FREE Kindle promotion!

 

Okay, I promised to do this, so here’s how it works.  I can offer, as a promotion, up to FIVE days on the Amazon website, in which the novel can be purchased for $0.00.  Pretty good deal!  I’d like everyone to take advantage of this, whether you need to or not.  Why?  Because it boosts the stats, ranking, and visibility of the book, independent of the money it makes.  And that’s gonna be good for sales!

So, this weekend (August 4 and 5) I’m going to cheat a bit and kick this off by offering the SAMPLE version, currently on Amazon.com, for free.  For those of you loyal to this site, the text will be nothing you haven’t seen before–as it has been available for weeks already, right here.  Please download it there, anyway.  You’ll then have the Kindle version to try out, whether on an actual device, or on the virtual versions I discussed in my last post.  And you’ll help the book ranking.

Following that, as the book goes FULL VERSION on August 11, I will schedule a free day for it, too (exact date(s) to be determined).  Whether you wish to pay the $2.99 or not, download it then, too!  Every click helps, believe me.

Hopefully it’s clear this is a marketing strategy that Amazon has developed.  It works!  It helps sales, ultimately, by boosting exposure.  So, again, please contribute a few minutes to the effort.

Raise your hand if you love technology! Yeah, me neither. OR, how do I read this book without a Kindle?

As an automobile enthusiast, I’ve often found occasion to lament the passing of simpler times, and simpler modes of technology.  Fundamentally, a codex book and a supercomputer amount to the same thing: information storage and retrieval.  And yet, inasmuch as new tech speeds the pace of our lives, I do not really believe this means improvement.

I took the opportunity in this novel to bestow ownership of some vintage vehicles to specific characters, cars I would love to own myself but probably never will.  I did this for some solid literary reasons, as well: as in a good movie, the choice of transportation–whether walking, flying, using public services, or other–often tells us important details about the backgrounds and values of those who employ them.  Thomas Wright’s 1939 Lincoln limousine (above) was a gift from his father, during a period of personal prosperity, immediately preceding World War II; Lambert’s old Chevy farm truck (below) served the purposes of a lifelong working man.

NOW, a practical problem rears its head for those who would like to read CLOTHO’S LOOM (available in just 12 days) but do not own a Kindle E-Reader.  Amazon.com itself has provided two solutions that I’m aware of:

1) Kindle for PC.  Here’s the link to the download: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

As the name implies, this small bit of software installs and emulates a Kindle device on your home computer.

2) Kindle Cloud Reader: https://read.amazon.com/about

Here,you create an account just as any owner would, and the virtual reader and books reside on the internet for your access when desired.

So where there’s a “Will,” there’s a way. . .to read about him.  I have tried both of these methods, and all I can say is, they worked for me.  I don’t own a Kindle, either!

Link to Amazon purchase page!

 

http://www.amazon.com/Clothos-Loom-ebook/dp/B008QOCHIA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343608143&sr=1-1&keywords=clotho+loom

But DO NOT buy, yet!  Until the countdown is up in 13 DAYS, you can only get the same sample chapters you can get for FREE on this website (link at left).  It is holding the place of the complete novel, but I wanted to get things moving as early as possible.  The FULL text, cover art, table of contents, and so on, will all be uploaded in less than two weeks.

I DO invite anyone who has read the sample chapters, if they so desire, to post a pre-review on Amazon, at your leisure.  We can never get enough exposure.

When I get an ISBN, the novel can then be recommended on sites like Goodreads (there’s an ASIN number on there, currently–I’m not sure if that will work.)  Anyone who would care to link to the Amazon page in your social networks, I appreciate it.  But remember, DON’T BUY YET!

T-minus. . .

 

Okay, here we go!  Hopefully self-explanatory, but for clarity’s sake, that’s DAYS.  Two weeks from tomorrow, CLOTHO’S LOOM will be available, in its copyedited entirety, to the reading public!  Not as early in the summer as I’d hoped, but perhaps you’ve still got a slot open in your schedule for what I think will be worth the wait.

The scheduled venue is Amazon.com, which means Kindle format.  Price: a modest $2.99.  However, for those who need a conversion for another device, write to me here and I can provide it.  ALSO, there will be, according to Amazon’s incentive program, a few FREE days in which the novel can be downloaded–I will try my best to alert my loyal blog followers to be ready for them.

A very exciting and busy time for me, then.  Finally, I will issue an occasional, repeated request: for those of you actually reading, POST, POST, POST.  Do it here, sure, but I would especially appreciate you hitting the Amazon page frequently, linking it to friends and family, putting it in your cart (no need to buy more than once, of course) and PLEASE REVIEW the book on Amazon!

 

 

Dreams, Prophecies, Visions, Hallucinations, Memories and False Memories

 

As a long narrative beginning in media res (in the midst of things,) Clotho’s Loom required several different techniques for exposition (the usual being an ignorant character who asks questions in order to be caught up on the action, thus bringing the reader up to speed as well.)  Furthermore, I needed my characters to be able to see glimpses of the future (or possible futures, based on choices) or even perspectives outside of their own.

Early on I posted on the topic of surreality.  It follows then, that the techniques employed for visions, nightmares, and other kinds of access to the subconscious would require a prose quality that can be long/rambling, or short/fragmentary, or both, and always illogical and appealing more to the senses than the intellect.  And of course, filled with symbols.  In the illustration above, multi-tiered meaning is expressed visually.  I chose an oasis, since much of the novel takes place in a desert landscape–perfect for hallucinations.

Free Symbols

As in all romantic works of fiction, I have made liberal use of symbolism and whole symbologies.  They are there for the reader to interpret–or not–just as one prefers.  Probably the most abundant source of potential symbols is Nature.  For example, birds are used frequently in literature to represent a person’s longing for, or quest for, freedom.  A bird in a cage, then, means something quite different from a bird in flight.  Below, the Killdeer has a broken wing–no, that’s not quite accurate.  It pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest.  Sounds like a lot of responsibility can come with that freedom.  Attention to detail is mandatory.  Bird imagery, if sustained through a work, would then become a symbology: an entire system of symbols.  Since the moon, too, has many incarnations (rising and setting, color, size, phases, state of eclipse by clouds or the sun, and so on) it would qualify as a symbology unto itself.

A free symbol doesn’t remain static.  It’s dynamic: it changes, it’s elusive.  It’s also one advantage of a novel, with its enlarged scope, over a poem or short story.  As in life, characters, situations, even locations, either grow or they decay.  So if I say “Jack had the work ethic of a spider building its web,” and then, 100 pages later, an actual spider gets displaced by a careless dog–well, that’s going to warn us about what happens to all Jack’s hard work.

So if the writer does his job right, such figures usually cannot be fully interpreted locally, only globally: that is, a reader has to experience the entire work, and consider how the symbol has changed and evolved, and to which of all the characters and concepts does it finally refer, and how, and why.  Quite a lot of fun, in my opinion, though not much like science and mathematics.  More for the right-brained among us, or inside each of us.

Sundial Worshipers

It may well be that ancient tribes of humans actually worshiped the sun.  Anyone who has camped in a very cold climate, and found herself eagerly anticipating the warmth of the dawn, can easily imagine how this would be so.  Yet, we modern, civilized folks, with our artificial heat sources, are above all that, aren’t we?

For those who pay attention to films from the late 1960s, you may recall Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with a section title-carded “The Dawn of Man,” during which two groups of proto-humans fight over possession of a watering hole.  Later, in the year 2001 A.D., we witness the Americans attempting to freeze out the Russians from discovery of an alien monolith under the surface of the moon.  This is the director’s subtle, impressionistic way of telling us that, after millions of years of slow-moving evolution, it’s STILL the dawn of man: our technology may have vastly improved, but we haven’t gone too far forward, spiritually.  We’re still fighting over the watering hole.

Interestingly in this connection, have a look around at what people in our culture today are worshiping, not just on Saturday or Sunday–but what are they paying most homage to, every day?  One thing that immediately strikes me is TIME.  As Wordsworth said, “Late and soon/Getting and spending.”  How rigidly we conform to the dictates of the clock, working 40, 50, 60+ hours per week, taking 2-3 weeks vacation per year, waiting until that magical age when we can slow down, and the days remaining are relatively few.  Strange how the things with the least materiality–they can’t be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted–are granted the most “reality:” money would be another pretty good example (the “cold, hard cash” of yesterday is today’s electronic direct deposit.)  Another of the memorable moments from 1960s cinema is Wyatt, in Easy Rider, throwing away his watch.  Inspired by that act, I had both my main characters constrained by the artificially constructed limits of time, and tracked their reactions to it.

Most of us worship, no longer the sun, but at the altar of the sundial.  How far we’ve come.

Personal Evolution

As little as one may expect to find it, life finds a way to adapt to the most unlikely and inhospitable environments.  Above I’ve included an image of a Acacia tree–an organism that can thrive in very barren deserts–and the mountains behind, as representing something like what I had in mind for Will’s sniper’s blind in Chapter 9.

Some believe that human beings are the most adaptable and survivable of all.  As a species, I’d have to agree that we rank right alongside others such as rats, viruses, and roaches.  But what about individual flexibility?  How much change can a single person undergo, how adverse the conditions tolerate, during his lifetime, before reaching the breaking point?  A certain tradition of literary realism, called Naturalism, often puts its characters into situations that function much like a pressure cooker, with author as a very cold-blooded scientific experimenter, to study the answers to these very questions.

At the point in the novel (about midway) that my male protagonist finds himself in this tree, faced with an irrevocable choice between life and death, he has already undergone much physical and some mental evolution.  But the spiritual challenges–which demarcate a human being from every other animal–still lie ahead: will he evolve, or devolve?

How Special are We?

My protagonists both find themselves in situations that cause them to wonder, Why Me?  After all, I’m just a regular guy/gal–no truly unique powers, skills, or heritage (unlike the ancient myths, in which every hero seemed to have been abandoned to obscurity, but only for a time, by famous parents.)

One feature that attracts me about more modern narratives–and a distinctly American trait of them–is their democracy.  Ben Franklin, one of our best autobiographers among his other prolific accomplishments, was fifteenth of his father’s seventeen children. Huck Finn was not only born into poverty, but voluntarily remained there.  The list of everymen goes on, right on down to John McClane in Die Hard.  Quite a contrast to the European tradition of Hercules, Oedipus, Arthur, and Hamlet, or more recent incarnations like Lucas’ increasingly elitist second Star Wars trilogy.

Ellison called the “search for identity” the American theme.  From birth, no one tells us who we are–we are conditioned and invited to find out: not necessarily to discover any secret, but to invent and make ourselves out of nothing.  And to remake, at intervals.  This is surely a double-edged sword, because with all its freedom it implies a great deal of responsibility, for individual success and failure.  I wanted the two “heroes” of my story to experience the full range of both.