Steven Harper Piziks

 It seems that one of my books ticked off a member of the school board. Aw! Definitely don't have a look at it.

https://www.amazon.com/Importance-Being-Kevin-Steven-Harper/dp/1644052571/

 Some great news! We have a release date for the audio version of my Clockwork Empire steampunk series. They hit the stores on January 28. Cut Bonnem and Kim Bretton narrate the books, and they're wonderful! The editor sent me some snippets, and I love the accents, I love the intonations, and I love the narration. Love!

I guess I'm a little unusual. See, some authors don't like listening to someone else read their books aloud, usually because the author has lived with the book for a year or more and has developed an internal voice of what the book and the characters sound like, and no narrator can match it. So the author feels uncomfortable: "The narrator got it wrong! That's not how Betty sounds!" or some such.

Me? I absolutely love it. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, I get fascinated. I get to see how someone else imagines my work. It's like getting a peek into a reader's head. Whenever one of my books comes out on audio, I can't wait to listen.

All four books will drop at once, though the first one in the series is The Doomsday Vault. The cover blurb goes:

A bizarre strain of zombies roam the streets of Victorian London, infecting all they touch with the Clockwork Plague. While most victims die painful deaths, a few become Clockworkers, geniuses who create the greatest inventions of the age—right before going insane.

The plague has also taken its toll on the life of twenty-two-year-old Alice Michaels. After her mother and brother die from the disease because of her, she feels obligated to ensure her father’s happiness. Unfortunately, that means ignoring her passion for automatons and instead, pursuing the wealthiest man possible.

But when zombies attack Alice’s cab, being tied down in a loveless marriage is the least of her worries. She is quickly swept up into a secret organization chasing down Clockworkers—and into the arms of Gavin Ennock, a former airship cabin boy and talented fiddle player. Together they will navigate a political conspiracy that threatens to consume their country and the world ...

Check out the cover. I'll hit you all up again when they come out!
 

 Hey, everyone!

 I did a guest blog earlier this week, but my schedule in Germany is a little hectic and I haven’t had time to share it: https://www.myfictionnook.com/2019/07/blogtour-the-importance-of-being-kevin-by-steven-harper.html I have some truly strange and useless skills! 

I'm pleased to announce I've sold my twenty-fifth novel!  Dreamspinner Press and I signed a contract for a YA novel.  It's tentatively scheduled for release in late 2019.

The blurb runs:

    Kevin Devereaux's life can't get worse. He's on probation. He's stuck with an unemployed ex-convict dad. And he lives in a run-down trailer on the crappy east side of town. To keep his probation officer happy, Kevin joins a theater program for teenagers.  On the first day, he falls hard for Peter Finn, the lead actor in the show. Peter returns Kevin's feelings, to Kevin's surprise, and for the first time, Kevin learns what it means to be in love.
    But even this isn't easy. America might have become more accepting, but Springdale is a conservative town, and Peter comes from a prominent family. They wouldn't approve of a gay son, and they definitely wouldn't approve of a boyfriend from the east side. The relationship has to stay a secret. Still, Kevin and Peter can cope as long as they have the play--and each other. Right?
    And then violence tears their world apart. Les Madigan, another member of the cast, brutally attacks Kevin. When Peter learns of it, he storms off swearing revenge. The next day, Les turns up dead, and the police arrest Peter. Peter swears he's innocent, even as the evidence against him mounts.
    Kevin is forced to deal with the emotional aftermath of his own assault and the possibility that his boyfriend killed someone in his name, all while sticking to a strict rehearsal schedule, figuring out what it means to be gay, and holding the shreds of his life together behind the scenes.

The working title was Behind the Scenes, but it turns out Dreamspinner already has a book by that title in the catalog, so to avoid confusion, we'll re-title my book.  This is fine with me--I've never been happy with that particular title, and I'm hoping someone can come up something a little snazzier.

This is my twenty-fifth book!  I sold my first novel in 1993, exactly 25 years ago!  That means I've sold, on average, a book a year since my first.  Go me!

Watch this space for more details.

My story "Sight Unseen" will appear in the next Darkover anthology: Masques of Darkover. And here we have a really awesome cover:



The anthology comes out May 2, 2017.

I'd been meaning to read THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI by Helene Wecker for quite some time and finally pulled it out off my TRB list.

The idea is intruiging.  A Jinni from Syria is released from his bottle in New York's Little Syria neighborhood in 1915, hundreds of years after he was imprisoned.  An iron band on his wrist keeps him from remembering how he was imprisoned in the first place and forces him to live among humans.  Meanwhile, a man in Eastern Europe pays a powerful rabbi to fashion a realistic Golem woman for him so he can have the perfect wife, but the man dies while emigrating to New York, leaving the Golem without a master and struggling with newly granted free will.  Circumstances and other people bring the Golem and the Jinni together.

The book suffers quite a lot in its execution.  Wecker spends far too much time wandering through her character's thought processes. In more skilled hands, this could have been fun or even riveting. Unfortunately, Wecker pauses her narrative to create several paragaphs of dull, leaden prose that could--and should--have been trimmed and tightened.  (Where was her editor?)  Her Golem does a great deal of internal whining about how constrained she is, despite her newfound choices, and she spends the vast majority of the book sitting in her room, ruminating about how dull her life is and how risky it is for her to go out and be a person.  (She fears making a mistake and being uncovered as a Golem.)  After the third page about her latest sewing project, we readers are bored as well.

The Jinni also has to hide his true nature for fear of discovery, and this becomes dull as well.  A budding forbidden romance between him and a human woman seems at first to be a central character plot, but it abruptly fizzles and goes nowhere, with no decent resolution.  Like the Golem, the Jinni is constantly portrayed as weak and helpless, and he gets into enormous trouble whenever he dares actually DO anything.  Boring.

It's actually possible to skip over entire sections and still follow the story.  The middle of the book sags badly, and nothing at all happens for entire chapters.

According to the author's note, Wecker did enormous amounts of research into the Little Syria of 1915, but you'd hardly know it by reading the book.  With the exception of a dance hall and a tin roof (which are described in great detail), the setting is given short shrift.  We have a generic coffeehouse, a generic smith's forge, a generic mansion, and a generic bakery.  (And, I might add, bakers work at night so the breads and rolls are ready to buy first thing in the morning. They don't work during the day, as the novel portrays.)

Wecker's prose =does= shine when it comes to portraying Jewish mysticism and just how the Golem of legend might work in "modern" New York, and her development of Jinni culture is great fun to read as well.  This doesn't overcome the books enormous flaws.

I wanted to like this book.  I worked hard to like this book.  But I just couldn't. Give it a miss, folks.