Sunday, November 27, 2011

This and That

In keeping with the season, we’re providing a cornucopia of ideas.

We’ve received another review for the first BobbieTitan book and it might be our favorite. Sharon Struck wrote:
The e-book, "Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain" was a fun adventure and a great mystery.  The characters in BT were believable and interesting.  As an adult, I was concerned it might be juvenile, but on the contrary, it was very entertaining with the perfect blend of adult and teen themes.  I think of myself as having somewhat of a short attention span so I only read books that grab me quick and this story did exactly that.  I highly recommend "Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain" to readers of all ages. 

It has been another tough couple of weeks at Poway High. Another student has “shuffle[d] off this mortal coil.” That’s the fifth in two years and it’s really taking its toll on the students, faculty, and staff at PHS. We find it’s also snaking its way into our writing. We’re working on another Bobbie Titan novel and some parts are darker than we anticipated. It’s not gothic or anything but Bobbie is older in this book and teenagers today have to deal with issues unimagined in our generation. So even though Bobbie-2 is fiction in the extreme, it feels right to include some burdens faced by the real life teenagers we know.

We’re feeling kind of important in the world of independent authors this week. A writer trolling through the web came across our blog and requested that we review her latest work and offered herself up for an author interview. It went straight to our heads! So now we are reading Binding Arbitration by Elizabeth Marks. We’ll let you know what we think, both of the writer and her work. If you can’t wait that long, here’s the link to her Smashwords page and this is the Amazon  Binding Arbitration link. And in case you were wondering: it wasn’t the kissing pictures that lured Elizabeth into our lair, it was baseball! She thought it was cool that Lynn is on a quest to see all the major league stadiums. Guess it takes all kinds!

We’re still waiting for our first review for The Valentine’s Game. Some of our loyal followers must have had the chance to finish it by now. Come on, tell us what you think! Good or bad, we can take it.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Lynn's Worth

We guess it’s a good thing to step back once in awhile to take stock and to think about where you’ve been, but it can make you uncomfortable.

Before we were Lynn Evans, Steve wrote a couple of novels for Traci as Christmas presents. Like Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, they involved young people with super human capabilities. While thinking about what adventures Bobbie might have in book two and who she might encounter, Evans reread some of these early efforts in order to mine them for ideas. It was a humbling experience.

There are flashes of brilliance in Steve’s first novels, but much of the work is undisciplined and careless; at times even clumsy. Evans was so amazed at the low-quality of the work that he reread The Mark of Kain just to reassure himself that none of Steve’s written awkwardness had been transferred to their collaboration. When Evans was through and had reassured himself that their story was as tight, faced-paced, and professional as he remembered, his immediate thought was thank goodness for Lynn.

For every flight of fancy Evans imagines, Lynn is there to enforce the discipline of necessity. Lynn is the one who ensures the story stays on the straight-and-narrow. She’s the one who ensures we absorb the comments from our advanced readers, works with the professional editor to polish the work, and makes Evans wait at least four months before the final editing to ensure perspective is maintained. All of these and her true love of a good story well told make the difference between stumbling over uneven prose and racing through a well told narrative.

Traci still loves her Christmas novels but she doesn’t let Lynn read them. The poor construction would ruin the magic. Instead Lynn makes Evans toe the line in between his wild imaginary escapades on their current efforts. Evans likes to complain that Lynnn is a tyrant, but he really doesn’t mind. He knows that when she’s through the results will be something worth reading over and over again.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Pucker Up For Poway High

This week it’s time for a reminder. We are still trying to raise money for the Poway High School Student Services Office. The way we are attempting to do this is through the sale of our eBooks. We’re hoping that providing you with a few hours of enjoyment through reading will make you feel happy to have donated to a worthy cause that does so much to help teenagers navigate the sometime rough waters of growing up in this ever-changing world.

We’re donating all the proceeds from our young adult adventure story, Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain. At either lynnevansbooks.com or le-kain.com, you can read a detailed description about the book and reviews by teenagers and adults. If you like fast paced young adult fiction, we’re sure you’ll like Bobbie’s adventures along the Columbia River in Oregon.
If you just can’t bring yourself to read YA, then how about a quirky romance?  Our other eBook is The Valentine’s Game and it’s all about how a group of 20-somethings compete for true love in games created by Cupid. If you like Sandra Bullock movies, you’ll love reading The Valentine’s Game. And, to show we are serious in our efforts to raise money for PHS, all sales from now until Valentine’s Day, 2012, will also be donated to the Student Services Office. So if you haven’t downloaded Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, or even if you have, now is a great time to go to lynnevansbooks.com and choose one of the conveniently supplied links to purchase The Valentine’s Game.
If you have already purchased one or both of the eBooks, you can still help us. We are always in need of book reviews, especially at public e-locations like Amazon. So, if you have Bobbie or V-Game, we would love for you to read it and let us and the world know what you think. If you purchased the eBook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes, please go back and submit a review. If you got the eBook from our sales site, send us an email about what you think and we’ll be sure to post it on our websites. Your opinions might just help someone else decide to get a copy and every sale goes a little further toward keeping a vital program funded during these tough economic times.

By now we’re sure you’re wondering why the pictures in this week’s post don’t really match our words. Well, the fact is that we get a lot more anonymous hits from Google when we include pictures of kissing . We’d love it if just our wit and wisdom drew visitors to our site, but the world just doesn’t work that way. So, with the hope that a few wandering internet eyes might learn about our efforts and help us to raise funds through storytelling, we’ve sprinkled a few salacious images in with this week’s plea. Just doing our part for old Poway High.