Thrill Ride 7 – Adventure is now available with one of my stories about that Babylonian bad boy, Nidintu.
You can get Thrill Ride – Adventure here: https://books2read.com/thrillride-adventure
Category: Babylon
It took a little longer than intended, but The Corpse in the Courtyard is done with final edits and was published this past weekend. Follow the link to get the book at your favorite digital store.
This past weekend I received some feedback on The Corpse in the Courtyard from one of my first readers.
I found the prolog hard, she said. There were time when you used a comma and I expected the word and after it. Did you do that deliberately?
As an example, I wrote A part of Jacob wanted to relax, walk across the courtyard The expectation was relax, and walk.
Writing that way was a deliberate choice. I came across the technique while studying the Eve Dallas novels by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts). I liked what she did and how she did it, and decided to experiment with the technique about the time I started writing The Corpse in the Courtyard.
Dean Wesley Smith describes using many craft techniques – tags, power words, etc., as sprinkling a spice in your writing. It adds depth and flavor when done right. If you do it wrong, it can pull the reader right out of the story – just like that mouthful of cayenne pepper when you used a tablespoon instead of a pinch.
So I went back to the Eve Dallas books, and then my manuscript.
Essentially that’s what I did in the prolog. Instead of sprinkling the technique through the pages as J.D Robb did, I spooned it on thickly in just about every other paragraph. Because I was now reading the story from a different perspective, I saw what I’d done and felt how clunky the story flowed. Not good as I could lose a reader in the first four or five pages, and they would never know why they didn’t feel at home with the story.
It didn’t take long to make some changes that improved the flow of the opening. Now I have to read through my current work-in-progress and make sure I used sprinkles and not spoonfuls.
We are into the last days of the Smashwords Summer Sale where you can get all my books at a substantial discount. Don’t miss out and check out https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/
This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.
My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.
I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.
I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.
Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!
Except not exactly.
The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.
I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.
I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.
Toward the end of last week, I finished the latest Jacob and Miriam novel. This is the fastest I’ve written a novel, but not the reason for this post.
I write the Jacob and Miriam novels in the third person, and the Jacob short stories in the first person. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write that way, it just happened.
Once the novel was done, I put it aside and turned my attention to a short story – at least I think it’s a short story. It may turn out longer. It’s a Jacob story that came about from a throwaway line in the story A Cousin’s Outing that appears in the Thrill Ride issue Sisters in Arms.
In that story, Miriam makes a comment about a past event, and Gideon makes it a condition of his help to hear the full story about the event.
At the time, I had no idea what that event was, how it came about, or who was involved.
Well, the subconscious mind is a strange thing, and over the weekend, I opened a new Scrivener document and started writing about that event. After about 400 words, I came to a slow stop. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure what it was, so back to the top and reread from the beginning. As I did so, I found myself changing the viewpoint. With my head still deep in the novel, I automatically wrote Jacob in the third person. As I cycled back through the first paragraphs, I changed from third person to first, and then kept writing.
Because I started late in the day, I didn’t really expect to hit my daily word count, and was quite surprised when I looked up and had blown past it. I don’t think I would have been anywhere close had I persisted with Jacob in the third person. And I even have a title. Keep your eyes peeled for Unwelcome Competition!
A short post this week to let everyone know Sisters in Arms is now available at all eBook retailers.
Women who put it all on the line when the shit hits the fan. Military, family, or thrown together by chance doesn’t matter. They join, they cooperate, and, when they run out of options, they fight.
Tales from feudal Japan to modern day Angola. A slink through the Parisien woods and a strut along the Seattle streets. A Babylon that we never knew to a war-torn hell we should all fear.
A baker’s dozen of stories about women owning their place in the world.
Sisters-in-Arms | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!
It’s funny how often after a long stretch of nothing apparently happening, everything seems to coalesce together and there’s a flurry of frenetic activity.
That’s how it’s been this past week, and probably how it will continue into the coming week.
Firstly, two of my stories were selected for the 2024 issues of Thrill Ride Magazine so there were edits and proofing copy in preparation for the upcoming kickstarter which starts on Tuesday 30th – Thrill Ride – the magazine (Year Two) by M. L. “Matt” Buchman — Kickstarter. There are some excellent writers in this year’s magazine, as there were in Year One, and I’m grateful to be included alongside them.
Secondly, I finally finished the editing and formatting of Death at a Wedding and got everything published, along with the reformatting of the cover for Thieves in the Temple. Both books now look like they belong together. Check out Death at a Wedding here: Death at a Wedding
And finally, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine confirmed my Jacob story The Cleansing of Abel will be in the May/June issue available in April.
It’s been a great start to the year and I can’t wait to see what comes in February.
This past week my wife was out of town catching up with some friends, which left the kitchen open and available to explore two dishes that have been on my let’s try list for a while. I do a lot of my experimental cooking while she’s away. And I make sure to be cleaned up before she gets home!
The first meal was Goan Venison Curry from issue 12.22 of the Big Green Egg Life Style magazine. The combination of fennel, cloves, chili, and cardamom appealed to me, and as I have stack of cubed venison in the freezer, it seemed a good choice. Except I must have missed something, because the generous spicing described in the article didn’t materialize. If anything the whole flavor was very bland, which was disappointing because I love a good curry.
With the curry behind me, the next experiment was Roast Chicken with Babylonian Spices from the book The Witches Feast by Melissa Jayne Madara. The dish is based on a translation of the recipe amusarnu pigeon with broth from tablet 8958 of the Yale University collection, dating back to about 1,700 BC.
After the not so great experience with the curry, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into – especially as I made some changes – sesame oil instead of olive oil, and the roasting phase on the Big Green Egg instead of the oven. While the chicken cooled after poaching in the sauce, and before roasting, I tasted the sauce, and immediately knew I had something different.
I was really pleased with the chicken, and plan to try it again. Now all I need are the other recipes on tablet 8958.
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