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Be a Sex-Writing Strumpet: Stacia Kane
From now on I’m going to copy all the reviews I write for this blog over to my original, bigger blog, How Publishing Really Works. Comments here will remain open as usual; comments on my reviews over at HPRW will be closed, so that discussions about the books are kept to one site. This should mean that we’ll get a bigger audience for the books which are featured here, and I hope a wider-reaching discussion for each of my reviews.
We’re talking about writing sex scenes here, guys. This is not for children. Despite my best efforts there is no way I can do this and not stray into adults-only territory. — SK
Stacia Kane writes novels filled with “… flaming hot sex…” (Romantic Times), “… sizzling romance that heats up every page…” (Darque Reviews), and “… spicy sex scenes beautiful enough to make you cry and hot enough to steam windows at the same time…” (Michele Lee). She has published more than a dozen romances and urban fantasies, with publishers like Ellora’s Cave, Pocket, Del Rey, and HarperVoyager. Now she opens her bag of tricks to show you how you too can write the scenes that readers crave.
From setting the scene to consummating the union, Stacia takes you all the way. She reveals the tricks of the professional author, step by step (using examples taken from her own and others’’ writing), giving practical exercises to try in your own books.
When sex is done right, the scene illuminates the most private acts of your characters, demonstrates their connection, their trust, the depth of their feelings, their desire for each other, the moment their relationship deepens and changes beyond anything they’ve been through before; it’s the scene that strengthens the story, increases tension, and adds complications, and at the same time gives the readers what they’ve been waiting for.
From the bare outline to the fully-fledged ready-to-publish novel, Stacia shows you how to avoid common errors, which details to use and which to avoid, what to do when the sex scene isn’t working, how to heat up the action, how to switch point-of-view, how to take the readers along with you to the finish.
Be a Sex-Writing Strumpet is like a masterclass in erotic fiction.
“A sex scene should be fun to write, and it should be fun to read.” Stacia Kane
I’ll start this review off with two disclaimers: this is the first book I’ve featured here which wasn’t submitted to me for review. I paid my own money for it, and after I’d read it I asked its author if she was okay with me reviewing it here: luckily for me, she was. Which brings me onto my second disclaimer: Stacia Kane, the writer of this book, is a friend of mine. If I hadn’t know her well and read her other books I doubt I’d have even known about this book, let alone bought it.
It’s a cracking little read. It’s engaging, absorbing and full of life; and it’s a perfect book for self-publishing: it has an easily-defined niche market, and Stacia already has an established fan-base thanks to her excellent novels. Stacia writes with a very forthright, entertaining voice; her personality infuses every line; she doesn’t shrink away from the more potentially challenging aspects of sex-writing; and the advice and information she gives is absolutely clear, on-the-button and hugely useful. She’s a fabulous fiction writer and an inspiring non-fiction writer, and I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in, or considering, writing any sort of sex scene.
And yes, for the record I did find a couple of problems. There is a punctuation error in the back cover copy; I don’t much like the jacket design for the print edition, which is muddy and dull; and I found a missing full stop or two between the covers. But I became so absorbed by the text that I forgot to look for such problems, and I read the entire book in one sitting. Such is the power of strong writing: and that’s why wanted to review this book here.
You can buy the Kindle edition here
The Turning: Paul J Newell
The world is Turning. He can sense it. Now he has to stop it.
People are disappearing.
When Lleyton Quinn is arrested in connection with a missing woman, he insists he knows nothing about it. He’s wrong. Soon he comes to realise that he is intimately entwined in the whole mystery. And when the female detective who arrested him pleads for his help, he is dragged to the centre of a phenomenon that could change everything. This is more than just missing people. The very fabric of society is being slowly unstitched by an unknown seamstress, and Lleyton has been chosen to pick up the threads. Before it’s too late. Before he disappears too…
This book is an intriguing blend of crime-thriller and science-fiction. Comic, dark and surreal in places, the story is based in the near future, in a world not too dissimilar from our own. Rich in thought-provoking concepts, this novel touches on all aspects of humanity, culminating in an evocative new theory about the nature of our world. This is fiction… that promises to teach you something.
The Turning is the sort of book that would might well accrue a stack of personalised rejections and offers to consider the writer’s next book when sent out on submission to mainstream publishers and agents. It is so very nearly excellent: but because of the author’s inexperience in both writing and editing it doesn’t quite reach the mark.
I can sympathise with Mr. Newell, because he makes the same sorts of mistakes that I make in my first drafts: we both over-write, we both use cliché, and we both like to hammer our points home and then some. The difference is that I then try to edit all those mistakes out, whereas Mr Newell seems content to leave them standing.
Overall, then, an impressive attempt which is let down by a lack of skilled editing. It’s a shame, as beneath all the extraneous stuff Newell’s writing is bright and pacey and engaging, with a light humour which reminds me a little of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar novels. Newell shows real talent and potential, and if he pays much more careful attention to his editing skills in future projects he might well go far. I read sixty-six pages out of two hundred forty-two to find my fifteen mistakes: however, I will almost certainly read this book right to the end and so I recommend it, despite its faults.
Lines of Neutrality: SB Jung
Lines of Neutrality is a window into the lives of two modern-day assassins—Raven Yin and Christian Delacroix. Unbeknownst to either of them, they are both hired to kill the same mark and coincidentally choose the exact same night and time to strike. This begins a chain of events that brings Raven and Christian together to fight a war far larger and more complex than either of them could have imagined. It is a war being waged against secret societies whose agendas are more enigmatic than their rumoured existence.
Their personalities and methods are fundamentally different, yet each of them discovers more about themselves by studying the other. Despite secret societies, internal betrayal, stolen memories and personal battles, Raven and Christian defy the odds to show that the Society of Assassins is nobody’s pawn.
S. B. Jung has been an English teacher since 2002. She has been writing plays, poems, and novels since 1997; Lines of Neutrality is her first published work. Her husband Matthew and son Aiden have been her strength, encouragement, and inspiration as she continues to write and create more worlds for readers to enter and enjoy.
SB Jung is a writer with real promise and Lines of Neutrality: Book One of the Assassin Chronicles has an interesting premise. Her text is lovely and clean, her grammar is pretty much spot-on, and I found that the pages of this book turned with a very pleasing swiftness: but despite all that, only read as far as page seventeen.
The problems I found were, for the most part, small and easy to correct: for example, the appendix is the first thing I found after the dedication page but the information it provides is confusing when presented here—it would have been much better placed at the back of the book; the cover design is unprofessional, and not terribly attractive; and the text on that front cover is blurry, slightly out of focus, and is in a font which really isn’t clear enough. The copy on the back cover needs attention too: it’s a little confused, a little cliched, and in places doesn’t quite make sense.
Moving on to the main text, then, I found a few quibbles which a decent edit would almost certainly resolve: there were some contradictions and lapses of logic which caused me to pause and rethink, and so spoilt the flow as I read. But the biggest problem that I had was that while this text is far more fluent and absorbing than most of the books I’ve reviewed here, it is still quite clearly the work of a novice writer—a talented and potentially very capable one, but still a novice.
I’d like to see what Ms Jung’s writing becomes when she’s written, and read, a great deal more. I have the feeling she could turn out to be competent and productive, and that in the years to come she might well produce books which are far superior to this good-but-flawed beginner’s effort.
The Deadline Murders: Ron Morgans
HENRIETTA FOX is a paparazzo. A wild, flame-haired girl in biker’s boots and leathers with an Irish temper. She rides a Yamaha on the streets of London stalking celebrities for the tabloid gossip pages. When a Chinese military plane explodes in a fireball before her camera, life for Henrietta Fox gets dangerous!
Five reporters across Europe have been murdered, each with their exotic, lop-eared Sumxu cats. Animals considered extinct for 300 years. Only Henrietta Fox knows why – and that knowledge could kill her. To survive she must pursue a madman across China with partner CASS FARRADAY, a six foot three ex-Repton public schoolboy turned tabloid reporter.
Only they can prevent an Armageddon assault on Britain’s Air Traffic Control. Fail and half a million lives will be lost.
Some self-published books are dreadful; a few are fabulous; and a few come so very close to being really good that I want to grab their authors by the lapels and shout words like “typesetting!” at them, as loudly as I can.
If Ron Morgans lived near me, he’d be getting the shouty treatment right now.
With The Deadline Murders Mr Morgans has written an engaging, competent murder mystery which I thoroughly enjoyed: but he’s let his book down by allowing some very basic errors to scatter themselves all over its pages. He’s used hyphens where dashes should appear; I spotted a few extraneous commas; and his page numbering is all over the place: his front matter pages are numbered 1 to 8 and then begin all over again with page 1 when his story starts (it’s convention to use a different numbering style for front matter if you want it numbered separately from the main text otherwise you end up with more than one page 4, which is confusing and can cause problems when referencing the text); and on a personal note, I found the paragraph indents far too deep. These are problems which a good copy editor—or even a good typesetter—could have fixed for him, and it’s a shame to see them on the pages of this otherwise competent book.
Such problems are minor, though, and as ever, my main focus is on the writing. I have a few issues with some of the grammar (for example, in the back cover copy quoted above it is implied that Henrietta’s leathers have an Irish temper); and there were a few problems with the text which only Mr. Morgans can fix: I realise that this is a thriller, and not a literary novel: I expect it to rely on the standards of the thriller genre. But in this novel some of those standards have been over-used to the point where they’ve become stereotyped. The two main characters were stereotypical in both their characterisation and their differences to one another: Henrietta Fox is a biker-girl photographer with red hair and a temper; Cass Farraday is ex-public school and wears suits from Saville Row. While they’re lively as characters go, I wanted them both to have more depth and subtlety and I think that a writer of Mr Morgans’ talent could have achieved this without too much trouble, even allowing for the limitations posed by the genre’s conventions. As it is, the interplay between his two main characters at times strays into Gene Hunt’s territory: on several occasions I felt like I was visiting the provincial 1980s (which was my favourite decade, though, so no great hardship there). Despite these little niggles it’s obvious to me that Ron Morgans is a capable, confident writer who, with a little more guidance and revision, could have brought this book up to a significantly higher standard.
I’ll happily admit that my genre-of-choice is literary fiction, which isn’t what Ron has written here: but I’m not trying to drag him over to the literary dark side. I just get the feeling that while this book is good, he is capable of much more. He has sailed through some of the things that others find most difficult—finishing a whole novel, creating distinct and lively characters, and constructing a plausible world for them to live in—who hasn’t done quite so well with the easier stuff. I think that Ron Morgans is a writer to watch who, with persistence and dedication, might well go on to bigger things, and I’m thrilled to have been sent a self-published book which shows such potential. By the time I reached page twenty-seven I had abandoned my scorecard: I read The Deadline Murders right through to the end and I’m pleased to be able to recommend it to you, albeit with just a few very minor reservations.
Edited to add: my good friend Sally Zigmond has also reviewed this book, and you can read her opinion of it here.
The 7 Gifts That Came To Earth: John Mellor
Seven precious gifts bestowed on the Earth but not revealed~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A young boy is charged with finding them“One of those unique and wonderful manuscripts that come one’s way all too rarely”“A most unusual and beautiful story that lingers in the mind long after one has read it”
~ ~ Senior Editor at a major UK PublisherThe singer emerged, and his music raged across the land, a wild, swirling cloud of chords laying waste like locusts to all that was soulless before it ..I come not to bring peace, he said
This story may be freely read on-line. But if you buy the book it will please my wife and impress my friends. Maybe yours too if you gift it to them. And you can read it in bed
For any freethinking, enquiring mind over 12
—John Mellor
I’m not a big fan of spiritual or inspirational fiction: I find it predictable, cheesy and often quite cringe-making. So I’m not the best person to review this book, which is rooted firmly in those genres.
Despite my reservations, that hideous big “7” on the cover, and the truly horrible fonts in which this text has been set (authors: if you’re considering using fancy fonts in yourself-published book, please read this first), I thought that this little book was charming.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect: no book is. Some of the storytelling was a little too forced and predictable from me (but that might well be down to the book’s genre which, as I’ve already explained, isn’t my favourite); the language used was a little formal and old-fashioned, which distanced me from the story and so stopped me becoming emotionally involved with it; and there were, of course, punctuation problems with it (for example, a couple of instances where a full-stop had managed to slip outside a quote-mark which should have contained it, and a dash used where a hyphen was required). There were a few lapses in meaning, to: for example, on page 21 we are told,
The specially-made gown — designed by the greatest couturier in the kingdom, assembled by a hundred hand-picked seamstresses from the finest silk of faraway lands — was cheap.
The Self-Publishing Review 
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