Reviews-The good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

Hello my Tuesday Scribe’s readers. PJ Sharon, here today talking about reviews.

Reviews come in many forms. You have the all-important “Big Name” endorsement or the Editorial review from some well-known source like RT or Publishers Weekly. And then you have consumer reviews. Summaries and quotes from wonderful readers who take time to go onto Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, etc, to leave starred reviews. These reviews are essential to leading others to find your books

 For some reason, I don’t always listen to movie reviews. I do, however, tend to look to reviews when it comes time to buy books. It matters to me if others have enjoyed the story and the writing. But what about a bad review? A bad review can potentially derail a young career by lowering the author’s starred average and keeping them from being able to advertise on certain sites.  Some book review blogs and promotional sites require as many as five, ten, or even twenty, 5 star reviews to advertise on their site.

Let me say I’m happy that so far Heaven Is For Heroes hasn’t had (to my knowledge) a bad review. I had a Publishers Weekly review that was average but neither stellar nor derogatory. I was just thrilled that they actually read and reviewed my book. I’ve been lucky. I know lots of authors who have had bad reviews, and it seems hard for them to get past it. My thinking is that you can’t take anything personally in life. You have to expect that at some point someone will have something negative to say about you or your work.

It’s the risk we take when we put ourselves out there. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but just because you have one, doesn’t make it right. I have to believe that the positive can counteract any negative feedback you get if, indeed, you have a great book.

I’ve recently started to review books and my feeling is that I will only review a book if,

 1) I am dying to read it. I have VERY little time to read so I’d better be having a good time. I’m picky about how I spend my reading time.

 2) If I like it enough to give it at least four stars.

3) If I have only positive feedback to offer. I don’t want to be responsible for saying anything negative about anyone or their work. If I felt strongly that I could offer the person constructive feedback, I would e-mail them privately or not post a review at all.

I might note as a sidebar that I won’t take points off for typos as much as I’m tempted to. I learned on my first book how hard it is to catch them all. The perfectionist in me who recalls a time when I rarely found a typo, is sad to see the current production of books in the digital world of the flawed spell check and the pinch of having to pay for many layers of editing. There are typos in most books these days, indie and traditionally published.

For today, I wanted to share with you my latest book review. If you haven’t read Renee Pace’s OFF LEASH, you must. It is a wonderful contemporary YA.

PJ’s Review for OFF LEASH by Renee Pace

OFF LEASH is a story of life and death, dogfighting, and discovering that a best friend, in any form, can save a life. Renee Pace’s debut novel takes you inside the life of poverty in a truly heartrending account of Jay Walker, a fifteen year-old boy saddled with a drug addicted mother and a little sister who’s dying from cancer. Jay’s life is one of desperation and hopelessness until he meets Ollie, a selfless and endearing Boxer that Jay is paid to walk. I don’t want to give the whole story away, because you should definitely read this book for yourself. I fell in love with the characters and found myself rooting for them on every page.           

I loved the voice of Ollie in a first person perspective of what life is like for a dog. This sweet, rambunctious canine steals the story. And Jay’s nitty-gritty account of his life and the hard choices he is forced to face, are spot on in their depth and meaning. The way that Pace reveals Jay’s character in many layers throughout his personal journey from boy to man is commendable. I felt like I was at his side from beginning to end.

Speaking of endings, Ms. Pace offers alternate endings for her books which I think is brilliant and I wish I’d thought of it myself. For me, I always choose the Hollywood ending. Although I couldn’t stop myself reading both endings and finding them diverse and poignant. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read more from this author. I’m waiting patiently for her next book in the Nitty Gritty series, OFF LIMITS. To see more of Renee Pace’s books or buy information go to http://www.yabeyond.com/books/renee-pace/

 

How about you? Do you buy books based on reviews? Do you think it’s okay to trash a book if you don’t like it?

You’ve Got a Friend in Me…

Happy Friday everyone! Casey Wyatt here. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving day. And for those of you participating in Black Friday, good shopping!

All week, the Scribes have been sharing their thoughts on Thanksgiving.  I’ll let you in on a secret, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love a day that is focused on family and food, but not obsessed with gift giving. Can’t beat that combination.

One thing I love about Thanksgiving is the holiday movie season. My family loves movies. In fact, my husband and I met while employed at a movie theater.

Many studios love to release their big holiday films the day before Thanksgiving. And in 1999, Pixar released Toy Story 2. We were all huge fans of Woody, Buzz and the gang and because we wanted to beat the crowds, hubby and I decided to take the kids Thanksgiving morning.

Seriously, going to the movies on a major holiday is not big on people’s to do list. Trust me, as a former theater employee who used to work holidays, I speak the truth.

I called my mother and told her about my plan. We’d go to the very first show and get to her house in time for dinner. And then I waited for her reaction. I mean, who puts Toy Story 2 ahead of Thanksgiving?Well, instead of balking, she was ecstatic. She and her best friend (also my kids’ Godmother) would meet us there. I don’t know why I was surprised. My mom is a card-toting member of the Woody fan club and there was no way she wanted to fight the crowds either.

That morning we arrived at the theater and the six of us camped out in prime seats: center aisle – not too far down and not too far up. As expected, there was barely anyone in the theater with us.  The kids were happy. They had popcorn, drinks, and candy my mother had snuck in for them. My youngest, only four at the time, was so light-weight my husband had to hold his seat down, otherwise, the poor kid would’ve been trapped like a human accordion.

The lights went out and we were all giddy with excitement. This was an “event” –  all of us watching the movie together. Right then and there, I was so grateful to have such a wonderful family. My mom is the coolest person in the world. She’s never lost her child-like sense of wonder and I should have known, out of everyone I knew, she’d be up for something different.

The movie was an incredible story (Pixar has the best  writers in the world) and we all loved it. I don’t really remember the rest of the day. I know we had turkey and all the fixings. My brother probably laughed at us for going to a movie that morning.

But deviating off the traditional holiday path, got us all thinking. What if….?

So we made plans for Thanksgiving 2000. We would all travel to Walt Disney World on Thanksgiving morning.

And did we all go? You bet we did. But that is a post for another day!

What non-traditional ways have you spent the holidays? Have you ever wanted to ditch the normal routine and try something completely different? Enquiring Scribes want to know.

I Dream of a Miracle

Hello, everybody. Suze here filling in for Viv.  For all of you New Englanders currently without power (and that includes me and most of the Scribes), here’s hoping you get your juice back soon!  Start worshipping the Electricity Goddess, wouldja? (I’d give my queendom for a hot shower!)  The storm has thrown us all a bit of a curve, so we’re switching up.  Viv will be back next week, but in the meantime we’re running this vintage post of J‘s.  With all this cold and snow, and hockey season approaching, read on! 

This post is inspired by a movie: Miracle, starring Kurt Russell (dreamy even in appalling 1979 plaid pants) is a movie about the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team.  Have you seen it?  If not, rent it! 

He's cute here, but keep reading!

Now I was not quite 10 years old in February of 1980 and I lived in a house of women.  We were not sports fans – at all.  We certainly were not fans of a brutal sport like hockey.  Tales of this famous team came to me in an odd fashion.  I had a boss back in the early 1990’s who was a small man with a HUGE personality.  I didn’t know much about him personally, but I did know that he played hockey in his spare time.  On his office wall, he had a big, framed picture of a hockey team.  I once asked him if that was his team.  His jaw dropped and he looked at me as if I had just asked him if a picture of Bob Marley was Jimmy Hendrix (this actually happened to me in college – I wasn’t very worldly in the 1990’s).  You know the look, the one where you are talking to someone and you say something and they wonder if you might be from another planet all together.  Or how you’ve lived this long with your head buried in the sand.  I used to get that look a lot. 

Suze prefers Kurt Russell in Bad Boy, Rather than Bad Haircut, Mode

Anyway, Brian The Boss said in a gentle voice suitable for calming skittish horses, “No, that’s the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team.  They beat the Russians…”  OK, so I might be giving away the ending of the movie here, but it’s kinda like the end of Titanic – you know going into it that the boat is gonna sink.

So, until Miracle came out, I didn’t know anything more about the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team.  But I’ve seen it several times recently.  In 1980 (big cold war days filled with troublesome happenings in the US including Iranian hostages, high gas prices and a bad economy) the Soviet hockey team hadn’t been beaten in 20 years and had spanked the US NHL All Star team regularly.  A bunch of 21-year-old kids from rival hockey towns worked harder to build a team than anybody thought was possible.  They had a goal and they wanted it badly.  They didn’t let the nay-sayers, and there were lots of them, get in their way.  They identified the strengths of their opponents and worked to take on those qualities themselves.  They ran drill after drill after drill and practiced play after play.  They stayed focused and fought to achieve their dream.

Does any of this seem familiar to you?  It does to me.  I want to be a best-selling author and I want it badly.  For most people this is an impossible dream.  But, I’m willing to work hard to get it.  I will write the stories I want to write.  I’ll become a marketing expert to push my books out there.  And a publishing expert, as well.  I’ll make my way down every avenue I can find to reach my dream.  I will ignore the nay-sayers and focus on my goals.  And when I beat my personal Soviets to join the Stephenie Meyers, Mary Pope Osbornes and Rick Riordans of the world, I will take a moment to enjoy my reflection in the gold medal achievement.   That’s today’s secret.

What’s your dream?

Dark Shadows . . .

Happy Thursday, everyone.  Suze here.

So have you heard?  A movie is being made based on the old horror soap opera, Dark Shadows, which ran in the late 1960s.  I’ve only ever seen clips of the show, but it looks like it was a lot of fun.  (Click here to see part of an episode.  Enjoy the closeups!)  One of my favorite actors, Johnny Depp, is slated to play the main character, Barnabas Collins, in the remake.  Look at this cast photo (see Johnny in the middle with the walking stick?) — how can you not love it?  I would watch it simply to see the 1972 clothes and hair.  Check out that leisure suit and turtleneck, baby!

This news, and the fact that it’s October, got me thinking about monster movies.  I’m not talking about the blood and guts and gore-galore flicks of the last few decades.  I’m talking about the classics — the campy kind we in the northeast could see on WPIX, Channel 11, out of New York City every Saturday (if you know what I’m talking about, you can hear the “Popcorn” song in your head right now, can’t you?).

Bela Lugosi as Dracula.  Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman.  My favorite? Boris Karloff as The Mummy (spectacularly spoofed by Hank Azaria in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian).  The goddess Isis saves the day in that one.

And, if you want to see a monster-combo, may I suggest another personal favorite?  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  Don’t forget King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Thing.

And what about the television shows?  I grew up on a steady diet of The Addams Family and The Munsters.  I always wished Gomez would toss a bag of money at me through the television screen, maybe smooch my arm and call me Querida.  Every time we saw a different room in the Munsters’ home at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, I wished I was there so I could poke around in all those cobwebby corners.   I still feel kind of bad for Marilyn.

The thing about these monsters is . . . they’re not really scary.  Oh, maybe Bela and Lon and Boris frightened moviegoers back in the day, but by today’s standards they’re so tame I don’t think they could frighten anybody but the youngest kids, who shouldn’t be watching that stuff anyway.

So tell us.  Who’s your favorite movie monster and why?  Why do you think we love monsters?  Paranormal romance lovers — explain yourselves!

And here’s a sneak preview of coming attractions:  The Scribes have a full roster of fabulous interviews lined up during Spooky Week at the end of this month.  Don’t miss it!

How to Turn a Manuscript into a Screenplay by Connie Neumann (aka Connie Mann)

Happy Sunday, Katy lee here, and today I have author, Connie Mann here to share with us her exciting journey from manuscript to screenplay. So, readers, sit back and enjoy the show!

Now take it away, Connie!

“Writing a Screenplay” had been penciled in on my list of “Things I want to do someday” for quite a few years. I’d written fiction and non-fiction books, articles, devotions, blogs, but never a screenplay. Every so often an idea for one would pop into my head and I’d give some thought as to where to start. That usually entailed pages of scribbled notes on a legal pad, followed by hours of staring at a blank computer screen–with regular interruptions to pace and consume too much chocolate. After a day and a half or so, I’d give up and move on to something else. But the dream lingered, just off screen, as it were.

Then one day during a conversation with my son, Ben Klopfenstein, who works in the film industry, the screenplay idea came up again. He was directing his first feature-length film (he’d directed multiple shorter projects) and was looking for a screenplay. Did I have any stories that might work for what he had in mind?

I gulped and said I’d think about it. But the idea took hold and despite my fear of the unknown, I told him I’d give it a try.

First, I read everything I could find on how to write a screenplay. But my favorite resource, by far, was “Save The Cat” by Blake Snyder. With my manuscript in one hand and “Save the Cat” in the other, I started taking my story apart, piece by piece.

Novels and screenplays are two very different creatures and the rules and expectations differ. I had to learn a whole new way of looking at things. Here are some of the differences:

Long View vs. Condensed Pace

When you’re writing a novel, you have lots of room to roam. You can develop settings and backstory and subplots and anything else you want. In a screenplay, time is condensed. Only conversations, interactions and conflicts that move the story forward get space on the page.

Introspection vs. Action

Characters in a novel can think about things—and we the readers are privy to those thoughts. Actors can only perform actions. So if the movie-goer needs to know about Jack’s secret, 10-year feud with John, how will you show that?

Settings vs. Locations

Novel settings can change from page to page. Not so in a screenplay. Every time the story changes locations, the whole cast and crew will have to pack up and move. So you limit locations wherever possible.

Different, isn’t it? But the process was a fabulous creative challenge and I enjoyed every minute of it. Clear Slate Films agreed to get involved in the project and I was privileged to be on set during the filming (which almost NEVER happens). I got to see my story come to life, which is something I’ll never forget as long as I live. Matthew Ashford (aka Jack Deveraux from Days of our Lives) and Julia Denton(K-Ville, The Contract Killers) were amazing to watch and work with.

The whole thing has been a huge labor of love, but we’re thrilled that our romantic comedy, Catch of a Lifetime (www.catchofalifetimefilm.com) is just about ready for release. A premiere is in the works, so if you visit the Facebook Fan Page, Catch of a Lifetime, you can get all the latest news, photos and info. You can even pre-order a copy of the movie from the website. We appreciate your support more than words can say.

I’ve so enjoyed being here today and I’d love to stay in touch. Feel free to stop by my blog, www.BusyWomenBigDreams.com any time. I’ll be posting more blogs about the movie process, and also offering encouragement to fellow dreamers.

But while I’m here, I’d love to hear what you think. Have you tried to turn a manuscript into a screenplay? How did it go?

Thank you, Connie for being here today! I will admit that seeing one of my stories out of my head and up on the screen, playing out in real life, would be a dream come true!

Readers, for a seak preview of the movie, click here: www.catchofalifetimefilm.com     

For more information about Connie Mann, visit her blog page. She loves romantic suspense, and her Florida-set novel, TRAPPED! is available now.  She’s also a USCG-licensed boat captain, so when she’s not working on her next story, she’s piloting boats along Central Florida’s waterways.