Roland Hughes on Success in Writing #AmWriting #Dystopian #BookClub

How do you write – lap top, pen, paper, in bed, at a desk?

If it were not for OpenOffice and its spell checking I could never be a writer.  That said, I seem to go through a lot of scratch paper.  Perhaps it is because I grew up before computers existed.  Notes in a text or other file tend to get lost but when I'm writing something I intend to complete my desk is littered with things written down on paper in my nearly illegible handwriting.

How much sleep do you need to be your best?

Interesting question.  I've seen it asked in many different ways.  People talk about Earnest Hemingway “at his best in the morning.”  Others talk about his drinking.  Few connect the two and say he was at his best hung over.  It is kind of a straight line.  If you drink a lot then you are either just sobering up or hung over in the morning.

Oddly enough I find I'm at my best when physically tired.  I don't mean exhausted after a day's work, but the kind of tired you get the next day or the day after many days of exhausting work.  Where you have slept all you can sleep but don't seem to have enough energy to go outside and do something.  That kind of physical fatigue keeps me parked in the chair at the keyboard.  The writing part of my mind is in complete control pretty much because the rest of it is still checked out.

Every writer has their own idea of what a successful career in writing is, what does success in writing look like to you?

The definition of success changes over the years.  Early on you want to have that run away hit so you can “live the life”.  A bit later your focus starts to move towards writing that one book which will last.  Once you approach the big 5-0 you tend to focus on writing something you really feel needs to be written and hope there will be one other person at some point in the future who discovers it and claims it made their life better.

Occasionally I visit a writing forum or two.  I'm always amused at the fledgling writers striving to make their first work a break out commercial success.  When they ask why I'm amused I tell them they should focus on writing really good books early on then strive for that big commercial success with their last book.  Why?  Because it wags the long tail of their catalog.  Many get offended when they here that, but it weeds out writers from lottery players.  Far too many people putting work out there think they can write a single story then live on easy street.  They don't want to hear that easy street doesn't have a zip code.

How did you develop your writing?

As a child I wrote a lot of letters communicating with family members.  The Post Office was all we had back then.  I guess that resurfaced later in life.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

When it comes to my “geek” book series “The Minimum You Need to Know” inspiration comes from identifying things developers need to know which aren't widely documented or, as in the case of the logic book in that series, are simply no longer taught.  My novels come from various places.  In the case of “John Smith” those characters simply refused to leave me alone until I told their story.

When you are not writing, how do you like to relax?

A glass of Chardonnay by the fire place with some good DVDs.

How often do you write? And when do you write?

I write when I have both the time and the need.  I self publish these days.  I have no deadlines or release commitments.  This gives me the freedom to do it right.

"John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars" is one big interview. It is a transcript of a dialogue between "John Smith" (who, as the title of the book implies is the last known survivor of the Microsoft wars) and the interviewer for a prominent news organization.

Buy Now @ Amazon & B&N

Genre – Dystopian Fiction

Rating – PG

More details about the author

Website http://johnsmith-book.com/

The Three Sisters #Excerpt by Bryan Taylor #AmReading #Humor

“Why’d you become a nun?” asked Mr. Ram.

“Well, when I was a kid, my mother got me to enjoy all the music she and my father had listened to when they were kids, you know, Big Band, Glenn Miller, and she’d get me to watch all the movies she used to go see with my father when they were growing up. I really liked the movies and music from back then. They had a certain optimism, a joie de vivre, almost a naivety about life, all of which it seems like we’ve lost since then. While I was in college, there was Watergate and Viet Nam and the CIA and racial problems, and Berkeley wasn’t exactly a hotbed of contentment. If people in other countries liked our movies and music, they hated our government, and everyone around me at college was either cynical or distrustful or, or…it just all seemed so different from the movies and music my mother had shown me. It seemed to me that there had to be a better way to live life than being distrustful and cynical about everyone and everything, and besides, I thought someone had to carry the torch of American optimism, especially when everyone else was trying to put it out. And I decided that person would be me.

“I decided that what I wanted to do was to go abroad and show others that America was still a country that wanted to help people. I had thought about going into the Peace Corps, but I didn’t want to be connected with the government because if I worked for them, I was afraid that the people in the country I was going to wouldn’t trust me. So instead I became a Maryknoll nun, purposing to go down to Central America to help others and show them what America could be. My parents were Catholic, and I had met a couple of Maryknoll nuns in California. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was in the convent. My parents didn’t like the idea at first since they were Methodist, but after a while they accepted my decision.” Sister Carla had turned away from the table and was studying the floor beneath her intensely.

“What’s she doing?” asked Mrs. Ram.

“She’s trying to judge how far it is to the floor. Penguins are terribly nearsighted because their eyes are adapted to seeing underwater. So it takes them a while to judge distances. They’re quite good jumpers though. Some can jump better than they can walk.”

“So what happened in the convent?”

“Being there was quite an adjustment those first few months. Though I had taken on the idealism of the thirties, I had not taken on the Hayes Commission’s morality. I had always had boys chasing after me, but I really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. You know, men are funny because it’s so easy to manipulate them. I took cues from the movies and from friends and learned to act coy and shy, or aggressive and spunky as the situation demanded. Most of them never realized how I was controlling them. They were so happy to be with me, they didn’t seem to care. What happened at the end of the date was their main concern. Not that I didn’t enjoy it either. In fact, I probably enjoyed it more than they did, but I also made sure the evening itself was just as fun.” Sister Carla jumped off the chair and started to explore the Ram’s house at her leisure.

“Anyway, the convent changed my dating habits drastically, but I adjusted quickly enough. A lot of the nuns I met there were nice, optimistic, and even idealistic, though often for different reasons from my own. Nuns are not the simplistic Debbie Reynolds types that movies make them out to be. Most of them are probably more vivacious and thoughtful than the average person. You know, they say clothes make the person, and it’s the same with nuns. Most people only see the black and white outer habits nuns wear before the world without ever thinking about what nuns wear under their habits. But to some of the more liberal nuns, their nightgowns were their pride and joy. Why, I myself had a veritable rainbow of brilliant gowns to sleep in. Under a nun’s habit lies her true nature, not in it.

“But that’s beside the point. In due time I was down in Central America, and I must admit, it turned out to be something quite different from what I had imagined. I was sent down there to work with Sister Carla, that’s whom I named our penguin after. She had already been down there for two years, and she believed in helping people’s bodies as well as their souls and went out of her way to do so. She made sure she had done everything she could for the people she was working with, and she never gave up. Whether someone woke her up in the middle of the night seeking refuge, or came to her at the church, she went out of her way to help them. It wasn’t always easy either. We were taken advantage of many times and we knew it, but we stuck by our jobs nevertheless.

“Unfortunately, Sister Carla did too good of a job,” continued Regina more solemnly. “She helped everyone regardless of whom they were and that was her fatal mistake. The government of the country we were in was rather brutal and the leftists often did their best to be as inhuman as the people they were trying to overthrow. There were rumors about some of the things that happened to people the government didn’t like. They told me about the ‘flying nun’ incidents. Government soldiers would take some nun who wouldn’t cooperate with them up in a helicopter, fly over the ocean, and then push her out the window and tell her to fly. None did. Both sides had told Sister Carla to stay in the Church where she belonged, but she and I ignored them. I guess we just figured it wouldn’t happen to us, or if it did, it was God’s will.” Regina paused.

“It was a Wednesday when it happened. I was walking home when some of the people in the village ran up to me and told me some men had taken Sister Carla away. They didn’t know who the men were or what side they were on, but she was gone. Two days later someone found her body. She had been shot twice. As soon as I heard, I went to see her body to make sure her remains were taken care of.

“I don’t know. The whole situation was just too real. Sister Carla would have wanted me to stay on, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. My heart wasn’t in it. I stayed down there a while and read the Bible every day. But everything seemed so wrong. If Paul wasn’t preaching at me, the priests were laying down rules and regulations for me. I knew how to live without some man telling me what to do. And the men in the Bible were bigger chauvinists than the men down in Central America. Just read the Bible and see how the Jews treated women back in Old Testament times. The Israelites killed all the men in battle, but raped the women they captured or made them their mistresses. Their women were just furniture. And then I realized Israel was just like Honduras or some other Center American country. Every few years there was a coup, an assassination, a war, or something like that. Nothing had changed in three thousand years.

“After Sister Carla got killed, I tried reading the Bible for solace, but everywhere I read there was nothing but death and destruction from man and from God. You read in one place where the Israelites kill 500,000 men in a few days. In another place an angel kills 185,000 men. I guess God would justify that like we justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but what I never could understand was Childermas, the Slaughter of the Innocents. God sent an angel to Joseph so he would save His Son Jesus, but He let all the other children die. Why didn’t God tell the other fathers that Herod’s men were coming to massacre their children? Why did He save His Son and not the other children? I never could understand that. Of course now I’m an agnostic, so I think it’s all a bunch of nonsense, but I never could reconcile Childermas.

Nuns just want to have fun! But when three former Catholic nuns have too much fun and get in trouble with the law, they become nuns on the run.

Driving back to Washington D.C. where they work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Parts, the three sisters are arrested in Tennessee. After defeating the local deputy in strip poker, they escape from jail, and are pursued by the zealous Detective Schmuck Hole, who has personally offered a $10,000 reward for their capture on The 700 Club. Little do they know that when the three sisters visit the Washington Monument, their lives will change forever.

Set in 1979, The Three Sisters is a sacrilegious satire that skewers not only organized religion, but the government, the media, intellectuals, corporate greed and every other part of the establishment. Maybe not the greatest story ever told, but possibly the funniest.

Buy @ Amazon

Genre – Humor, Satire, Catholicism, Politics

Rating – R

More details about the author

Connect with Bryan Taylor on Facebook

Website www.threesistersnovel.com

@GaryTroia on Life Experience, Fear & Familly #AmWriting #AmReading #ShortStories

Tell us a bit about your family.

I live with my girlfriend Marina, and her son Jamie. Marina does all of my marketing, publishing, and runs my web site, leaving me free to write!

How do you work through self-doubts and fear?

Like all writers I have doubts that what I’m writing is not good enough. The writing doesn’t flow…the list is endless. But I continue writing and do my best to ignore the inner fear. I think it was Stephen King who said, write faster than your doubts, or something similar.

What scares you the most?

Not being able to write anymore. It has been my lifelong dream to write, I am now living my dream. For me now, not writing would be living a nightmare!

What makes you happiest?

Living the life that I want to live, which is writing.

What books did you love growing up?

I was a late-comer to reading. I found my love of reading after I left school, the first book that I ever read was the Bible.

How closely are your books based on your own experiences?

Almost completely. The reason I decided they should be labelled as fiction is that I didn’t want to be going crazy because I couldn’t remember things accurately. Also, since I may write more of them, I wanted the freedom to play around with reality to make the stories what I want them to be.

From its opening line—“Song thrushes and black birds’ eggs are the easiest to start your collection with,” said Reggie. – I expected the book to be more like a collection of stories about childhood antics in the countryside, but the majority of the stories are about adulthood. Is that partly to communicate the idea that a sense of place is really about identity?

The first few stories are from childhood and are setting the scene for incidents that happen in subsequent stories once Ray Dennis is older. The person we become as an adult is shaped by childhood experiences, so I suppose these first few stories are about identity. The next line of that story is: “In my South-east London School, Reggie Boniface was a little unusual. He didn’t do drugs. Never mentioned girls he fancied. Avoided violence, didn’t like sport, and studied hard. He was someone who I never dealt with, but he used to fascinate me nonetheless.” So I am really interested in how a person is shaped by experience.

When you look at Ray in the book, how much of him is still with you?A little too much for my liking. I don’t feel like I grew up very effectively. I didn’t grow up with any constant role models, so I found out about life the hard way, making unnecessary mistakes. I drifted from country to country, place to place, and job to job, always feeling like an outsider, looking for something. However, unlike Ray I do not drink or smoke anymore.

Do you still feel like an outsider?
I do, a little. But now I put that feeling to use, by writing about it.

How your parents reacted to your books?
I don’t even know if my Mum has read any of my books. I can’t even venture a guess. Probably a combination of pleasure and horror. I think that may also have to do with why I waited such a long time to write books that obviously contain an awful lot of my childhood experiences. I could never imagine my Mum showing her friends a copy of my books.

For the first time ever, this collection of short stories by Gary Troia brings together, in chronological order stories and memoirs from Spanish Yarns and Beyond, English Yarns and Beyond and A Bricklayer’s Tales into one complete volume.

“Excellent! A collection of short stories about depression, alcoholism and drug use. Very compelling reading. I read this short story collection all in one go.” (Maria, Goodreads.)

A Bricklayer’s Tales is the ultimate “I hate this job” story, written as a collection of short stories and memoirs, each one revealing a snapshot in the life of Ray. Troia captures the tedium of working in a low paid, menial job and living hand to mouth. This book of short stories is sad and questions the reader to ask questions about their own life. This book achieves clarity without trying.

Ray has three expensive hobbies: drinking, drugs, and running away. Without the income that Bricklaying provides, he would not be able to maintain his chosen lifestyle, so he compromises his principles and continues with his trade.

A collection of short stories and memoirs that include:

The Cuckoo’s Egg. Boyhood antics lead to tragedy.

My Grandfather’s Shed. The making of an English key

No Comb on the Cock. Gypsies, champion fighting cocks, and career choices.

What I Did In My Summer Holidays In 1000 Words. Could having an idea ever be considered a criminal act?

My Best Mate’s Head. Did a weekend of boozing save Ray from certain death?

The Shetland Isles. A trip to sunny Benidorm, a chance meeting with some Glaswegians, and a cold, miserable job in Lerwick.

Pointing a House in Islington. Too much alcohol and cocaine don’t mix well on building sites!

Angel Dust. The peculiar story of a man whose new life in America leads to conversations with Ancient Greek philosophers

Peyote. Hippies, LSD and an idyllic refuge

Return Ticket. Handcuffed and ready for deportation. A sad departure from the States

When I Joined a Cult. Sober dating as Ray discovers religion.

Bilbao. How very, very English!

Teaching Other People. The grass is always greener-the escape from bricklaying.

A Week in the Life of Ray Dennis. With the prospect of no money for food or alcohol this Christmas, Ray has to find work quickly.

Catania. A meeting with a Sicilian fox, some Neapolitans, and a man with a camel haired coat.

Advert In The Art Shop Window. Will a new building job in Spain be the start of a new life?

Gaudi. A flight to Barcelona for a kebab, and a look at the Sagrada Familia.

The Day My Soul Left Me. “To be or not to be? That is the question”

How Not to Travel to The Alhambra. Hung-over, the wrong fuel, the car breaks down. Will they ever make it to Granada?

The Road To Ronda. A terrifying drive to Ronda, was it worth it?

Poking A Carob Tree. A new home and new neighbours, just in time for Christmas.

Spain Reborn.No more commuting to London. Lets celebrate!

Home From Home. A parallel world where the Spanish have taken over Weymouth.

Three Common Carp.An epic battle with a whale and marlin it is not.

Mrs. McClintock. An absurd farce in which a Glaswegian couple retire to Spain

Steak, Egg and Intensive Care. A harmless dinner leads to hospitalisation.

The Unchangeable Chameleon. Can a leopard change it’s spots?

A Bricklayer’s Tale. The story of a disillusioned, alcoholic bricklayer

A collection short stories and memoirs of British dark humour.

 Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre - Fiction, Short Stories

Rating - PG-16

More details about the author

Connect with Gary Troia on Facebook & Twitter

Is Your Chair Killing You? #Excerpt by @KentBurden #AmWriting #Wellness

Over the years the one thing I have found to be true in life is that things are never as simple as we would like them to be. Just a few years ago if someone asked you if lived an active lifestyle, you knew that if you worked out for 30 to 60 minutes a day 4 to 6 days a week you could answer “yes.” If not, you said “I’m working on it.” For decades scientists have studied the relationship between how much we exercised and our exercise levels and health. But in the past five years, some scientists began looking at this correlation from a different perspective: Instead of thinking about what exercise does for the body, researches started to investigate what sitting for long periods of time does to the body. This was some seriously unconventional thinking.

Rather than looking at what we weren’t doing they started to look at what we were doing, which was a heck of a lot of sitting. In fact, by some estimates many people are sitting as much as 12 hours a day. This new perspective has begun to turn the science of sedentary studies on its head. Researchers from such diverse fields as epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics and physiology are seeing more data that is leading them to believe that the amount of sitting we do on a daily basis may not only be making us very sick, it could be causing us to die prematurely. The most disturbing revelation is that 30-60 minutes of sustained exercise may have little or no positive affect on a sedentary lifestyle. To put it simply, sitting for extended periods of time may be slowly killing you, and just working out after sitting around all day may not be enough to save you.

The fact that sitting around is bad for you isn’t very surprising; you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard that doing nothing for long periods of time could make you fat and unhealthy. But most of us thought that if we hopped on a treadmill or took a spin class or shook our groove thing in a Zumba class a few times a week, we’d be cool. But according to microbiologist Marc Hamilton from the University of Missouri we need to adjust our thought process. “People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising…Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body.”

This subject has been thrust into the national spotlight with a new Australian study that looked at death rates over a three-year period. The study concluded that people who spent a lot of time sitting at a desk or in front of a television were more likely to die sooner than those who were only sedentary a few hours a day. Of more than 200,000 adults age 45 and older, the lead author of the study Hidde van der Ploeg and his colleagues at the University of Sydney found that people who reported sitting for at least 11 hours daily were 40 percent more likely to die during the study than those who sat less than 4 hours daily.

The results appear in the Archives of Internal Medicine, March 26, 2012, and reveal that the link between too much time sitting and shortened lives stuck even when they accounted for how much moderate or vigorous exercise people got, as well as their weight and other measures of health.

Another study released in July of 2012 showed that an analysis of five large studies that followed about 2 million people in several different countries lead by Peter Katzmarzyk of Louisiana State Universities Pennington Biomedical research Center found that the life expectancies of people who said they spent more than three hours a day sitting were a full two years less than people who spent less than three hours sitting daily. Maybe even more surprising was that this was true regardless of whether subjects reported getting the recommended amounts of exercise or not.

In a 2005 article in Science magazine, Dr. James A. Levine, an obesity specialist at the Mayo Clinic, gave his insights into why, despite similar diets, some people are fat and others aren’t. “We found that people with obesity have a natural predisposition to be attracted to the chair, and that’s true even after obese people lose weight,” he says. “What fascinates me is that humans evolved over 1.5 million years entirely on the ability to walk and move. And literally 150 years ago, 90% of human endeavor was still agricultural. In a tiny speck of time we’ve become “chair-sentenced,” Levine says. This “chair sentence” as Levine puts it may very well be a death sentence.

So what’s the big difference between sitting and standing, you ask? I mean just standing around seems every bit as lazy as sitting, doesn’t it? Hamilton knows better. “If you’re standing around and puttering, you recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never tire,” he says. “They’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.” One enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, sucks fat and cholesterol from the blood stream, and burns the fat for energy while shifting the cholesterol from LDL (the bad kind of cholesterol) to HDL (the healthy kind of cholesterol). When you’re sitting, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to hang out in the bloodstream. After a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol drops by 20%. Amazingly this is just one of the myriad of chemical changes that take place in the body while we sit. Sitting for extended periods of time has a huge cascade of effects on the body, everything from back pain and restricted blood flow to being implicated in an elevated risk of certain kinds of cancer.  Let’s take a look at what this new research really has to say.

Sitting for extended periods of time is as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. And exercising for 30-60 minutes a day isn’t enough to undo the damage from extended periods of sitting. Is Your Chair Killing You reveals shocking new research showing that sitting for long periods greatly increases your risk of developing obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer. Our bodies were designed to move constantly over the course of the day, but most of us sit for hours a day at work and at home! Fitness and wellness expert and award-winning author Kent Burden has created brief, simple movements you can incorporate into your daily life to combat the damaging effects of sitting. These simple movements, done standing for 1-5 minutes each hour will burn calories, energize and refresh you, and you won’t even break a sweat; you’ll even improve your back pain. This book is a how-to for weight loss and disease prevention. Read this book–you’ll be healthier in as little as 8 minutes a day.

Nominated for the Dan Poynter Global Ebook Awards and won honorable mention at the Los Angeles Book Festival

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre – Non-Fiction

Rating – G

More details about the author

Connect with Kent Burden on Facebook & Twitter

Website http://www.kentburden.com/

Sandy James Takes on Life's Road Blocks @sandyjamesbooks #Lupus #AmWriting #WriteTip

Let me start out this post with some rather personal information.

I have lupus.

For those of you who don’t know about lupus, it’s an auto-immune disease that causes antibodies to go a little wonky and start attacking my own body. Suffice to say, it’s a bitch.

So what does my disease have to do with writing romance novels? It’s one of those roadblocks that every author has to face. And there are plenty of them out there!

In my case, the lupus plagues me two major symptoms—pain in my joints and muscles and something called “toxic fatigue.” Imagine having the aches and exhaustion of a bad case of flu on pretty much a daily basis. That’s what it’s like to have this damned disease.

Now, please don’t think I’m blogging about this just to whine or elicit your sympathy. Far from it! I have faced lupus the same way other authors face myriad things that keep us from writing. I work around it.

There will be so many different things that keep a writer away from her craft. We all know that. What a writer has to do is find ways to go over, under, around, through those roadblocks and keep churning out words.

One thing that helps me tremendously is that I love the craft so very much. Writing, from my perspective, allows me an outlet for the voices in my head that never want to shut up. I love creating new people and places. I love designing my own “worlds.” It’s like playing a literary version of The Sims.

But no matter how much I love writing, there are days I have to make myself sit down and write. I have to force myself past my roadblocks. The pain. Being tired. Wanting to just surf the internet. Wanting to watch the latest episode of The Walking Dead. It’s up to me to resist all those temptations. I have to get down to business and remember my goals.

Knowing how easy it is to make excuses, I’ve made it a goal in 2014 to write every single day. Even if I only get down a few hundred words, I strive to write something. The only way I can achieve that goal is to make writing one of the highest priorities in my life. That’s the only way I’ll keep my career moving forward.

What roadblocks keep you from writing? Have you found any tips to help other writers get around those roadblocks?

For the fans of Jennifer Probst, Ruth Cardello and Jill Shalvis, comes a series about love, friendship, and lunch!

When life gets tough and love is hard to find, four friends take their troubles to lunch. High school teacher Juliana Kelley tells the Ladies Who Lunch that her life needs an overhaul . . . and gets a whole lot more than she wished for.

Juliana has spent thirteen years in the same teaching job. She’s ready to dive into a new career with both feet . . . when a run-in with the hottest man she’s ever seen knocks her head over heels. But with her failed marriage to a fellow teacher fresh on her mind, Jules can’t afford to lose herself in a relationship-no matter how perfect it may seem.

Connor Wilson has hit rock bottom when he loses his career as a top-notch Realtor because of a large gambling debt. Now, in a small town he finds a fresh start-and a gorgeous redhead who sparks new life into him. Together they start a successful real estate company, but when pleasure sneaks into the business, they’ll have to decide what they can let go . . . and what they can’t live without.

Word count: 75,000-85,000

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre - Contemporary Romance

Rating – PG-13

More details about the author

Connect with Sandy James through Facebook & Twitter

Dance for a Dead Princess by @DeborahHawk3 #Romance #Mystery #ReviewShare

Dance for a Dead Princess by Deborah Hawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overall rating based on plot, characters and writing
4 stars

Initial thoughts - It started out fast but then it slowed down and I wasn't sure if I was going to like the rest of the book. I was expecting it to be a romance book with little mystery but it turned out to be the other way around.

Pros - I loved this book. It was absolutely packed with adventure, passion, heart-stopping suspense, love! If you are someone who prefers to read literary fiction over any other genres, as I do, all I can say to you is put your prejudices aside and try this book. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner. It truly is the work of an excellent and extremely talented storyteller and writer, all my "book snob" friends will be getting a copy, and I can't wait to read more from this author!

Cons - The dialogue wasn't consistent and at some sections did not seem to fit the setting or the character's traits.

In the end, I say - A good read which was emotionally satisfying and tied up loose ends in a good way.

Disclosure - As a Quality Reads UK Book Club member, I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I received no monetary compensation for my book review. This book review is based on my thoughts, opinion and understanding of the book. This book review does not reflect the opinion of other book club members.

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The Soul of the World (Legends of Amun Ra) by @jg_silverman - 5 stars - #Fantasy #ReviewShare

The Soul of the World by Joshua Silverman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Overall rating based on plot, characters and writing
5 stars

Initial thoughts - First things first, the editing for this book is close to flawless. Every word is in place and you don’t have to reread to make sure you have understood correctly. Imagination, imagination, imagination. How does he do? Silverman builds a world that makes reading this book into an experience.

Pros - I preferred the introduction more than the conclusion. It was a single line that made me perk up and go, “okay, let’s do this.” The characters are clearly defined, each brings his or her own strength to the story and there is enough twists and turns to keep the reader glued to the plot. Without reading the first book, it may feel some things are undiscovered but when you read it in sequence, these are explained and as you get to the end, little clues are left behind to what the third book may bring (I hope).

Cons - I have to wait for the next book which I hope comes fast enough.

In the end, I say - I would highly recommend the book to any fantasy reader and also to book clubs or reading groups. This series has many points which are worth discussing - these include world building, writing technique and 3D characters.

Disclosure - As a Quality Reads UK Book Club member, I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I received no monetary compensation for my book review. This book review is based on my thoughts, opinion and understanding of the book. This book review does not reflect the opinion of other book club members.

View all my reviews