ozma914 | Entries tagged with novel

Yes, I've won National Novel Writing Month! 50,000 words of a novel over, in my case, 25 days.

What's my reward? Well, bragging rights. Also, I get a novel out of it, and that's no small thing. 99% of all people who attempt to write a novel agree it's horribly difficult to get it finished. The other 1% are friggin' freaks of nature.

This is the fourth time I finished a novel rough draft in thirty days or fewer, so by now I'm pretty sure I can do it. This one was different in couple of ways, though:

First, it's, it's a sequel to a novel that hasn't been published yet, Fire On Mist Creek. The original one, also a romantic comedy, remains in the hands of a very big publisher of romance novels. Unfortunately, after asking for the full manuscript, the editor has had it so long the odds of them buying it are vanishingly slim.

The other unusual thing is that this story is my first novel set during a holiday, specifically Christmas, which you probably figured from the title. Christmas novels are popular among romance readers; on the other hand, I assume their popularity is limited to a certain time of the year.

I shot for a 60,000 word manuscript, but it looks like the story will end up at barely 55,000. That's okay for some romance publishers, but by most standards falls short for a novel. That's something I'll worry about later, when I have the whole thing finished.

So, how do I celebrate? By starting the editing process, of course. One mistake NaNoWriMo participants often make is to immediately start shipping their book around to agents and editors. Unless you're a savant, 50,000 words in 30 days leaves you with a rough draft ... very rough. Mine needs editing. I'll make four or five passes at least, before it's ready. That's the job.

I'll probably polish up the first scene and put it in the newsletter, so people will have an idea of what to expect. When will the whole thing come out? Well ... some Christmas yet to come. That, also, is the job.

(But don't forget our other books are available as gifts THIS Christmas!)

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Current Mood: busy

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This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in California who's holding down a job to support her blind mother and her brother, an inventor who's working on his own flying machine. To say airplanes were still new at the time puts it mildly; in fact, the author gives credit for help on the book from Glenn C Curtis, a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry and winner of the first international air meet, and Wilbur Wright, who with his brother did something even more spectacular just eight years before publication.

Orissa's brother Steve is a genius in mechanical design, but the Kane family finds itself in the middle of a dispute with two former business partners, who want to invest in the Kane airplane for different reasons. Here Van Dyne cleverly describes one partner in heroic terms and the other like one might describe a silent movie villain--then flips the script.

Soon the plane is the target of sabotage that injures Steve; and although it can be repaired, Steve is forced out of an upcoming nationwide competition by a broken leg. If only there was someone who'd been watching over his shoulder the whole time, and knew just about as much about the flying machine as Steve himself ... but who ...?

Oh, no, surely not a girl. How indecent!

To say the book's approach to a female protagonist was advanced for the time is putting it mildly. Orissa Kane jumps into the role of airplane pilot fearlessly, and meets all the many challenges that come along with it. Yes, there's a boy, and Orissa never loses her "maidenly virtues", but she's also competent and way braver than I would have been.

But what would you expect, from the same author who invented Dorothy Gale and Ozma of Oz?

Because Edith Van Dyne was really L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. That shouldn't come as a surprise for those who read the Oz books, which were full of strong, smart, competent female characters. (And it's how The Flying Girl came into my reading orbit. I've been reading up on Baum as I prepared to tackle writing my own Oz book.)

By today's standards The Flying Girl would be considered a young adult book, and it also works pretty well, a century later, as an historical novel. In context it's surprisingly advanced not only in its treatment of women, but in its technical aspects--it turns out Baum, who wrote science fiction and invented an early robot and miniature submarines, had an interest in the mechanical.

There's a sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and I liked this one enough to look forward to trying the second one.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53386/53386-h/53386-h.htm

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929527241

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

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This was part of a series of Coming Attractions related posts I was going to put out regularly to promote the book's release. This summer being typical, the last one I posted was almost two months ago. *sigh* This one is just the press release I sent out to various newspapers, radio and TV stations, blogs, celebrity talk show hosts, and the Library of Congress, just after the the book first came out. It did land me a TV interview, but otherwise it seems to have vanished without a trace, so this might be the first time you've seen it.

So hey, you want to share this around ... who am I to stop you?

(You can read chapter one here: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2019/03/chapter-one-of-coming-attractions.html)

A local author has just published his tenth book, and saved travel money by setting it in Noble County.

Coming Attractions follows the battle to save an Indiana drive-in theater from developers, and is the fourth romantic comedy written by Mark R. Hunter of Albion. It was easy to get into the mood, Hunter says: He brainstormed and outlined the story while sitting with his family at the Auburn-Garrett Drive-in, waiting for the first feature to start.

In the darkness of an Indiana drive-in movie theater, Maddie McKinley returns from the concession stand, climbs into the wrong van, and gets tackled by the father of the kids inside. Logan Chandler is embarrassed about roughing her up, but also intrigued by the beautiful young woman from Boston, who arrived alone at the movies wearing an expensive dress. Unfortunately, he’s the local businessman leading a battle to save the drive-in from developers—and she’s the attorney sent to make sure it’s torn down.

"At heart it's a love story, but it's also about a clash of cultures and changing times," Hunter says. "And coffee. Somehow coffee became a theme ... and I don't even drink coffee."

The story's other main setting is the fictional town of Hopewell, situated somewhere in eastern Noble County, which he named after nearby Hopewell Road. It's familiar territory for Hunter, whose novels Storm Chaser and its sequel The Notorious Ian Grant, and their related short story collection, Storm Chaser Shorts, were mostly set in the fictional town of Hurricane, also in Noble County.

Although his most recent novel, Radio Red, is set in Michigan, he and his wife Emily also went local for two non-fiction books: Images of America: Albion and Noble County, and Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With the Albion Fire Department. The two also collaborated on the humor book Hoosier Hysterical: How The West Became The Midwest Without Moving At All, and collected his humor pieces together in Slightly Off The Mark.

Mark Hunter also wrote a young adult novel set in southern Indiana, The No-Campfire Girls.

Coming Attractions and the Hunters' other books, and a link to Mark R. Hunter's blog, can be found on his website at www.markrhunter.com, and he has an Amazon Author Page at www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO

Mark can also be found on social media, including:

Blogger: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter