Book Review: The Black Wolves of Boston

I don't remember who suggested The Black Wolves of Boston to me or where I heard about it. When I got it and started it I was under the impression it was a young adult urban fantasy with werewolves, vampires, and witches.

I was enjoying it and liked the characters and then noticed it had a lot of um... There was sexual tension, and at one point an implied hand job between a 300 year old vampire and a just before college teen... I was confused. What sort of urban fantasy was I reading?

Oops. It's a romance urban fantasy and not a YA urban fantasy. That's not what I'd wanted or what I normally read even. But, it was well written, the characters were well developed and likable and the world was interesting and well developed so I kept reading.

I'm glad I did. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't want to give away too much but the newly made werewolf is a straight boy who is also a bisexual wolf which makes for interesting situations.

I recommended it. I'm not sure if I'll get others in the series or not. I don't know if I want to be a guy that reads romantic fantasy.

Book Review: Crooks & Straights by Masha du Toit

Crooks and Straights by Masha du Toit is set in South Africa and is the story of an adopted big sister trying to protect her "special" little brother. I use the quotation marks here on purpose because he's special for a reason and that'll come clear.

The setting is one I don't see often enough. I really enjoyed the feel of the novel for being set in Cape Town, I think it was Cape Town, suddenly I think that's where the author is from lol. It doesn't matter because it's not our world or our town. Magic works and there are magical creatures, and djinn you can summon in a cup of tea, a magical mafia-esque underground, and hints of a totalitarian regime of purists (non-magical folk, AKA muggles in the Potterverse) growing in power. I suspect we'll get more into them in the second book.

Which brings me to my only real complaint, it ended too soon. I realized I was already 98% of the way through the book and there wasn't any resolution happening. It never DID happen. In a story arc type thing we closed the book because it was over around the time where Luke gets on the Millenium Falcon for the first time to leave Tatooine. Yeah, not kidding. WAY too soon. All set up, beautiful set up, interesting set up, great world building set up but then YOINK! The waiter takes the salad plates and presents the bill with no meal or dessert.

That being said, do I recommend Crooks and Straights? I don't know. I do like the setting and the characters, except the Dad. I thought he was a little hollow and underwhelming. He mostly got bossed around by the women and did whatever they told him to do whether it's his wife, the hired help, old woman down the road, or the daughter. He was there, but only barely. I don't remember his name even... Kesel maybe?

Yes. Get the book. I liked the story so far. I liked the setting. I want Masha du Toit to write more stuff and I'm a supporter of indie authors and it's worth the money. But get it knowing you'll want to get the next one because you're not really buying Book 1 so much as Part 1.

Book Review: The Kid Dies by Haji Outlaw

The Kid Dies by Haji Outlaw was free for the kindle edition and I grabbed it. The book's description looked interesting, from amazon, "This superb work of dark fiction, in the vein of Chuck Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy, finds a female assassin with five kills remaining in order to exit her life of murder." Wooo... I liked Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It's one of my top five favorite movies of all time. I even bought an autographed copy of the book because I loved it. And while I didn't LOVE The Road by Cormac McCarthy he's got a name like a Scottish barbarian so he's probably better than I think... his book's just too depressing though. If I want bleak I'll look out the window. Iowa winter's aren't known for their unbleakness (which is, evidently, not a real word).

On my kindle the book shows how far along I am in the book in percentages. I was late back from break. I was almost late back from lunch. I got an app for my phone so I could read later into the night without it hurting my eyes so I could read this book late. Great book for 96% of the book.

It had two amazing characters who could have whole series' written about them. A smart, talented, capable, attractive female assassin named Freya Simone. I loved her. She's like an anti-James Bond. So, great. Really liked her bits.

In the other story line was an 8 year old um... he's imprisoned in a prison for psychopathic criminals or something along those lines. He's described as completely without empathy, killed his own mother while he was being born; kills a fellow inmate/patient while the staff talks about how bad he is. Evidently he's also got psychic powers and they're really well written, well done. I liked it a lot. I liked HIM a lot as a bad guy though. He's not a bad guy we'd normally expect. 8 year old kid? Not your typical baddie. Cool twist. Sociopathic 8 year old with unstoppable mental powers? Muahahaha... bad news.

Then there was 2% of transition where I was um... not sure where things were going with the book and then the final 2% of the book happened and I realized the author had accidentally ended the wrong book. The whole book had built to something and it happened then there was an epilogue part of the book, a part like in the movie The Piano after the piano is pushed into the lake, stop watching there!!! Or Pay it Forward, you'll know where to end it. Don't keep watching! It's stupid! Well, this is the same way. After the scorpion goes down to the sand to do what scorpions do... STOP READING. Everything that comes after that goes back in time and retroactively wrecked the book for me because the story was retconned and warped and turned into a Bob Newhart "it's all a dream" kind of thing, no, it's not all a dream... it's just the ending was such a complete non-sequitur. Stop at the scorpion doing what scorpions do, seriously. Up to that part it's a GREAT book... after that... well, if you keep going don't blame me... seriously, he ended it weirdly... and it didn't add to the story or the book or the characters. It subtracted from all of those things.

Book Review: Hipstopia

I got Hipstopia for free during a promotion on Amazon. I've read R. A. Desilets before and enjoyed her books. This one looked different to me. Good different, and at free what was I out, right?

Imagine a Dystopian future, now imagine one populate/ruled by a hipster with his hipster followers? Now imagine it's in LA. What you have is the setting but it's not the story. The story is a person discovering who they are against a backdrop that says you are exactly who you want to be... in these 7 choices thankyouverymuch and don't stray, don't be different, be unique like us... exactly like us, or else.

And then boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl AGAIN and she knocks him out, literally, not figuratively. :) Go read it. It's the fashionable thing to do.

You do want to be fashionable don't you?

Book Review: Eye of God by R.J. Blain

The Eye of God by R.J. Blain is a fantasy story, part one of the Fall of Erelith, involving two protagonists set in a richly realized world with a very strong religious based magic system.

I'm acquainted with R.J. Blain through Google+ and find her interesting and someone I'd enjoy a cup of coffee with if the opportunity ever presented itself.

I really enjoyed her book but that doesn't make it perfect. On amazon I gave it 4 out of 5 stars. If three stars is average it was above average. It wasn't 5 star perfect though.

The blurb on amazon talks almost entirely about one of the protagonists, Blaise, who appears to be some sort of exiled, or fallen angel and the other protagonist, Terrin -- a slave who wears a magical collar that punishes him with pain if he acts or even thinks, against his master's wishes, is mentioned in only the last sentence of the blurb.

That being said the book started with Terrin in a tense situation and opened a lot of questions that made me really want to keep reading the book. That part was perfect. The part that was off-putting for me was that since the book started with him I sort of, as a reader, assumed he'd be the primary focus of the book. Sure, books can have two protagonists, but one is usually the main guy and the other sort of a B-story line and eventually the two merge or intersect. So I was a little confused why Blaise got 90-95% of the blurb but we started with Terrin. I felt off balance because of that.

Terrin, as a slave whose actions are controlled by the collar make him really a passive character. As protagonists go it was a little frustrating to me. I like my protagonists to be people of action. Terrin was a puppet on strings, jerked about by whomever stood in front of him that wasn't wearing a collar. He'd worn the collar for as long as he could remember so freedom wasn't something he was familiar with. He couldn't even realistically rebel against the collar because it a) punished thought and b) had been there so long he was effectively like a broken docile horse. Yes, he did things that were exciting and cool, but it was always at the behest of someone else. Puppets make really boring protagonists.

Blaise, a fallen angel, maybe exiled for something? Maybe he can earn his way back into the good graces of the pantheon's god? Blaise was ridiculously interesting. If you've seen Arrow on The CW you'll get my next comparison if you haven't I'll try and explain it. Blaise's most interesting bits weren't what he was doing at the time of the book. That was interesting (if convoluted -- more later) sure, but his back story that we were given in little doses here and there was fascinating. I loved it. It was like watching Arrow where the scenes from the island, the flashbacks, were awesome and kept my interest. Blaise's past was incredibly interesting to me and not revealed in long swaths of exposition, but parsimoniously doled out over the whole book. It really worked. It built tension. It built suspense. It kept me interested in the Blaise character. I can see why he featured so prominently in the blurb. He was and is a lot more interesting than the puppet on strings that Terrin was in this first book.

Blaise in the here & now of the book was sometimes convoluted, honestly, the whole book was sometimes convoluted in that R.J. Blain tended to not want to over-share and bury us as readers in details or back story. I get that. But sometimes things were a little too sparse and I felt like whole paragraphs had been hacked out in the editing process that would have cleared things up for me. At the end of the book I wasn't lost or confused so the information was there, it was just not put there in a way that made things easy for me as a reader. That's okay I think. Some books are an easy read. The stuff is spoon fed to me in chronological order and there isn't a heck of a lot of work I need to do.

The Belgariad is one of my favorite series ever. It's not, by any stretch, a complicated or challenging book/series. Eye of God is going to require the reader to think and remember things they've read and put them together themselves. It was such a change from what I normally read at first I was put off by it. By the end of the book it wasn't something that I disliked so much as something that was different. I'll definitely read book two but I'll do so knowing that it's going to require thought on my part, work on my part. It won't be a super relaxing beach read. That's not what R.J. is writing and she's doing it on purpose. Does she limit her audience when she does that? Yeah, probably. I'm guessing she wants smart readers. If she revealed a little more, a little earlier, a little... more spoon-feeding would go a long way to broadening her audience. I think.

Having said that I was thinking about things she did in her book that I liked that I'd want to do in mine. Things I'd "fix" in my book that I messed up on. (To be clear I'm not saying she messed up. I believe her choices were deliberate.) But after publishing Jump/Drive I've started noticing things in my book that I'd change if I had it to do over again. I'm going to save that for another post or this one will get too long. Look for it toward the end of the week.

*Links to amazon are affiliate links and if you buy something following those links I'll earn some small amount of money. I thought it'd be underhanded to not mention it. Click & buy. Help a starving artist. :)

What is Young Adult Literature?

I recently got a two-star review on Amazon for my Young Adult (YA) adventure story Jump/Drive and I have mixed feelings about the review. First and by degrees of magnitude ahead of any secondary feelings is how happy I am someone else almost read my book. Second is that the reviewer hadn't really read my book. That's a problem with amazon reviews that  is worse, I think than their belief that authors shouldn't review books.

The reviewer had bought my book for his eleven-year old daughter. I have to say that's not part of my target audience. She will, one day be my target audience but right now she's eleven and that's not, by my feelings, a young-adult.

Wikipedia says YA fiction goes from twelve to eighteen. I, personally, would say twelve is on the low end but there are some precocious twelve year-olds for whom it'd be okay. In those cases, the gray area cases, I'd hope the parent would read the book first, or at least be familiar with the author. I'm new. Not many people out there in the world are familiar with me yet so let me explain what I mean when I classify my books as YA.

Fairy tales are stories that help children deal with things that they'll encounter later. Fairy Tales teach them, through story, important life lessons in a way that doesn't appear to be teaching things. They teach good and evil. They teach that if you keep trying you can win out. They teach that we all have allies out there and if we accept their help they'll help us through hard times. Hell, Fairy Tales teach us that there ARE hard times but in a palatable way. In a way a child can understand without being threatened.

Young Adult literature does much the same thing but in a way that's closer to home. There aren't any witches or wizards in my stories. There may be step-parents. There aren't magic beans. There are guns. There aren't vampires. But there may be talk about sex. There are things that young adults, may well encounter in real life and I try and deal with them in a tactful, tasteful way that is realistic, sometimes idealized way to get the young adult thinking and talking about the subjects that are in my stories. Maybe the things in the book haven't happened to them, maybe they have. Maybe they've happened to a friend of theirs and they don't know how to deal with it or talk about it, or even what to think about it. I  hope my stories are a safe way for young adults to encounter teaching stories in a way that is fun, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

In Jump/Drive the story itself is about a hole that opens up in a small town and exposes a secret, underground, area beneath the town that the government was building for the population to retreat to in the event they needed to evacuate to somewhere safe. That's how the story starts out. The lesson in the book, the learning opportunity, is about abuse, sexual abuse, and what love is and how love, desire, and sex may be related but they're not the same thing.

My story has teenaged boys in it and they talk like teenaged boys talk. Their language isn't what you'd hope to hear in church, but is what you'd likely hear if you could hear boys that age talking to each other without an authority figure around them to stop them from swearing. The reviewer objected to the swearing and for that I'm truly sorry. Not sorry that it's in there. That's how they would talk. The dialog is the part of the book I think rings the most true. That's not just my opinion, but the opinion of everyone I've talked to about the book. Even those who object to the use of the swearing agree that while they don't like it, it is how they would talk. It's real.  I want my stories to be real. Fiction isn't just lies and made-up stories. Good fiction, which I hope my story is, is truth, real truth, told as if it were fiction so we can learn from it in the same way Fairy Tales teach our kids a truth by using witches, poison apples, and candy houses.

So, if you are someone from, my age range would be more ideally from 13 - 35, grab a copy of my book and read it, tell me what you think about it. Talk to your kids about it after they read it; let them know before they read it that they can talk to you about it if they want. But if you're not sure about a book, like really really sure, read it first.

Yeah, Author... that's me. HA! :)

Guess who is going to call himself an author now?

This guy. That's who.

My book Jump/Drive is available on amazon.com now for the kindle. The paper version will happen later. It's $2.99 for the e-book and if you're an amazon prime member you can borrow the book for free.

When a sink hole swallows up a small mid-western town's mall three teens decide to find out what happened and let the world know what happened in their small corner of the world.

Relationships are explored, old friendships deepened, and unlikely friendships formed in the backdrop of conspiracy and adventure created by the disaster. 

Adolescents bring all sorts of strange ideas to sex, love, and how those two are related, but when there is past sexual abuse in the picture the strange ideas can be even stranger and the at night, when the lights are off and they can't see each other's faces, they talk about it and learn things about themselves, and each other.

Ban my book -- please. Banned Book Week

Book banning. Those two words carry so much impact. It's almost visceral to me. I'm someone who, when they move and I have too many books (I know, right?) can't get himself to throw away a book. I'll box it up and take it to the library and donate it before I'll throw it away... which is illogical as I'm boxing it up to take it to the library to avoid boxing up and taking it to a new place to live. But books are important to me.

Books are ideas. They're time travel. They're a psychic connection between the author and the reader across time and space. Stephen King talked about that in his book, On Writing and he's right. Of course he gets it. He's a master at it.

This week is Banned Books Week.

As a reader the idea appalls me. As a writer it angers me. There are people out there, a lot of people, who will decide a book doesn't need to be read by you for you. Some of these people haven't even read the books they're deciding you shouldn't read. The whole Harry Potter series, an excellent series from a story-telling point of view, and from the point of view that it created a mythology for a generation of kids. It engaged those kids who hadn't been readers and turned then into readers. It reinvigorated the Young Adult genre in a way nothing had in years. But, there are those out there who think that all those things are Bad Ideas and so nobody should be exposed to them.

I respect parents being aware of what their kids are reading and that's great, but that's not what we're talking about. When I was growing up there were books my parents would tell me were maybe too old for me. They would offer explanations for parts I didn't understand if I had questions. But they never said that I shouldn't read it. They might suggest alternative books and say I should wait a while to read one but they never banned one.

I've written a book that, if all goes according to plan, I'll release in the first half of October. I hope someone wants it banned. It means they've read it. It means I've presented a challenging idea. It means I've challenged what they think about the world and I'm an author. It feels good to say that. But part of what makes a book great to me is if it a) entertains b) doesn't bore, and c) changes the way I think about things. A good book will do two out of three of those things. A mediocre book will do one of those things.

Three of the most challenged books of last year, 2011 are:
The Hunger Games Trilogy (I know, it's more than one book. Leave me alone.),
Brave New World, and
To Kill a Mockingbird.

It's 2012 and they're still challenging To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World. Seriously?

Nothing would make me happier than to be on a list with those books. They're great books. They change the way people think. When my book comes out I hope you'll give it a read and I hope, as long as I live here that you're able to read it. I don't mind if you object to it. I don't mind if it doesn't entertain you (but I hope it does) but I do mind if you try and tell other people they shouldn't give it a read because you're afraid of the ideas in it. My book's not anything like those three. But it IS similar to Chris Crutcher's stuff and if you've never read his you should. I really enjoyed Deadline. It was the first of his books that I read & it made me a convert.

Check out the lists of books people have petitioned to have banned and give them a look. If the ideas in them scare people they're probably powerful ideas and they could stand to be shared.

Relaunch/Reboot

I've rebooted my simplerich.com site as the blog where I'll talk about and focus on my writing and developing my newest story from rough draft to published e-book.
I'll still talk about it here some as well, but I want the book to have a home as well and I think that looks more "professional" than a blogger site. I want to be taken seriously. I want to take my writing seriously. To do that I'm going to need to focus on it more and focus on it with more direction & intention than I've been doing. Part of that is the site.

Sci-Fi - Modern Mythology

I'm re-reading Dune. I really love that book. If you're not familiar with Frank Herbert's Dune, it's classic sci-fi from back in the Golden Age of sci-fi when Sci-Fi that was written could attract a cult following and even, sometimes, spawn an almost religious following that goes years into the future (That may be what cult following means so perhaps that's redundant. I'm no Frank Herbert). 

Asimov's Foundation trilogy (First book was published in 1951 (It's the only series to ever win best sci- fi series of all time hugo award, beating out Lord of the Rings according to wikipedia)), Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land (1961), and Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) are the big three I think. To be fair I don't include Asimov's Foundation in there because I personally think it fits but because his idea of psycho-history is still around today in some form or another and it's generally agreed that it fits in. I don't believe it creates a modern mythology like the other two do, but there's no denying the impact of the trilogy on almost all subsequent writers. I, Robot the same way. The laws of robotics are almost accepted as real things today when robots are written about. 

They just don't write sci-fi like these any more. I'm not saying that because they're classics. I'm saying that because while there is sci-fi out there that I really enjoy, The Vorkosigan series for example, the stories are now more about people than ideas. Dune & Stranger In a Strange Land created a mythology people liked, loved, and created worlds and did things with worlds and ideas that just aren't being done today that I've seen, and I read a lot of sci-fi. Or, maybe it's just those books hit me at the right time in my life where they made a big impression on me and I'm projecting their importance beyond what is real. 

The closest I can think of today is The Matrix, the first movie. The rest of them try to live up to the promise of the first movies promise, but they don't. They're not as heroic. Maybe that's part of why I don't include Asimov's trilogy in the same league as Dune & Stranger, the heroism there is mostly done by a guy who is dead early on, Hari Seldon isn't all that heroic because he's dead to me. His ideas live on past him and guide the development of a civilization and since I've already said the stories were about ideas that supports the idea… but the missing component for me was the heroic nature of the myths created by Stranger's Valentine Michael Smith, and Dune's Paul "Maud'Dib" Atreides. 

The ironic part (I hope I'm using his right) is I think both of these stories argue against following a leader and to think for yourself, make decisions yourself, and be responsible for your actions and their consequences… or at least aware of the consequences of your actions. I can't say either hits too hard on the idea of accepting the responsibility as much as they are to be aware of that responsibility. Perhaps that's why today these books aren't being written any more. We're not big on personal responsibility, or thinking for ourselves it seems. A deference to authority and a tendency to blame others, either for our shortcomings or luck for our successes seems to be more popular today than it was when these were written. 

That was key in The Matrix as well when Neo had to choose which pill to take, he couldn't defer the decision or get someone else to make it for him. He had a distinct choice to make and only he could make it and after making that choice he had consequences and responsibilities to be dealt with and from the pill on in the movie the story is heroic, even the failings or times he floundered, those were heroic in that they were a result of actions he'd taken. There was no luck involved, just unfolding events following one another based on the actions and ideas of the mythological heroes the stories are about.

I love a good myth story and wish I could find some being written today. There's a certain amount of hope in a myth and I think we are in a time that could use a hopeful myth to guide, or inspire us to greatness. 

*I don't link to Asimov's Foundation because I really don't enjoy reading him at all. His ideas made good stories, but I just don't think he's all that great a writer. 

What I like reflects WHO I like

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I figured out today what my problem is with some books.  I love the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I love David Eddings' Belgariad. I can't get through... That's not true, I could. I just don't want to, the Tad Williams Otherland books and I'm currently not enjoying the Song of Ice & Fire by George R. R. Martin. I can't think of a bigger contrast in book styles. Another series I enjoyed, in case I'm accused of not liking epic fantasy, is the Lord of the Rings. I liked that one.

I like good guys. I like honor. I like loyalty. I like friends who stand by their friends and are willing to do anything for them. I like when friends can trust each other and act on that trust even in their absence because they know their friends and family are honorable, reliable, and trust-worthy. I want to BE that person. I hope that I am. I  hope that my friends recognize me as a reliable, trust-worthy, honorable person who will help them. I want the things I read to be like that. The books I enjoy have those kinds of people in them. I like to spend my time with those sorts of people. I like to surround myself with those sorts of people. I like to be friends with people I strive to be worthy of. I like my friends to want to be worthy of me. I don't want a relationship where either of us thinks the other is a skeevy back-stabbing, conniving S.O.B. I like idealists. I like people who strive for an ideal.

I don't mind if the people in the books have faults and insecurities. I don't mind if they're not perfect. I don't mean to imply I only read space-opera type things where everybody's perfect and bigger than life. I enjoy those too. The Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith is an excellent example of bigger than life heroes who are hyper-good, hyper-honorable, and who have no faults at all. I really like that series but it can't help but be pretty one-dimensional.

The Vorkosigan series, and another series I like is the Empire of Man series, AKA the Prince Roger series, by David Weber and John Ringo. Those characters have flaws but they strive to overcome them. They work to be worthy of each other and of an ideal. They work to improve themselves and those around them. They're trying for something great.  David Weber's Honor Harrington has a female protagonist who tends towards space-opera levels of perfection (except for the two books in the middle where she's just beaten down for two books and I didn't enjoy them at all... there was nothing good happening in them, she just suffered and suffered losses and even her victories were painful. No fun to read... but I read them.). She's almost a little too perfect, too one-dimensional.

But that's my thing. In my life I want to be someone people can trust and rely on. I want to help people. I want to be someone people want to be around and someone who people enjoy being around. I want to be worthy of the friends I choose. I want them to be worthy of me as well. The players in the Song of Ice and Fire aren't worthy of anybody. There are no heroes. They don't aspire to anything grander than survival by any means necessary... and that's not fun to read about. I feel like I'm dirtier after reading those books. There are a very few exceptions. I like Bran.  But one person in a cast of 24 isn't enough to drag me through the Song of Fire & Ice books. Perhaps if all his chapters were chopped out and put together into a single book "Bran's Tale" I'd read that. Maybe Jon Snow's as well. He's likable. I don't care about anybody else in the series and actively dislike most of them.

So, I'm closing the one I'm reading and I'm not opening any more of them. There are plenty of books and stories out there that I'll enjoy that I don't feel like I have to make myself read. I don't get enough time to read to force myself to read things I don't enjoy. I'll go to it when I've read all the things I enjoy and want to read. Once that list is done then maybe I'll go back to the Song of Ice and Fire.

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand, by Anne Rice was the last of the books I could remember having read in her Vampire Chronicles series and I wanted to re-read it before reading the next in the series. I had no idea it would generate this sort of line of thought for me as I read it. That is one of the things I enjoy about reading. It's not just the escapism a book can bring, but the thoughts it can generate... and those thoughts, ideas, and feelings can vary as we read or re-read the books at different times in our lives. Thank you for making it through my thought piece inspired by this book.

What has The Vampire Armand to do with us as a modern day fairy tale? It's a reminder to us that there are things that go bump in the night; sometimes that movement in the shadows of our rooms may not be just a curtain in the wind of the ceiling fan. The bogeyman is very much real... very much alive and well in our modern day iWorld. He isn't a snarling drooling monster with fangs that glisten with venom, at least on the outside he's not. But when he's hungry, when he has needs he does what he has to do, what he needs to do to get what he wants, to sate his appetite.

When Armand is captured and imprisoned and starved for days he is crippled with hunger, his desire to feed has gone from the mere appetite that most modern Americans confuse with hunger to the ravening beast that consumes his every waking thought. When a strong young man is thrown into the cell he's in he tears into him with no regard for anything other than sating his need... his hunger. It isn't until he's fed, killing the person thrown in there with him, that he looks to see who it is and recognizes it as Richardo, someone he saw as a brother, someone he said he'd die for. At which point his guilt at looking at his victim causes him tear his now dead friend to pieces and shove him through the bars of his cell a piece at a time. These are the appetites and the strengths of the appetites of the modern bogeyman. It's not that they do the things because they want to, or because they choose to do them... it's because they need to do them and in spite of their love for us, or all their best intentions, they can't help themselves. When their appetites consume them they're blind to who their victims are and it isn't until later, when their appetite is sated that they look down at what they've done and feel remorse... and even feeling it they know that it will happen again... and again... and we, their friends and neighbors never know who they are or what they're feeling.

We invite them over for coffee, have them come mow our lawns for us while we're on vacation, give them keys to our houses to water our plants and they walk among us, always telling themselves that they've got it under control. They can, like Louis tries to do in Interview with a vampire, live off the blood of rats or lesser animals... that they can get by with dribs and drabs of what it is they want... But as we invite them closer, make them more a part of our lives the clock is ticking, and the needs are building, the appetite growing and we go on with our lives blissfully unaware of the ravening beasts that inhabit the skins of our friends and neighbors just waiting for the right time to come out... for the figurative full moon to trigger the change to mix monsters here.

That's the fear, the scary part of the lessons in The Vampire Armand... it's that the people you know and trust can be something so profoundly other than you believe them to be... and that within us is an appetite, a desire, that if not met for long enough could cause us to fall on our brother and feed on him until we are shoving bits of him away from us because we can't bear to look at the evidence of the bogeyman that lives inside of us.

It's a double-edged scary story in that the bogeymen are beautiful on the outside and are capable of hiding among us... and that the bogeyman could be, if the conditions were right, us.

I started this thought piece series with the quote from G. K. Chesterton:  "Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." And that is part of this book as well... only the dragons in The Vampire Armand aren't beaten by an external force. There's no knight in shining armor that saves the day. They endure... they continue to exist, with their appetites intact and ever-present. Today's dragons aren't beaten so much as they're subdued, held in check. And that's how this book presents itself at first. There are two endings, the first shows the hope of Armand holding his desires, his needs, his cravings and appetite in check for the good of his children that he intends to take care and the second ending... the second ending shows that his children no longer need his care. The second ending... the final ending, is a wail of despair and fear and anguish, and anger as the appetite wins... the monsters continue to perpetuate themselves in spite of his swearing to keep his own appetite in check. The dragons aren't slain after all, and they're still out there. Sometimes the dragon wins.



The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Part 3

Anne Rice's Vampires are similar to other modern vampires in that they drink human blood and are creatures of the night. They don't go out in the daytime and are instead asleep when the sun comes up. They die by either exposure to the sun or fire. A stake through the heart won't do it, and religious icons like crosses don't do anything to them. The Vampire Armand is very religious and visits churches often, having been a painter of religious icons before he was made a vampire.

Rice's vampires are described as beautiful creatures who tend to create vampires they love, also beautiful people. They tend to the emotional as well. When they sleep if they've cut their hair it will grow back to the length it was when they were created. They don't have to feed every night as they get older. The younger vampires, more newly created ones, need to feed more often than the older ones. All her vampires are incredibly strong and fast, preternaturally so. As they get older their powers increase, and some vampires get some gifts while others gain other powers.

They live forever or have the ability to. It seems the number one killer of Vampires is boredom. As the years and decades go by they grow weary of the repetitiveness of their life and they choose to go into the sun, or as in the case of Lestat's maker, into a giant bonfire. Marius says to Armand that the way to live longer is to only feed on evil men because feeding on the innocent will lead to madness, despair, and eventual self-immolation.

Which brings us to the main characters in The Vampire Armand. Armand was raised in Kiev, Russ in the fifteenth century and was raised Eastern Orthodox Christian and, after praying, he was able to paint beautiful icons of the Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. Kidnapped by tartars he was sold into slavery where he was abused both physically and sexually. The abuse was bad enough that he got blocked the memory of it completely. He was sold again to Marius, an ancient vampire, 1500 years old at the time he fell in love with the boy Armand and renamed him Amadeo, "beloved of God." Marius took him to his home, a home for misfit boys of indeterminate age. Marius cleaned him and educated him, and showered him with all the benefits of being raised as a wealthy person in Venice... a VERY wealthy person. While Amadeo nee Armand lived there and grew up he was Marius' lover as well as pupil. Eventually, to save Armand's life, he was turned into a vampire at seventeen by Marius.

Looking at this abbreviated version as a fairy tale we see the exaggeration of abuse and the exaggeration of the savior who saves the hero of the story. It's not a simple bad life with a simple better life at the end of the story. The bad life is horrific, beatings, rape, even his childhood in Kiev, Russ wasn't remembered as a wonderful place, but a place where if things had gone as they had been going he would have finished his life as a penitent saint buried in the ground alive and fed and watered by people who kept him alive, just barely, until he finally died buried in the Monastery of the Caves. From this he was delivered into a life of fabulous wealth, beauty and culture by a fabulously wealthy, beautiful man who, all he asked for in return was Amadeo's love... both emotional and physical.

One of the parts of modern vampire lore is that vampires can't come into their victim's home unless they've been invited in. If you look at the parallels between the monsters of vampire stories and the modern monsters who prey on people, victims, children... they too are more often invited in than not. Statistics say random acts of violence between strangers are rare when compared with the violations of trust by friends and family who use their victims for their own desires. The invitation of a vampire's victim to the vampire into their home is akin to the extension of trust by people to others. The vampire's feeding on the people who have invited them in is akin to the modern predator's use of his victims' trust against them to gain what they're after.

In Interview With a Vampire Louis' relationship with his maker, Lestat, isn't as easy as Marius' and Armand's (Marius & Armand both appear to genuinely love each other whether in spite of or due to their age difference I have no idea and don't care about in the context of this article.) Children, victims, are able to do something wonderfully amazing... or at the very least, interesting. They are able to hate and love their predators at the same time. I don't suggest that Armand and Marius did, I'd like to be very clear on that point. They appeared to love each other from start to finish... even though in time they grew apart. But when watching Cops or some other police drama how often do we see the victim of a domestic assault come screaming to the defense of the person who beats them? It's not necessarily a defense mechanism or an untrue love, but a complicated thing where it's possible to hold both emotions in their mind at once, loving the person who does things they may or may not love... and hating them when they do it perhaps. Loving and hating combined into an emotional web that holds them together. Is it any wonder that many vampire stories say that the only way they can be killed is a stake through the heart? (Not Anne Rice's Vampires though... that won't kill them.)

The relationship between Armand and Marius is an example of a complication I talked about in a previous article. At first, the physical intimacy they shared was, I believe, a different thing for each of them. The act of sex is a pleasurable thing ofttimes. At first, I believe for Armand, Amadeo at the time, was a hedonistic act of pleasure, something he liked for the sheer pleasure of it. I don't believe there were, for him, any strings attached as it were. He enjoyed the pleasure it gave him while Marius, who was in love with the boy, was engaging in lovemaking with someone he loved. The desperation of Marius' kisses and hugs betray an emotional tone that Amadeo didn't share at first. He grew, with time, to share it however and the relationship became one of equals inasmuch as such a relationship can be when the ages and powers are so wildly disparate... and always there was the Master/Student dynamic as well as Marius tried to make Armand more than he would have otherwise been.

What do we learn from all of this? What do I learn? Surprisingly little about vampires.

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Part 2

The Introduction and Part I may be helpful for understanding this part... or maybe not. This may be off the deep end. You tell me.

"Loaded words and phrases have strong emotional overtones or connotations, and evoke strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning." from Wikipedia on "Loaded Language"

One of the things with words is they only have strict dictionary meanings in dictionaries. Once they leave our mouths or enter our ears they start to accumulate baggage. Our personal feelings change the meanings of the words beyond what they mean in a dictionary. Just like someone who is allergic to peanuts doesn't look at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich the same way I do. Word allergies, and even thought allergies, temper the way people encounter words and thoughts in a way that wouldn't be indicated just by the pure definitions of the words on the page. (Yes. I believe there are words and thoughts people encounter that cause them to react violently in much the same way a person reacts to exposure to say, poison ivy.)


Writers use words on purpose to get a reaction from their readers. I'll talk about one of Anne Rice's word choices later. Right now though I want to talk about "sex." The word and our relationship with the word. Not the act itself.  Sex is something I'm going to say almost all animals have. It's how almost all animals reproduce. I'm hedging here so I don't have to list all the exceptions. But sex happens. I just described it as an act four sentences ago and you went along with it without even stopping at the idea of sex as an act. But that's not all sex is when people are involved.


I'm going to posit that there are different kinds of sex. There's the kind of sex that is the act of having sex with the intent of making a baby. There's sex that is something done between two people as a way of expressing their love for each other (with or without baby expectations/hopes). There's the fun sex-play of people playing at sex. There's the violent sex that is less about the act of sex than about the domination or violence of one person over someone else. All those things are sex. There's the sex of the willing who are talked into it and later regret it. There's the sex of the unwilling who are unwilling to say no. There's a LOT of different types of sex and how does one know what is meant by the word? What baggage do we bring to the table when we see the words used? What preconceptions do we bring to a passage like:

"Give me your mouth, give me your arms," I whispered. My hunger startled and delighted him.

He laughed softly as he answered me with more fragrant and harmless kisses. His warm breath came in a soft whistling flood against my groin.

Now, what if I told you the people involved there were of vastly different ages and Anne Rice describes the one saying "Give me your mouth..." as a boy, not a young man or man, but "boy." Does it change your perception of what's happening here? Or what's being done? What if the "boy" being described is 17 years old? In medieval Europe when the average life expectancy was 35 so he'd be middle aged?


People have sex and I believe it's possible for a person to have sex, playful sex that doesn't mean anything... but for other people to believe that it has all the baggage they bring to the idea of sex. Just because professional baseball players take the game seriously and make millions of dollars playing it doesn't mean that a pick-up game in a schoolyard in summer is also a serious affair as well. Sometimes a baseball game is just a baseball game. And sometimes sex doesn't have baggage attached to it whether you or I think it would or should or not. Our expectations of what's going on in any sex act between other people brings our baggage and expectations into it in a way that we can't remove ourselves from. We know we're doing it and we do it anyway. If we asked them what they thought of it and their answers weren't in line with what we thought their answers should be would we believe them or believe they were wrong and self-deluded? How many people believe that Anna Nicole Smith loved her rich husband and happily, lustily, excitedly did the dance of the two-backed beast with him? It's possible... but how many people bring their own baggage to the table and say "No. She's wrong. What I know from my house in Podunk, Iowa having never met or seen them in person is more correct than what they say." We do it all the time when sex is involved.


We've, as a society, seen sex become some weird schizophrenic thing alternately glorified by Hollywood as the goal of all relationships, no matter how brief... and demonized on news-shows, talk-radio, and daytime TV as the cause of all ills in our culture, whether it's due to too much sex on TV or because as some would have us believe, all sex is an act of violence by its very penetrative nature. But sex, even when it's alluring, it must have terrible consequences... All slasher movies worth their salt when I was growing up involved teen-agers trying to have sex and whenever they would be close to it... an ax or machete would come through the bed or wall at them. Sex is bad! But WOW is it fun! If only you can survive it.


Anne Rice talks about sex a lot in this book, and describes it, and doesn't really beat around the bush too much about whether or not the participants are willing or not. There are a variety of different sex acts in the book with a variety of willing and unwilling people involved in them. It's the whole range of sex. It's not pornographic. Marius and Armand are far too classy for that even if Anne Rice isn't. ;^) 


When she talks about sex she's counting on us readers bringing our baggage to the table. She's counting on our reaction to the book making it either horrific or titillating, scary or gross, exciting or ultimately just weird. In general, I believe in a group of 10 readers who read this book for the first time I think there will be 9 different interpretations of the sex in the book and 1 person who didn't finish it because they were too offended by it all. The sex isn't the main part of the book, but it will, I believe, generate the most widely divergent views based primarily on the loaded language involved in describing what happened. And I think she does a superior job at not using loaded language (other than "boy" a lot) but when we would try and discuss it we WOULD use loaded language that would betray our feelings about the various acts as they happened... assuming we talked about the sex at all. We may gloss over it by saying, "I skipped those parts. I didn't like them." There are parts of Heinlein I do that with (Number of the Beast anyone? shudder.)   

Sex. Thank God it's only 3 letters long if it were any bigger think of how many more places we could hang our baggage!


The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1

“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

~ G. K. Chesterton, writer

This is the second post in a series. It might make more sense if you start with The Introduction.

Fairy tales are stories we tell our children to teach them lessons about big ideas using little words and putting it in a framework they will understand now as well as later. They're artful lies that teach us a Truth. Fairy tales and children's stories involve exaggeration and hyperbole. Heroes are always princes, heroines are princesses, there are giants, geese who lay golden eggs. Instead of strangers offering children candy there are witches living in candy houses. Bad guys aren't just bad guys. They're wolves. They hide in the forest behind bushes to leap out at us, and failing that they'll hide in houses and look like family members, grammas with big teeth and big ears who are wolves intent on eating us and our kids. The world isn't safe. It's not safe out in the woods. It's not safe in stranger's houses, and it may not be safe when visiting relatives. Everywhere you look may hide a wolf.

When the characters in Fairy Tales suffer they don't suffer like normal people. They aren't grounded or sent to time out. They're enslaved to their step sisters. They, in myths, have to clean stables out that could never be cleaned out. They're thrown into ovens, gobbled up by any manner of animals and beasts. Their suffering is dramatic and violent. If you've ever seen a spoiled child not get his or her way you know what true suffering and deprivation is. Wailing, throwing themselves to the ground, crying, piteous chest-heaving wracking-sobs! When they hurt themselves, however minor, the screams and screwed up faces are pictures of anguish that would make Munch proud! Nobody suffers like a child... except in Fairy Tales of course.

The lesson of Fairy Tales isn't that the world is dangerous though. The lesson is that even though the world IS a dangerous place things will turn out OK. The good guys win and the bad guys lose.

In The Vampire Armand, by Anne Rice Armand, the protagonist, doesn't start out as a vampire. He starts out as a kid when he starts his story: (This excerpt is from Page 31 of Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand)

They must have raped me on the boat because I don't remember coming to Constantinople. I don't remember being hungry, cold, outraged or afraid. Now here for the first time, I knew the particulars of rape, the stinking grease, the squabbling, the curses over the ruin of the lamb. I felt a hideous unsupportable powerlessness.

Loathsome men, men against God and against nature.

I made a roar like an animal at the turbaned merchant, and he struck me hard on the ear so that I fell to the ground. I lay still looking up at him with all the contempt I could bring into my gaze. I didn't get up, even when he kicked me. I wouldn't speak.

Thrown over his shoulder I was carried out, taken through a crowded courtyard, past wondrous stinking camels and donkeys and heaps of filth, out by the harbor where the ships waited, over the gangplank and into the ship's hold.

It was filth again, the smell of hemp, the rustling of the rats on board. I was thrown on a pallet of rough cloth. Once again, I looked for the escape and saw only the ladder...

That's how his story starts (not the book, but the story of the protagonist). It starts with terribleness. She starts with the worst things she can thing to submit a child to, rape, beatings, kidnapping, rats, filth... it has an almost Fairy Tale like quality to the horribleness she submits the protagonist to. After this what could possibly be worse? Seriously? Is there anywhere to go that would be worse than this?

The next part will talk about loaded language, language that we bring our own baggage to when we hear it. It's part of the piece I expect grief about so I want to bust it out from the rest.



The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction

A post inspired by a book isn't unusual for me. The book this time is Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand. This is a different post for me.... maybe a different series of posts. It's the content of the post that's different. I'm not sure if it will ever see the light of day... or, since it's inspired by one of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the dark of night. I don't know how much meat is on this bone... that metaphor will be decidedly tasteless if you choose to read on. I'd advise against it and yet, as a writer, I'll hope you do read it.

One of the things about the Internet, one of the things Facebook and Google+ and just blogs in general grapple with is privacy. Once it's out there, it's generally good sense to assume it is out there for everybody. Privacy settings and such aside, there's nothing stopping someone within the enabled group from copying and sharing things put on the Internet with others. Flickr is an area where that happens. You can lock down photos and then as your friends & family group grows you suddenly find your pictures on other sites, on their Facebook page with no privacy settings at all... Once it's online it's out of your/my control. This post is one I wish I could keep from some people. Which is funny kind of... because I know the way to do it is to not hit publish. The idea for the post (or series if it runs overly long) has been worming its way through my head for days now. Not because it's particularly new or earth-shattering I'm sure... I haven't done any real research on the subjects I'll go over so if you see things you've seen before I'd love links.

• Fairy Tales & Exaggeration

• Hansel & Gretel
• Red Riding Hood
• Exaggeration & Suffering

• Loaded words

• Food Allergies

• Anne Rice's Vampires (briefly for people who don't know)
• Marius & Armand

• Rice's choice of descriptors
• Hyperbole as story telling tool RE: Fairy Tales
• Seduction & invitation
• Fun vs Baggage

• Vampires & Lessons for today

• Undiscovered country -- all that's left that scares us
• Fear like Stephen King does, the monster of the ordinary

That's my back of an envelope outline that I sketched out at work as I was doing something that was repetitive and mindless. 

Some of those, 2 & 3 are short but they don't combine well together so I'll probably combine 2 with 1 and 3 with 4... but 4 will tend towards long so maybe I'll leave 3 short and solitary. I'm looking at the points as individual posts but can't see it working out that way if they're going to be similar in length... I'll work on it as they happen. Or maybe I'll ignore length constraints and wind up with two long ones... I'd rather see it as 3 though. We'll see.

In concluding this introduction I'd like to say this is a thinking out loud piece. It's not a position paper or a well researched topic. It's me thinking about a topic out loud and pulling different things together in my head, organizing them here where you can see it happen. Don't let the outline fool you. Those note are more aide-mémoire than a rigid outline. It's me reminding myself of things I don't want to forget to include... at points I'm intentionally vague to not spoil the upcoming chapter... perhaps in a wave at cheap theatrics, to build some degree of anticipation among my three readers.

One of the things I am going to do is talk as if I know what I'm talking about. I may say, "Fairy tales are stories we tell our children to teach them lessons about big ideas using little words and putting it in a framework they will understand now as well as later. They're artful lies that convey a Truth." That may or may not be true. But it's something I believe to be true. Writing that way is faster and more clear than me prefacing every line with "I believe..." or "It seems to me..." I'm the author of this thought piece so unless I say otherwise the thoughts herein are mine. I'll footnote ideas that I think belong to someone else. If I give an idea as my own that you believe belongs to someone else feel free to leave me a note in the comments. I'm not intentionally plagiarizing anybody and it's possible for people to come up with the same ideas from different directions at different times... I'd be interested in seeing the links.

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

Book Review: I Am Number Four

I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You know how they say about many movies made from a book "the book was better?"
If that's the case here do NOT see the movie!
OK. That's kind of harsh... sorry. Maybe the movie will be good.

The part that got to me was the whole book, MUCH of the book is building to something that happens in the final chapter and BOOM the book's done.

There's these bad guys who are really really bad... when they're described it's sort of throw-away description and the sense of being chased that is supposed to be there in the front three quarters of the book? There's no chase. There's no tension. There's no edge of the seat...

I can see the book being a short run tv series maybe. It's got love interest, high school angst, rebellious youth, and a wild party while the parents are away... it's got all the ingredients of an 80s movie come to think of it... plus monsters, kind of.

Anyway. I finished the book. That was my goal. I liked the idea of the story but with as much buildup to something there was no real pay off, and there wasn't any real resolution. The ham-handed envelope at the end... wooo.... gonna have to read book 2 to see what's in there. That would have worked if I'd cared about any of the characters in the story, as it is... it may as well be a clearinghouse sweepstakes letter. *shrug* I'll be fair, maybe there was something in the envelope that I missed. By the time it came up I could see the end of the book and I was sprinting for the end as fast as I could go just trying to get it over with.

Favorite book of 2008

My favorite book of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
It's my favorite for a couple reasons; not the least of which is that while it can be had for free download on the internet, provided by the author, not theft, it is also for sale and is a HUGE sales success.

From the author's site:

The US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover’s selling so well that my publisher’s delayed the paperback for a year!). The book’s made just about everyone’s best-of lists for 2008:

It's a young adult novel that,  briefly, tells the story of a high-school kid, group of kids, who live in a surveillance intensive society. The government, city, state, federal, watch and track almost everything, and then a terrorist attack happens and the tracking gets worse. Freedoms are curtailed, and people are kidnapped by their own government to be investigated for behavior that doesn't match societal norms as determined by the surveillance. It's a fight back against Big Brother by kids, hence the name. That's such a brief thumbnail description it doesn't do it justice.

You don't have to trust me on this one. You really can get it for free from the author's site, and if you like it you can buy a dead-tree version if you like, or even an audiobook version. I got it for free, read it on my palm and liked it enough to buy the dead tree version and the audiobook version.

Little Brother a great book, and it changed the way I look at the world around me. No higher praise can be given a book.

I broke down and read something by Seth Godin

Back in the 80s and early 90s you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a movie or tv show that Christian Slater was in. Somehow I managed to miss everything he was in for years. The first time I saw him was in Pump up the Volume and it was on video. I don't know what year it was, but back then videos didn't come out as fast as they do now after theatrical release so it was late in his career.

Enter Seth Godin on the Internet. Every business, managerial, productivity, marketing blogger out there mentioned Seth Godin with the same breathy enthusiasm as a Beatles fan at one of their concerts back in the day... with much squealing, waving of hands, and tearful adulation of all things Sethy. He was so popular I wouldn't go near him. "Purple Cow?" Yeah... I don't think so. I'm sure it's yet another manager book full of trite crap that's easy to say, incredibly obvious, but so hard to do in real life outside the confines of the trade-paperback sized hard-cover book with over-sized type that makes up 98% of all those business books that airports are full of. I was sure he had all the buzz words and said them in a great way with stunningly exciting anecdotes so everybody was sure they could go right out and do it. He built an empire out of that sort of stuff. I assiduously avoided everthing he wrote. If a blogger quoted him I'd mark the post read and move on. He was too popular to be that good. If he WERE that good, and what he wrote WERE that great then everybody should be up to their eyeballs in money. Banks would all be full, and everybody would be in business for themselves crapping hundred dollar bills and taking six month vacation to the islands. I wasn't seeing anybody crapping hundreds except Seth from his book sales. I had him pinned as a modern day snake-oil salesman milking the business men for all they were worth.

You get my feelings right? Here's the best part. I'd never read anything he wrote. Not a word. Maybe a quote of his made it across the Quote of the Day and I didn't notice it w†as him that said it until it was too late but honestly. Never read anything he wrote.

Then he gave away his newest book, Tribes, on itunes for less than a buck. Crap! How's he milking people at under a dollar? What snake-oil salesman GIVES his snake oil away?!? I decided to see if he was worth a damn after all. I'd made up my mind about him so let's see what he had going for him. He was certainly worth what was it? Eighty-five cents? I was willing to spend that much for trite crap that would be completely forgetable like most of all the rest of the business feel-good garbage out there. (You may notice a certain disdain for much of the stuff out there right now for business readers. That doesn't apply to all business books at all. I will only link to and recommend stuff I like. If I mention a book and don't link to it that means I don't recommend it.)

Some personal background. I've been fatigued with my job lately. I don't remember much of last month. I was going through the motions, performing check-lists, and making an appearance and punching a time clock. I was NOT excited about it. There was no passion in it. I didn't love it, hell, many days I didn't even like it any more. I was waiting to be down-sized and looking forward to it. Waiting for it... hoping for it to end the misery that my job had become. I was NOT in a good place. It's a lot of why my last blog didn't come back. I felt like a fraud writing about management when I wasn't managing at all but just sort of putting in time.  So, when I read Tribes it was really going to be a hard-sell. I was fed up with management, I disliked Seth Godin precisely because everybody else in the world seemed to worship the water he walked on, and I was considering looking for jobs as a bag-boy at a grocery store because I didn't want responsibility, creativity, authority, or calls after my shift was done.  I was completely checked out.

And the book didn't give me any secrets. It really didn't. There was no top five action items to do every day or magic checkbox format to use to guarantee success. No secret hand-shake, mesh the thumb webs, tilt to the left and down with firm squeeze, nope, not in here. There wasn't a formula to find and apply to every situation that would guarantee me anything.  What it DID do was remind me what I had loved about my job. Back in the day I was a manager of a store and I built the store and customers into a community. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody knew me. I loved hearing them saying things like "I'll come back when you're here and I'll bring a friend..." That's my passion. Not because they loved me, but because they loved what I was doing and so did I. I built a community and built a place people liked to come. Customers would visit with each other, and if I was visiting with some I'd bring others into the conversation and we'd all talk and that I loved. That's what I was great at. Seth reminded me of that.

I can still do that. It may well be that I will at some point be downsized. I may lose my job and I might get demoted. I have no way of knowing. What I do know though is that I loved building community and I am good at it so I'm going to do that again... some more. I can do it within the confines of my job description as well as the tedious parts of my job (I'm sorry, but there's no exciting way to verify proper inventory is on hand in the stores and notify buyers' etc that I need more. There's no love for that and that's what my job had become at the expense of the part of the job that I'd loved.).

Now, I have no intention of going back to read anything else Seth has written. The odds of him cranking out two books that will hit me in the sweet spot in a row are pretty slim. Not to mention my November is busy enough already. I want to go about making my job something I like again rather than reading about jobs. So If you like community building. If you're part of a community or want to start one either in your workplace, family, town, city, state, world, internet... Tribes is the book you need to read now. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you've never heard of Seth Godin this is a good introduction to him. I can't recommend any of his other stuff because I've never read it. I'm sure it's fine. 

Just as songs we grew up listening to in High School are better because of where we are then in our lives... this book is hitting me at the perfect time for it to have an impact on me. I don't know if it would have been as great a year or two years ago. But at this time in this place it's a great book and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Oh... after loving his book and looking up his blog to link to him here... I STILL won't subscribe to his feed. I'm a fan but can't be a fanboi. I'll give you the links. I'll let you follow his blog if you like. He's really a good writer and probably a great and charming guy. I'm sure there's a zillion people out there who would swear he is. I've been avoiding him too long to start subscribing now. :)