret that a good interviewer’s most important job is finding the perfect hook, the part of a story that makes for engaging metaphor and a relatable message. So I was thrilled to learn that children might play a factor in our interview (this has never happened to me before), and I began hoping for an interruption, for something that would give me an easy angle on MacDughlas’ balancing act between family and the written word.
But when the call connected and the video began streaming, I found the exact opposite of what I was expecting. The room was quiet and still, and MacDughlas was ready for some serious conversation.
“The kids are down for their nap,” she begins immediately. “This is my quiet time.”
She was ready to get started, so I jumped right in and asked her about writing. She told me all about her experiences in school, her daily journal exercises and the boredom they reflected. She wasn’t happy with writing about her own life, so she asked her teacher if she could write something else. So at age eight, bored already with writing for writing’s sake, she began writing her first epic about her grandparents’ pomeranian. One chapter at a time, she wove the story together and began her love affair with creative writing.
“I was lucky. I had very encouraging teachers all the way along. The only people who read my writing were my teachers and my parents. They all said ‘You do well at this. If you enjoy this, keep doing this.’ So I said, all right. That’s what I’ll do. Then I got to high school and people would ask me what I wanted to do, and I’d tell them that I wanted to be an author. They would pause and say, ‘Well, that’s very nice, dear. What will you do to make money?’”
And at this stage in the game, it was a reasonable question to ask her. Writing had been a part of her fiber from the very beginning, yet only now is MacDughlas beginning to really focus on making a career out of writing. In so many words, the last few decades have brought with them constant change and an endless line of different jobs, of new locations and temporary environments.
“I’m a bit of a gypsy. I’ve moved 42 times now. I’m 41 years old.”
This was not what I was expecting to hear from a working mother. I’d already decided that this interview was going to be about making it work, about having it all, about a strong woman filling the roles of mother and writer concurrently. And, to be sure, that’s exactly what MacDughlas is doing. But that, as they say, is not the whole story. I found myself intrigued about her nomadic lifestyle, one that seems at odds with the preconceived notions of MacDughlas that I carried into our conversation.
“This is really the first time in my life that I’ve laid down roots and stopped moving. I’ve done so many things in my life. I’ve lived in one room studios, in small apartments and rented houses… I’ve worked in restaurants, in call centers, in bars, I ran my own marketing business for small businesses in the area, I’ve worked as a door-to-door salesperson, selling vacuums.”
Throughout all of this, writing was an important part of her person, yet always sat in the background. It wasn’t until the end of her first marriage and the decade-long journey into motherhood with a new husband that she found herself ready to explore the issues surrounding her divorce (one she describes as amicable). This seems to be a common thread in the lives of writers who suddenly turn serious about their work. As MacDughlas puts it, she wrote about the divorce to deal with the issues and sort everything out, and by the time she stopped to look up, she realized that she was writing a book. She built an entire story around her central character, someone who represented her in so many ways, but who shared histories with any number of other people in MacDughlas’ life. She introduced people she’d met years before as characters, wrote the plot through to what should have become the end, and found that she was no longer thrilled with the story. She knew that she didn’t want to write another self-help book for divorcees, even if hers was taking the form of a fictional novel. All around her were stories of strong women, of others like her who made it through divorce without much help from the outside. She wanted to tell a different story. She wanted to take her character, this person she’d spent so long creating and listening to, and do something brand new.
“I had a friend who had been reading and critiquing the story as I went and he kind of said, ‘Yeah, this has gone the way of the dinosaur, here. What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Maybe I’ll just make her crazy. Maybe I will drive my character insane and have her start killing people.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea!’ I sat down that night and thought about mysteries. I realized that I could do a mystery.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that this has been the life story of what will soon be MacDughlas’ premier novel. For someone who has spent life in transit, in constant evolution, it must be incredibly comfortable to lift a character from the familiar environment of one novel and drop her suddenly into something new and unusual. That’s her normal. And it’s that precise factor that makes MacDughlas’ voice unique and worth sharing. She says that as she’s made the decision to publish this work and to begin, for once in her life, allowing others into her stories, she’s become more comfortable with the idea of looking back at the many stories and poems she’s produced over the years. How serendipitous, then, that the first step toward this new career as an author (a designation, by the way, that MacDughlas refuses to give herself until she begins selling her books), came after she stopped moving around, but also after she made the decision to drastically change the life of her main character.
Movement. Discovery. Change. Growth. If MacDughlas’ own life story should inform her work at all, these are the kinds of themes we can expect from her stories. I’m excited because we can trust that they are coming from a lifetime of real experience. I’m excited because we can trust that her stories will keep on coming. If a nomad like MacDughlas is happy to settle down with her family and build a new career around writing, then we can also trust that her wandering ways will live on in her work.
Because someone who has lived a thousand lives surely has a thousand stories to tell.
Sinead MacDughlas is all over the Web. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and learn more about her work at her homepage and blog.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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The 200 Word Book Review // Our Island of Epidemics by Matthew Salesses
RYAN - Dissociation. Unrequited love. Hunger. Laziness. These are some of the illnesses that strike the citizens of Matthew Salesses’ Our Island of Epidemics. They come in waves, crippling the entire population, leaving them subject to the whims of their affections. Tension mounts as the islanders discover one among them who is immune to the epidemics. On this man:
He didn’t understand how free we’d felt to be ill – when we were all ill and all understood. “You ruined everything,” we told him as he looked at us with pity. We feared what else he was immune to. We feared his children’s children, and Darwin, and the end of our island’s communality.
At first glance, I might have supposed that this immune man is offered to the reader as a relatable guide to this foreign island. But what strikes me about this book – a quick read, and presented with brilliant brevity – is Salesses’ ability to create a world of widespread heartache, of magic, and of flying fruit, and to make the man without magic, or illness, or heartache seem strange and alien to the reader.
Because none of us are immune to the many epidemics that come with the human heart. Our relationships are built upon trust and the understanding that we are a fickle people, given to changing moods and minds. I walk away from Our Island of Epidemics pondering the futility of perfection and its pursuit, and a bit more grounded when it comes to my consideration of those friends of mine who seem immune to the vices the rest of us call friend.
Buy this book and read it. You will not regret doing so.
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Liked this post? Check out a few of our best interviews, articles and editorials:
Author Spotlight // Carl Corder Pioneer Profiles // Nathan Monk: Short Circuiting on Purpose
The 200 Word Book Review // Royal Ferdinand by Donald Ford
RYAN - I’m often testing out new features and formats for this blog, and today I’m pretty excited to introduce the aptly-named 200 Word Book Review. Because sometimes, we don’t have twenty minutes to sink into reading a review. If we did, we’d just read a chapter or two of the book itself and make a decision. In the spirit of brevity and of conciseness, I’ll occasionally offer these sorts of short-form reviews of independent works. Today, we begin with the short story, Royal Ferdinand by Don Ford.
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Perhaps the best place to begin my review of Royal Ferdinand is found at the end of the story, in the words of the author.
Hopefully children and those young at heart will enjoy this display of simple fun as we look into the lives of two very different characters who we find are not so different.
In so many words, this short story (a storytale, as Ford dubs it) accomplishes the transparent wishes of the author. The story of a king named Ferdinand and a bull named Ferdinand (not to be confused with the bashful beast of literary fame) was originally presented to me as a short story, and I suppose the term applies. But as I read it, I was reminded not of short fiction, but of the enchanting children’s stories that worked to stoke my imagination in my younger years. The piece sat on my computer, yearning instead to be a Golden Book in my hands, encouraging me to paint whimsical pictures in my mind of a king in a cowboy hat, of a tyrant named Morbid, and of a bull bathed in perfume. Children will enjoy this story, although they might enjoy it more with the inclusion of some illustration. If you’re in the mood for a simple, fun story reminiscent of what you read as a child, this story’s comforting, light style might be worth checking out.
Royal Ferdinand by Don Ford is available as a Kindle eBook on Amazon.com.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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Check out a few of our recent reviews and author interviews:
Books We Love // Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
Author Spotlight // Lisa Vaughn
RYAN - I once read somewhere that writers are perpetual emotion machines. I typically blanche at the thought of using so cute a line in anything that I myself would write, but, from time to time, one-liners can really do the trick. Because it’s really quite true, isn’t it? People who invest themselves in telling stories are constantly jumping from character to character, from scene to scene, mapping all sorts of different emotions and atmospheres. Perhaps it starts before the pen even touches paper. I can’t say for sure how often I have written furiously out of anger, or rosily out of love. So it’s not surprising that when I sat down to speak with artist and author Lisa Vaughn, I found myself reflecting on the power of love to empower, of fear to imprison, and of grief to motivate.
“I never really set out to be an author. If anything, you would classify me as an artist. So the book came out, it’s a memoir, and it came about after my mother’s death. It was a healing process for me. It was all about digging in and rehashing the past, and through that, voila!, came a book… As an artist, I’m all about expressing myself. So when this story came up, which is actually a story I held inside my head for over 30 years, and when my mother passed away, I was kind of forced to deal with it.”
I share this quote above a number of others that I could have led with because there is something about the surrender in Vaughn’s voice when she talks about her story that reminds me as a writer that writing is not necessarily always an intellectual enterprise. Sometimes, writing is about letting the story take hold, about lending it our minds and our hands just long enough that it might come to life. It’s as though the story is a part of her, some creature living in the back room of Vaughn’s mind who eventually grew tired of waiting to speak. Maybe, instead, it’s an old friend that she parted ways with in her youth, someone who stole a piece of her heart and refuses to give it back.
Incidentally, that’s exactly what Vaughn’s memoir, The Gifted Ones, is all about.
“I grew up in a small town in Indiana. Society was a lot different back in the 60’s and 70’s. The book basically deals with the story of me and my first true love, my best friend who happened to be female. So it’s basically the trials and tribulations that go along with that, especially back then in such a conservative society. It’s about my parents not approving, and it’s about me fighting for my right to love. In the end, it wasn’t quite the right fit for one of us, but it really did teach us a lot about love and loss and what it truly means to love a person for who they are, not what they are.”
The book began as an exercise in sorting through the issues that remained between mother and daughter, but in an honest pursuit of closure, Vaughn was pushed to once again open herself to the story of her first love. The story occupies a critical space in Vaughn’s life, a point where true love and fear intersect, where judgment and acceptance stand locked at odds with each other, where the person she is today can smile and nod to the people she used to be. Vaughn recalls what it was like to let her guard down and share this story for the first time in decades:
“I wasn’t ashamed of this story or anything, but I kept it inside because it was mine. Then, one day, for whatever reason, I sat down with a friend of mine. We started talking and the subject of homosexuality eventually came up, so I saw fit to start telling her this story. I really didn’t intend to tell her all the details, but I just kind of opened my mouth and it all spilled out. Towards the end, she looked at me, tears running down her face, and she said, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to tell this story. You have to write a book about this because the world needs to hear this.’ So that gave me the idea. I knew the story was special, but I didn’t know it could touch people like that. That’s when I knew I had to write a book, something I’m not trained to do, so I wrote it the best way I knew how, which was just to sit down and tell it.”
As Vaughn spoke, I thought about how often I’d heard teachers or other writers talk about how fear can cripple the art of storytelling. I reflected on my own moments of terror, when I would destroy stories of mine for fear that they wouldn’t be accepted, or when I’ve handed over a copy of something to a friend with a pit in my stomach. If writers are beings of great emotion, then I would also venture that fear is a rival that we all come to know and love. But for Vaughn, this wasn’t a simple matter of vulnerability when it comes to word choice or dialogue. Any reservations she may have held in regards to the story she’s now told had everything to do with her real life experience, with the turmoil that surrounded what she to this day remembers as her first true experience with love. So while I don’t know anyone who has ever written out of fear, I’m beginning to think that fear may have a lot to do with the writing process. Sometimes it emboldens us to tell our story in the face of fierce criticism. Other times, it forces us to think about whether we have anything worth sharing at all. But at the end of the day, fear serves writers best when it’s being overcome.
“If it comes from your heart, and it’s genuine, how can it be wrong? If you put your heart and soul out there, and you’re vulnerable, people react to that. They can tell that you’re genuine. So you may think that you’re the only one, and that you’re a freak, but you’ll be shocked at how many people come to you and relate. That’s what’s great about this book. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, bi, or whatever, everybody can relate to love.”
At this point in the conversation, I became markedly confused as to whether we were discussing Vaughn’s book or that first love she found so long ago. It was then that I realized that there’s really no difference. Because Vaughn has shared her book, has made her past known to her friends, her family, and to her loving husband (that’s right) all in the pursuit of promoting love and acceptance in a world that desperately needs them both. There are a thousand good reasons to write a book, but I, for one, can’t think of one that’s better than this. The Gifted Ones is for anyone who has ever felt alone, or misunderstood, for anyone who has loved and lost, for anyone in need of a reason to accept people for (as Vaughn says) who, and not what, they are.
Author Joan Didion once wrote something that’s stuck with me for the greater part of a decade since I first read it: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Throughout my conversation with Lisa Vaughn, this quote kept popping up in the back of my mind, challenging me to reflect once again on those parts of my life, whether they were difficult or full of love (or both), that have made me the person I am today. I wonder what would happen if more people could gather the strength to share their deepest, most personal memories. I wonder what the world would be like if we could not only accept those people we used to be, but also those people who we used to love, or the ones we have grown to fear. I wonder if one story could have the power to make at least a small part of the world learn to love without condition.
I’d like to think so.
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You can find Lisa Vaughn’s debut book, The Gifted Ones, on Amazon. Connect with the story online on Facebook and Twitter, and check out Vaughn’s blog for more information.
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Author Spotlight // Teric Darken
RYAN - When I called Teric Darken to begin our interview, he answered confidently with a warm, “Hello, Ryan.” In a rare turn of events for me as an interviewer, he insisted on asking me about myself, on learning what he could about me. It was obvious from the start that he was earnestly interested in getting to know who I was and was as interested in a two-way conversation as he was in sharing what he could about himself. This set the tone from the beginning of our conversation to the end, a conversation that was all about opposites attracting, about balance and expression, and about why, in Darken’s opinion, there’s room for pretty much everything in his world.
Knowing that I’m a part of the digital publishing industry, Darken dove right in, discussing the merits of the web and modern technology, and the necessity of change. He spoke passionately about why we have to embrace technology, all the while our Skype call sputtered and froze and eventually broke down altogether. A few minutes later, after I’d had enough time to ponder the hugely ironic gravity of such a situation, we found ourselves once again in communication, with the caveat that it was raining in Arkansas and Darken’s DSL connection could go again at any moment. It didn’t.
So with our confidence in technology once again restored, I asked my typical starter question, knowing full well that we were past it: Why did you start writing?
“There’s nothing like being read to when you’re a kid. It’s books giving birth to authors. Here it is in a nutshell: When I was very young, like five years old, I can remember my grandfather, my Pa, he would always tell me the story of the Headless Horseman, you know, Sleepy Hollow. I can remember him telling me that story over the hearth of the fireplace one time in the winter. So there’s this crackling fire, and I’m five years old, and he’s telling me all about Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones and the Headless Horseman and his pumpkin flying through the air. It thrilled me, and it was scary to a five year old.”
He went on to talk about his Granny, his mom and his dad all reading to him as a boy. He reminisced about the Hardy Boys and about Peter Pan, about those Golden Books many of us remember from our childhood. He told me about his dad’s own storytelling, about his favorite character, a moth named Old Scratch. And then he talked about something more terrifying than any Hawthorne tale: adolescence.
“In school, I had an English teacher, she gave us an assignment to construct our own poem. It had to be original. And something just clicked with me there. While everybody else was groaning about the assignment, I went home and got to work and there was just a floodgate that opened up in me. You know, when you’re a teenager, you have a lot of pressure built up in you with the teen angst, and you don’t quite know what you’re going through, or how to express yourself. You’re finding out who you are as a person. So I just started writing these words down, and pretty soon I had a poem.”
And he turned that poem in, fully expecting an A. He told me that he was Ralphie from A Christmas Story, excited to turn in his composition about the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle, only to be told rather simply that he would shoot his eye out. He got a D on his poem, but only because his teacher thought he was plagiarizing (a D for plagiarism? I thought. I would have been expelled!), but he proved to her that he was true with an on-the-spot rewrite from memory.
Many years and about twenty full journals later, Darken is a firefighter, a novelist and a man caught between up and down, past and future, light and dark. He kept writing, his poems and stories filling hundreds and thousands of empty pages, before turning his sights to the world of thrillers. His first work, a self-published novella called K-I-L-L FM 100, was the start of something new for Darken, who was more comfortable with shorter stuff. He remembers thinking that this book would be huge, an epic on the scale of the Lord of the Rings, only to find that after printing it had a page count of about 100. Since then, he’s gone on to write another self-published book, U-Turn Killur, and has been picked up by a publishing company with his first traditionally published book, Wickflicker.
“I write about evil things, you know, my stories have a lot of darkness in them, and it’s real. But I only deal with the darkness in order to embrace the light. I really like to write with purpose, you know, to add in some commentary on morality and truth. I do espouse a Christian worldview, but I’m not here to force that on anyone. I know that people are going to believe what they believe, and that’s perfectly okay. I do, however, really try to own that part of myself and work my own worldview into my book, because what author doesn’t? So, you know, I think it’s important to embrace a little darkness if we are to appreciate the light.”
We went on to discuss these works and what it was like for Darken to begin with self-publishing and move onto a publishing environment that felt like a family. We continued discussing how important it is for authors to support one another in today’s economy and with today’s industry, and we related over our desire to see more independent writers doing interesting things with their work. But it wasn’t until the end of our conversation that Darken said something to put the entire interview in context for me. We were again on the topic of digital publishing, sharing each other’s thoughts about why it was important and how it can benefit the struggling writer.
“I just really believe that there is nothing like holding a book in your hands, turning the pages. I think that digital books are great and really can do some amazing things as far as reaching new people and getting our stuff out there, but I don’t think that they need to completely replace old-fashioned books. There’s room for both.”
There’s room for both. Whether we’re talking about something as specific as digital books versus traditional publishing, or as abstract as the darkness versus the light, it seems to me that Darken is a man who is comfortable with a little chaos, or tension, or change. If he’s any kind of a poster child for the new breed of “modern” author, we should be excited. He’s not willing to outright dismiss the traditions that make him who he is, but he’s also ready to see what new technologies and ideas can bring to the table. And to be clear, he was very firm on this point: “We can’t let go of tradition or we’ll forget where we come from.”
And you can tell, while reading his work, that Darken is more than happy to embody this perspective.
“Those stories my dad used to tell me, I work those into my books. Old Scratch is basically the devil. He morphs into a moth. I know that sounds kind of weird, but if vampires can do the bat thing, why can’t the devil do the moth thing?”
Traditions merge with new ideas.
“At the very end of U-Turn Killer, through one of the characters, I actually put in that very poem from high school that got me writing. That poem from the 10th grade is in there.”
The past meets the present.
“I ask you about yourself and I share so easily because I believe it’s a two way street in an interview. Yeah, the interviewer should be prepared and ask the right questions and all that, but I think the interviewee should be just as ready to share and to get to know the person asking the questions.”
Conversations go both ways.
I think we could all use a little bit of this in our lives. It’s so easy to be ashamed of our early work and who we used to be, but why be ashamed when we can embrace that as a good part of ourselves? It’s easy to draw a line in the sand and pick a side, arguing with all our heart for tradition and ink and paper, or for innovation and touch screens and digital downloads. But why make up our minds on something like that when we can simply enjoy both sides, appreciate what each has to offer? I’ll walk away from my first meeting with Teric Darken thinking hard about what I do with my light and my darkness and how I handle my past and my future. Because I think he’s right.
There’s room for both.
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Learn more about Teric Darken on the web by visiting his homepage and connecting with him on Facebook and his blog. You can also purchase any of his books online on Amazon. You should definitely go do that now.
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Author Spotlight // Dean Lappi
We met author Dean Lappi not at a coffee shop or a pub per our usual procedure, but on the busy wall of a Facebook group. He’s a lover of fantasy, an evangelist of networking and an experimentalist through and through. We rigged up our recorder and turned on our speakerphone for a conversation with Lappi, in which we discussed math as magic, publishing as collaboration and good networking as the lifeblood of the modern author.
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Tell us about what you do.
Well, for fun, I write novels. I write pretty much any genre, but right now I’m focusing on fantasy with kind of a hint of horror mixed into it. So, I’m kinda working in a different genre than what is standard for fantasy. I wanted to make it a little more realistic and take what’s going on in our world and transpose that into a fantasy world.
How did you get into that genre? What about that mix is attractive to you?
What really brought me into it was that fantasy is one of my favorite genres to read, and I’ve read it since I was ten years old (I’m forty three now), so I’ve read pretty much everything out there that I can. One thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of fantasy doesn’t delve into the darker parts or humanity, and I kind of wanted to do that, to write something a little different.
Right now, I’ve written one novel. It’s called Black Numbers, and it’s being published by a company called Fantasy Island Publishing Company. Right now, it’s available in eBook format through Amazon, and we’re working on a print version to go in bookstores. So, I’ve written the first book and I’m rolling with that, getting that out there, and I’m right in the middle of writing the sequel. I’m trying to make the series into three books, maybe more. It’s kind of grown unexpectedly.
It was my first full length novel, so I was just kind of experimenting. I jumped into the fantasy, which is something I knew very well, and decided to go for that for my first novel. I didn’t know what to expect when I wrote it, and it’s started to get some good reviews, and pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to who’s read it has loved it. So it gave me the incentive to go onto book two and see what happens from there.
You say that you were experimenting when you wrote the first book. What was that experimental writing process like?
The key part of it that I really played around with was that I added sexuality into the mix. Not a lot of fantasy out there deals with sexuality. I’m not talking about writing sex scenes. That’s not the point. I’m more talking about how sexuality can affect a person who’s going through it, what happens when something bad happens. I was just experimenting with that and I turned it into a story. I took it further, added a whole bunch of other features, and that turned into a novel.
The second big thing that I wanted to do was explore magic. In most fantasy you have magic, and I wanted to kind of give it a scientific background, so I wrote into the book that this magic is created using advanced mathematics. You can use advanced mathematics equations to manifest powers and magic in the real world. So, those were the two key differences that I went for.
Especially in a writer’s mind, advanced mathematics might just be the exact opposite of what we usually think of when we think of magic. It sounds like this is not the same kind of happy, fun magic with invented Latin words we find elsewhere.
Yeah, you’re right. 100%. In general, I’m not putting anything down at all. Those fantasy books out there that are like that are wonderful. I love what they do with magic. I just wanted to do something different and try to bring our world into it with science and math, and leave that behind how it’s created.
Tell us a little about your story.
Well, it really follows a key set of characters. It’s a journey tale. It’s a tale of understanding who this character is as he grows and understands his knowledge of math and what kind of power that brings him. The background of the story: You have this secret society who really want to bring around a concept called “black numbers” and it’s the dark side of mathematics and magic, and they want to bring around a person who can control that power. They’ve been searching for someone and they’ve been trying to breed to bring around someone who can do this, and the main character is that person. His father is in league with them, and he’s been trying to fulfill their wishes and this young man finds out what’s going on and escapes. He has to try to find the reason behind what’s going on. It’s kind of a journey story, mixed in with the human condition. There is a creature who is basically the only thing that can bring about these powers in a person, and it’s essentially done through a sexual assault. It’s chasing the main character to control him through that power.
Switching gears a little bit, talk about your publishing process. What did that entail for you?
The publishing process has been really interesting. I’m kind of in a new genre in publishing, where it’s not the big publishers, the big six or ten publishers where you sign with them and they take care of everything and you get a very small percentage. Then you have the independent publishers where you basically do all the work, all your own marketing. The company I’m with is kind of a hybrid. It’s a coalition of authors, and we’re all helping each other. We do our own work as far as formatting the book, getting it ready for print and eBook format, but the publishing house itself takes care of the final details. They take care of a lot of the marketing, and we all still do a lot of our own marketing as most authors do, but the company has a bigger role in that.
So, it’s been a fun process. I’ve met a lot of great authors and a lot of great friends, and we’re all just helping each other out. It’s been a really, really good experience.
What advice do you have for other authors out there looking to get their work published?
Most authors try to get published through the big companies. As everyone finds out, that’s a very tough thing to do. You probably have around 10,000 manuscripts submitted and they choose to publish maybe 30 or 40 a year because of their dynamic. They usually stick with well-known authors and they don’t really branch out to new authors. I self-published first just to get my book out there because I was having no luck, and through the self-publishing, I met a lot of people, a lot of other authors, and really got to know a lot more about the business that way. I joined a lot of Facebook groups, met a lot of readers and writers that way. The biggest thing is just you’ve got to keep networking with people. A lot of times that will open up doors.
You’re on a desert island. You’ve got three books for the rest of your life.
1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (That’s three books right there, but we’ll let it slide…)
2. Shogun by James Clavell
3. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
What’s the one book you never want to read, never want to talk about, never want to hear about ever again?
Not ever hearing about it again? Probably Harry Potter. I’ve only read probably part of the first book, so this statement is not based on fact, on the quality of the book at all. I really respect J.K. Rowling, she’s amazing, I’m just tired of hearing about it. So many different movies and fan boards and all that. It’s just one of those things that’s overloaded. I hear that it’s a fantastic series. I’m just tired of hearing about it every day.
We’ll let that slide, too.
True to his word, you can find Dean Lappi all over the web building connections and making friends. He’s got a blog, he’s active on Facebook and Twitter, and you can even find him on Google+. Be sure to check out his book, Dark Numbers, on Amazon, and watch for it in bookstores this fall.
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Remember to follow liloQui on Twitter and Facebook and definitely head over to our homepage if you haven’t yet. Not doing so could result in sickening regret and persistent night terrors.
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