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.

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.

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.

An Analogy

Reading a good book is like a four-year-old’s Halloween.  If you haven’t yet figured out why, we’ll spell it out for you in a few paragraphs. First, a little personal background.

Evans learned to read because of a girl. He managed to make it through school all the way up to his high school junior year by taking the same classes as his smart older sister had the year before. It was kind of ingenious, really. He “borrowed” the near perfect reports and tests she’d carefully saved as a record to her glorious scholastic accomplishments, made a few deliberate mistakes, and collected an easy “B” from the previous year’s “A.” But then Evans fell in love with a dark-eyed literate beauty and, in the hopes of having something intelligent to say to her, actually read a book. It was Catcher in the Rye and it irrevocably changed his life. The beauty went on to marry her childhood sweetheart while Evans began to gorge himself at the literary feast where he once just pretended to eat.

Lynn’s introduction to the joys of reading were not too dissimilar. She was too popular and too consumed with social interaction to do more than the minimum reading to get through high school. But she fell in with a learned crowd in college and they introduced her to The Lord of the Rings. Mesmerized and enchanted by worlds she’d never guessed existed, she would often avoid the mundane subjects her major required in order to pursue love and high adventure between the pages of a paperback novel. Lynn hopes her students never learn how good friends and good books allowed her to procrastinate in business classes while she collected her bachelor’s in Marketing. It wasn’t until Evans helped convince her that she needed to line up her talents with a suitable career that Lynn began her three plus decade of excellence in the science of education, first as a student and then as a teacher. A side benefit was that the reading is so much more entertaining in the Education Department.

We’ve both learned what other devoted readers have: that a good book captures you. It’s not like going to the movies or interacting on the web. Maybe it’s because a reader must meet a book halfway before the magic occurs, but being consumed by another’s written story is an unparalleled escape that can’t be matched by cinema, an amusement park, or Facebook, at least not when you’re an adult. It seems different for kids. 

Before we are capable of understanding that there is more to the world than what happens outside our five senses, we can happily get lost in make believe. Watching our four-year-old grandson don a costume and ask for treats on Halloween looks like what reading a good book does for us. In both cases there is a transformation that goes beyond logic and touches on magic. We lose the innocent escapes as we grow older and more worldly, but, luckily, they can be replaced. There are worlds and wonders waiting for those who are willing to experience a book and, this time of year, they even come with chocolate.

When All Else Fails, Try Poetry

We’ve got nothing this week! Nada. Zip.
So Evans dug through the back of his hard drive and came up with some free verse he’s written. The first one was from Promise, the book we killed last week. The rest are from moments in time when it seemed like the best way to say something was a poem. We hope you like them.

A Warrior’s Request

Slip away from your patent leather existence,

with its neat bows and reserved affections,

and bathe with me in the ice blue silk of our pleasure.

Don’t be frightened.

When my ragged longing reaches to hold your naked hopes hard next to mine,

the demon’s desire won’t devour you.

It won’t.

It won’t.

I promise.

So slip away and take me into your clothless beauty

where two caring can quench their thirsts for each other.

Then show me how I might find a certain peace in your arms

without battle

and guileless dreams in your touch

without war.

An Impossible Notion

A thought.

A wondrous possibility,

too rare, too fine, and too unlikely to be true,

keeps tickling me.

I need to find out if you’re laughing too.

Playing Hooky

The sunlight found my window today when I was supposed to be working

and teased me until I left the data to analyze itself

while I walked among the roses.

It would have been smarter I know,

just to close the blinds and concentrate,

but it’s too late now.

The flowers held me captive

and the warmth drained away any hope of coherent thought.

So, since there was nothing for it,

I decided that I might as well think of you and wonder

if the sunlight found your window too.

Alternatives

Other hours call me

from beneath our public smiles

and hint of breathless possibilities

both naked and daring.

How

How can we still be connected? 

It’s not rational and I’m always rational now.

But from yesterday’s somewhere, a girl I loved found me

and we picked up the conversation as if we’d just got out of class

instead of letting more than a quarter century slip by.

How can I hear her laughing?

It’s not reasonable and I’m the king of reason now.

But her firelight pixie voice echoes in the soulless bits sent through a virtual desert

and her teasing smile is transmitted along with today’s mischief

into my inbox.

How can she still care (and why does it matter)?

It’s not something I should think about now.

But a woman, who was once a girl I loved, found me

and I can’t stop feeling that some of what we were then

is timeless.

Daydream

I catch my breath with the thought of you sometimes.

And in that reality suspended second,

released as I am from structured expectation,

your image will float before me smiling,

inviting my touch.

It’s ever only a moment.

The phantom suggestion dissolves with my stuttered exhale.

But it will make me wonder

if your breath is ever caught over me sometimes

and, if so,

does it leave your fingers tingling.

Indian Summer

Even now,

when black sky besieged by a tireless moon

blossoms in bare light dress,

I’m reminded of how the water reflected glow

danced in your eyes.

These are the nights,

warmed by hot cloudless days,

where I recall how your soft pink nipples pressed their anxious lead

and enticed me to bathe in the dark lake of your sweet summer smell.

In this luminous dark,

I hear again the strings of cherished fidelities as they fly from my lips

and feel again that desire for my hands to wander

over your tanned and laughing body.

The Death Of A Story

Last week was exciting. There is something incredibly fulfilling about finally completing everything and rolling out a new novel. This week we had the opposite experience. We killed a book without publishing it. Although we can’t hide the fact that it is disappointing, in many ways we learn more from our “failures” than from our successes.

Promise was first written in the heat of passion. Evans wanted to capture the overwhelming feelings of unexpected first love that was both unusual and universal. A love that was instant, deep, quiet, and scary all at the same time. And he wanted unforgettable characters that everyone could relate to. In short, he wanted to push the boundaries of a young adult love story. The first draft was 120,000 words, twice as long as it was supposed to be and, while obviously full of passion, it was a jumbled mess.

We worked on Promise together for more than two years. Lynn loved the ideas but knew that the book couldn’t work the way it was first delivered. She was ruthless about restructuring the story to make it coherent while trying to divest it of anything not germane. She sent it out to readers multiple times and we reworked the narrative over and over again, eventually getting the word count down to 95,000. Then we sent it out again and the reviews weren’t great. One of the biggest problems we had was selling the idea that high school kids could be that mature. The other was that there wasn’t enough doubt about how it would end up. Our readers loved some parts, but not the book as a whole.

Evans took it back and restructured the first half, making the characters older and removing anything not connected to the main story. We reread it this week with the idea that we’d pick Promise up again and push it through until it was finally right. However, we both reached the conclusion that Promise was never going to fly. We know at this point that many independent authors would just go ahead and publish the last clean copy anyway and we can understand why they would. But even though we’ve spent hundreds of hours working on it, we just can’t ask people to read something we’ve written if it isn’t our best. Instead we’ll move Promise into the home of wayward stories with the hope that we can mine some of our favorite parts for future novels.

So, though it’s a little sad that you may never get to read the scene where the protagonist gets her face slapped during her best friend’s art exhibition or learn how passionately we can write a lesbian love scene while still remaining tasteful, we know we’ve grown as writers from the experience. And, maybe, making writers better is the most any book can do for its authors. If that’s true, then for us Promise has been a success.

The Valentine's Game

We love weeks like this! After the challenge of writing the novel, the struggle to edit and refine it, and then the pure toil of getting it ready to be published, there comes the time to announce that it is finally available for everyone to read. That’s what’s happening right now. Our second novel, The Valentine’s Game, is out in the world just waiting for hungry eyes to devour it.

This time it is even more exciting because we have a brand new internet location to go with the book. Now all you’ll have to do is go to www.lynnevansbooks.com to find descriptions, reviews, and links for all our published novels. It’s the easy way for you and all your friends to get your very own copy of The Valentine’s Game and all of our other published novels.

We naturally think all of our stories are worthwhile, but there is something truly special about The Valentine’s Game. It’s a romance but not like any romance we’ve ever read or even heard about. It’s fun, fast paced, a little quirky, and, even if we must say so ourselves, a pure delight to read and re-read. It’s the perfect escape from the everyday.

Like our previous novel, The Valentine’s Game is an eBook available in a number of easily accessible formats. For our loyal fans who have favorite reading devices, it can be purchased directly from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Apple iTunes bookstore. Although we make a dollar less per book when you buy it from one of these locations we actually want our readers to get them at these sites if you’ll give us a review when you’ve finished reading the book. That way, people who haven’t discovered Lynn Evans yet will believe you when you tell them that The Valentine’s Game was a great read. If there is no way we can convince you to give us a review, then you might as well buy the book from us and read it on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. We promise to put the extra dollar to good use.

So go to www.lynnevansbooks.com right now to read details about The Valentine’s Game and choose a place to get it. Trust us; you’ll be glad you did. It’s a story worth the read.