Strange Vacation gathers in the offing

We have a cover design. We have the back jacket copy. Can April Fool's Day be far behind?

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Berford Oswald Wiggins vows to take his best friend on a killer vacation. And a Wiggins always keeps his word.

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Berf loves Jake like a brother, but not like a brother-in-law. After all, he wouldn’t wish his sister on anyone, least of all Jake. When Berf’s warning falls on deaf ears, he falls back on The Code and serves as Jake’s best man.

The ill-fated marriage scarcely lasts two hours before going south, and Berf decides he and Jake should do the same. But the trip is far from an idyllic escape.

A series of bizarre accidents gets Berf to thinking of Spider, an extreme sports freak who recommended this special Cancún deal. Did Spider ever come back from his Caribbean vacation?

And when a fellow traveler drops dead out of a clear blue sky, Berf suspects they might not be going home next week. Or ever.

Cover for Postcards from Fred

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Fred book on the way, and once again Amanda has created a great cover. Here's the final cover for Postcards from Fred, coming out in October. Click to see it full size.

Here's the book description:

Ever wonder what would Jesus do? On a date?

It’s been a bad weekend. Mark Cloud’s dreams of romantic bliss have been cruelly obliterated, and his friendship with the local moonshiner has drawn unwelcome attention from the local Pharisee, Deacon Fry.

Then two girls enter his life: one a lovely and sold-out-for-Jesus preacher’s kid who just might be The One for him, the other a prodigal wild-child who just might give Deacon Fry the ammunition he needs to rid himself of this troublesome pastor and his vexing family.

Mark’s romantic aspirations and his vow to fly under the church-politics radar crash into his vow to live his life asking the seductive but inconvenient question: What Would Jesus Do? His response will determine not only his dating life but possibly the future of his father’s career.

Sign up for the newsletter to get notified when it's available, and also to get sneak peeks and freebies. The next issue goes out next week with freebies for the insiders.

Cannibal Nights **

** Cannibal Nights: Pacific Stories, Volume II, Kiana Davenport, 2011

I bought this Kindle book and House of Skin three months ago in response to the storm of controversy that Davenport fell prey to in the clash of the old guard (traditional publishers) and the new guard (ebook self-publishing). I won't go into the various sides of the fracas, but there are probably points of merit in both camps, although I tend to side with the author, for obvious reasons.

I haven't read her previous, traditionally-published, work, but the endorsers include Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Isabel Allende (15+ novels, 30+ awards), Norman Mailer (need I say more?), The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. Despite the very amateurish cover that screamed SELF PUBLISHED!!! I grew hopeful.

As the title suggests, Cannibal Nights is a collection of short stories. I'm more of a fan of the long form, although I have thoroughly enjoyed many short story collections, including those of Damon Runyon, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K Chesterton, O'Henry, Flannery O'Connor, and others. Aside from the last, not necessearily literary, perhaps.

While I found Davenport's writing engaging in spots and well crafted in others, I was disappointed. In many cases I felt like I was getting a story in summary, rapidly glossing through the high points with the occasional dip into an immediate scene, which failed to pull me into the narrative and connect with the characters. There were moments in George Bush and Papa at the Paradise that I enjoyed, and some of the title story, but often I felt the plot of the stories to be ennervatingly inevitable, cloyingly melodramatic, or tritely tragic.

Given the endorsements, I suspect that her other work is more compelling. We shall see what House of Skin brings us.

EBOOK FORMATTING *

Why it matters.

Unfortunately, the formatting of the ebook was as amateurish as the cover. Absolutely zero navigation from the Kindle menu, although there is a TOC near the front. To get to it, you have to navigate to the cover and page forward ten pages or navigagte to the beginning and page back four pages. No logical TOC, no left/right button navigation between stories, which means she didn't create a toc.ncx file.

Vertical spacing is formatted via blank linespaces, so when you scroll between TOC items, you have to scroll through the blank lines as well.

Chapter headings are formatted with the anchor inside the heading tag, which means that the heading loses its formatting when navigated to via the TOC rather than the next-page key.

Paragraph formatting and scene changes are formatted properly.

I wish Davenport well, but if she's going to self-publish, should step up to the plate and either learn the technology or contract it out to a competent freelancer. And get a real graphic designer to do the cover.

Kim ***

*** Kim, Rudyard Kipling, 1901

I found The Game so intriguing that I grabbed a 99-cent copy of Kim for the Kindle and read it through. This copy has photos of woodcut illustrations by Rudyard Kipling's faother, J. Lockwood Kipling.

A great story. It's a shame I never read any Kipling up to now. As a classic, I've always been leery of Kim and other Kipling novels. You know how classics, like other things that are supposed to be good for you, can be. Tedious, unpleasant, boring.

As Robertson Davies said of a character in A Mixture Frailties, "During the first day or two she attempted to get on with War and Peace, but found it depressing, and as time wore on she suffered from that sense of unworthiness which attacks sensitive people who have been rebuffed by a classic."

The writing style in Kim is dated, but engaging. It's a story of a boy and a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage mixed with a spy novel. If that doesn't sound interesting, think again. Recommended reading.

EBOOK FORMATTING ****

Why review formatting?

Fully functional navigation, including TOC and chapter forward/backward keys.

Paragraph formatting: Good.

No apparent errors.

Pilot Error ***

*** Pilot Error, Tosh McIntosh, 2011

I'm not much one for reading thrillers, even though I co-wrote one back in the day. But that was a one-off and not my story. I've read one Clancy (seriously in need of an editor) and two Bourne books (painfully written, but that was the model Phil gave me for his hero, Matt Cooper, so I forced my way through a couple) but that's about it for me for the thriller genre.

Tosh is a career aviator, fighter plane pilot, commercial jet pilot, and all that, so he knows whereof he speaks. Nick, the protagonist, is a NTSB crash investigator who stumbles on a conspiracy and gets cranked through a meatgrinder before he finally gets on the other end, much the worse for wear. The body count is pretty high, but that's probably typical with a thriller.

One thing about this book, it really puts you in the left seat of some pretty cool airplanes. And what Nick does with the last one, well, I don't even want to think about it.

If you're fond of thrillers, you should check this one out. He's just getting started and more are on the way. I've seen a few peeks of some early scenes of the sequel, and it looks pretty good, too.

EBOOK FORMATTING ****

Why ebook formatting matters.

Tosh got it right on the conversion. Edited and proofread. Full navigation. Good paragraph formatting. Scene separators. The works. He also did the cover himself.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart ***

*** The Girl with the Long Green Heart, Lawrence Block, 1994

Amazon has a thing called the Kindle Daily Deal. If you have a Kindle or read Kindle books on a PC or smartphone and you aren't getting the emails, you should sign up now. I've bought more good Kindle books in the last two months the previous ten months that I've owned the thing, all at $1.99 and under. This book was one of those.

I've read a handful of Block novels, mostly in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, all of which were very entertaining, so I knew this one was a sure thing.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart is a classic noir story, and a gem of the genre. The voice is perfect, the protagonist is perfect, the scheme is perfect. I didn't mind at all that because of the dictates of the genre I knew the twist way ahead of time. It was just such a joy to soak in the atmosphere of a brilliantly told noir story.

If you're a fan of noir, this is a must read.

Block was on the last segment of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last week.

EBOOK FORMATTING ***

Why it matters.

Nicely formatted. Fully function navigation and TOC. Proper paragraph formatting and scene breaks. There are two formatting artifacts that could have been resolved:

1. Chapter headings lose their formatting when the left/right buttons are used to navigate. This happens when the anchor tag is inside the heading tag instead of before it. Easy for a publisher to fix.
2. The last paragraph of ten of the sixteen chapters was centered, probably because it got wrapped in the tag for the heading of the following chapter, although I didn't verify the cause by looking at the code.

These are fairly minor formatting issues, although both should have been caught during proof-reading and the first is well-known and should always be tested during production.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane ***

*** The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Kate DiCamillo, 2006

This was a Kindle Daily Deal book. Of course it's a kid's book, a story for children. It seemed a little stark in some places for a kid, but what do I know from kid's books?

Edward is the very definition of the passive protagonist, as he is a toy rabbit made of china and fur. He can't move or talk. All of the action in the book happens to him or around him, viewed through his thoughts.

But this is the way of some children's books, so I guess that's OK. He's a bit of a smug prig in the beginning, which I found amusing.

It's a nicely told story from the author of the Tale of Despereaux and Because of Winn Dixie. The illustrations by Bagram Ibatoullines are excellent.

EBOOK FORMATTING ***

The thing about ebooks.

No table of contents, embedded or otherwise, for the Kindle. However, the left/right keys do move you back or forward one chapter. The Nook sample I downloaded had a TOC. In all other respects, it is a nicely done ebook.

Back On Murder ****

**** Back On Murder, J. Mark Bertrand, 2010

Note: I started rating books online 20 years ago, before Amazon existed, and developed a 0 to 4 star system. Add a star to get an equivalent Amazon rating.

First off, note another four-star book. Not many of these in a year. You should get this and read it now.

I don't recall where I first ran across Mark - somewhere online about a decade ago when I was in Honolulu and he was in Houston. We exchanged some emails. I read a short story of his and was overwhelmed. At that point I knew I wanted to read anything this guy wrote.

But then life proceded as it does and now, many years later, I'm in Texas and he's in South Dakota and I discover that he's got a contract with Bethany House and a couple of books out in a series. I downloaded the sample on my Kindle, read it, and bought the thing right then. I had the discipline to finish the bedside book I was reading before picking up Back on Murder. As soon as I finished it, I bought the second one immediately. I'll read it when I finish a few other items in the stack.

Here are a few things that stood out for me:

• "I let her take my hand a lead me up the back stairs All is not right in my world, but one small corner is about to get noticeably better."
• "Her gaze has a soft and sightless quality, as if her eyes were the back of a silvered mirror."
• There is this brooding backstory hanging just out of sight for a large portion of the novel. You know there's some point at which this is going to be laid out for you. Two-thirds of the way in, you get the story, but in tight dialog, not in a big information dump. Very deftly handled.

The bottom-line is, if you like well-written police crime fiction, you should read this book. It's not quite Michael Connelly, but it's pretty dang close. Kinda like E. F. Benson vs P. G. Wodehouse. Excellent characters, March, the homocide cop who is the protagonist, the various levels of the police department, the bad guys, all of them, very well drawn. The story has plenty of tendrils, some of which fade out and others which interwine at the end, to keep you guessing.

Connelly was a crime-beat reporter. I don't know that much about Bertrand, personally, but he seems to have a surprisingly intimate knowledge of police culture and processes for a guy with an MFA. Although there was one moment that bugged me. A cop comes to March, saying he'll give him important information in exchange for an immunity deal. They talk for a while, the cop insisting on a signed deal before he'll even mention what his information is about. As I know from my extensive experience in watching cop shows and reading crime novels, you can't get a deal without some sense of what it is you have to offer and a high degree of credibility that you can deliver. So the conversation doesn't feel authentic. Cause I know these things.

This book is published by Bethany House, which is a Christian publisher, but there is no three-points-and-a-poem, come-to-Jesus moment, for which I am grateful because I find them obnoxious and typically avoid Christian fiction for that reason. There are a few notable exceptions based on quality writing and lack of cheese factor. Bertrand is now on that very short list, along with Lisa Samson, Tosca Lee, Athol Dickson, and a few others.

There was only one spot, about a third of the way in, that I felt edged the line, when a cop who is religous gets provoked and says, “What do you believe, March? About God, the universe and everything?” Which is followed by 2 or 3 paragraphs of his response. The exchange felt gratuitous. Less than a page. Minor irritation that quickly passed.

EBOOK FORMATTING **

This is the first Kindle novel that I've reviewed. Having recently suffered through producing Kindle, Nook and iPad versions of the three Fred novels, paying painstaking attention to high-quality production, I'm painfully aware of bad formatting.

For a traditionally published book, the author has no control over production, so this is really a critique of the publisher and their epub production, which may or may not be outsourced.

In my humble but accurate opinion, if publishers want readers to spend $9.99 or more for an ebook, they should produce a superb quality ebook. I hired an experienced epub guy and did over a dozen proofreadings of all three versions of all three books to do everything possible to deliver them with the highest production quality, and with extras you don't get in the print books. And I'm just one guy, not a publisher. And the Fred ebooks are only $2.99. So I have little tolerance for significantly priced ebooks from major publishers, or anyone else, with poor production quality.

NAVIGATION

None. No table of contents, embedded or otherwise. No ability to skip between chapters using the right/left keys. So, if you want to skip back 7 or 8 chapters to check on something, you just have to scroll back one screen at a time, check it, and then scroll forward. Or play "guess the location" with the Go To button.

PARAGRAPHS

There are two ways of doing paragraphs:

1. Indent the first line, no blank lines between paragraphs.
2. Block style, no indent, a blank line between paragraphs.

This book does both, which wastes limited ereader screen space. Pick one is my motto.

In addition, like many print books, extra line spacing is used to indicate a scene change instead of some kind of graphic element. The problem is that with spacing between paragraphs, which doesn't normally occur in a print book, it's easy to overlook the extra space, which means you enter a new scene without realizing it and get disoriented. Not good to get knocked out of the story like that just from a lack of good formatting. I recommend some kind of graphic indication of scene change for all ebooks. Plus, it just looks nicer and doesn't cost extra to do.

PROOFREADING

I get the impression that proofreading is not as high priority for ebook production as it is for print. In this case, there is a paragraph that is right-justified with ragged left margins somewhere in there. There is also an occurence of a character's name that is hyphenated in the middle of a line, with spaces in the middle of the name, thus: Cav- allo. It's highly unlikely you would see either of these errors in a print book.

NOOK

I downloaded the Nook sample. You get the front matter and a couple of chapters. The paragraph formatting is done right, indents, no linespaces. There is both an embedded and physical table of contents, but the embedded TOC only covers the front matter and the first chapter. The physical TOC covers the whole book, but it doesn't work. Touching the links doesn't take you anywhere.

If I were Bertrand, I'd send Bethany house a copy of this review.

The Art of War **

** The Art of War, Sun Tzu, 512 B.C.

One advantage of getting a Kindle is you end up reading all the classics you've been putting off reading because you can get them for free. One downside of this practice is that the free versions tend to have poor formating. But hey, it's free.

One thing I learned in the (very long) introduction is that, like the Bible, The Art of War has had many translators with varying interpretations of problem passages. Lin Wusun's translation is interspersed with James Clavell's commentary, which offers alternate translations and illustrative anecdotes.

If I were a student of war, strategy and tactics, I would have found the multiple viewpoints interesting, but I'm not and I found they slowed down the reading. However, I did enjoy the anecdotes. Man, those ancient Chinese warriors were a crusty lot!

If you're into this type of thing, it's worth more stars. For me it's more of a curiousity than anything. Hmm, maybe I'll stream the Wesley Snipes movie of the same name.

Blue Hotel ***

Blue Hotel, JT Conroe, 2011

Last year, after a three-year sojourn in the wilderness of screenwriting, I returned to my homeland, the novel. I've got three works in progress and plan to release the first one, Muffin Man, in early 2012. So, for all you Fred Book fans out there who have been wanting something new from the Whittington pen, your day is coming.

I said all that to get to the point of the fact that I've swapped my screenwriting critique group for a novel-writing critique group. It's been great fun, reading stuff and savaging it. Heh, heh. Last month one of the writers released Blue Hotel on Amazon as a Kindle book for the felicitous price of $2.99 and I snatched it up. (By the way, if you haven't already, drop by my post on e-book prices and give me your thoughts.)

Now you might be thinking, "I'll skip this review because I don't have a Kindle." And you would be wrong, because you can download a free Kindle viewer for your computer, so that matters not. And this is a book worth getting the viewer for, or even a Kindle, as you can get one for $114 these days.

I'll admit that I didn't have high hopes for Blue Hotel when I bought it. Nothing against the author, who is a great guy, but it's just the odds. I know a lot of great guys who are not very good writers, even some who are traditionally published. It's surprisingly hard to write a good novel, even if you're a reasonably good writer, and often even very good writers fail to pull it off. But I was willing to take a stab at it for a brother-in-arms.

By the time I was halfway into Chapter 1, it was no longer a labor of obligation. It moved like a freight train and I hung on for the ride. I read the first third of the book in once sitting and forced myself to stop because it was two a. m. and I figured it might be nice to get some sleep for the day job the next day. I read another third the next night, and finished it the next. And I'm still thinking about some of the scenes and characters a week later.

The novel is set in and around the location of a Stephen Crane short story, "The Blue Hotel." You don't have to read the short story to enjoy the book, but it is interesting to do so, anyway.

Treasure Island ***

*** Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

I made a reference to Treasure Island in my current work-in-progress and thought there might be multiple parallels the protagonist, so I zipped through it in a few nights. It's 127 years old and still a quick and entertaining read.