Not another book review - My Soul to Take, Rachel Vincent

Just as a side note, I really don't like this cover. The US one is a bit weird too though, so I'm not sure which I prefer. The UK covers for the rest of the series are very pretty though. And incidentally, slapping the word Twilight onto every YA book going is a bit of a cheat.

Anyway. I originally read the free ebook prequel to this story a year or so ago, and loved it. It seemed like a really new concept, and I'm a sucker for banshees. Despite that, it's taken me this long to get round to actually reading My Soul To Take (and I won't lie, part of that is that I find the very similar titles for the series as a whole quite confusing and wasn't sure where to start, but that's my stupidity). So I was really looking forward to this book, especially as I love Vincent's Shifter books so much.

And I did like it, I really did. But it didn't grab me quite the same way the prequel did. I like Kaylee. I like the banshee mythology. I like that it is quite different from other YA I've read. But I didn't love it and I can't quite put my finger on why. Vincent is an amazing, visceral writer, and maybe that raw emotion that powers the Shifter books was a bit muted here? It was only towards the end that I felt we were really seeing Kaylee, and before that she was simply going through the motions. I don't know if this was a deliberate choice by Vincent - Kaylee is smart and erudite, but obviously a wallflower, very much used to keeping her emotions bottled up. This made her more outspoken behaviour later in the book very striking, but it also meant I felt like I never got to know Kaylee until the last minute.

I get the sense there's a lot more to learn about all the characters in the book though; not just Kaylee. Tod and Nash will be ones to watch, and I really liked Harmony. Emma felt like a bit of a blank slate, but as she wasn't really a major player in the plot, I didn't mind that so much. I'm sure she'll be fleshed out in the sequel (which I do plan to buy).

In all, I think I maybe unfairly (and subconsciously) compared My Soul To Take to Vincent's Shifter books whilst reading, and of course they're going to be completely different! But it's still Rachel Vincent, so it's still a good book, it just didn't quite live up to the promise of the prequel. I will buy the second in the series at some point, but there are other books taking priority right now!

Fingernail-chewing

Well, it took me all afternoon yesterday, but I think I mastered the whole ebook-making process. Go me! I thought I'd experiment with a short story I originally had published under another name in an anthology I can't imagine anyone has read. Just looking for the perfect cover image right now, then I'll crack on and see what happens. It's all so tense!

ETA: I jut uploaded LOVE, PRAYER, FORGIVENESS to the Kindle! *gulp* I included an excerpt from RAVENOR too. Here's the cover I made:

Should be available in the next 24 hours or so!

Rage, rage, rage

Spending my afternoon trying to get to grips with converting files to upload to Kindle. Amazon's FAQ is horrible. Calibre apparently hates me, and Mobipocket Creator keeps finding errors with my files. I don't know if it's because I use Open Office? Apparently PDF and Word formats are accepted by Amazon, but Mobi seems to be the best from what I can find. So why doesn't it do what I want it to?!

On the bright side, I've added another 1k to Ravenor, so it's not all doom and gloom. Now back to battling with technology *cries*

Chugging Along

Got one thousand shiny new words down on Ravenor, and designed a cover. Yay! Nothing new on DitD, but hopefully Monday, being a bank holiday, will prove productive. Now I'm watching a Louis Theroux documentary on Florida prisons. It's terrifying. I never want to be a man in prison. Or a woman in prison, for that matter, but I would especially hate to be a man and go to prison. I would just get eaten alive. I guess it's probably a good thing I'm not inclined towards armed robbery or anything.

Beginning

Today I shall begin to write. Yes. I shall. I've been getting this idea straight in my head for a while, trying to fit a few elements together to get it clear in my head what I'm actually going to write. And voilà, in the shower this morning, it all came together. There's something about lemon and tea tree shower gel that just gets my synapses firing, apparently.

I'd had the title (December in the Dark) for ages. I had my main character, I had a sort-of-plot. What I didn't have was a monster. For this is a tale with monsters, as all good tales are. I just hadn't been sure what kind of monster. I toyed with vampires and werewolves, but my muse rightly rejected these as overdone. I wanted something different. I thought about British folklore, which is ripe with faeries, goblins, and witches, but although that felt better, it still didn't feel right.

And then, this morning (well, this afternoon if you want to be accurate about it, but it's Sunday, I slept in, it's fine), as I reached for the lemon and tea tree shower gel, it hit me. I wanted to write about these guys:

These guys are known as drow or trowe, and they're the dark elves. Well, that's actually a lie. In Scottish folklore, drow are actually troll-like, short, and ugly, but the nice thing about fiction is that I can pick the bits of folklore I like and embellish them how I choose. So the drow in December in the Dark won't be short or ugly. They will be tricksy and dangerous. And they will fit beautifully in my tale of creepy mansions, violin-playing heroines, madness, suicide, and family secrets. I can't wait to get started!

The Inaugural Post - a book review, why not?

Sam I Am - Heather Killough-Walden

I vascillated back and forth on how I felt about this book throughout reading. On the one hand, I liked the premise and the Celtic edge. I liked Logan (although she was a bit of a special snowflake, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing, and I think Killough-Walden worked hard to make Logan a believable character). I liked the spooky Halloween atmosphere. So all that was great.

On the other hand, I was less keen on other aspects. Take the love interest, Dominic Moldovan (who was nearly always referred to as Dominic Moldovan, as if there might be several other Dominics coming along any minute and we'd get confused). He and Logan have a small handful of encounters throughout the book, most of which involve fighting the villain. So I didn't really buy their "connection" or feel their chemistry. If I were Logan, I'd be slightly perturbed that this boy I've never really spoken to before knows my birthday. It might sound like a small thing, but think about it. Logan's life is one of constant hardship due to her dysfunctional family. She's a loner and something of a misfit at school. It seems odd to me, given her self-doubt and self-imposed isolation, that she'd fall so quickly into any kind of bond with Dominic, who's supposedly a lust object for every female student at school. Why would she trust him so fast? I wanted a little more depth and exploration here, I suppose. I thought Logan had better chemistry with Sam, the bad guy.

Speak of which, I liked the idea of Sam Hain (even if the name was a little too corny), but again I felt more depth was needed to flesh the idea out. I suppose this being the first part of a trilogy, that will come. It would have been nice to get a deeper insight into who and what he was, however, as he spends the whole book just thinking about Logan. I don't really know what his role is in a wider sense, why he actually wants Logan, or why it's really that a big a deal that he's walking the mortal world.

Overall this is a good YA read. It's well-written with some interesting ideas, but it's also underdeveloped, particularly as far as the romance subplots went. It would also have been good to get a better look at Logan's homelife, given the impact it has on her. We know her older brother is ill, but we don't know what the problem is. We know her mother has a drinking problem, but it's something we're told rather than shown. More detail here would give the reader a better understanding of Logan and her reactions to the events unfolding around her. Hopefully the sequels will expand on the world touched upon here.