Round 1: Match 1

The Light Keepers vs. Call of the Herald

The Light Keepers
 by Mande Matthews

The Call of the Herald 
by Brian Rathbone

This was my first selection, and it proved to be a very difficult choice. I hadn't realized The Light Keepers was a prequel novella, or I'd have gone for the initial first book in the series. Both of these read as fairly standard fantasy novels in terms of the initial setup. On the whole, I thought the writing in The Light Keepers was smoother and more polished than in The Call of the Herald. But the start of the story in Call of the Herald that intrigued me more, and that's my focus this round, so I went with that in the end. I think it was because there just a little more drawing me into the world that was being built in The Call of the Herald. I'll probably swing through the rest of The Light Keepers at a later date, because the world was definitely intriguing, though I might try the real series first. If enough battles are this close, maybe I'll do a second round with the books that didn't make it through round one.

WINNER: The Call of the Herald

Book Madness

So, my selection criteria for this Book Madness project was pretty much as follows:

• Each book was offered to everyone for free on Kindle at the time I downloaded them.
• Science Fiction/Fantasy/Speculative Fiction category (since that's what I already had several of, and it's a genre I really enjoy)
• Appeared to be indie publishing (though I didn't look that closely at the publishers, honestly, under the assumption non-indie publishers weren't giving away free e-books that have recent copyrights, so some might actually be small press.) 
• Appeared to be part of a series, because I wanted to be able to snag a continuation if I ran out of book before I ran out of rounds. I'm still not 100% sure what my round quantities will be after the first one. I am currently aiming to keep to a single book for this competition, but I wanted to keep my options available.

Round 1: Chapter 1.

The Round 1 battle will mostly focus on which book snags me into it the deepest in the first chapter. (If there is a prologue, I will read the prologue and the first chapter.) Yes, I'll look at other things too, but that's the big test: which of the two stories going head to head do I need to know more about?

The Bracket:

The bracket was randomly seeded by the BracketMaker app.

Sorry, didn't have room for authors in the brackets. I'll try to get a full list up later if I can, but it's low priority for me, since I already have the books. At the very least, though, I'll be posting all that info, links, etc, for each "battle" as I blog the results of the competition.

Anyone Need a Pair of Ducks?

I tend to be very meta, in that I think a lot about my thought processes. Why do I think the things I think? Why do I have trouble thinking in some ways over other ways? One of the things I often think about, paradoxically, is why I think about things more than I do things. Like writing.

November is always a really tough month for me in "real life" land, so while I sign up for NaNoWriMo every year, I hardly ever "win." This year I didn't get anywhere. Part of the reason for that, though, is that I really hate the writing I do when I "do" NaNo. It feels off, bad, and too hard to fix afterwards. I tend to build in my head first, so that by the time it's on paper, it's a 3rd draft more than a 1st draft, and NaNo short-circuits that process. But I like the social aspects of it, and the frenzy, and the feeling I'm part of something bigger when I participate. Another paradox.


Paradox makes the world go round, however, and is part of the glorious thinking that makes us human. And be forewarned--I tend to harp on human-ness as a writing theme :). What makes us interesting is that we are full of contradictions.

And so, with yet another paradox, I am going to launch into writing again with a major reading project. I've been picking up various indie books as people say "Hey, I have my book available for free this week!" and I've decided to do a little March Madness approach with them and a bunch of other free indie books I've snagged off of Amazon. 32 books going head to head. I'm going to start with openings, and move to bigger and bigger chunks of the surviving book in each round. I'm going to be looking at different things each round, and seeing what works for me. It's kind of a combination reading extravaganza and writing/story analysis game. I'm hoping doing this will serve to kick-start my own book, which is languishing inside me in complete outline form. Or maybe it's just an elaborate procrastination plot. Or maybe it's both. The joy of paradox.

While I won't necessarily read every page of every book due to the structure of how I've set this up, I will indicate with each "battle" if I would have kept reading the losing book or not, and attempt to give some explanation of why I preferred one book over the other.

To the authors of these books if you stumble across this blog (and especially to those I know from G+):  This is about what *I* am looking for in this exercise. It's not necessarily going to be what *you* want me to look for during this. So please, while you are free to follow along, comment, whatever, just keep in mind it's about my journey as a reader, a writer, and an editor, through this particular set of books. It's not about giving reviews or critiques, though stuff I say may help to serve those purposes. If I say anything useful to you, great. If not, just ignore me. If you end up really defensive about my choices or explanations, well, I reserve the right to ignore you too :).

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content. --Touchstone, As You Like It.

If you watch the area behind the chain-linked fence at the train station, you can see the air shimmering. It looks like one of those heat shimmers you sometimes see on a hot road in the summer, where everything behind the shimmer seems to waver. It looks like a point where reality isn't quite real, like there is some kind of wrinkle connecting two universes, or a rip in space-time. I was always convinced it actually was a rip in space-time, and one day I decided I would just go through it and see where I ended up.

I ended up here.