A Book Review!

My New-Found Land has gotten a nice review at The Lulu Book Review! This is my first non-friend/non-acquaintance review!

Although I do keep editing and updating the book as I find errors, I've debated whether it was worth my time and money to get a professional edit and ISBN. Such a step would enable me to place my book in libraries and bookstores where I have connections and perhaps branch out from there. It would mean a lot of work and self-promotion and I'm not sure if it's a path I have time for right now. But it could be rewarding and would at the very least be educational.

This little review gives me confidence to start thinking along those lines again. Funny to think that this road trip story with its origins as serial blog fiction could have potential as a "real" book. It came together so organically on a five-month nightly blog posting binge that I've never treated it very seriously. Meanwhile, the novels that I've written with a deadly serious mindset still wait for me to toss them back on the query-go-round while I stress and angst over every comma and conjunction.

Maybe the secret is to not be too serious? I've certainly had more fun with My New-Found Land than with anything else I've ever written. That alone has made the journey worth my while!

Tagged!

Hi. It’s me, Diana Channing. Sorry if I’m a little nervous, but this isn’t where I’m supposed to be. My author got tagged by someone named Karen Alaniz, but she says she’s busy, and I should respond instead. I’m afraid to ask what my author is so busy with. She’s probably thinking up more trouble for me. So I’m going to try to appease her by answering this "meme" thing.

I’m supposed to write eight things about myself. I can’t think what would be interesting about me, but I’ll do my best.

1. I know three languages—English (of course), Spanish, and Apache.
   
2. I never knew my father, who was drafted into the resource wars when I was a baby and didn’t come back.
   
3. I got my first gun when I was eight. It was a birthday gift from my grandfather, and he taught me to hunt small game near our rancho. This was something he used to do with my Uncle Nick, who was killed in the resource wars.
   
4. My grandmother hardly ever left the house, although she didn’t use to be that way. She was in the town of Macrina the day of the big food riot and barely escaped with her life. After that she was always nervous and preferred to stay indoors and knit or sew.
   
5. After what they call the Valle Redondo Massacre, I went to live with my neighbor, Amalia Channing, and her adopted boy, Will. Neither of them are kin to me, but Amalia encouraged me to call her Auntie, and Will let me call him my brother. I had no more living relatives, so it helped to have a family, even if it was one we made up.
   
6. We lived for three years on the Apache reservation after leaving Valle Redondo. The Apaches owed Auntie’s family a favor, since her sister Carina was a veterinarian and had cared for their animals without hardly ever charging them for it. But once the Nativist faction got control of the tribe, we had to leave because we had no native blood.
   
7. There’s a folk song about me, but it’s not true.
   
8. I’m afraid to read what my author is writing about me, but I bet it’s not true, either.
   

Well, that wasn’t so bad. I can think of things I've done that were a lot harder. Naming eight interesting people I met on my journey to Kentucky would’ve been more fun, though.

I hope this makes my author happy. I don't know what I ever did to make her hate me, but I want no more trouble with her.

Character Study: Will Channing

With a nod to Susan Helene Gottfried and her West of Mars blog, I’ve decided to post occasional character studies, drawn from my writings.

I’m starting with loyal but stubborn Will Channing, from my dystopian novels. He is a peripheral character in Tin Soldier, a main character in Bella Diana, and gets a few mentions in the first diary of Diana's Diary. He also features prominently in the planned final book, Water Bearer.

1. Will isn’t technically an orphan. He has no reason to think his parents are dead. He just hates them.
   
2. When he was seven his parents hired him out him to a rancher who was a known child molester. He figured if he did a good job, he would be left alone. This worked at first, until it quit working.
   
3. Will ran away and spent the next few years traveling and getting by as best he could.
   
4. He coped with his memories of molestation by protecting the girls he met on the streets. This made him feel strong and in control of his own destiny.
   
5. At the time Donovan Sloan caught him picking pockets in the town of Macrina, Will was caring for a young orphan named Tasha. He referred to her as his sister, even though she wasn’t.
   
6. Donovan took Will and Tasha to live with Amalia and her sister Carina in Valle Redondo. After nearly four years on the streets, Will didn’t adapt very well to having rules and lessons.
   
7. Everything changed when Will met the neighbor girl, Diana. They were close in age and shared the same interests, but she was smarter and didn’t need Will’s protection. He found this so surprising that he was smitten, although he was too young to realize it.
   
8. Will learned how to read only because Diana liked to send him notes and he wanted to know what they said.
   
9. When the government mercenaries came to Valle Redondo, Will saved Diana’s life but couldn’t save her family.
   
10. Will started calling Amalia “Mother,” as a gesture of respect.
    
11. He took Amalia’s last name as his own, even though she never adopted him in any legal fashion because the secession and civil war made it too confusing to figure out which “government” was the “real” one.
    
12. Because Diana was so traumatized at the loss of her mother and grandparents, Will allowed her to call him “brother,” or “shilah” in the language of the small Apache tribe they sheltered with after they left the valley. He thought she’d get better faster if she felt like she still had family.
    
13. By the time Will was old enough to realize that he was in love with her, Diana had been calling him “brother” for so long she could think of him in no other way. But he won't accept that.
    
14. Will isn’t introspective, and he isn’t a man of ideas. But he can recognize these traits in others and he respects them.
    
15. Will is loyal and reliable, almost to a fault. These traits inspire confidence when he is in a leadership role.
    
16. These same qualities turn to stubborn blindness in his dealings with Diana, who won’t follow his lead in the one thing that really matters to him—building a future together as husband and wife.