Review of a #mustread Thanksgiving story from @MaryPThornburg

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Of course, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving in the UK, but we know all about it from our friends across The Pond, and I'm sure many people here wish we shared this great tradition.  Perhaps the next best thing to experiencing it ourselves is reading about it, and I recently read a short story that immediately put me in the midst of celebrations with a wonderfully bizarre family.  

The story has the highly unusual title Uncle Spotted Turtle Entertains the Pilgrims and is written by Mary Patterson Thornburg, an author who has quickly risen to the top of my all-time favourite authors list.  Here is my review:

I’m totally hooked on this author, so when I saw a title I hadn’t come across before, I accepted Amazon’s invitation to “Look Inside” - and I didn’t have to read more than a dozen words before downloading it.  I read it immediately.

I love the way Thornburg wholeheartedly embraces her characters and settings, making them come alive, sounding, as they, do completely natural and utterly believable.  I’ve never even been to America, but I was there, with Jeremy, in the first and second grade, colouring in pictures of turkeys and singing about ‘wide and drifted snow’, and I was there at the family Thanksgiving feast, hating obnoxious Cousin Kevin, and loving Uncle Spotted Turtle so much, I wanted him to be part of my own family.  This excellent short story (far, far too short for my liking) painted an enormous picture in my mind of a time, place and people that could not have been made more real or more wonderful in any possible way.

I’ve raved about Mary Patterson Thornburg for long enough.  It’s about time the world sat up and took notice of her superb writing.  Start with this delightful short Thanksgiving story – very appropriate for this time of year, but well worth reading all year round - and I promise you, like me, you will be totally captivated by this supremely talented author.

From me, this highly entertaining short story could not possible earn less than 5 well-deserved stars.

The story Uncle Spotted Turtle Entertains the Pilgrims is available from Amazon (price 99c/£0.99), using these links:

Amazon U.S.

Amazon U.K.

and I highly recommend it wherever you are in the world this Thanksgiving - and to all our American friends                                

Authors, are Amazon's bots eating your words?

If you've written a book and listed it for free on Amazon, you're probably seeing vastly higher rates of download than you ever see reflected back in reviews.  You may have attributed this to laziness, or perhaps some form of digital hoarding (which for sure does exist as well).  In actuality however, something a little darker may well be taking place.

As a result of Kindle Unlimited, authors can be paid for people reading their books.  Like all well-intentioned systems, it took very little time for people to figure out how to game the system.  Someone looking to do so starts by creating a fake book.  It could be plagiarised, a convincing copy, or entirely randomly generated garbage.  They then list the book, for a price, as Amazon does very little (i.e. basically nothing) to verify that this is a legitimate book.  They do nothing to promote the book, so it will not sell.  Instead, they list it in Kindle Unlimited.  They can then either use a bot, or a number of minimally compensated people, to 'read' the book on Kindle Unlimited.  As a result, the "author" gets paid, and can even use this to launder money from stolen bank accounts or cards.  So far you're probably wondering how this involves you.  You may also be surprised that these bots (or so called clickfarms, in the case of humans) exist at all.

As it happens, and as unbelievable as it sounds, bots account for almost 40% of all traffic on the internet.  Some bots are benign too - but around half are malicious.  This means 20% of all internet activity is actually from someone's bot somewhere, trying to cause harm.  As such, while most people may have no idea that bots exist, they are a big focus for large companies such as Amazon.  As a result, Amazon soon figured out what was going on, and shut down these dishonest "authors" because they could identify what activity came from a bot and what was legitimate.  The bots would be single-minded in helping their one "author", and so it was fairly obvious they weren't legitimate.  So, the bots had to evolve.

To do this, bots would now also download free books, and read those as well as reading the fake one.  Now your legitimate free book becomes an accessory for these bots, and you get nothing back - nobody's bothered to teach literary criticism to the bots yet.  Worse still, you run the risk of Amazon thinking you're involved in this shady practice as well, and having them shut you down or pull your content.  If they do, you'll be in for a lengthy and possibly futile argument with them.

I hope this has helped demystify the big difference in ratio between downloads and engagement of your content.  Feel free to leave a comment on your experiences, or ask any questions you may have.

(This post was written by guest blogger Alexander Sofras, a professional in the field of software development with many years of industry experience).

When the attraction is purely physical – or hackneyed romantic conventions

I read a contemporary romance by a new author this week, which didn’t really work for me, because it used a time-worn convention that has started to get on my nerves.  I’ll call it hate at first sight.  I won’t name the book, or even write a review, because I would hate to be negative about a newly-published author, but I will name and shame the hackneyed convention.

The hero and heroine meet for the first time and are clearly attracted to each other – and why not, they are perfect for each other – but the heroine senses some undefined hostility in the hero and instantly mirrors this back to him.  She then spends the next few chapters coming into conflict with him, and asking herself (too many times) what it is about him that rubs her up the wrong way.  She doesn’t find an answer.  Needless to say, their paths cross fairly often, and sometimes they seem to be on the edge of making a friendly breakthrough – which is quite understandable, since they are, as I said, clearly made for each other and destined to be together at the end, because this is, after all a romance, and we all know how they work.  Until then, however, misunderstandings continue to keep relations between them sizzling and hostile, and numerous golden opportunities for them to get to know each other and understand what makes each other tick are lost.

Towards the end of the novel, our hero and heroine naturally discover the reason for the silly misunderstanding and rush off into the sunset (or bedroom) for their happily ever after.

What I object to about this is since they have denied themselves every opportunity to get to know each other, the attraction between them has never been more than purely physical.  That isn’t love, surely, and nor is it particularly romantic.

Not to my mind, anyway.  But perhaps I'm just too old-fashioned.

Why are TV chefs cooking our language?

Let’s face it, we’re a nation of foodies – our obesity statistics prove that.  And TV chefs are doing what they can to redress the problem and show us how to eat healthily.  

Like many of us, I do enjoy watching a good cooking programme, and these days there are plenty to choose from on every channel.  But watching these talented TV chefs conjure up mountains of delicious delights is not quite the same as listening to them.  Have you heard them recently?  They’re reinventing the English language, and it’s deeply worrying.

I’m not talking about simple lapses in grammar or syntax that anyone might make, especially if they’re multi-tasking in the way these culinary maestros do by simultaneously demonstrating and explaining their recipes while answering questions and/or interviewing their guests, so I might cringe a little when I hear that pancake batter “needs to be much more runnier”; “plates need to be more hotter”, or food can be made “even more tastier” or even when I hear that summer is “fastly approaching”, but I can take it, along with a small pinch of salt.

Verbing nouns is a well-known abomination in the corporate world that is beginning to spread elsewhere, including the world of cooking.  I’m not sure when butter became a verb, but we’ve been buttering our toast for many years, so it doesn’t sound too odd to butter a pan or pie dish to prevent food from sticking to it.  But why stop at butter?  I recently watched a TV cook telling us to “pepper the steak, but don’t salt it yet”.  And when the food is ready, you don’t put it on a plate to serve, you “plate it” or “plate it up”. 

Sometimes an unusual expression catches me off guard and makes me question it.  The chef who said, “If I use too much of it, it will outstand the other flavours” may have been grammatically correct, but it was a usage of the word ‘outstand’ I haven’t heard before.  While the cook who “oversighted” the sugar in her recipe, left me wondering if she intended to invent a new word, or simply meant she had forgotten to add sugar.

  

We’ve all grown used to hearing about plates of food thanks to one particular programme, but what does cook up lurid images in my head is the phrase “the plate [or the food] eats well”.  The thought of plates devouring themselves or items of food munching away at each other is far from appetising.

Chefs on television have long lamented the absence of ‘smell-o-vision’ so that viewers can experience the delightful aromas emanating from their dishes, but one TV chef recently seemed to expect something even more from our TV sets when he instructed us to “Look at the flavour” being created from his dish.  I tried until I was cross-eyed.  I really did.

With thanks to www.pngtree.com; to www.coprogallery.bigcartel.com/category/nouar, and to www.superbcook.com/dishware for the excellent images used in this post.

Buried Treasure by @GilliAllan - #Review - So good I read it twice!

Gilli Allan is one of the most accomplished British storytellers I've come across in recent years, so it's always a great pleasure to read a new story from her.  Here is my review of her  fab new book, BURIED TREASURE, as published on Amazon and Goodreads.

I was delighted to receive an early copy of Gilli Allan’s latest story, since I have read her other books and have the highest regard for this talented author.  The title intrigued me from the outset; who hasn’t at some time in their life dreamed of finding buried treasure?  I know I have, and found this treasure of a story deeply satisfying.

The story concerns two very different people, and two diverse ‘treasure’ hunts.  For university lecturer Theo, his quest relates to evidence he needs to find of an ancient pilgrim route on the site of a proposed new supermarket near his university campus, in order to prevent its construction on a possibly sacred site.  Events and conference planner Jane’s treasure is much closer to home.  Her great uncle Alf uncovered the haul while ploughing one of his fields with his son during World War II.  Sadly, the find was confiscated by the government and placed in the British Museum without recompense, but, according to family rumour, one special artefact was missed, and subsequently secreted away.  In the fullness of time, Jane will inherit this, and her curiosity about it is as immense as the moral dilemma it will create if and when it comes into her possession. 

You might expect this common ground between the two would lay the groundwork for a promising relationship, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Jane sees Theo as an ‘upper class fogey’, a ‘brain on legs’, while a typical ‘Essex girl’ is at the forefront of Theo’s mind whenever he considers Jane.  But there is a far more powerful area of common ground between them, if only each could break down the barriers to discover it.  Both characters have been damaged by their pasts, far more so than each realises. 

This richly-drawn pair drive the action of the story and I would defy any reader not to empathise with them and become engrossed in their personal histories.  There are several other colourful supporting characters, all adding depth and interest as well as helping to reveal more about these two, but it is Jane and Theo who will stay in your mind long after you’ve finished reading.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story because you owe yourself the pleasure of reading this and discovering it for yourself.  And I promise you will not be disappointed.  It is a very satisfying romance, to be sure, but as always with Gilli Allan’s stories, BURIED TREASURE is about so much more than the relationship between two people.  Parental relationships, sibling, marital, workplace and that all-important relationship with oneself all come under compelling scrutiny.  The writing is intelligent and honest, and made all the more interesting by the author’s knowledge and evident love of archaeology, which gives the story that extra credibility.  I wholeheartedly recommend BURIED TREASURE as a must-read this summer.

Time to roll out my cute cats, and there is no doubt in my mind about how many this story deserves:

Well done, Gilli Allan.

About the author:

Gilli Allan began to write in childhood - a hobby pursued throughout her teenage. Writing was only

abandoned when she left home, and real life supplanted the fiction.

After a few false starts she worked longest and most happily as a commercial artist, and only began writing again when she became a mother. 

Living in Gloucestershire with her husband Geoff, Gilli is still a keen artist. She draws and paints and has now moved into book illustration.

She is published by Accent Press and each of her books, TORN, LIFE CLASS and FLY or FALL has won a ‘Chill with a Book’ award.

Following in the family tradition, her son, historian Thomas Williams, is also a writer. His most recent work, published by William Collins, is ‘Viking Britain’.

An exciting new release from @GilliAllan, plus cover reveal

Great news for all fans of author Gilli Allan - her long-awaited, and truly excellent new story BURIED TREASURE is due for release on June 14.  Before revealing the cover, here are a few words about it from the author herself:

BURIED TREASURE

In introducing the cover of my new book, I am prompted to ask the question: What is Treasure? 

There’s that magic crock of gold. All you need is rainbow, and some fail-safe method to find the spot where it touches the ground. There’s the cave in the desert, lit by the jewellery, gems and tumble of golden coins and artefacts which fill it.  All you need is a magic lamp. Or there’s always a desert island somewhere, with a chest of pirate gold buried in the sand. To find this you’ll need a parchment map, with a dotted line leading to X marks the spot.

To design my cover, I looked endlessly at images of treasure and of archaeological digs.  Nothing I saw, though interesting and attractive in themselves, really conveyed what BURIED TREASURE is about.

My book is less about material treasure and more about the damage that burying the past can inflict on the present.  It is easier to suppress hurt and humiliation, and erect barriers against the world. It is only by trusting again, and exposing your mistakes to the light, that you can rediscover the best of yourself.

AND HERE IS THE COVER

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER AT: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SN5NWJ2

mybook.to/BURIEDTREASURE  (universal)

Back cover blurb:

Their backgrounds could hardly be further apart, their expectations in life more different. And there is nothing in the first meeting between the conference planner and the university lecturer which suggests they should expect or even want to connect again. But they have more in common than they could ever have imagined. Both have unresolved issues from the past which have marked them; both have an archaeological puzzle they want to solve. Their stories intertwine and they discover together that treasure isn’t always what it seems. 

About the author:

Gilli Allan began to write in childhood - a hobby pursued throughout her teenage. Writing was only abandoned when she left home, and real life supplanted the fiction.

After a few false starts she worked longest and most happily as a commercial artist, and only began writing again when she became a mother. 

Living in Gloucestershire with her husband Geoff, Gilli is still a keen artist. She draws and paints and has now moved into book illustration.

She is published by Accent Press and each of her books, TORN, LIFE CLASS and FLY or FALL has won a ‘Chill with a Book’ award.

Following in the family tradition, her son, historian Thomas Williams, is also a writer. His most recent work, published by William Collins, is ‘Viking Britain’. 

LIFE CLASS:  http://myBook.to/LifeClass

FLY OR FALL: myBook.to/GilliAllan

TORN:  MyBook.to/gilliallansTORN   Trailer: http://youtu.be/u2eIP16ERcI

https://accentpressbooks.com/collections/gilli-allan

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gilli-Allan/e/B004W7GG7I

http://twitter.com/gilliallan   (@gilliallan)

https://www.facebook.com/GilliAllan.AUTHOR

http://gilliallan.blogspot.com

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1027644.Gilli_Allan

https://romanticnovelistsassociation.org/rna_author/gilli-allan/

Guest Blogger Jenny Twist on Dual Language Publications

It's always a pleasure to welcome my friend Jenny Twist to my blog, and especially so when she has something exciting to share with us all.  So let me hand straight over to Jenny to tell you about her latest publishing venture.

Today I am launching a joint venture with Alicia Pérez Alarza.

It was clear to me when I was learning Spanish that there were very few really good dual language books available. Five years ago a friend of mine complained about the same thing,

I did some research and discovered he was right. Most dual language books available on Amazon are very poor quality, either translated by English speakers who are not bilingual, or are completely inappropriate for those wishing to learn modern Spanish. What is the point, for example, of using Don Quixote as background reading? If you were teaching English to a Spaniard, would you  recommend them to read Chaucer?

And there is another point. Something that infuriated and offended me when I was learning Spanish. The stories they choose are so boring. It upset me to spend good money on boring books.

So I published one of my own. I chose Mantequero because it was short, the title was the same in both languages, and I had already had some interest from a school in California where many of the students were Hispanic.  

I felt it was essential that the translation should be done by a native speaker. Good translations are invariably translated into the translator’s native tongue. However good you are at a foreign language you will never be able to speak it like a native. So I paid for a professional translation.

It worked very well. I know of at least two schools which adopted it but the cost of translation was prohibitive. It was too high to make the book viable commercially.

So I reluctantly abandoned my plan to produce a whole series.

Then something happened. An author friend of mine said he had many of his books translated into

foreign languages using a translation site where you split the royalty with the translator. Sadly, the site only does straight translations, not dual language, but in the course of having translations done (mostly in Portuguese) I came across Alicia and we became friends.

I told her about my dream of producing dual language books and she was very enthusiastic. Our first joint effort is out today as an eBook and will be followed shortly by the print book.

We think we can probably produce a new book every six weeks or so.  Once we have, say, half a dozen we can start seriously marketing them for schools.

If, in the meantime, any of you are learning Spanish, I’d be delighted if you read this and tell me what you think.

Here is the blurb for The Children of Hope:

In 1960s England, girls who got pregnant out of wedlock were kept in Mother and Baby Homes and their babies taken for adoption at six weeks old.

Ginny is desperate to escape and to keep her baby but she’s needs outside help.

If only her friend Julia would answer her letter.

En la década de 1960 en Inglaterra, cuando las jóvenes se quedaban embarazadas fuera del matrimonio se las recluía en casas de acogida para madres gestantes y a las seis semanas de dar a luz sus bebés eran entregados en adopción.

Ginny está desesperada por escapar y poder quedarse con su bebé, pero necesita ayuda del exterior.

Ojalá su amiga Julia contestara a su carta.

Click on the book cover or the title to find Mantequero on Amazon

Click on the book cover or the title find The Children of Hope on Amazon