Wednesday, May 9, 2012

New Review of Apart From Love

So glad! I must share. The first UK review of my book appeared minutes ago on Amazon, here in the UK and in the US.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautifully Crafted Triangle of Love, August 26, 2012
By 
A. Rose (Devon & Menorca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Apart From Love (Paperback)
The story is told from the viewpoints of Ben and Anita. Ben is the adult son of Lenny who has been estranged from his parents for the past ten years, with Ben blaming his father for the break up of the family when Lenny and Natasha divorced. Anita is Lenny's new wife who is pregnant, the same age as Ben and also has an uncanny resemblance to Natasha, so much so they could have been taken as sisters - but in appearance only. Natasha was a beautiful and talented concert pianist with elegance and grace to match. Whereas Anita is rough, ill educated, dresses brashly and her speech is no better than `street talk'. What Ben didn't know was that even when he was a child at home living with both his parents, his mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease and that this progressed to the stage where Lenny divorced her and had her cared for in a home. The marriage wasn't always happy with Lenny having many affairs and flings but Anita, one of his flings, had been around for ten years or so before he married her following an unplanned pregnancy.

Without giving more of the story away, there are many facets to each persons story and all have their hopes, fears and revelations. The love between Ben and Anita which both of them hide as much from themselves as each other, is a slow burn, almost dangerous dance that is more in their heads than physical. Lenny is a little bit like a spy listening to tape recordings of both Ben and Anita's thoughts, playing and rewinding the tapes over and over, torturing himself in preparing their words for the novel he is writing.

Uvi Poznasky is a very talented lady, not only is she a very accomplished writer, she is a poet, sculptor, artist, teacher and much more. The beautiful cover of the book is of one of her works of art and after visiting her website I see that she is indeed gifted and worth taking a look at uviart.com . This is a beautiful and sophisticated novel of love, loss and torture and well worth reading.
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Sunday, May 6, 2012

From Poem to Animation: Jess and Wiggle

Once there was a little girl
With the cutest reddish curl
Her name--how could you guess?
It was simply--Jess

 So started a poem I wrote for a little girl named Jess, who at two months was looking at the world with such an intense, serious observation, as if to examine if anything was worthy of a smile. Once the ink dried on paper, each verse started forming shapes in my mind. So here is the title page:


You can see that from the start, the word 'Jess' became her face, and also that it bore an expression, sad at the beginning, happy by the end. Likewise, the word Wiggle was drawn, literally with a wave in it, one 'g' rolling around the other. Other words soon followed, becoming pictorial elements that express their meaning. So the word 'Spin' spins around itself; 'Comb' has the teeth of a comb; and so on.


Then, once the entire book was ready, I used the illustrations to create an animation:

★ A Children’s Book ★
For the child in you
Paperback: Amazon
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Are Your Reading Habits Changing?

Are your reading habits changing because of the new generation of eBook devices? Do you find yourself hindered, as you try to immerse in reading, by their multi-purpose design, which offers a multitude of ways for your concentration to stray away? The original Kindle was not designed as a multi-purpose device, specifically so that readers could focus on reading and nothing else. But in a competitive market, where the iPad, Nook and Kindle are forced to come up with newer designs, eBook devices offer more and more temptations to lure us away from the task at hand--more inventive escapes, that end up shortening our attention span.

Is this a question of concern to you? It is to the writer of this New York Times article, called Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On. 

I may be alone in this, but somehow I'm afraid that if enough of us fall change our habits, our attention span might be cut down not only for reading a book--but also for reading each other's lips. Another words, listening. And then, the world we live in could easily become the new Babylon, where the less we listen, the more weird is what we hear, and every word separates itself from our language, till all we can do is just turn to our tablets and click ourselves away.

Ink-on-paper painting called Babylon, with the words 'Word' and 'Language' appearing in different tongues
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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Beautifully Written, Poignant Poetry: "Peer Inside My Soul and See Me"

The literary scene is so crowded nowadays, that finding a book worth your time seems like a hard exercise at times. This is why I am posting my book review for Peer Inside My Soul and See Me in this blog. De Ann Townes Jr. opens up the most intimate places in her being, inviting you to read her, all of her: the passion, the longing, the hurt. She takes you deep inside, in spite of her pain and vulnerability, because at that moment, the moment when you peer inside, her emotions are most raw, intense, and vivid. 

Her poetry is about her love, her jealousy, and even about her longing to be defined by her lover. At times she lets the man she loves think of her as if she were a big canvas. With total submission, total rapture she lets him become the creator of her existence. Such are her images, images that elevate the ordinary into a poetic vision. Her rapture sweeps her, and him too, into a mystical spell of destruction. 

De Ann shows no hesitation when she introduces certain expressions, once in a while, in spanish into her poems, which adds a special touch, as if you caught a whisper between the two of them. She gave special attention to the layout of the book, where all the poems are 'centered' on the page. This makes the words, and the varying length of each phrase, become a graphical element black on white, as if the poem has turned into a graphic vase, holding the words inside.

Highly recommended!
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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Face of the Story

I take book cover design with the utmost seriousness. It gives a face to my story, and must express it faithfully, in graphical terms. In my mind, when you take my book into your arms, you must be rewarded by holding a work of art. This reward starts with the cover, which opens the door--literally and figuratively--and sweeps you, page after page, into a different world. It continues with an appealing layout of the interior pages, and culminates with the story. 

★ Love reading? Treat yourself to a family drama ★
"A feast for the armchair psychologist"
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Converting Your Story from Book to eBook

Many of my friends, who are curious to know how I accomplished the conversion of Apart From Love from book to ebook, ask me to explain, in excruciating detail, how to do it. My best advice to you, having gone through the process, is not to rush things, or you will create a mess.

 Once you convert your story from book to ebook, you have two separate copies of your work. So later, if you want to make a change--even as simple as fixing a punctuation mark--you are left with the need to do it twice, or to start keeping a log of your changes. This gets even more complicated if you maintain several ebook formats: a .epub one for the iPad, a .epub one for the Nook and a .mobi one for the Kindle. It takes some experience to learn that there is a way to collapse these separate files into one, but knowing this came, for me, at the cost of having done things in an order that I would have reversed, had I known better.

 So in spite of this great enthusiasm that drives you to convert your book and put it out there, so the readers can start flocking to your door, I suggest you wait until you're sure, absolutely sure, that your story is complete. Done. Finished to the last period. And then wait some more.
Once you are ready, here is a great article by Aaron Shephard called From Word to Kindle.
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The Bust of Beethoven

"A majestic bust—the bust of Beethoven—perched above me. At the time I didn’t hardly know who or what Beethoven was. Anyhow, I was so scared that it made my hair curl. The bust seemed to gaze fiercely at the air with them marble eyes, eyes as intense as they was vacant. "
This, in Anita's voice, is the first time we see the bust of Beethoven in my novel My Own Voice.

 From the beginning, this bust is more than a mere decorative object; it is, in fact, nearly a character, with a special relationship to Anita. It represents where the previous wife, Natasha, came from--a world of music and inspiration, from where the bust stares down, as if in contempt, at the unrefined, uncultured Anita. But just like a character, the bust of Beethoven undergoes a change as we travel along the arc of the story. Once the white piano has disappeared from the scene, the bust is out of place. Here is the way Ben describes the change:

"My father would rub his eyes, amazed to discover Beethoven's bust planted down there, in the dust, on the floor, its eyes frozen in dumb confusion. Discarded. No longer perched on top, it seems to have shrunk—or else the space has, somehow, ballooned around it.
The marble head seems cropped by a beam of light on one side, and a pile of music notebooks on the other. The sculpted shoulders lean against streaks of peeling wallpaper, blackened streaks that have previously gone unnoticed, crumbling away in the shadows, behind the bulk of the piano, which is now missing."

From this point on, Beethoven becomes a silent witness to the goings on in this family. And not a willing witness, mind you, as described by Anita, in her tongue-in-cheek manner:

"By the time Lenny returns from the door, I’ve crossed the floor on all four, all the way to Beethoven, and turned him around so he don’t face us no more, and instead he points his nose at the corner, and I’ve come right back to lay, in a foxy pose, on them pillows...
It’s not only me wondering about it—it’s Beethoven as well, his blank eyes following every one of our moves from down there, on the floor, like he’s annoyed at his bad luck, having to witness all this—and in slow motion, too!—and his neck, despite being solid, must be terribly cramped, and like, he hopes to be relieved of that pain pretty soon, and stretch his neck, and could we please stop idling there like some tired old couple, and come stomping off in his direction, and break it already."

In the watercolor, I rendered the bust in blue colors, as befits a thing of marble, a character really, one that tries to keep a cool head, so to speak, in an environment that has been whipped with a whirlwind of passion, guilt, blame and grief.

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