Lately I’ve been reading a lot of YA despite the fact that I’m about as far from YAhood as one could possibly get and still be animated. I like YA. The stories I’ve been reading are original and fresh with some really quality writing. A. S. King‘s The Dust of 100 Dogs comes to mind as does Neil Gaiman‘s The Graveyard Book, Heather Brewer‘s The Chronicles of Vladimir Todd and Lynn Sinclair‘s Key to Aten series. I’m sure that the publishing industry, obsessed as they are with the ‘bottom line’, will screw this up eventually as they have with my usual genre of Suspense/Thriller. With the possible exception of Barry Eisler, Lee Child and a very small handful of others, the S/T genre would fit nicely into that old Reagan quip about redwoods: If you’ve read one Suspense/Thriller, you’ve read ‘em all.

Recently I finished Adrienne Kress‘s Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. I don’t think this is a YA book, more like Middle Grade, or MG if you’re in the know about such things. Frankly, all these genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres confuse the hell out of me but I’m pretty sure Alex and the Ironic Gentleman is MG. For one thing, the protagonist is a ten and one half year old girl. I don’t think that quite qualifies as Young Adult. Maybe Old Child or Middle of the Road Child or Almost a Teenager But Not Quite but I haven’t, yet, heard of genres such as these. The other thing that leads me to classify it as MG is the story telling style which I will go on about later.

In a nutshell, so to speak, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman is the story of Alex Morningside and her 6th grade teacher Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood is the rightful heir of the Wigpowder fortune, a hidden pirate’s trove which no one knows the location of and which a competing family, the Steeles, are trying to claim as their own. Alex manages to find the map to the location but not before Mr. Underwood is kidnapped. The rest of the story details the adventure’s Alex encounters as she tries to rescue her beloved teacher and secure for him his rightful fortune.

‘Nuff said, as Stan Lee would say. Hey, you didn’t think I was going to give it all away, did you? Suffice it to say there are some wonderfully drawn out characters in this story and the adventures will tickle you silly.

I will say that I had a bit of a hard time getting into this book. Not because of the writing, to be sure. And certainly not because of the story. All that was quite impressive. It was the story telling style that threw me for a bit, one which I haven’t encountered in a very long time. That and, I suppose, the age of the protag. Hard to identify with a ten and a half year old when there’s a half century difference between she and thee. But once I opened myself to, and actually remembered, the wonder and joy of a life at its beginning, I really fell into this and found myself embracing fully the style Kress uses to tell Alex’s tale. Trust me, you’ll love it.

And, just so the FTC doesn’t get into my case here, no one has paid me for this review. Hell, Adrienne, who I know from my time on the writer’s forum Backspace, has no idea I’m even writing this and, considering how little traffic I get on this blog, I doubt it will help her much anyway. Still, if you are the one or two sorry souls who do follow my blog, please buy Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. If not for yourself than for someone you love. Trust me, they’ll get a hell of a kick out of it.

I’ve just started reading Kress’ Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate. Maybe I’ll let you know what I think of it later.

I’m EJ and I dog ear book pages.

Yeah, I know, sacrilege, defamation of the sacred page, the kind of thing the library police are there for. Still, I do it and I’m glad other readers do it as well. I love it when I’m ferreting out clues in a good mystery, following the adventures of a pirate cursed by the dust of a hundred dogs, viewing the Mississippi from Pap’s point of view or slicing up a Fokker fuselage with my Sopwith’s 7.7s and I suddenly run across a dog eared page. I always stop and think: Someone has been here before me, in this very place I now am.

I always wonder about the person who dog eared the page; were they young or old, male or female? Did they run out of time, patience, were they distracted by something, called to the phone or by a loved one or just get sleepy at the end of a long day? Were they casual readers, avid readers or total book junkies as I am? What did they think of this story we share? Have they read other books by the same author or was this their first? When I see that crease up there I actually feel the presence of that unknown reader, I can almost see them standing there, smiling, knowing what’s ahead, squirming to keep from giving the end away.

The publishing industry is going through changes, eBooks are taking over. I’ll admit that despite my love for the feel of a book in my hands, I support this eBook revolution. I think it will give a lot of good writers a chance to entertain a lot of good readers, something the publishing industry with its bottom-line mentality doesn’t seem to get. The sad thing about that, though, is you can’t dog ear 1s and 0s.

Back when finned gas-guzzlers ruled the road, there were hundreds of short story markets and I sampled as many of their wares as I could get my hands on. Well into my twenties, short stories were half of what I read and all that I wrote. Real life intruded and both the markets and my short story writing fell by the wayside. Novel writing was the way to go and there I attempted to travel.

My first ‘novel’ was written in the late 70s – early 80s, nearly indecipherable scrawls on pad after pad of yellow paper. It was called Mrs. Lawrence of Essex – A Twisted Love Story and was really a series of short stories strung together along a time line. I lost those sheets of paper somewhere along the way but remembered the gist of the story vividly, transferring it to zeros and ones when I got my first computer. Over the years, that file has moved from computer to computer, been converted from Wordstar to Wordperfect and updated through all the WP versions to the current one. It’s still pretty much in it’s first draft stage and may well stay there forever.

I completed three more novels since those first scrawls. The first of those went through so many revisions and name changes that it’s a disjointed mess and no longer has a title. I think of it as my learning novel. It was a good story with good characters that I think of too often but it’s so mixed up now I doubt it will ever see the light of day.

The second of those three, Stealing The Marbles, I wrote in a frenzy shortly after a return from Greece in 2004. I even managed to get an agent for it but he turned out to be a royal dickhead and I ended up dumping him. I haven’t made a serious effort to get another one since. Call it a quirk in my personality, but I have a difficult time playing the query game and, considering the bizarre way the publishing industry works today, there are long moments when I’m not sure I want to play the game. Hell, I’m not sure I could play it. I don’t do people well and once you get published you find yourself in the midst of a whole lot of em. I have a feeling I’d make a complete ass of myself.

The last of the three, Meter Maids Eat Their Young – A Love Story’s End, damn near killed me. Meter Maids was sort of a sequel to Mrs. Lawrence and a little too autobiographical for comfort, sort of a closure thing to something I’d been hanging onto much too long. Another one of those quirks, ya know, a tendency to hang on to things long past the point at which I should let them go.

Since finishing Meter Maids, I haven’t really attempted another novel. I’m not sure if I ever will. Oh, I have ideas, I’m just not sure if I want to devote the time to something I probably won’t pursue beyond the writing. What I have been doing is writing short stories and finding that I really enjoy the whole process. Three or four have been published in the last few months and I have one, The Karaoke Singer, currently playing at the SoMa Literary Review.

I like the intensity of writing a short, the brief letting go of the real world and into the whirlpool in my head. Once an idea takes hold, I can be off and running, pounding out two or three or ten thousand words in the time it takes the sun to make it’s daily journey across the sky and having a finished product by bed time. And when it’s done, there are no query letters to write, no dismal hunt for an agent, no marketing departments to judge your worth, just a quick scan of Duotrope’s Digest to find the right market and off the story goes. Ok, so there’s rarely any pay but you don’t have to do any interviews, become a guest blogger, meet and greet any editors or publishers or marketing drones or play any of the other games a published novelist needs to play in today’s publishing world. And, being the basic recluse that I am, I like that just fine.

Did I mention that The Karaoke Singer has been published by the SoMa Literary Review? Please show your support for short stories in general and me in particular by checking the ezine out. To check out some of the other stories I’ve published recently, follow this LINK.