Weekend Review: After Dead by Charlaine Harris

I decided to do another weekend review since I had checked After Dead out of the library as well. I remember when After Dead was released, I had already lost my excitement for the Sookie series and did not buy this or the last three Sookie books. This one was about fifteen dollars for the hardcover and very thin. I browsed through it in the store, but to be honest, it wasn't that appealing. I decided to pick this up at the library while giving Harris's new series a try. I advise anyone who may be interested in this book to do the same, go to the library. Do not waste money on this "book". I had forgotten who some of the characters were and skipped through to the ones I actually remembered and cared about. None of them had great endings, some of them were short, some of the endings were terrible (people dying and divorcing everywhere). It's the type of book you can read in five minutes.

Weekend Review: Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

I want to start out by saying I loved the Sookie Stackhouse books, and thought that I would be a huge Charlaine Harris fan. I found that Sookie Stackhouse was one of the characters that I related to most(in the older books). She felt like an outsider, and I think everyone feels like an outsider at times. I devoured the older Sookie books like candy and while I was waiting for the later books to be published I checked out the Harper books. Both characters had something supernatural about them, but Harper was the more realistic of the two. I loved both series, but I did want Harper to end up with Manfred. Speaking of Manfred, he's in Midnight Crossroad. Midnight Crossroad has a mixture of odd characters, including a vampire, a witch, and Manfred. Even the cast of supposedly interesting characters didn't help me to finish the book. Places and food were described way more than they needed to be. I only read the first fifty or so pages so this is more like a first impressions blog, but my first impression is that this book felt too much like it was trying to copy the Sookie books. In the end this book wasn't for me. I'm still trying to find a book that I can love as much as the Sookie books.


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Sneak Peek

Today I decided to take a peek at one of the short stories connected to Zombie Bite. This is not the main story, just a connected story. It's still in the editing process, but I decided to share a page, so here it is.

                “Why the hell are you sitting home alone on a Friday night?” I greeted my roommate, Darci.

            She didn’t reply as I dropped my purse and apron on the counter closest to the door, and walked over to the sofa, where she was hidden beneath at least ten pounds of blankets. I hadn’t seen her since this morning, but it looked like she hadn’t moved all day. I gasped when I caught sight of her once round face, which had grown thin during the five hours I’d spent at work. Her glassy eyes took a long time to focus on me, but when they did I couldn‘t help noticing they‘d taken a whitish tone.

            “You look like crap,” I said before I could stop myself. I had a habit of saying whatever popped into my head, which sometimes got me into trouble, but Darci had never seemed bothered by it.    

            “I think I’m getting sick,” she mumbled in response.

            “Do you want me to bring you to the doctor?” I asked.

            Darci had always been chubby, but now she looked frail, so thin that her bones were visible beneath her pale skin. The way she was sprawled across the sofa made her look like a rag doll. “Can you turn the light out? It‘s killing my eyes.”

            “Darci, I think you should go to the doctor,” I said as I made my way across the room to turn the light off.

            “Shh, let me watch the news,” she interrupted.

            The light from the TV danced across her pale face, casting her in tones of blue as the words ‘breaking news’ flashed across the screen. The tv was louder than I would have liked, but I took a seat on the floor in front of the sofa. A blonde news reporter stood in front of a house that had been roped off by crime scene tape. 

Big News!!!

I realize that I haven't shared much about my writing lately. I had been planning to self publish Hair Of The Wolf as my first release, but I decided against that. As I was looking at Hair of The Wolf I realized that there was something that didn't fit with the ending, so I took a break from that to work on another story(one featuring grim reapers). When the first draft was nearly complete I decided to look at all of my work, and I came across Zombie Bite. Zombie Bite was a short story that I wrote about zombies. I think that I may have even put the first few paragraphs online because I wasn't sure what to do with it. It was complete, aside from needing a few edits, but it was short. It might be fifty pages, and there are two other short chapters I have on my computer relating to Zombie Bite. I have decided to finish editing Zombie Bite and self publish it. I will look at the short chapters and possibly post those on this blog. I will probably also include them in the book itself as well.

Selling yourself as an author

I've been thinking a lot about the way that I present myself as an author. I haven't published anything yet because I haven't felt that my work was ready, but when I do I want to be prepared. While I know what to do when I am called to a job interview, I have no idea how to sell myself as a writer. I've tried this in the past in query letters, and been told that the query letter was great but my story wasn't. I didn't mind being told that my story wasn't great. I made a big mistake by trying to send my work out before it was ready. I think a lot of young authors do that, and at the time I was about 19. Now that my writing has matured I feel like I need to take a different approach to selling my books. I'm just not sure how to do it. I don't even know when to start, or where.