04/15/2011

This week enjoy two features themed around colors and writing. The Color of Inspiration - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about How to Use Colors in Writing by Brittnee Alford and Seven Colors In An Acid Wash by Colin Conway.

"Sunday: It’s the beginning of the week. The sun comes up through the blinds. The clock reads 6:30 AM. You always wake up at 6:30 AM. Why? Because that’s the time you wake up to start writing. You sit behind your desk. Pull out your worn notebook."

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The Sherlockian By Graham Moore

By Carlotta Holton

As an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, I found that the game was definitely afoot in this delightfully ripping mystery-within-a-mystery. Author Graham Moore’s debut novel adeptly alternates the action between two time frames, two continents and two heroes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and contemporary Baker Street Irregular, Harold White with the underlying theme of man’s “need to know.”

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Book Scout: Tips for Survival By Colin Conway

I used to be a boy scout. I learned things like how to weave a basket, carve a horse out wood and punch holes in leather. I also learned how to survive in the wilderness, at least for a week-end, and I have the badge to prove it. Now, in an effort to earn my "You are a Published Author" Merit Badge I've come up with BOOK SCOUT: Tips for Survival which is based upon my experience as a scout.

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by Brittnee Alford

Sunday: It’s the beginning of the week. The sun comes up through the blinds. The clock reads 6:30 AM. You always wake up at 6:30 AM. Why? Because that’s the time you wake up to start writing. You sit behind your desk. Pull out your worn notebook. Look at your empty glass from last night. This has suddenly inspired you. The sun is shining through the blinds, through the teal-colored bottom of the glass and a radiant teal has illuminated unto your once crisp white page.

Monday: You dread Mondays. You have to actually go to work. You have someone waiting on you, counting on you, expecting, always expecting. But first you must write. After all it’s 6:30 AM. The desk calls you. The empty glass sits anxiously. The blinds give in to the power of the sun. You sit down behind the desk. You pick up a pencil. Something doesn’t feel right. You open the drawer. There it is. You’re favorite pen to write with. Yes, this obnoxious, bright magenta, plastic pen. It’s nothing expensive. In fact you don’t even know where you got it from. But it inspires you to write, and so it is of special value to you.

Tuesday: Well there is nothing really special about today. You just feel compelled to get up. You don’t have to work. Freelance, oh what a life. It is that time. Yes. 6:30 AM. You know the routine. You are writing with your favorite pen that resurrected yesterday. Then it happens. You spill your water all over your crimson color carpet. It looks like a wet, fresh blood stain. You laugh. Ah the simple things that inspire a writer.

Wednesday: The middle. Being in the middle is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. In the middle of the week, you sit in the middle of your desk. You are wearing your favorite navy plush socks—the ones with the fuzzy feeling. It is 6:30 AM. Something is going to happen to inspire you. Is it the sun? No. Is it the glass? No. Is it the pen? No. Then just as you scoot your chair up to the desk, you step in the still wet spot from yesterday. Your navy plush socks are soggy. Damn that plush carpet! It doesn’t dry quickly. Guess what. There it is. You are inspired by a soggy navy plush sock.

Thursday: 6:30 AM. Not at the desk. This is a bad sign. You are in front of the computer. Today is a typing sort of day. It’s time to send off those rough drafts to your editor. And then you think about that god-awful sienna shirt that she always wears. It’s so hideous! It makes you laugh. Inspiration is at work yet again.

Friday: It’s Friday. Enough said. You are behind the desk. You take a sip of water from the glass. Your lovely wife walks in. She’s wearing that lavender dress you bought her. This is it, your inspiration for the next supporting female character. Yes, she will wear a springy, lavender dress. She’s going to be a riot though, just like your wife. She smiles, and you think, but she will be loved.

Saturday: It’s the weekend. Yet here we are again. There must be a cycle to life. Things must make sense. You are at the desk. Clock reads 6:30 AM. And you sit down in your chair. Oh, you never told them what color the chair was. It’s maroon. It inspired the whole 6:30 AM thing and writing in the first place. After all, it’s the chair you stole from your job when you quit to become a full-time writer.

Book Reviewer for International Book Management Corporation

Colin sat in front of his computer, fingers lightly resting on the keyboard. Seven colors and seven days were his characters.

Day 1: My world turns olive and there’s nothing I can do, so I watch and see what happens. Olive climbs the walls and licks the ceilings. My hands are olive, and even my bellybutton is when I check there. Olive begins to warp my world and I am no longer sitting at my desk, but at the controls of an olive colored Abrams tank plowing through an olive jungle. I flip a switch and olive colored flames rip out to consume an olive colored pagoda. The olive has become too dominant. One color is not enough. Olive is violent and I am subject to it. I drive my Abrams tank late into the night wreaking havoc on the olive world until I fall asleep and then wake the next day to find…

Day 2: Fuchsia everywhere I turn. The jungle is gone and I find myself in the Malibu Barbie torture chamber. Fuchsia climbs my body and the destructive olive is leached away to be replaced by a fuchsia urge to go to the mall, or be a pilot, or an astronaut or a scientist all while wearing fuchsia and displaying a blond hairdo that is distinctly fuchsia. I look for something to eat but all the food is fuchsia and my gag reflex triggers spewing fuchsia in a puddle that looks horrifyingly similar to the fuchsia pool outside where fuchsia girls lounge. I bury myself deep under a pile of fuchsia blankets until I feel like I’m smothering to death. I lose consciousness and fuchsia, not blackness, covers my sight.

Day 3: I’m in heaven. At least I think it’s heaven. Can’t really tell. Heaven’s supposed to be cloudy right? That must be why everything is ivory. Ivory figures move amongst the ivory clouds and I assume they are angels. I am filled with an abiding sense of peace. Ivory softness surrounds me and I wander through my new Ivory world. For hours, and hours, and hours. Until I realize Ivory really sucks. It’s just white upon white upon white. I try to ask if there are any other colors, but what I took to be people before are just shifting columns of ivory, just more clouds. I scream and scream and eventually just to get some color bite at my arm until ivory flows out all over the place. I pass out from lack of ivory, I need an IV of ivory stat.

Day 4: The effects of my ivory loss seem to be wearing off as I awake to find indigo. I am having a fever dream about the rainbow. Roy g biv. Except I am halfway through biv and going nowhere, except down. I can definitely feel myself falling. All that ivory must have been clouds because now I’m free falling faster than Tom Petty out of an air balloon. I worry about hitting the ground and try to figure out how much time I have, but big surprise the ground is freaking indigo and I can’t tell where the sky stops and the ground begins. I’m trying remember what my high school physics teacher told me about how fast a body has to be moving to liquefy on impact when smack

Day 5: It’s happened I’m liquid, but then why am I able to think I’m liquid. I think I can wave my azure hand. Wait, azure? I thought I was indigo. At least the first three color changes were different! Blue to more blue? Seriously? I try to swim towards the surface of what I assume is an azure ocean, but I don’t know which way is up. Where is the azure air? Hell I don’t care what color it is, I’ll go back to olive just get me air! I think there is a flicker of azure light and I swim towards it but I’m fading fast. This is it, the whole worlds going azure as I lose my mind once again.

Day 6: The plum water washes against me and I shift in the surf. Plum sands trickle through my hands as I pull myself towards the plum beach and the plum cliffs above. Thank god its not another shade of blue. I journey inland over plum hills and across plum plains. Ahead a plum forest looms and I stumble on through a plum night, into a plum day. I reach the edge of the forest just as day is breaking and stumble forward through the plum foliage into…

Day 7: Raspberry fields forever. They make me think of the great plains of Africa, if Africa looked like it’d been colored by a five year old girl trying to use up her Raspberry scratch and sniff marker. I scratch my arm and wish I hadn’t sniffed. The world might have changed color seven times but I’m still wearing the same clothes I was seven colors ago and I’ve got the scent to prove it. I lay down in the raspberry grass, hoping a raspberry lion doesn’t come along and eat me. I’m all played out. Bring on the next color. I’ll deal with it when I wake up…

In my bed. Red flannel sheets cover me to my neck while my head rests on a cream colored pillow. Yellow light streams in through my window onto the fake wood paneling where a black frame holding my “Official Irish Whiskey Taster” certificate hangs from a grey nail. I close my eyes again and all I see is black, perfect. I don’t know what it was or if it was, but I know it is never meant to be.

I go to my desk and start to write it all down, but it can’t be monochromatic, that’s just bad writing.

My name is Colin Conway and I’m from Abington, Pennsylvania. I’m a senior at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in Fiction Writing and English Literature. I enjoy writing short stories and not so short novels. I like to run and take Judo to stay in shape. In the future I hope to find a job at a publishing company or literary magazine writing about books and the publishing industry.

By Colin Conway

I used to be a boy scout. I learned things like how to weave a basket, carve a horse out wood and punch holes in leather. I also learned how to survive in the wilderness, at least for a week-end, and I have the badge to prove it. Now, in an effort to earn my "You are a Published Author" Merit Badge I've come up with BOOK SCOUT: Tips for Survival which is based upon my experience as a scout.

1. A Signaling Device: Say you're lost. Not only because your cell phone took a nose dive into the stream you just crossed but because you are really, really lost. The question is how to let people know where you are. Now apply that question to your story about being lost. You need to send a strong signal to the reader that says very clearly: HERE'S A STORY WORTH READING. I don't mean starting you story with some gratuitous sex scene or sound effect like: V-V-Vroom went the car, or Bang! Bang! sounded the gun but by starting you story where the story begins. Where's that? you may ask. Well, the story starts when something out of the ordinary happens to your protagonist that causes him, or her, to act and react.

2. Shelter: You found an effective signaling device and damn if it doesn't begin to pour down rain. Lightening thunder and the whole shooting match and the sun is about to set. (Which can be a good thing: At least you know which direction is West.) What do you need to find? SHELTER and structure in which to protect yourself. Your story needs a structure, too. Here's some of the building blocks: First you decide to whom your story belongs (and your story, as a new writer, normally belongs to the Protagonist). Once you know who the story belongs to you can begin to shape the story around them. Your protagonist should naturally be your most interesting character, and so everything they do should help to move the story along. These are essential elements that need to be addressed in order to give your story a solid form. Just like building a shelter, your story needs a solid base to build off of, or else you're going to be left out in the cold.

3. Food and Water: The storm has passed, but all that huddling in your shelter has worked up an appetite. You need food and water to keep you going. You'll need to forage close to your shelter. Your story needs food too, and you shouldn't wander too far from your protagonist to find it. Everything you need for your story to survive is right next to your main character. The relationships you've given him/her will be the food that your story needs to survive. Complex relationships between characters will enrich your story and make it grow strong. If there is ever a moment in your story that seems like it could be a low point don't forget that your characters are complex people and they always have something going on. If you provide you protagonist with a rich cast of supporting players then your story will never be dull. Even in the harshest environment your characters can survive.

4. Fire: What is a story without a campfire to warm your buns? You novel needs fire on several levels: You need to keep a fire under your protagonist butt or he'll remain stagnant. You need to make sure that the fiery conflict at the center of your story never dies down. If things seem to be petering out throw some fuel on that story and shake things up a bit. Also, you need to use fiery and exciting language to keep the reader's attention. If you only speak in flat meaningless cliches no one is going to want to read your story. If you create sentences that set the reader's blood to boil then they will be hot for your story. You need to craft a story that will burn its way into people's minds and make them want to warm themselves over it again and again.

It is a dangerous world out there for a book. Give it every chance to survive. Oh, and as a scout I found, first hand, the answer to the age old question: Do bears poop in the woods? YES, they do. I advise you not to step into it-I had to toss away my favorite hiking boots.

My name is Colin Conway and I’m from Abington, Pennsylvania. I’m a senior at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in Fiction Writing and English Literature. I enjoy writing short stories and not so short novels. I like to run and take Judo to stay in shape. In the future I hope to find a job at a publishing company or literary magazine writing about books and the publishing industry.

By Danielle Bissert

From the moment I started reading The Second District I was hooked. It’s as simple as that. The whole world could have exploded and I would still be glued to my chair, totally absorbed in the life of Arch Sinclair, cowboy movie star, who buys a sprawling ranch in Oregon. Arch is a charming good guy who trades the “back-biting” frenzy of Hollywood for fresh air and open ranges. Or so he thought. What Arch got was bad guy Congressman Justin Yarbrough, a neighboring rancher, who does everything in his power to cause Arch’s venture to crash and burn. Why? Because he wants the land.

Arch isn’t the kind of guy to back down from a fight and figures his only way to win against Yarbrough’s dirty tactics is beat him in the upcoming election. So Arch throws his hat into the political ring and that’s when the real fun begins. Yarbrough is experienced at mud-slinging and is very well-connected in the political arena. So much so that Arch winds up looking like a criminal and is forced to hire Barry O’Shea, a smart, seasoned attorney to advise and defend him against Yarbrough’s accusations. Rapidly things turn ugly and Arch finds himself in court.

Author Jerry Banks, an attorney himself, effectively brings to The Second District an enriched courtroom drama that magnifies an already suspenseful plot. I knew Banks was an attorney before I started reading the book so I prepared myself to be confused and bored by the legal format that exists throughout much of the novel. Instead, Banks provoked in me the same addiction that glues me to the TV during Law & Order marathons.

The Second District, like all good fiction, has developed characters, strong setting and a well-defined plot. The conclusion: A jaw-dropping courtroom drama.

Jerry Banks’s latest novel in the Barry O’Shea series, Vital to the Defense, is going to be released real soon. I have an advanced copy and I can’t wait to read it!

Keep them coming Mr. Banks.

By Carlotta G. Holton

As an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, I found that the game was definitely afoot in this delightfully ripping mystery-within-a-mystery. Author Graham Moore’s debut novel adeptly alternates the action between two time frames, two continents and two heroes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and contemporary Baker Street Irregular, Harold White with the underlying theme of man’s “need to know.”

This well-crafted novel begins with Arthur Conan Doyle struggling with the best way to kill off Sherlock Holmes so that he can begin writing historical fiction. The year is 1893. When Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty go over the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem,” Doyle is shocked to encounter anger and hostility from the English people who don black armbands in mourning for the fictional character.

The action shifts to the present at a convention of Sherlock scholars known as the Baker Street Irregulars who have gathered to share in the discovery of a long-lost diary of Doyle’s that has been found by member Alex Cale. For decades scholars have wondered what events/experiences prompted Doyle to resurrect Holmes in 1901 in “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Would those exploits be detailed in the missing diary?

Also making his entrance into the society is Harold White, a freelance literary researcher by trade, who briefly meets Cale and then finds him murdered in a hotel suite. The alleged diary, which was in his possession, is not found. A la Doyle’s short story, A Study in Scarlet, the present- day- killer has left the word “elementary” written in blood on the wall.

Enter Doyle’s great-grandson, Sebastian, who hires White to solve the murder and find the diary. Employing Holmes’ skills of deduction, White assumes the challenge. Alternating chapters track Doyle’s seven year hiatus from Holmes as he begins his own manhunt for a serial killer during the Victorian era. Assuming the traits of his own creation, Sherlock, he invites his friend and author, Bram Stoker to be his real-life Watson as they follow the trail of a savage murderer of women connected to the suffragette movement in London’s East End. Moore effectively intersects the parallel stories.

While The Sherlockian is a work of fiction, the murder of an Irregular is based on an incident in 2004 in which a Sherlockian was found dead after claiming he had found Doyle’s lost papers. In this fast-paced and engrossing novel Moore effectively mixes historical fiction and contemporary detection. Both heroes – Doyle in Victorian London and Harold in the 21st century get to practice Holmes’ techniques. Along the trail we are treated to glimpses and references of Holmes’ cases such as A Study in Scarlet, The Adventure of the Illustrious Client and The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, a technique sure to please not only Doyle’s fans, but new readers as well.

The Sherlockian is a wonderful read celebrating the cleverness of its author while offering a nostalgic appreciation of all that was Victorian - hansom cabs, fog- covered- cobblestone streets, the female fight for equality and the invention of electric lighting symbolic of Doyle’s life and writings. The author also successfully manages to evoke sadness for the loss of Victorian antiquity. Doyle laments the passage of the significant era when he tells Stoker, “what saddens me is not the passing of time but the curious sensation of being aware of it as it happens.” Stoker responds to him: “realism is fleeting. It’s the romance that will live forever.”

Moore comments on the genre of the mystery novel. Stressing the power of a tale well told, he maintains that humanity craves solutions. Harold addresses his love for the genre to his companion, Sara. “Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it’s unsatisfying. It’s unpleasant for the reader. There needs to be something at the end, some sort of resolution… It’s that the reader needs to know. .. That’s what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in so ordered and rational. It’s beautiful.”

Like the new electric lights that paved the way into Doyle’s 20th century, readers continue to need to be illuminated by the truth. And Harold White is our very own contemporary Sherlock Holmes. Well done, Mr. Moore!

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead,Vampire Resurrection, and Deadly Innocence and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

By Colin Conway

Spring has only just sprung, but I’m already looking into books for beach reading. In my search for stories to be enjoyed on the sand I found Glenn Ickler’s A Deadly Vineyard. The book takes place on the beautiful beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. And even though I was in an office in Pittsburgh watching the snow outside, reading this book I was transported to a beautiful beach town. What I found on the pages was an interesting combination that could make for decent seaside entertainment.

This is not the first book featuring these characters and the depth of their connections is obvious. Even the cat Sherlock Holmes has a history and a distinct personality. As the mystery unfolds these connections are tested. The mystery that the characters try to solve is complex and gripping. Something is always afoot, and so the story moves rapidly. What is most interesting aside from the murder is the main character and his relationship woes. Mitch is a middle aged cat owner in a long distance relationship. Needless to say he is anything but typical. What interested me most in Mitch was the fact that he was very openly flawed. The author did not try to make Mitch into this super noble figure who always does the right thing, but instead Mitch is tempted in the book, and sometimes he does not resist temptation. I was angry at Mitch when he failed to act in the most honorable way possible, but that just goes to show how attached I became to him.

I make puns sometimes. I think I learned it from my dad. Puns are his bread and butter. I always thought that no one could love puns more than dad. That was until I read A Deadly Vineyard. If puns are my dad’s bread and butter, then for Glenn Ickler they are the very air he breathes. Every ten or fifteen pages a few of the characters would get in verbal sparring matches that made me laugh out loud, chuckle or sometimes roll my eyes. Within the first ten pages we are given this little exchange, “ ‘Look at this—the guy’s name is Wade Waters,’ Dave said. ‘Is that a perfect name for a diver or what?’ ‘Great for a guy hunting for liquid assets,’ I said. ‘He sounds all wet to me,’ Al said. ‘Probably made up that name,’ I said. ‘You know, kind of a pseudo-swim.’ ‘I’m going to bail out of here if you guys don’t dry up,’ Dave said.” That’s just a taste of what comes up over the next 212 pages. The puns come fast and frequent in this story and go a long way to lighten the mood and move the story along.

This book presents an interesting mystery and lets the reader observe a set of complex characters trying to solve it. Glenn Ickler will have you amazed at the sheer number of puns he can cram into the pages of this book. So head to the beach and prepare to be intrigued and amused by A Deadly Vineyard.

My name is Colin Conway and I’m from Abington, Pennsylvania. I’m a senior at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in Fiction Writing and English Literature. I enjoy writing short stories and not so short novels. I like to run and take Judo to stay in shape. In the future I hope to find a job at a publishing company or literary magazine writing about books and the publishing industry.