Charlotte’s Babblings

I am so thrilled to get a pre-publication review of Maven Fairy Godmother from Publisher’s Weekly on the Amazon Breakout Novel Award promotion!   I am certainly willing to “smooth out the prose.”

Manuscript Review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization
Maven, a dissatisfied middle aged woman with dismal job prospects, gets tapped for a new job-fairy godmother in the Faery dimension. The job comes with nigh-limitless magical powers and a set of carefully defined rules. Senior Fairy Godmother Fiona firmly believes in upholding the archetypes of stories and doesn’t like how modern-day Maven breaks the rules, forcing her charges to acts of self-realization and independence. Fiona’s other charge, Tulip, struggles to come to terms with her changeling birth and must commit to a life in Faery or in Mundane. Ultimately, the novel follows Maven’s training, as well as the deftly interwoven lives of her “clients,” or women whose wishes she has granted. This fairy tale world, while somewhat self-aware, has a keen understanding of the roles archetypes play in fiction, but manages to subvert them. The author raises questions about the absence of middle-aged women in fairy tales that draw obvious parallels to modern-day existence. A bit of work on smoothing out the prose and explaining the world in greater detail would go far in making this novel a remarkable piece.

 You can help me build my platform for Maven! Please go to Amazon, download the free excerpt of Maven Fairy Godmother, and if you like it, write me a review. (the more stars the better… :-))

James Brausch’s new book came in today, The Voice Said “Obey.”  It is a fictionalized account of what he would do if he woke up one day having lost everything, based on his real life experience.  As the title suggests, his awakening was a personal experience of the Divine, edited to illustrate his business model and his personal life model. All the events are true, according to him, merely rearranged and time-compressed to make his point that there is no reason not to make your life happen the way you want it, starting now, no matter what.

I’ll be proofreading the book tonight, which won’t take long, as it is only 193 pages in a 4.25 x 6.75 format from lulu.com. I’m familiar with his writing voice, and his idiosyncrasies with sentence structure and punctuation. The book design is clean and readable, with the exception of the tiny print on the back of comments from the blog, some angry and critical, and others thoughtful and supportive.

I’ve read the blog posts already, and I am very interested in how the galley draft will be different from what I have already read.  He has also posted about how easy it is to write a book, and I can see that taking real events and revising them to make a point could be simpler than making it up from whole cloth. However the real secret is that this is at least the third draft of this work, the original having been posted to the web as it happened.  Writing is still re-writing, but as Dickens learned, it’s best to recycle as many times as possible. A review will be posted tomorrow.