The Third Twin, by Dani Sinclair, Reviewed

This is a Mills and Boon Silhouette, ‘Intrigue’ romance. That probably means a lot to those who read these books regularly. As a writer, and a bloke, I read this one to see whether it was a genre I could write. So, bear all that in mind as you read this review.

It is, of course, a love story. But it’s also a lot more. The element of crime is strong, as are the elements of family and social injustice. A lot of readers condemn these books out of hand, assuming they’re poorly written and formulaic. I found this to be neither of those things.

There is suspense, mystery, tension, both sexual and general, and there is, of course, a burgeoning romance. It’s this final element that’s formulaic. The reader understands that the two main protagonists are destined for each other and recognises the barriers placed for them to cross in order to arrive at the essential happy ending (no, I don’t think that’s a spoiler: a romance of this nature has a happy ending; they all do).

As for the writing? It’s tense where it should be, description isn’t overdone, the action scenes are well handled and the relationships, complex and multi-faceted, are presented cleverly. I found the plot a little over-cooked and the author seemed to have found herself in something of a maze, if the denouement narrative is a guide. The ending reminded me a bit of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and his habit of describing his method of detection to the gathered guilty and innocent.

For me, character is the most important factor in a book. The individuals who people these pages are well drawn and various. That they can be slotted into various stereotypes is inevitable, given the narrow guidelines determined by the publishers, but that doesn’t prevent these particular players from being real people. I enjoyed the strong female lead and the object of her desire fitted in well with her hopes with enough potential flaws to make the reader wonder just enough. The minor players were also well constructed.

There is inevitably, given the specifics set by the publishers, rather more telling than showing than is good for the book. And some of the twists and turns seem to have been inserted ‘on the hoof’ rather than planned; but I can hardly complain at that, since I do it all the time myself.

But, in spite of its intended female readership and the slant it must take for such an audience, I enjoyed the read and found it largely satisfying. For those who care, there remains an unanswered question, of course. The answer is that I have already written a book containing much of what we find here, but I couldn’t write for this specific genre. It’s too confined and controlled for the way I write. But that’s not a reflection of the ability of this author; she’s worked within the constraints admirably and turned out a pretty good read that, I imagine, will sit very happily with those who more regularly read this type of fiction.

So, if you enjoy your romance with intrigue, mystery and some threat facing the heroine, you’ll get good value and plenty of entertainment from this one. Give it a go.

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The First Month of 2014

Something of a transitional month for me. Having finally committed to spending more time on writing activities and less on the building of the author platform, I’d also committed to certain activity on Twitter, which lasted until the last week of the month.

Much of my writing time was spent doing the final edit of book 2 of the fantasy trilogy (46 chapters), completing it on the 28^th. Book 1, A Seared Sky: Joinings, is due to be published by Fantastic Books Publishing in spring. I then began to edit book 3. This is a much more time consuming exercise as it’s the first edit of the rough draft, much of which was written for the NaNoWriMo project last November. So, where I could edit a chapter of book 2 in around 20-30 minutes, the chapters of book 3 are taking between 3 and 4 hours each and, so far, I’ve done the first 2. I’m doing a structural and language edit together and following that with a full edit using ProWritingAid. I then give each chapter to my wife to read. Valerie has a great memory, and spots repetitions, typos, anachronisms and inconsistencies. She makes the perfect beta reader and I usually have to do only one final edit after she’s made her suggestions.

I’d set myself a target of submitting 4 short pieces, either stories or poems, to magazines of writing contest each month and I managed to send off 2 stories and 2 poems to contests. Of these, 1 story and the 2 poems were written this month. I also wrote and posted two short autobiographical pieces to the excellent ReadWave site. These submissions are up to 800 words each and may be factual, opinion, memoir or short story. If you click on the site title above, it’ll take you to the relevant page.

My writing group, Hornsea Writers, decided to celebrate 25 years of being by designing a group blog and I contributed to that. If you click on the group name, it’ll take you to that site.

I read and reviewed 4 books, though one of those reviews will actually follow this post, as I wrote it this morning, having finished the book last night.

And I updated the Writing Contests page 3 times. I’m due to do another update this weekend. It’s a popular page and receives a lot of visitors. If you know of a contest I haven’t listed there, by all means let me know. (there’s a ‘contact me’ link at the top of the page.) I only list contests with cash prizes at least 20 times the cost of entry, by the way.

So, not a bad start to the year so far. Let’s hope the output increases as the year progresses. How are things going for you in 2014? Drop us a comment and share your success or other news.

The chart, explained:

Writing - initial creation of stories, blog posts, reviews and longer works.

Editing - polishing of all written work to make it suitable for readers.

Research - discovery of info for story content, market research, contests and blog posts.

Reading - books and writing magazines.

Networking - emails, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and comments.

Admin - story submission, blog posting, marketing, organisation, tax, and general admin tasks.

Starring the Reviews

Reader or writer (and hopefully, the latter makes you both, since a writer who doesn’t read is, frankly,not doing the job properly), we consume books and often want to share our opinions on them. So, we review. Many sites where reviews appear use a star system to grade them. I’m not going to list them all, but I’ll use three of the most popular as examples and try to gain a feeling for what reviewers might understand by these gradings.

We all know that 5 star reviews are considered the pinnacle from the point of view of the writer assessing success or otherwise, and thought of as a damn good guide to readability by readers. So, the grading is quite important to all of us. But what does it mean?

If you hover over the stars on Goodreads, you’ll get the following results: 

1* Did not like it, 

2* It was OK, 

3* Liked it, 

4* Really liked it, 

5* It was amazing.

Do the same for Amazon and you get these results: 

1* I hate it, 

2* I don’t like it, 

3* It’s okay, 

4* I like it, 

5* I love it.

With Smashwords, hovering over the stars produces no response and I can find no definitions at all on the site (that’s not to say they don’t exist, of course, just that I can’t discover them!).

So, there’s no consistency in the systems. 4 stars can mean ‘I like it’ or ‘I really like it’ or whatever the reviewer considers is the hidden meaning of the Smashwords stars. Similarly, if a book is ‘okay’, then it could be awarded 2, 3 or 1-5 stars depending which system in use. And, I don’t know about you, but I can ‘love’ a book without necessarily considering it to be ‘amazing’.

My point? This system is used by readers to gauge the potential readability of a book. I’m certain that many readers won’t get beyond that * award, making their decisions whether or not to read/buy, based entirely on this rather arbitrary symbol.

The tool isn’t up to the purpose for which it was introduced. Perhaps, as readers, and writers, we should get together and demand that the different sites conform to a uniform system so that everybody knows exactly what is actually meant by these symbols. Or perhaps you like the variations. Either way, I’d love to know what you think.

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What Will 2014 Bring?

Last year, around this time, I produced a blog post on my writing activity during 2012. Because I find it useful to detail my activities, and it may interest those who follow the blog, I’m repeating that exercise today for 2013.

It’s been a peculiar year in many ways. Socially and professionally there have been many events and changes. I retired from employment in April and celebrated my 65^th birthday in May. In September, my wife and I celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary and, in the same month, our daughter reached the milestone age of 21. In December, my aunt reached the great age of 100. So many reasons to celebrate, and the freedom to do so in terms of travel and time.

I changed from PC to desktop iMac, an investment I’ve really appreciated in spite of a few disappointments (Apple’s definition of ‘intuitive’ is clearly not the same as mine!). But, in many ways this has been a positive change. I’m still learning, though. And, possibly the single most irritating aspect is the lack of a # on the keyboard, an exclusion that makes hash-tagging Twitter and Facebook posts far less simple than it otherwise would be: Apple take note!

I spent a good deal of time editing the first 2 volumes of my fantasy trilogy, since Fantastic BooksPublishing have accepted the work and will be publishing volume one, A Seared Sky – Joinings, soon. I also spent a lot of hours writing book 3 of the series. This year will see the editing of that volume, of course.

I wrote a few short stories and entered a couple of contests, though fewer than I intended. I made a start at writing poetry, and this is an activity I intend to increase over the coming years: it’s a different skill from prose writing and has a beneficial effect on that, developing the understanding of metaphor and simile as well as encouraging brevity.

On the admin side, I’ve continued with research and compilation of details of writing contests and you can find this regularly up-dated information under the Writing Contests tab above. Hope it’s useful.

Much of December I spent in experimentation on social networking. (The chart illustrates the portion of time spent on this) Really, I did this to confirm suspicions I acquired last year about the effectiveness of such activity for an author. It seemed to me that the apparently ubiquitous ‘author platform’ may be less than effective in actually garnering readers and selling books. This year’s activity has confirmed those suspicions and I shall be curbing my social networking activity this year to concentrate on writing, submitting and publishing stories, since it’s apparent that those writers who achieve wide readerships are the ones who publish more work. As I enjoy the actual writing more than any other of the activities that surround authorship, it will be a pleasure for me to take this turn.

I’m also intending to read more. I read 53 books in 2013 (most of them I reviewed as well) and I’ve set myself a target of 52 books over the year, using the Goodreads Reading Challenge as incentive for this.

I do, however, expect to exceed this target.

The chart at the top of this post shows the proportion of time I’ve spent on the various activities during the year. It’s noticeable that the activity on which I’ve spent most time is networking. Whilst there’s some satisfaction and much pleasure to be gained from interacting (not to mention the way it can help others), I have my doubts about its real value in relation to the activities of an author. The coming year will see a great deal more actual writing, editing, submission and publishing. I’m a writer, and writers write, after all.

So, to the comparison figures, where I list ‘achievements’ for the year. I gave a list for 2012, which I’ve repeated here, so we can see the comparison with 2013. Please note, it’s the left hand column that shows this year’s activities.

2013                                                                            2012

Published work:

None!                                                                          Sensuous Touches, an erotic anthology.

Heir to Death’s Folly, a gothic horror short story.

Rebirth, my contribution to the sci-fi anthology, Fusion,  published by Fantastic Books Publishing.

Writing Contests:

2 entered. No success                                                 4 entered, 1 short-listed.

Social Networking as at the end of each year:

2013                                                                            2012

Blog:

1181 posts                                                                  1062 posts

491 followers                                                              447 followers

181,769 page views                                                    85,511 page views

29,250 visitors identifying location                           18,882 visitors identifying location

Facebook:

Author Page: 569 ‘Likes’                                            379 ‘Likes’

Personal Profile: 1,795 Friends                                  1,599 Friends

Goodreads:

1,001 books listed as ‘Read’                                       882 books listed as ‘Read’

177 Reviews written                                                   130 Reviews written

125 titles in ‘to read’ list                                             136 titles in ‘to read’ list

3,231 Friends                                                              2,118 Friends

LinkedIn:

2,958 Contacts                                                           2,274 Contacts

Pinterest:

1,123 Followers                                                          662 Followers

7,305 Pins on 33 boards                                            4,774 on 32 boards

Google+:

559 in my circles                                                         336 in my circles

413 circles including me                                              183 circles including me

Twitter:

8,759 Following me                                                    5,110 Following me

8,758 I Follow                                                            5,012 I Follow

22,033 Tweets                                                            11,823 Tweets

As you can see, my social networks have all expanded quite significantly. However, this increase has had little impact on the number of books I’ve sold, which is you can expect less social activity this year and more in the way of writing. I’ll continue to record that here on the blog.

By all means add me on your social networks: I’m cutting down on the activity, not stopping it completely! Let’s see what 2014 has to offer, shall we?

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