Saturday 3 November 2012

Green Wizard Rainy Saturday News

The Illustrated Woman is out in paperback, ladies and gentlemen.

*drum roll*




American readers - if you are interested in buying TIW in Paperback, please use Cspace! It's much better for my business and costs you nothing extra! Thank you.


So far, it has received mixed reviews. 
E
Though all the readers have found TIW to be a decent read and well written - and beautifully edited by my editor Mary Ann Bernal - the criticism has focused on the sex, which is probably a bit too hard.  

One of my biggest friends in this game couldn't finish it and, for a writer, that's the worst thing. 

My book Hollywood Shakedown was once slaughtered - I mean savaged, muntered, banjaxed and totally destroyed - by a friend of Kelly's and I didn't mind because she read every word. 

For a writer, the qualitative review doesn't matter in my opinion - its whether a piece is read or not, so when my friend wrote to me and said she couldn't finish it, I felt a failure. 

Then this happened again with another close female friend who felt the descriptions were just too hard.

Originally, I wrote this as an urban piece, like Carla, a dark romance-cum-love triangle and then decided to spice it up a bit due to dismal first quarter sales for Green Wizard. 

The spicing up, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, though I will challenge anyone who says the three chapters concerned are not well written. The collective erotica genre in Indielit is often - technically, at least - the skimpiest lode of decent writing and I know the three chapters concerned stand muster.

However, you CAN read The Illustrated Woman without reading the dirty chapters. It won't harm the experience.

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For a cleaner reading experience, Please avoid the two chapters named after Idomenus and the one named after Ajax
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Cuckolding: The Idomenus chapter is a description of the art of Cuckolding and that has also annoyed a couple of readers.

In the US, there is a fascinating and quite scary subculture of older white men who pay well endowed black men to service their wives.

I had never heard of it until I bumped into the practice on Tumbler when I was writing Carla - the chapter with Kenny undergoing Group Therapy.

On many occasions, they film the act. I'm told its an extreme form of swinging. I read about it in a state of astonishment and the notes I made form the crux of the Idomenus chapters.

If you're not interested in that stuff - as two or three of the readers have already found out - it can be a bit of an, er, awkward read.

I do think the story overall passes muster. Its 164 pages long and can be read in a morning over two cups of coffee and a doughnut. If you live in a city, you will recognise much of what goes on and the book covers age old themes. Choices. Decisions. Good guys/Bad guys. Poverty. Hopelessness. Redemption.

And tattoos.

Better still, its £5.99 in the UK and $8.99 in the US in PAPERBACK. (half those prices and less on Kindle).

Ideal Christmas stocking filler material, if you ask me! Just watch the hot stuff.

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NaNoWriMo: I'm joining in with this, even unofficially. The US National Novel Writing Month. 50k in a month. Anyone who knows me will also know that is what is known as a piece of piss. Any of the great pulp writers of the forties and fifties could do that standing on their heads - with typewriters - if they could keep off the whisky.

My working title. "Love, Nat.": A story of an English teacher who falls in love with a fifteen year old pupil.

Nothing exists so far. I'm off to watch Newmarket and then I'll have 2k tonight. I won't give a blow by blow because its too hard, but I will record the numbers.

Anyway, much more interesting stuff on the Cauldron on Tuesday.

Thanks for listening. Wizx

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An absolutely fantastic review of The Illustrated Woman by K-Trina Meador, reviewer for the Cross Plains Examiner in Texas and a great friend of the Indielit community.

http://www.examiner.com/review/the-illustrated-woman-by-mark-barry-1

1 comment:

  1. The Illustrated Woman is a good story and skipping the erotic chapters as the author suggests is an easy fix for readers uncomfortable with erotica.

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