Voices: Religion As A Writing Tool

Introduction

Voices by Ursula K Le Guin was the last book on my March reading list, and I actually finished on time, but I’m a little behind on posting the review. At any rate, I’m done reading it, so let’s take a look.

Reader’s Review: Voices

This is the first YA fantasy novel I’ve reviewed on my own without a request for a review here on the blog. Le Guin didn’t disappoint either. The piece is well-written and perfectly suited to this blog. I have read Le Guin before, as I read her Earthsea series when I was fourteen or fifteen. I loved those books, so I had high hopes for this book. And, as I said, Le Guin didn’t disappoint. She masterfully wove a story that captivated me with a rich story, a vibrant world, and dynamic characters.

The only real complaint I have is that it was in present tense at the beginning. I really don’t like that in books, but because it was first person and was almost written as an address from the MC to the reader, it was easier to move past. It did eventually switch to past tense as the full narrative got underway, and it was much easier to enjoy then.

The book is suitable for older children and teens. I’d say it’s fine content wise for anyone who’s at least twelve. The book does mention rape and abuse of women by the soldiers in the city where the book takes place, but nothing is actually shown or discussed in much detail. Similarly, there are one or two conversations the MC ends up roped into where one of the soldiers’ sons was talking about sex and trying to figure out if any women the MC knew would be available, but the MC shot the conversation down quickly and not much detail was actually given. The author keeps it PG-13. The language, to my recollection, was clean. Overall, I would recommend parental guidance for kids under twelve, but it is a YA book and stays appropriate for teens.

Writer’s Review of Voices

As the title hinted, our discussion today will center on Le Guin’s masterful use of religion in her work to bring the story and its civilizations to life.

I know some fellow authors who, as Christian authors, strongly object to religions besides Christianity being in their work. They won’t include any deities in their writing, made up or otherwise, that are not the Christian God or a representation of Him. I respect that, and if you’re in that camp, you’ll probably find this particular writer’s review rather useless to you. But if you do want to include deities and religions in your world for authenticity or other reasons, as many writers do, Le Guin has a lot to teach.

Her work Voices mainly represents two religions: that of the Alds and that of the people native to the city the Alds conquered before the book began. The two are in conflict to start because the Alds believe in and worship only one god, believe writing is evil, and see the gods the natives worship as demons that must be purged from the earth to make way for their god’s return.

To start with, they only conquered the city in an attempt to find the origin point of all evil, which their legends say is located in the city or the land around it. They march in and destroy all libraries, writings, and statues of the gods they find along with anything that they believe to be a temple.

The natives are then forbidden to worship any god besides the Alds’ god, and anyone found with books is killed. Naturally, this doesn’t sit too well with the natives who were used to their worship and to governing themselves. It creates a great amount of hatred, tension, fear, and suspicion.

Le Guin uses religion to add to the conflict as well as to bring the world to life. If you dislike stories where religion, even made up religion, takes a strong roll, Voices probably isn’t for you. But because religion is an indispensable part of the world, the conflict, and the story, Le Guin’s work is an excellent place to start learning how to use fantasy religions, or even real ones, to bring your story world to life and to add fuel to your fire of conflict.

I could go on and on about the ways Le Guin uses religion to add to her story, but I’m a firm believer in the idea that observation of how it’s done well is one of the best ways to learn when it comes to writing. So go read Voices. See how Le Guin uses religion and then apply the principles you see to your own work. You’d be surprised what this kind of practice and learning method can do for your writing. Good luck!

The Vine Witch: Integration of Magic

Featured Ariel Paiement3 Comments

I recently finished listening to The Vine Witch on Audible. It was a great listen and a wonderfully written fantasy novel. This is the first fantasy novel I’ve reviewed on here that wasn’t by request too, actually. As always, I’ll start with the reader’s review and then go into the writer’s review. Don’t read the writer’s review if you want to avoid spoilers!

The Vine Witch – Reader’s Review

This book was a great listen! I got it from Audible and wasn’t at all disappointed. The characterization, imagination, and craft behind the story creates quite a bewitching tale. The only fault I had with it was that I didn’t like the way they brought actual words in for the spells here and there. They didn’t always do so, but I’m not fond of magic systems that use spoken incantations. While I don’t necessarily get too upset over being told a character chanted an incantation or spell, I dislike when actual words are used since I have no way to know what’s actually being said if it’s in a foreign language, which it sometimes was here.

The author clearly did her research on the darker side of the arcane arts, but I was pleased that she kept it clear that blood magic, demonic activity, and arcane/dark magic were considered evil and not to be meddled with. Whatever problems I had with the way she handled spells, this clear delineation between a magic that allows for things like crafting superb wine or creating pastries that allow one to realize the validity of love towards another and magic that kills, consorts with demons, and delves into darkness was something I greatly appreciated.

The other thing that I’ll note is that it’s fairly clean. No sex scenes, barely any heated kissing, and little that would cause me to say the book wouldn’t be okay for a younger audience. The only thing that might cause some parents to prevent their children from reading it would be the dealings with the darker, Satanic type of magic. I wouldn’t recommend the book for young children because of it, but it’s probably okay for thirteen and up.

The Vine Witch – Writer’s Review

As the sub-title of this post notes, we’re going to be looking at the integration of magic into the world within The Vine Witch. We’ve talked about magic in previous posts on Saturday Setups, with the most recent being on the consequences of it. Weaving it into the world can be difficult. However, Smith did a good job, and we can learn a lot from her techniques. So what were her techniques?

Spoken Spells

As I mentioned in the reader’s review, I didn’t like the use of spoken spells. Smith didn’t use them every time you turned around, which was good, but it still bothered me. That said, it did lend a certain sense of realism to the piece. Why do I say that? Well, not every type of magic that Smith had used spoken spells. Some did, but often, the spells used by the vine witches in the vineyards had more to do with remedies and unspoken communication with nature than it did spoken words.

Still, other kinds of witches, especially those dealing in hexes or curses, do use spoken spells. One interesting thing about how Smith chose to weave this into the story is that she uses rhymes. While some of the words used to activate spells weren’t English (And who knows what language they were. They didn’t sound familiar to me.), many of them were actually rhymes.

That part was quite interesting. Many of the spells the main character used were nursery rhymes she’d learned as a child. That isn’t something I’ve seen done much, but it gave the magic a unique flavor and served to blend it into the world more clearly.

Making Magic Indispensable

Worth noting is that this book is set in the real world somewhere in France (I believe). So while Smith didn’t have to create a new world, she did have to find a way to spin a tale where magic could fit in. In the case of The Vine Witch, people are actually quite open about the use of witches.

Everyone in the Chateau valley where the vine witches work knows about the witches who work the vineyards. In fact, the witches are revered because no one makes good wine without them. In this way, Smith makes magic an indispensable part of life. Usually, magic used on an Earth setting for a book tends to be less relied upon. Smith didn’t choose that path. She wove a tale where magic and life couldn’t be separated.

In fact, that was proved many times over in The Vine Witch because when the male lead tried to force the use of magic out of his vineyard, the vineyard constantly failed. He didn’t make good wine, and everything kept going downhill until he was willing to open up to a world he couldn’t see.

Differing Views on Magic

The other thing that Smith uses to bring the world to life is the difference in views on magic. Some view it as purely evil while others have a more complicated view of it. Even the witches themselves have areas of magic that they believe are absolutely foul and should never be touched (such as blood magic). The main character initially falls into the camp that magic is superstition at best and evil at worst.

He finally is able to reconcile magic with reason when one of the monks at the local church talks to him about it. The monk tells him that once upon a time, the ideas of bacteria, pasteurization, and cars would have all seemed like magic too.

Why? Because they were beyond the realm of human imagination and senses at the time. The monk notes that the vine witches are able to see a part of the world that normal human senses can’t but that being able to do so doesn’t necessarily make them evil. Magic, like any other tool, can be used for good or for evil.

I don’t necessarily condone that perspective of things as some of the magic used in the book is undeniably evil. The author doesn’t try to make it seem good either, but in moments like this, there is cause to question whether she really believes it’s evil in every case.

As a Christian speculative fiction author, I prefer more clarity here. However, each author and reader has to make that choice for themselves. My personal convictions won’t match everyone’s, and that’s fine. As I said earlier, there were things that bothered me about the book. However, it was a good read overall with a lot that authors can take away from it.

Conclusion

As both a reader and a writer, I found The Vine Witch to be an engaging and interesting read. I was pulled in to the story and kept enthralled until the very end. It had twists and turns I didn’t expect and characters I could relate to and bond with emotionally. I’d recommend this book to anyone who loves fantasy with the caution that if you’re staunchly against any kind of spell-based or spoken-word magic, you may want to steer clear.

New Blog Schedule For the Fantasy Nook

Featured Ariel Paiement

Hi, everyone! I hope this finds all of you doing well. Things have been chaos for me lately with finishing out teaching, working full-time as well, and finishing out my own freelancing projects in addition to upkeeping the blog and still writing. I’ve been handling it all for months now, but now that I’ve gotten my acceptance into Liberty as a Masters student for Composition/English, I only have this summer before much of my time will be spent on work and my classes. I’ve been thinking a lot about a new blog schedule for The Fantasy Nook because of this.

And I’ve finally decided. Yes, I’m going to make adjustments to the blog schedule now. I contemplated waiting until January when I’m planning to start classes, but I want to have time in the summer to slow down a little and enjoy life. I haven’t really done that since I started my associates in community college nearly six years ago. And I can tell because it’s all becoming way too much. I can’t cut everything back, obviously. However, having a new blog schedule is one way I can help free up time to still enjoy what writing I do have instead of feeling like it’s a chore. As such, here’s what I’ll be doing.

The New Blog Schedule

I want to keep posting the Thursday Technicalities and Sunday Stories. I really enjoy writing those, and I feel like they’re the most useful regular segments of the blog. Here and there, I might also share a sneak peek at what I’ve been writing, but my writing pace may slow down quite a bit because of time limitations. Now, I’m not sure if I’ll be posting the Sunday Stories every week. I may end up doing it every other week, especially since I have to work from home for my job every third Sunday. On Thursday Technicalities, I will do my best to write one a week for you all. If it becomes too much, I will let you all know.

Book reviews! Since I won’t be overloaded with writing, I will be doing more reading. That means that I should be able to post book reviews more regularly. I’ll be putting up a page with what I’ve got planned out to read and when I hope to have the review posted. I do accept requests for reviews (only fantasy for the blog, but I’ll review other things on Amazon, Goodreads, and Bookbub even if it isn’t fantasy). So, while I do have a list, I’m not opposed to adding something to it if I have room and time. Sign up for reviews here.

At the End of the Day…

You’ll get Thursday Technicalities once a week as usual. Sunday Stories will be every other week typically. I’ll post book reviews as I finish fantasy books. Updates or sneak peeks at work will only be up here and there. I hope you’ll all stick with me despite the less frequent content!

The newsletter will still go out once a month with its usual content (book recommendations, updates, and a writing discussion for the month). I’m working on making that more reader-friendly for users who may not have the easiest time with their eye-sight. Someone kindly brought it to my attention that the format is misery for those with bifocals. To those who have the same problem and have struggled through it, thank you. I’m very sorry it’s been so difficult to read. It’ll be updated for the next newsletter assuming I’m able to get it fixed in time. If you want a spot in the newsletter, you can sign up on this form.

Idi & The Oracle’s Quest: Characterization and Voice

Featured Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This was the newest book on my list of books read. So far, it’s the only one I’ve finished this year. I’m off to such a great start on that sixty-books-read-this-year goal, aren’t I? Yeah, not really… Anyway, I finished this sometime mid-January but am only just getting to the review for the blog now. As usual, my reader’s review is the same as the one I post to the usual reviewing sites like Amazon, Goodreads, and Bookbub. If you are interested in learning more about the craft in the book, skip the reader’s review and go straight to the writer’s review. Or feel free to read both. I don’t really mind.

Reader’s Review

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It could have gone through another edit. There were a lot of little errors and problems that a strong editor could have ironed out of the book, and as an editor, those issues were abundantly clear to me. However, I found the story itself to be entertaining enough, and I don’t feel those problems would keep a reader looking for a quick read from enjoying. Unless you’re the type to be a grammar Nazi, a writer who’s picky about stuff being just right in every way, or a freelance editor like myself, you’re probably not going to notice the issues most of the time.

The characterization was pretty strong with several characters having particularly unique voices, which I appreciated. The variety in character, personality, and voice was refreshing, and I liked the struggles they all went through between choosing right or wrong in the entirety of the story.

That’s another thing. Right and wrong were clearly defined in the book with consequences for doing either clearly outlined too. It’s hard to find books that keep that line from becoming blurred, particularly in fantasy, so I liked that Traynor did this well. If you’re looking for that in your fantasy books, then this book has that going for it, for sure!

I would recommend this story. It’s a good choice for younger kids (pre-teens and up), I would say. There wasn’t anything terribly inappropriate, in my opinion, and the book doesn’t use any foul language. Kids who like adventure books with magic and wizards mixed in will enjoy this, and it’s easily accessible for even reluctant readers.

Writer’s Review

Now the fun part, right? We’re going to pick apart the craft for this book and talk about what could be better as well as what was well done. To begin with, let’s talk about the good things that we can all learn from. I’m going to focus mainly on voice and characterization since I noticed these two elements stood out as being nicely done in this book.

Voice

To begin with, voice was excellent here. When I say voice, I’m specifically referring to the different voices and flavors of speech that characters had. Some authors do very well with this while others don’t. Traynor did well with it. You could tell the difference between characters by the dialogue alone in most cases. The way they phrased things, what they said, and the word choices they used were unique with each character. Some were, of course, more similar than others, but they were all, in my opinion, different enough to allow readers to tell the difference. This can be pretty tough to do, so if you choose to read Idi & The Oracle’s Quest, pay special attention to the different ways Traynor differentiates between characters in dialogue. I think you’ll be surprised at how many ways it can happen with everything from sentence structure to the individual words themselves. It’s often more subtle than you’d think, though in some characters, such as the dwarves that one of the main characters stays with, have more unique voices than others.

Characterization

In many ways, voice is simply a subset of characterization. After all, the way a character speaks says a lot about who they are. However, voice wasn’t the only part of characterization Traynor executed well. Her characters in general feel as if they could be real people thanks to their little quirks, oddities, and practices. No two are alike, however similar they may be at times. Their uniqueness sets them apart from one another and goes a long way toward making the story believable. For me, the characterization was one of the main reasons I kept reading the book. I started it after picking it up in a Facebook review exchange group I’d joined, and we were only obligated to review if we felt we could give the book a good rating (anything above three stars). At first, I wasn’t positive if I could or not because of what the book didn’t do well, but the characterization combined with an overall interesting story-line saved this book from receiving no review or a shelving on the not-finished shelf on Goodreads from me. This just goes to show that many times, even if a reader isn’t fond of your plot or something else in the book, they’ll keep reading anyway if you can invest them in the characters.

A lot of what brought the characters to life was the humanity in them all. Idi started out with a petulant, rude streak but grew into a decent, kind human being. He went through struggles we can all understand (to one degree or another, at least), and I wanted to root for him. I wanted to know what happened to him. His mentor Marcus was also well-rounded. He was a kind old man who sometimes lacked patience but generally was very loving in spite of his insecurities and frustrations surrounding his apprentice. These are only two examples out of many in the book, but they’re good places to start if the area of characterization is something you struggle with.

What the Book Didn’t Do Well

Okay, so this is more a cautionary tale than anything. I know editing is expensive, or at least seems so when you’re a broke author struggling to make it in the highly competitive market, but it’s important. Now, I could tell some effort had been applied to this book, but it fell far short of professional in many places because of missing or misplaced commas, poor sentence structure, or lagging flow in the story. These are all things that, by themselves, wouldn’t necessarily cause a reader to stop reading for pleasure, but they’re certainly going to stand out to one degree or another.

We don’t notice what isn’t there. Unless it should be there, that is. Likewise, we often don’t notice what is there until it isn’t when it needed to be. This book is a good example of that. Mostly, its issues weren’t ones that an average reader would catch every time. They might notice a confusing sentence, a slow paragraph, or even a missing comma here and there. But for avid readers, it’s going to be a stumbling block. And here’s the thing. The avid readers are, many times, the ones who will share your books with all their friends and read them a million times if they really liked them. If they can’t point to a book and tell you it was a good piece of writing, they’re not going to recommend it. The average reader is going to read it, might mention it to one or two people (if they think of it or someone asks), and move on. Maybe they read the next book. Maybe not. If they’re not big readers but really found your book appealing, you may get a bit more exposure from word-of-mouth. Avid readers though are much more likely to become enthusiastic fans. I can say that honestly as an avid reader myself. I’d recommend my favorite authors in a heartbeat, and chances are that I’ll review them, share them, and talk about them too. At the least, I’ll be talking about them, even if I wasn’t directly asked. (Maybe a little too much sometimes).

All that to say that editing matters. It pays off. I know it feels expensive and it’s easier to do it yourself, but unless you’ve got some background in editing or have done a lot of research on it to learn how, it’s only easier because you don’t see all the problems with your manuscript. No one likes to admit it, but that’s the way things are. Even for me, as someone who edits for clients, I find that I don’t catch everything in my work without multiple edits (probably four or five as opposed to the thorough, once-through or twice-through edit I can do for a client), and not even then sometimes. Why? Pretty simple. I wrote it. I know what I was thinking. No one else does unless I communicated it well, and if I didn’t, well, I’m not going to catch on to that little problem unless it’s so obvious that even I don’t understand what I was trying to say. (Then I know there’s really a problem. Probably something along the lines of “I wrote this when I was three-fourths of the way asleep, and I need to rewrite this whole section” kind of problem.) That’s going to be at least equally true of anyone with little to no experience editing.

There’s no shame in that.

But you do need to address it if you want your book to stand out from every other self-published title on Amazon that some beginning writer threw together in hopes of making a quick buck on it. We all know a good cover sells books, but you’re not going to sell more than a few copies if everyone drawn in by the cover wants to leave five pages in because your work is so full of problems it’s impossible to get through.

To be clear, Idi & The Oracle’s Quest was not that bad. It wasn’t bad enough that I couldn’t understand it or wanted to bang my head against a brick wall. It was just bad enough to frustrate me a lot at the beginning and to continue to needle me here and there once I was invested in the characters. But, since we’re trying to learn from what went right and what went wrong with these book reviews, I didn’t want to overlook this important point. Get an editor if you don’t know how to edit. Even if you have to ask a friend who’s good at it to do it in exchange for something else (like a free copy of the book or a really nice dinner out), get an editor. If you can edit proficiently, then find beta-readers. Get input from your intended audience members so that you know what you missed! You will not catch it all because you are hardwired to understand what you are trying to communicate. No one else in the world is. Make sure you know what areas you need to clarify before you go publishing things.

Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful to you all! If you want a copy of Idi & The Oracle’s Quest, you can pick it up in ebook or paperback formats on Amazon. In closing, I would like to point out that this book did have an excellent message. It’s clear that the book has Christian influences to it, so if you’re looking for a good juvenile or YA Christian fantasy, this would be a good choice. It isn’t as clearly Christian or allegorical as Joanna White’s or Allen Steadham’s stuff, but it’s still good. I’d say it’s more like what I tend to write in that it has clear Christian influences, but it isn’t necessarily meant to be expressly Christian through clear salvation themes or Bible verses woven into the text. The influences are there if you’re a Christian or know anything about Christian beliefs, but you won’t be hit over the head with it everywhere you turn either if you’re more in the mood to read a book without serious philosophical undertones.

Howling at the Moon – The Surprise Ending

Featured Ariel Paiement

Introduction

To start off with, let me say that Howling at the Moon is a short story, not a book. So my review on the writers’ end of things will be a little bit shorter than it would normally be since there wasn’t as much in the book to dig into. But we’ll still go over that section, so let’s just dive right in!

Reader’s Review

Amber offered me a copy of this story when I mentioned I did book reviews on The Fantasy Nook and was looking to build up the content in that area. This was an already published work she had out, and I’m so glad I took her up on the offer of a free copy to review! This short story was over way too fast. I loved it, and I was really sad to see it end. The story drew me in from the start and held my attention through to the finish. The ending is a little bit unexpected, or, at least, it was for me, so I was a bit surprised by it. I had mixed emotions as a reader on the ending side of things. A part of me was glad that things worked out how they did, but another part was worried it might end nowhere good for the characters in the future. But, hey, it’s a short story, so the beauty of the ending is that we don’t know either way what happens as a result. All in all, I would definitely recommend reading the story. You can get a copy through Port & Key’s website or use the Amazon and Kobo links posted there to grab a copy.

Writer’s Review

Okay, those of you who are still with me are probably here looking to see what you can learn. If you’re just interested in reading the story or, at the very least, want to read it before I spoil it, please don’t read any further! There will be discussion on the story’s techniques and specific details, so please take the time to read the short story if you don’t want it spoiled. Then come back here.

Still here? Okay, let’s get started then!

The main thing I saw that was done extremely well was the twist ending Amber gave the story. At the beginning of the story, we have our protagonist, a witch who bakes cakes and cupcakes, and a woman who comes into the shop. The woman ends up having a tarot reading done by our protagonist, claiming she wants to know if her husband is cheating on her.

At this point in the story, I’m assuming that the main character might somehow help this poor woman or, since I didn’t realize it wasn’t a full-length novel, that the woman was just part of scenes to set up the main story. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turned out the guy our protagonist was dating was married to the woman who came in for a reading, and they’d split, so the woman was trying to kill him. Now, I’m not entirely sure if she did it because she wanted to make sure that if she couldn’t have him nobody would or if she just did it out of spite and anger. Who knows. But I wasn’t expecting her to actually kill him, using the spelled cake made by the protagonist to fulfill the woman’s wish. The protagonist’s sympathy was misplaced, apparently.

None of this was anything I expected, but I really didn’t expect the finale. The protagonist tries to bring her lover back from the dead, and Circe, the goddess of magic the witches are bound to in this story, agrees upon the condition that our protagonist becomes immortal and acts as her hand to remind the other covens who is really in control. Yup. She ends the story with a shade for a lover, whom she can only see during witching hour, and immortality for herself. Not at all what I was expecting to happen.

But, it worked really well. Amber set it up beautifully, and even though I never saw it coming, it made sense later after I’d finished the story. For those of us trying to achieve a similar effect with our endings, this is a good lesson in doing so. Set up the clues, make them subtle but still there, and then surprise the reader with the ending those clues led to. After you do that, you’ll have the certainty that most readers will understand why the ending was what it was, even if they didn’t expect it at first.