30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Nine

Day Twenty-Nine: An author that you completely avoid/hate/won’t read

Stephen King

Look, I don’t have anything against Stephen King. I think his career has been incredible. I’ve enjoyed – kind of – some of the movies I’ve seen adapted from his books. I just genuinely have no interest whatsoever in reading anything he’s written.

My partner tells me he’s only ever written two books, and that every other book is a complete copy of those previous books. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never read a Stephen King book.
Here’s a list of his film adaptations that I didn’t totally hate:
The Shining.
Stand By Me
The Shawshank Redemption (my partner’s favourite film.)
The Green Mile

One day I might pick up a Stephen King book and I really hope I enjoy it. I would like all the hype around his name to be founded. In the meantime, I’m too busy hunting down novels that actually appeal to me. And I’m sorry to say that Mr King simply does not.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Eight

Day Twenty-Eight: A book you wish you never read

Fallen/Torment by Lauren Kate.

What can I say about this book (Fallen) that doesn’t include spoilers? Not much. So if you don’t want spoilers, GFTO.

I simply cannot get over how abysmally disappointed I was with this book. I bought it because I saw the cover and I knew it would bug me forever if I didn’t give it a shot. It’s a beautiful cover, possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen. The back cover blurb suggested that there was an mysterious boy that Luce, the protagonist, would want to investigate with possible hope of romance.
OK. Truth time. Daniel Grigori is a dick. Lucinda Price is the most overrated heroine ever. She’s frustratingly passive, a doormat that her new friends walk all over. She’s supposed to be at a reform school that allows facial piercing yet will electronically shock their students for no reason, has practically NO adult supervision, and is surrounded by security cameras that are easily circumnavigated.

The reform school is a gloomy, poor, falling-down place, set next to a graveyard. Ooooh, spooky! Yeah, right. I have no idea who the hell would build a reform school like that. Also, Luce is put in there because she was present at the death of her first kind-of-boyfriend, who spontaneously combusted when she kissed him.

It doesn’t make sense as to why Luce ended up in a reform school and not a pysch ward. We’re not given explanations as to why the other kids are there, either (except for Penn, who attends because her father worked there). The kids Luce makes friends with don’t even seem bad in any way, just typically teenagers, even though the majority of them are fallen angels.
Some of them are GOOD fallen angels and some of them are BAD fallen angels (called demons). Now, I’m not religious, but even I know that there is no such thing as good fallen angels. Those who fell threw in their lot with Satan. Maybe they’re hoping God will allow them back into Heaven if they behave now that they’re fallen. I don’t think so.

We are given NO explanation of how the boyfriend BBQ fire starts, whether Luce had something to do with it (oh, it’s hinted that she was kind of responsible, but it never happens to any other boy she gets close to and it’s never explained exactly what happened) and don’t even get me started on how pissed off I am about the SECOND fire that randomly starts in the library as Luce and her weird friend Penn are stalking Daniel.
Luce is so superficial, she falls head over heels for a dick who obviously hates her, yet he also ends up falling in love with her because it’s ‘fate’. Meanwhile there’s hottie bad boy Cam who is supposed to confuse her and we KNOW is going to be the villain, it’s that obvious, but I was damn well rooting that Luce end up with him.

The secondary villain, Miss Sophia, is given absolutely NO foreshadowing for her abrupt betrayal, and her part in the story doesn’t even make sense.

After the whole book preparing us that Luce and Daniel being together was a very Bad Idea, yet also telling us the two were damned well meant to be, it was very anti-climactic when nothing happened when they kissed. And there was no explanation as to WHY nothing happened. All of Luce’s past lives exploded on account of being brought up religiously, and this life’s Luce, who is agnostic, doesn’t explode into a fiery pinnacle when she learns too quickly what Daniel is and how she fits in with it.

Luce is kept in the dark, and as the reader, we are kept in the dark as well. It’s a very frustrating experience.

Sense making = zero.

Torment wasn’t any better. Daniel was even more of a dick, Luce was a whiny stupid bitch (despite her precious 4.0 average) and her new school was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of.

I honestly wish I had never read these books. It’s a very, very bad commentary on what’s gone wrong with YA since Twilight was released. Although I do not want to simply throw them out because I paid for them and the covers are pretty, I’m pretty sure I will only ever re-read these once just to confirm why I hate it so much (like I did with Twilight).

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Seven

Day Twenty-Seven: A book you would write if you had all the resources.

Dadewalker by Lissa Bilyk.

What more resources do I need other than time, effort, imagination, and a way to store what I’ve written?

BTW - this is the actual cover we're using.

I first started what would eventually turn into Book 1 of a five-part series in 2002, when I was sixteen years old. The character Innocence Frostcaller came to me from nowhere, and was originally an elf with sharp, pointed teeth. At first, I couldn’t figure out the relationship between her and her shapeshifting sidekick Tagodan because it was at once a kind of guardian older-brother role, and advisor, protector, and confidant, and at the same time with a love so deep it could never be shattered. Later, as I delved more into Paracelsus‘ elemental theories and changed Innocence’s race a few times, I realised they were two sides of the same person. They were never, ever love interests. That’s just gross.

Rome was originally two characters (and after he was combined, his name was Lake). Laysa, Danu and Tai were inspired by my own friends at the time. It wasn’t until I realised Rome had to be just one character that I realised Innocence needed a romantic love interest: that’s where Prince Garuth came from. He sprang fully-formed into my head and in two weeks when I was supposed to be writing four essays for Uni, I wrote 15K words detailing some of their experiences as love interests.

A lot of the series has changed since I first conceived my heroine. I’ve been through several plots, added characters, deleted others, changed a few more. As I grew older and read more books, I realised that I could afford to make things more grown-up with darker themes, and not just write an adventure book full of fluff where no one ever got hurt. My four years at University helped me understand and develop the world.

I didn’t want vampires, werewolves, fairies, dragons, or wise old wizards in pointy hats, even though it’s a high fantasy with paranormal elements. Sure, the banshees are vampiric, Tagodan’s shapeshifts into a wolf, Fury was originally part sylph and had a dragon totem, Laysa and Rome are sorcerers, and the six Fae races are somewhat inspired by fairy tales, I knew I needed to write something much more original. I didn’t create any of the six Fae races, I simply took a basic idea and moulded them into what I needed in this world.

I finished Dadewalker in 2010, thinking it was a 122K word book. Then I thought harder about what I was trying to achieve: get people reading paranormal and fantasy that’s not run of the mill vampire crap or male-led quest stories. To write fantasy that’s more approachable for women fantasy lovers. So I split Dadewalker into two and re-wrote huge chunks of it. I’m still working on Darkwalker, Book 2. Both books will be put on sale this year, along with some other things I’ve written, while I work on writing the rest of the series.

I hope this makes other people realise that to write a novel all you really need to do is WRITE IT.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Six

Day Twenty-Six: A book you wish would be written

Deathwalker by Lissa Bilyk.

Indulge me. Deathwalker is Book 5 of the series I’m working on. Currently Book 1 and 2 are in editing stages, Book 3 is being written, and Books 4 and 5 are being planned and outlined.

I wish Deathwalker were written because I’m working linearly and that means that the whole series would be complete (minus the spin-offs).

While writing the books sure are a lot of fun and I know the characters pretty well because they’ve been in my head for so long, it’s also a lot of hard work weaving the entire narrative over five books (and spin-offs). How do you keep the story fresh and interesting, how do you write characters that people care about, how does it compare to other YA/high fantasy books on the market?

Will anyone like it if it’s self-published, and am I making the right choice when literary agents are looking for new and interesting books and mine might be one of them? Will anyone like it when it doesn’t fit into the normal YA subgenres: angels, vampires, werewolves, fairies, mermaids, paranormal romance, steampunk and so forth? Is my less common take on fantasy the Next Big Thing? (I’d like to think so!)

I have no idea when Deathwalker is going to go on sale. I’m not making any promises: after all, I know I’ll be moving to Australia, finding a new job, getting a new house, planning a wedding and so on before it’s written.
This cover is just a mock-up. It’s not the cover I’ll be using.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Five

Day Twenty-Five: Your favourite autobiographical or biographical book

Keep Smiling by Charlotte Church

I enjoyed this autobiography a lot more than Charlotte’s first one, Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far). Basically because Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far) only really told me things I already knew about. It was written when Charlotte was fifteen or so, after her Christmas album Dream a Dream had been released, but before they decided to record Enchantment.
This autobiography is more grown up. It really tells more behind-the-scenes stuff such as the reality behind her relationship with her ex-manager, her relationship with her parents, and Gavin (who at the time, was the father of Ruby but Dexter wasn’t born yet, they hadn’t been engaged and therefore hadn’t split up).

Yes, some of the tales told are re-tellings of tales we’ve heard a million times before – how she was discovered, her relationship with her aunt, her singing lessons with Lulu etc. But once you get past all the stuff we’ve already covered (with little insights such as a more mature look back on her childhood) you get into the really interesting stuff. The ex-boyfriends before Gavin seem to be largely ignored as far as I can remember – I don’t recall much mention of them – after all, they both sold their stories to tabloids.