Fiction Review: ‘My Memories of a Future Life’ by Roz Morris

I have no idea what to make of this. I don’t even know how to characterise it: literary paranormal fiction, maybe? Or a psychological… hmm, not thriller, exactly, but mystery, perhaps. And although it was interesting, in an oddball sort of way, it never quite flowed for me. It felt just a bit out of kilter like a slightly convex mirror, everything coming across as distorted. Maybe that’s appropriate for the story, I don’t know. Certainly the future parts were much more interesting and vivid to read about. The premise is that a talented London pianist, Carol, finds herself unable to play because of repetitive strain injury. Her flatmate, Jerry, is pursuing his personal demons by way of regressive hypnotherapy; he feels he’s been a victim of Jack the Ripper in a previous life. Carol tries it too, but finds herself in the future, a soothesayer called Andreq, someone who […]

Posted November 24, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

I’m back!

Did anyone even notice I was gone? No? Oh well. I’ve just spent three very pleasant weeks in Australia, first in Adelaide, then crossing the Nullarbor desert by train to Perth, then back to Adelaide to catch the plane home. Great weather, great food, great wine, great people – so friendly and just all-round nice people. And an astonishing number of them from my original stamping ground of Merseyside. Very weird to fly half-way round the world and hear so many Scouse accents. I got plenty of reading done on the long flights to and from the UK, and on the train. Thank goodness for a well-stuffed Kindle. I have eight reviews ready to post, and several other books partly read. Lovely to be able to catch up on my reading, and not to have twenty other things vying for my attention. I got some writing done, too, although I […]

Posted November 24, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Current writings, Publishing/marketing / 2 Comments

‘The Plains of Kallanash’: first promotion results

When ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ was published in September, I took the decision not to do any serious promotion. There were several reasons for that, not least the fact that I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing, so very likely I would be wasting both time and money. But the main reason was the received wisdom that promotion is pointless until you have at least three books out. Why promote a single book, the thinking goes, when you can’t offer an enthusiastic reader anything else? Once you have three, preferably in a series, then promoting book 1 leads to increased sales on books 2 and 3. But I’d decided to enroll with KDP Select (it seemed easier to stick to Amazon until I had a better grasp on this publishing lark), so I had free days to use. And I’ve been active on Goodreads for years, so a […]

Posted October 29, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 4 Comments

Sci-fi (?) review: ‘The Mengliad’ by Jana Janeway

This has an intriguing premise: imagine that half the people you see around you everyday are not, in fact, human. Imagine they look the same, but genetically they’re very different, so they avoid daylight, eat differently… No, no, come back! These are not vampires. I did get worried for a moment, I’ll confess – all that preferring the dark – but these are Mengliads, and they’re quite different from vampires. Instead of drinking blood, they eat — actually, I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing that, but it amused me hugely. Jessica has a normal, if somewhat dull, life until something happens to revive her dormant Mengliad DNA and she becomes (more or less) a Mengliad herself. I liked that there’s no halfway, blended state, you can only be one or the other. And there are no superpowers in evidence, just a somewhat different physiology. And discovering how that differentness […]

Posted October 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Historical fiction review: ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Sarah Dunant

I loved this book. Right up until the very last chapter, I loved it. And then… if I hadn’t been reading on my Kindle, I’d have hurled the thing across the room. Ack. I can’t talk about the reasons for this without giving away spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything, don’t read the second half of this review. Here’s the premise: fourteen-year-old Alessandra is the oddball of her fifteenth century Florence family. She’s not beautiful, as her sister and two brothers are, she’s not content to follow the prescribed duty for a well-to-do woman and either marry and push out babies, or take herself to a nunnery, she’s been educated and she has artistic talent. Her drawing is a secret, abetted by her slave maid, Erila. She yearns for freedom, but is constrained by the need to remain virginal. But when her father employs a painter from […]

Posted October 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 3 Comments

FREE this weekend: ‘The Plains of Kallanash’

Yes, folks, for the 25th and 26th October you can download a copy of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ completely free from any Amazon store. If you already have a copy (thanks!), tell your friends about it. It’s an epic fantasy adventure with a strong romantic theme, and at 564 pages, it’s a traditionally sized fantasy, so plenty of story to get your teeth into. Magic, mystery, a barbarian war and an unconventional marriage – plus a dragon (sort of!). Link to your local Amazon to download a free copy from the side bar. Here’s the blurb: Thousands of years after a magical catastrophe reshaped the world and pulled the moons out of alignment, the secret of magic has seemingly been lost. At the centre of the vast, forbidding Plains of Kallanash lies a land ruled by a secretive religion, whose people fight a never-ending war against the barbarians in the […]

Posted October 25, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 3 Comments

Other World Mapper: Kickstarter

I’ve always been terrible at art. Really. I can’t even draw convincing stick people. It never really mattered much, though, because I never needed to. I left all that painting, drawing and generally arty stuff to those with a talent for it. But now I’m writing fantasy, and really, a little drawing skill might be a rather useful thing to have, because – maps. Every fantasy world has to have a map, right? I’ve had people ask about maps for my stories. Oh, but you’ll have one when the book is published, won’t you? Well, no, because: see above. And I really can’t afford professional artwork for a map. Now, I know there is already software out there that supposedly allows anyone to draw maps, and I’ve even tried some of them, without any success. My hand-drawn back-of-the-envelope efforts are better, frankly. But I keep hoping for something simple enough […]

Posted October 23, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in General / 1 Comment

Mystery Review: ‘Hushabye’ by Celina Grace

This is one of those British-based police procedural books where the author did pretty much everything right – interesting characters, a nice (but not gory) murder mystery/kidnapping, some intriguing reveals along the way – all in a pleasant, undemanding style. I enjoyed the read but it never quite caught fire for me, somehow. The central character is Kate Redman, a detective with a history, starting a new job with a case involving a disappearing baby and a murdered nanny. The parents are a workaholic self-made businessman and his Z-list celebrity wife. Kate has to unravel the mystery while staying on the right side of her new colleagues and keeping her past firmly out of sight. None of this is particularly radical, but the methodical police work rustles up enough clues to keep the pages turning. The writing style is sometimes pedestrian: whenever our trusty detectives meet with potential suspects, greetings […]

Posted October 18, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Kindle Unlimited: a change of heart

It’s only a couple of weeks since I wrote about Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s all-you-can-read subscription service, and concluded that I probably wouldn’t bother with it. And there I was this morning, looking at a non-fiction work and dithering. It was one of those how-to books that are so common nowadays, under a hundred pages but not too expensive. So why did I dither? Because I knew perfectly well that if I bought it, I would skim through it, find a few paragraphs interesting, forget the rest and never read it again. Very few such books are real ‘keepers’, that I would want to go back to repeatedly. I could have got it for free through my Prime account, of course, but I can’t do that from the Amazon book page. I would have to find my Kindle, connect to the store, search for the book all over again and only […]

Posted October 16, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in General / 2 Comments

‘The Plains of Kallanash’: the first month

A month ago, my first fantasy novel went live on Amazon. This is a status report of what’s happened to it since. Marketing strategy Erm… what marketing strategy? Experienced authors publishing their umpteenth book plan the launch with meticulous attention to detail, organising street teams to post reviews and spread the word, scheduling promotional campaigns with military precision and adjusting on a daily or even hourly basis if sales and rankings underperform. I didn’t do any of that. The received wisdom is that sales can’t be expected to take off until the third book at least, and even then only in popular, high-turnover genres like romance and YA, and when the books are arranged into a neat series. I write stand-alones, loosely linked but not in a series, in epic fantasy with added romance (sort of). So a big promotional push would almost certainly be a waste of money. My […]

Posted October 16, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 2 Comments