Wannabe Writers

Posted on August 27, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

I had the joy and amusement (read: dripping sarcasm) of eating dinner tonight with a wannabe writer. I don’t think there are many things out there that can push my annoyance button nearly as quickly as those people who talk the big talk and make no action on it. This guy was your classic example of how to make sure you’re never published and won’t make enough money to pursue writing as the serious occupation it truly is. Let me explain.

There aren’t very many places to sit, as the dining area is rather full. I see an open spot near where I like to sit away from the televisions and crowded areas, and there’s quite a few empty seats around him. So I politely ask him if any of the seats are taken and if they’re not, would he mind if I joined him. He indicated the seats were not taken and that I could sit if I wished. As a polite topic of conversation, I asked him where he worked and what he did. He told me that he was an electrical mechanic, working on electrical systems in the trucks here. But really, the only reason he took this job was so he could earn enough money to publish his book. Oh, no. His bookS. Because, you know, he’s written six already and wants to start on his seventh.

I took the next logical step and started asking what were apparently quite silly questions. While this is not an exact transcript of the conversation that followed, you’ll get the general idea of my opinions as the conversation moved forward.

Me: Oh? You’re a writer? What genre do you write?

Him: I write in all genres. I’ve done a vampire thing, and a ghost-like story with Tonto (which he went into in mind numbing, unbelievable detail). But I combine various different genres and story styles. Some of it is written as poetry, some as prose. There really isn’t anyone out there who writes like I do.

Me: Mm-hm. You said that you took this job so you could earn enough money to publish your books. Have you looked at submitting query letters to agents, editors, or publishing houses? Because the idea of selling a novel or two is so that you can get paid to write more. Why do you need money to publish your book?

Him: So I can self-publish. My work is so different and new that I doubt any normal publishing house would pick it up. I want to be able to make posters so that I can make it look like I’ve published more books.

Me: And where would you post these posters?

Him: Around my hometown. Like at the county fairs and such.

Me: Ah. And you think that a county fair is going to be quite full of people wanting to buy books? From an author they’ve never heard of?

I don’t really remember his reply to that. By this time, I had also asked him what his word count was on any of his finished books, which he didn’t know. I asked him how many pages his final draft was and how many drafts he had gone through before he got to his final draft and he didn’t know his page count, nor did he think there was any possible way to keep track of how many drafts and revisions he’d gone through. At least one full revision, though. He also did not have anyone reading his drafts. I somehow also managed to ask him what books were most like his stuff (which, of course, nothing could possibly even come close to what he writes because it’s so new and different and blah blah blah). He listed off a couple of books and I asked him if he’d done any research to see who published those books, to which I received a fabulous blank look.

And then I made probably the biggest mistake of the entire conversation. I asked him what his goal was – why he wanted to publish a book.

(dramatic pause)

Him: Why, to achieve notoriety, of course.

Yes. He really said that. I ran out of my limited patience right about then. I told him it was good to dine with him, I wished him the best of luck in his endeavors, and I left.

I have this unbelievably strong desire to list off some of the things you can do if you want to be a writer.

1. If you want to be a writer, sit your butt down and write. Get behind your keyboard, find a pen and paper, get some digital speech-to-text software, scribble something down on a napkin, whatever works for you. If you can’t find time, make time. If writing is in your blood, it’s something you’ll have to do no matter what. I’m still putting something like 1200 words on paper every single night, even though it’s not in the way I thought it would be, but I’m still writing. Trust me when I say that if I can make time for it, so can you.

2. Being a writer is a lot more than just having big dreams. You have to be willing to do the work for it. This means researching agents, editors, publishing companies, attending conferences, reading, learning your craft, networking, and even your very own marketing. A nice, juicy publishing contract isn’t just going to magically appear in front of you. No one is going to pound on your door and tell you how they just happened to need a brand new science fiction story and heard that you were a writer and you simply MUST write it for them! If you’re not willing to do the work to find people who want to represent you, then most of them are not willing to do the work to find you.

3. Even if you want to self-publish, you still have to do all the work. You have to find a market, do something like a target audience analysis to figure out who you think would be most likely to buy your books, and you have to get the word out. You have to invest in bookmarks with your front covers on them, pens with your name and book title, plane tickets and hotel bills for those conventions. You have to be willing to put yourself out there to fans and critics alike. For a lot of writers, that’s down-right frightening.

4. There have been billions if not trillions of books published over hundreds of years. Do you really think you’re so new and different that no one has ever written something like your story? Here’s one of the less publicized things you ought to do as a writer – don’t be arrogant and pretentious until you’ve earned it. And even if you have earned it, that doesn’t really give you the right to behave like that. It just means people will be more prone to overlook that fault if you’re a millionaire author. Be confident of your work, but not to the point where strangers might want to strangle you.

5. No book is ever good enough on its first draft, and certainly not ever good enough with only the author’s eyes having seen it. Find a critique group or friends or family members or someone you trust to give you completely honest feedback on how to make your story better. There’s always room for improvement, but as the author of a work, sometimes we see what our brain intended instead of the words that are physically on the page. No first draft is perfect. Find people to give you good feedback.

I think that’s about all I have time for tonight. There’s a bunch of other stuff you can do if you really want to be a writer, but the biggest one is that if you want to write, sit down and WRITE!

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So You Want to Make Them Suffer

Posted on July 26, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

We, as writers, are often looking for ways to increase the tension and the inability for readers to stop turning the page. There have been many times in my life when I have been reading a book and the story was so well written and I cared so much about the characters that I simply could not put the book down. How many books have you read that kept you up all night just so you could finish the story? How many times have you cursed at the author of any given book for encouraging you to be late to work because the book was just that good?

I guess the very first thing I think of when I think of tension is making the characters suffer. Here’s kind of a run down of my thoughts on the best way to do that.

Physical Suffering

You’d think this would be common, or that it could be remarkably easy. Increase or decrease the actual temperature of the location your characters are at. This can be so much more intense than just dropping your characters onto an ice planet. If your characters aren’t fully prepared to deal with the rigors of their environment, then the environment itself becomes a tool for tension, suspense, pain, and suffering. For instance, if your characters are on a planet with a very heavy jungle, they’re going to sweat a lot. If your character also happened to fall and scrape some skin off somewhere, the sweat would then leak down into the raw flesh and sting in a remarkably painful way, thus increasing your character’s suffering. Your characters might also be inclined to drink tons of water and tend to be very thirsty in this type of environment, which is a perfect time to introduce hazards into the water which prevent them from drinking. Bacteria, infection, flesh-eating water life. There really aren’t any limits to the ways you can use the physical environment to increase the suffering, and therefore the tension, of your story. Even stories with romantic elements can use this option to their advantage. Put your heroine in a very sexy dress and have her wait outside on the curb for a taxi in the pouring rain as she flees from the clutches of the abusive millionaire. It sounds cliché, but it also means that it’s a perfect time for the romantic interest of the story to show up and see her at her absolute worst. Her beautiful dress, clinging in ruins about her with wet maschera running like sooty tears down her face. Mud and dirt, flung up from passing vehicles as they splash liquid sewer onto the remains of her dignity. She would be cold, and wet, and utterly miserable, which would in turn make her likely to lose her temper when the romantic interest enters the scene. Those are just a few easy and quick examples of ways to make your characters physically miserable.

Internal Suffering

This category is a little bit more difficult to pin down. It’s something akin to taking away the non-physical things which make your character tick. For example, your character is a knight who loses faith, or a soldier betrayed by those in command, a best friend betrayed by the only person they trust, or someone who loses the love of their life. Take away their faith, love, duty, religion, beliefs, loyalty, financial stability, or anything else that means everything to your characters. Using this form of suffering to increase the tension in your story requires that you would have built a solid character all the way from the beginning of the story and not just have emotionless paper cut outs. That way, when the country that your soldier has dutifully served their entire life collapses in a chaotic revolution where the people the soldier is sworn to protect rise against the government the soldier is sworn to serve, the internal chaos of the soldier’s duty verses loyalty creates a conflict of interest for the character, thus making the character miserable. Other examples include perhaps a hunter who finds out too late that the wolf they chased on the night of the full moon was their beloved, and they just shot the wolf with a silver bullet and chopped of its head. As the wolf’s body returns to its human state, the naked body of the hunter’s beloved is revealed by parting of the clouds that had been covering the moon’s luminescence. While this may seem like an ending to a story, it begs the question of what the hunter will do now that everything they loved is gone. What happens when the wolf’s pack comes searching for the murderer of their family member? Does the hunter give in as a sacrifice of death? Or perhaps is cursed to join them, and thus give up everything they knew as a hunter?

The Mystery

In horror, you see a lot of suffering by means of gross, bloody deaths while other characters in the story get picked off one by one. While this is an effective means of adding or increasing the tension in the story, the problem becomes one of artistic death. If you reveal too early on how the character’s are truly dying, you take the tension away, but if you wait too long or don’t leave appropriate clues, when the creature or murderer is revealed, the reader won’t believe it. I think the same could go for the other genres as well, except instead of a really colorful death, you have multiple suitors for a romantic interest, or perhaps many people who could have the motive to truly commit the crime which started the mystery. This is a very artful balance between what the readers should be shown versus what the writer hopes the readers will infer. It’s a difficult balance to maintain in order to keep tension and suspense, as well as the reader’s somewhat limited attention span. I think it’s true for almost all genres that if you give everything away too quickly, the readers will lose interest.

I’d say these are pretty decent ways to get the writerly brain thinking about better ways to make characters suffer. I might have more thoughts on this later, but for now, it’s quite late and time for me to be done with my typing for the night.

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The Money vs. The Reader

Posted on June 10, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a bit lately is if it’s more important to build a solid reader base or if it’s more important that I make money off a book that really isn’t ready to be sold yet. Let me build an example for you. You’re stuck someplace that has limited access to everything. There’s no giant super-stores where you can randomly enter and decide to buy whatever you wish. You’re lucky most of the time to just have food to eat and water to drink. You share your room with a bunch of other people, just like you. Internet is supremely limited and there are no cell phone towers and the landlines are really difficult to use. Most people that are with you on this trip brought electronic devices to use for morale purposes, such as eReaders, laptops, and MP3 players. One of you is an aspiring writer who just happened to have a PDF version of the only real novel they’ve ever written. What do you do?

One of the choices in this situation is to share your book with as many people as possible, letting it go from person to person for free without any ability to control who might copy it and send it to someone else or who is even reading it. You won’t make any money doing this, but it might be possible to build up a reader base, since there are definitely some very extended periods of down time.

Another choice would be to “self-publish” your work. Perhaps set up an account and have people give a dollar or two every time they read or shared the book. You can’t prove to anyone that your book is “making money” because you’re not really published and no one even knows anything about how to create an actual money system for this type of book sharing.

So my question is this: Is it more important to have people reading your work or is it more important to go through the proper channels and work towards making money off your novel?

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English is not the easiest language

Posted on June 4, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

All night, every night, I sit at my two laptops and work on pulling words together to make sense out of things that I never paid much attention to before departing on this research trip. It’s hard sometimes, to do the same thing every night and still try and find a fresh way to write something that I must have written at least 80 times already. My life here is the model of redundancy, but every night when I turn in my first draft, my boss requires fewer and fewer changes.

I wish I could show you all the things I’ve written. Some are things I’ve been very proud of. Some, not so much. I’m not writing about demons right now, kanimas, gladiator battles, hopeless romances, galaxy exploration, or alien wars. I kind of wish I was because the real world continues to pull at me, making me colder and more desensitized every day.

I’m writing about the world we live in. Stuck out in a forgotten part of the world, trying to make the best out of a writing situation that drains all my creative power and gives me nothing to show for it. I can’t even correctly say how many words I’ve actually managed to put on paper at this point. If you figure about 1200 words times 78 days, that’s something like 93,000 words. My thesis manuscript and first “completed” novel isn’t even that long. I still have the majority of this trip left to go and I’m not sure I can keep putting that many words on the page per night.

I’ve seen other writers who have daily word count goals or other similar ways to keep themselves writing. I don’t have a choice. I have to write. I sometimes imagine myself with an old-fashioned metal slave-chain hooked around my ankle and attached to my desk. It drags at me.

But you know what? I’ve learned more about sentence structure and active and passive voice and keeping people entertained than I really thought I would. I’m building a lovely selection of calluses on my fingertips, which can only help improve my already speedy typing. I’m writing for something like 2 million people. This might be the largest audience I ever have and none of them will ever know who I am.

Another interesting side note that I’ve noticed is that I wind up having to teach the particulars of English every night, which is even more interesting since apparently I don’t know the correct terminology for the majority of the English rules I know. The discussion tonight was on the usage of words like “the”, “a”, and “an” and how I didn’t even know what they’re called, and I’m apparently not very good at explaining why “The apple fell off the tree” is proper English and “Apple fell off tree” is not. Other than it sounds very cave-woman-ish, I have no terminology to explain my inherent knowledge of why one is correct and one is not. I suppose I could look it up, but I can’t think of how I would find the time for that kind of in-depth study of my own language. And then I feel slightly stupid because those to whom English is not a native language can recite to me the proper technical terms, but still can’t create correct sentences.

But then, maybe I can’t form correct sentences either. Especially not so late at night / early in the morning. And for that, I say, practice writing. That way, proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation becomes a matter of muscle memory and not an excercise in futile memorization of technical rules. Language should be alive, as should the story the words are used to tell.

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Book Review: Decision At Doona by Anne McCaffrey

Posted on May 15, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

I finally had time to read since I left on my research trip. I found a copy of Decision At Doona (Science Fiction, 245 pages) by Anne McCaffrey and I thought it was a perfect book for my current situation. I was absolutely amazed that this book was written in 1969. Oddly, the book I picked up appears to actually *be* the 1969 book and it’s in pretty good condition, too.

I picked this particular book up because the Crystal Singer Trilogy is my one, single deserted island book. Also, Decision At Doona looked like a small book and I was looking for something I could read while accomplishing other tasks. It fit nicely into my pocket and I finished it the day after I started it. Of course, I also neglected some of the things I should have been doing so that I could read the book, but that’s what us writely types do from time to time.

The thing I like about science fiction stories is that if they are truly done well, it’s not just a made-up story about some people dealing with life on another planet. It’s a story about the human condition. It’s about building bridges between cultures to try and learn how to work together for common goals. I think this is a story that really reaches me here because I’m sharing it with one of my non-American friends. After I finished the story, I then let someone from the most opposite culture as mine read the book. He is working on his Enlgish and I thought this story was a great way to introduce him to science fiction. He says his culture doesn’t really have any science fiction books so this is completely new for him. It’s interesting to see his take on all of this, but he’s reading at a very high level and I’m enjoying the brief conversations we’re able to have about this book. He agrees with me that the whole idea behind the book so far is about building bridges. That’s such a symbolic term and idea that I’m really glad I picked this book up. If more people tried to work together for a common goal, to not make their way the only way, then I think humanity as a whole would be a lot better off.

I’m hoping I’ll get caught up enough with things soon so that I will be able to get more writing and revisions done. I think I’m about to the point where I can look at my novel with fresh eyes. I also think that I’ll be renaming Accept Fire and Blood to something like Affinity. I don’t quite know for sure yet, but I like Affinity much better. I think it fits the plot and storyline a little bit more clearly.

Meanwhile, I continue to put huge amounts of words on the page here. I do think my writing style has improved because I now actively avoid all passive everything. I can’t really tell you exactly how or what this learning process entails, but I can tell you that it takes about 9 hours of my night, all night, every night, to put my 1200 to 1500 words on the page per night. I guess the moral of the story here is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of words you’re putting on the page, so long as you’re doing it every single day. So long as you continue to practice your craft and learn new skills, even if you can’t write about flesh-eating demons and magical kanimas, that every word on the page matters.

It doesn’t matter what you write. Tell a story. Tell a thousand stories every night. And don’t forget to read.

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Getting Things Wrong

Posted on April 19, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

I knew I would be remarkably busy when I left for this trip, I guess I just didn’t really figure out how busy until I actually got here. For the last month (and it feels weird knowing that I’ve been gone that long already) all I have done is non-entertainment oriented things. I’ve read and written things I can never share, and a good eight hours a night, every single night, is devoted solely to putting words on paper. I wish I could say that all those words are things I get credit for or that I’m building a fan-base for my eventual move into the world of being a real author, but that’s not the case at all. I know that an alarmingly large amount of people are exposed to everything I write, but none of it is fun. You want to know the best part, though?

I’m not even any good at it.

This is a kind of writing I’ve never done before and one that I think I will struggle to master for the remainder of this really long trip. But I think it’s helping me to focus my writing in a way I would have never imagined. It’s a little bit of a strong description to say that I hate it, because I don’t. Not really. I struggle with it in a Peter Parker kind of way, where I’m not the best suited for the task and I mess up a lot, but I’m trying my best to do everything I can. I wish I had time to write for fun and work on any number of the projects that used to live in my brain. I say used to live in my brain because there’s not a whole lot of outside stuff going on in there these days. Maybe as I adjust to things here, I’ll be able to settle into a schedule where I can do something other than what I do all day, but still. I’m burnt out and exhausted and I’ve barely scratched the surface on this.

The other really interesting thing about where I’m at is how frequently I see so many other people getting it wrong. I see other people’s words on the page and I know that they lie, but I can’t prove it. It’s a matter of who has the better words, a battle which I don’t even know if I’m winning. I don’t feel like a very good writer most of the time, in fact my horror critique partners back at SHU definitely were of such a high caliber that I often felt like a wannabe hack writer.

Oddly, that’s kind of how I feel about my writing now. I have a different audience for my stories and I rarely have the ability to write out the ones that could be fun. And I’m getting much worse at remembering things. My brain is far too full.

I think I might have rambled on enough for now. I’m learning a lot more about writing styles and addressing the proper target audience for any works in progress. I’m also relearning how to not get any sleep at all. It’s a fun game 🙂

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A Hardy People

Posted on April 6, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

Most people have at some point wondered what they would take to a deserted island or what kind of items would be most important to them if they had to give everything up. I don’t think people in modern, first world countries really understand what it means to have nothing except pride and honor.

Let me give you an example. Say, for instance, that I asked you to close your eyes and picture a farm. Pretend that this farm has been in your family for generations and that you’ve grown up your whole life, just knowing this farm. You get up early and take care of a growing list of never-ending chores, perhaps have a quick breakfast before doing more chores, and eventually when the sun sets, you participate in a simple meal with your family before crawling into bed and doing the whole thing all over again, all day, every day, for your entire existence. Would you fight for your farm? Would you do everything in your power to keep that farm for your children?

Admit it, when I asked you to visualize a farm, you thought about a beautiful, classic ranch house amongst fields of green wheat or corn, waving gently in the wind. You thought about tractors and cows, maybe a beat-up pickup truck that you use to drive down a dirt road to get the mail from the box at the end of miles of fields. You thought about fluffy clouds floating across a baby-blue sky with a red barn framed in the sun.

Just a hint – that’s not the farm I’m talking about.

I’m talking about a farm, cut from the rock face of a mountain, with years of labor put just into making irrigation channels and a mud hut barely big enough to fit a multi-purpose table. There’s no kitchen, not the way we would think of it. There’s no clean metal sink with running water. If you want water, you have to hike 1,000 feet down the mountain and haul it back up using only your own body. There’s no microwave, no stove, no fridge. You work all day in blistering heat and unbelievable humidity, only to barely find and make enough food to feed your family. And you get to do all this in maybe three different outfits and no shoes. Every day. There are so many rocks in your farm that you use them to build just about everything from walls to recreation areas. When I say recreation areas, I mean you build piles of rocks and then create a game where you try and knock over as many of the rocks with as few throws as possible. You have nothing except what you fight every inch for, every scrap of land and every crop a battle.

But those of us who are privileged enough to live in first world countries don’t really have to worry about that. Even when we say we have nothing, we still have a lot more than many other people. We have running water and electricity, and both of these things are taken so much for granted that most are more willing to complain about having a small plasma television instead of thinking about how grateful they should feel just to have a solid roof over their heads.

The interesting part about travelling to places such as this research trip is that you really find out what matters the most to you. Do you miss your television? Your fast food restaurants? Or do you miss family and friends, and think of all the things you could have and should have done in order to be better parts of their lives? Do you miss out on weddings and birthdays, winter holidays and other celebrations? How do you balance all the things you should be grateful for with all the things you don’t have, such as the people who matter most in your life? You live every day without things that everyone you know takes for granted. You don’t have access to abundant amounts of food, or entertainment, or indoor plumbing. All you have to cling to are those things that people choose to include you in. Letters, cards, packages. Little things that make life a little easier, but still not the same as being able to actively participate in other people’s lives.

You might ask what my point is. I guess part of my point is that people should be more thankful for those things that they do have. And the absolute most important thing people should be thankful for is the ability to interact with those they love. Friends, family, coworkers, even strangers on the street. We all have so much more in common and we were meant for so much more than what we do with our lives. Take away technology and take away all our physical luxuries and all we’re left with is each other.

You matter to me. Even if I’ve never met you, I’m happy you’re here. Be thankful for all the things you have in your life, even when things seem down. The world isn’t out to get you – it was here first. The best we can do is to keep working every day to make things better for those that come after us.

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Random thoughts in transit

Posted on March 27, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

I’ve been absent for a little while and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to post more regularly or have something more useful to say in the coming year. I suspect I’ll be reading a bit more than usual and I’ve been putting a lot of words on pages in the last week or so, but I haven’t really been able to post anything here.

So far, my research trip isn’t giving me as much story fodder as I was originally intending, but I suspect that has more to do with the fact that I’ve spent so much time lately travelling and not enough time actually contemplating the world around me. I’ve learned quite a bit about rocks, though, which was unexpected. I’m hoping to be able to settle down at my next stop for a good bit of time and that’s when I should start being able to take the time and energy to write about the environment I’m in at the current time.

I suppose that’s not entirely accurate. I’m absolutely surrounded by story ideas, I just haven’t had the ability to do anything about them. Especially since so many of those ideas are so very mundane and boring, like mattress monsters that eat people during their sleep or tents that move in the middle of the night. Maybe a little bit about winged demons that are lighter than air and crawl around the ceiling fabric of canvas tents, searching for vigilant women to corrupt in the day.

If I never mentioned that my brain is a strange place, it really is.

I was also spending a little bit of time reading about the whole Dorchester / Leisure press thing. The basic summary of that story is that apparently, they aren’t paying their authors, nor have they been paying them for quite some time. So if I happen to see any books published by them, I guess I won’t be buying them. But a better question would be where exactly would I be finding books to purchase anyway?

I really like how people keep saying that reading is a dying hobby when I’ve seen more eReaders on this trip than i thought I would. I’ve seen all types, too, and I’ve found myself having more discussions about books than I did the last time I went on one of these excursions. I’m torn between sharing some of my eBooks and not because I’m pretty sure that anyone who borrows the books I have will love them and then want to buy their own copies. I don’t know. It’s a confusing issue, since books aren’t really physical over here.

I’m hoping that once I get settled, I’ll be able to set up an actual schedule and then write at least 500 words a day and therefore finish the revisions on Accept Fire and Blood and get a full draft of any of the projects I’m working on done by Christmas 2011. I think it’s doable.

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Book Review: Steel by Carrie Vaughn

Posted on March 17, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

As usual, I decided to procrastinate from packing and decided to read Steel (Young Adult Fantasy, 294 pages) by Carrie Vaughn instead of packing for my upcoming extended research trip. I enjoyed this book, as I tend to with most of Vaughn‘s work and I’m glad I had a chance to pick it up before I left.

I think this story is a fascinating look at the difference between sword fighting for fun and sword fighting when real injuries are likely. There probably aren’t that many people who could vouch either way for whether this is an accurate representation of the differences, but I think it as done quite well. You always get those who absolutely insist that they know how things work because they’re part of clubs or they take lessons, but I think it’s truer by far to say that there are very few who would know for sure, and those that would know probably wouldn’t say anything about it.

There were a couple places in the story where I felt like there might be an ending similar to the Scyfy Channel’s newest rendition of Alice in Wonderland where everything revolved around the Mad Hatter and then Alice leaves Wonderland only to find that she loves him and he followed her. But thankfully, that’s not done here. We only get a small taste of the potential feelings developing between Jill and Henry and Henry, or a Henry-esque character, doesn’t show up at the end of the story. Instead, we get more of a sense that Jill has found a focus for her life and it doesn’t revolve around a guy that she met. I think that’s rare in a lot of books that have romantic elements. Most romance stories that I’ve encountered end with the female protagonist completely forgetting that they are a person all by themselves without being dependent on the boyfriend or other male in their life. Don’t get me wrong – the romantic element in this story was remarkably short and not really the main focus of the story, but it was there and I felt like commenting about it.

I also think this did a great job of showing how spoiled we’ve become in our society today and how I believe many of us could do with a bit of a perspective change. I especially like the portion involving the ships for slave trade and how deeply that affected Jill. That’s a very humbling lesson to learn. Jill holds up very well with her changed situation in life and I was happy to see that nothing too horrific like rape happened to her, but you would think that in that era, it would have been a very real threat.

Overall, this was a good story and I’m glad I bought it, even though I enjoyed Voices of Dragons better, but that’s mostly just because I like dragons 🙂

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Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

Posted on March 15, 2011 by C.A. Jacobs

I finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea (Fantasy) by Ursula LeGuin a couple days ago and thought that it was a pretty good read.

This was one of the first books I’ve read in a while that had a distant third person as the narrator and it seemed to work out just fine. I don’t really think I have too much to say about it because it was a good story with solid, human characters who made mistakes and don’t seem too far distant.

There were a lot of very detailed sections about the ocean and the kind of toll it takes on the forms of flesh and I really enjoyed imagining that I could feel the wind and salt caking my skin. That also might be because I currently live on an island and therefore the ocean is a much more prominent part of my life.

One of the key things I noticed during my time with this book is when it was written. I’m constantly amazed at the works produced forty and fifty years ago. The vision and imagination of some of the core writers from that time takes my breath away. The book market is so saturated right now that it sometimes feels like every story has already been told, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting to write new stories in new ways or from reading every book we can get our hands on. I think LeGuin was definitely a pioneer for her time and I’m fairly certain that I as a writer owe a great debt of gratitude for the stories produced by all the writers who came before my attempts to get myself published.

Overall, it was a good read and I might like to read it again someday.

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