publishing

L. T. RYAN: EVEN BEST SELLERS AREN’T PERFECT

Posted on by vlaw759

L. T. Ryan burst onto the publishing scene in 2012 with the first two books in the best selling Jack Noble series (now numbering 16). With his skills in marketing and technology, he was able to self-publish successfully through Amazon books. Ryan’s writing skills landed him spots on the best-seller lists for Amazon and USA Today.

The following year was even more productive. Ryan published nine more books in 2013, including five volumes in the Jack Noble series. Because he was able to control every step of the publication process, Ryan was able to ensure that all of his works are made available simultaneously in audiobook, eBook, and Kindle format as well as in print.

The Depth of Darkness, also published in 2013, is the first installment in the Mitch Tanner series. The other books in this series (so far!) are Into the Darkness and Deliver Us from Darkness.

The Depth of Darkness is my focus here because it is a great example of good and (in my opinion) bad writing—and thus could serve as a writing lesson to us all!

RELAX: No spoiler alerts needed here. Indeed, I hope you will read L.T. Ryan’s works and let me know what you think.

“L.T.” Ryan has lived in various points in the Appalachians, including Georgia and Virginia, with his wife, three daughters, and one slightly psychologically unbalanced, but lovable dog. He enjoys writing fast paced suspense thrillers. When not staring out the window while pretending to write, he enjoys reading, hiking, mountain biking, fishing, and spending time with the ladies in his life.

The Good

There’s a lot of it.

  • His plot here is complicated, with lots of threads that weave together in a believable pattern at the end. It revolves around two elementary school children kidnapped from the playground during recess.
  • His characters are interesting, well-drawn, and consistent, including the relatively minor ones (for example, Mitch Tanner’s mother). 
  • The two children, a really smart white girl and a black boy who suffers from asthma are best friends, perhaps initially based on both being outcasts. This cross-racial friendship is taken for granted/not a focal point for anyone, which I like. In addition, they are caring and protective of each other.
  • He avoids the stereotypes of the clingy, dependent female.
  • By and large, Ryan has created realistic children (even though occasionally the kidnapped girl seems resourceful beyond eight years old).
  • The interpersonal relationships appeal to me.
  • I like the balance between Tanner (who tends to be hot-headed and impulsive) and his partner, Sam (who supports Tanner while also providing a voice of reason/practicality.
  • Tanner and his pre-school daughter have a close, loving relationship—which is fresher than such a relationship between a father and a young son.
  • The sex scenes are handled well. I like that the sex is left to the reader’s imagination rather than being explicit to the point of causing one to wonder, “Could two people really do that?”

The Bad 

Although the issues described below distracted me from the reading experience, I greatly enjoyed the book. In fact, I liked The Depth of Darkness so much that I read the entire Mitch Tanner series!

Verbal Distractions

The specific one I noticed most was using “at” unnecessarily, as in, “Where are you at?” If it were only one character, it could be a character note. When multiple characters say it, it’s an author note.

The other thing that made me grimace was telling things implicit in the action. For example, when Tanner took his sunglasses off his head and dropped them in front of his eyes “to keep the sun out of his eyes.”  Sunglasses blocking bright sunlight is assumed. A reason to don sunglasses only needs to be mentioned when it’s something else, like hiding the emotion that might be revealed.

Other examples would be unlocking the door and then opening it, or describing how he kicked the door open, then reversed the action to kick it shut again.

Repetitious Actions

Mitch Tanner sweats—copiously and often. The reader gets many descriptions of how and with what he wipes the sweat from his brow. Also described often is the following relief of a blast of AC or cool air from the open refrigerator.

Tanner drinks beer and eats pizza so often one would think they are two of the basic food groups. So, okay. But everyone else seems to pick-up, order, make, or have pizza on hand, too. Why not cold chicken or leftover tuna salad sometimes?

Work calls in the night all seem to come at 2:00 or 2:30 in the morning.

Overall 

I recommend L. T. Ryan, because of the “good” stuff mentioned above. Also, I’m a series junkie, and he has a lot of those out there. AND, I didn’t notice the “bad” stuff cited above in all his books (for example, the Rachel Hatch series). 

In 2013, Ryan was a (relatively) inexperienced writer, and one would expect improvement with experience.

Bottom line: Your writing doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth reading, so keep at it.

L.T. Ryan’s Works

Jack Noble: Because Bear Logan and Jack Noble’s stories overlap so much, L.T. Ryan has suggested the following reading order to encompass both series.

  • The Prequels
    • The Recruit
    • The First Deception
  • The Early Years
  • The Noble Sagas
    • Noble Intentions (Jack Noble 4)
    • When Dead in Greece (Jack Noble 5)
    • Noble Retribution (Jack Noble 6)
    • Noble Betrayal (Jack Noble 7)
    • Never Go Home (Jack Noble 8)
    • Beyond Betrayal (Jack Clarissa)
    • Noble Judgment (Jack Noble 9)
    • Never Cry Mercy (Jack Noble 10)
    • Deadline (Jack Noble 11)
    • Noble Ultimatum (Jack Noble 13)
    • Noble Legend (Jack Noble 14) – Pre-order

Rachel Hatch

  • Drift
  • Downburst
  • Fever Burn
  • Smoke Signal
  • Firewalk
  • Whitewater
  • Aftershock
  • Whirlwind

Blake Brier

  • Unmasked
  • Unleashed
  • Uncharted
  • Drawpoint
  • Contrail

Mitch Tanner

  • The Depth of Darkness
  • Into the Darkness
  • Deliver Us from Darkness

Cassie Quinn

  • Path of Bones
  • Whisper of Bones
  • Symphony of Bones
  • Etched in Shadow
  • Concealed in Shadow

Affliction Z

  • Patient Zero
  • Abandoned Hope
  • Descended in Blood
  • Fractured
    • Part 1
    • Part 2
  • Coming Soon: The Sickness of Ron Winters

ALSO KNOWN AS…

Posted on by vlaw759
These pen names are fairly self-explanatory.

Is there anyone out there who didn’t know that Vivian Lawry is the pen name of Vivian Makosky? Well, now you do. 

There are many reasons why an author might choose to use a pen name. Particularly fancy authors might even use a nom de plume.

To Share Credit

Lawry Gulick,
in his natural habitat

My first attempt at writing fiction was the Chesapeake Bay Mystery Dark Harbor.  The plot required a lot more knowledge of sailing than I possessed, and so I started working with a coauthor, Lawry Gulick. Most fiction books are not (obviously) coauthored, so we took the pen name Vivian Lawry.

When I started submitting short stories, I asked Lawry whether it was okay for me to use that pen name. He said, “Sure. This is the only fiction I’ll ever write.”

People more often than not mispronounce and/or misspell Makosky anyway. My professional (psychological) publications are by Vivian Makosky, and using a pen name for fiction allows me to separate the genres.

By the time Dark Harbor saw the light of day, I’d published numerous short stories as Vivian Lawry. Publishing the novel as Vivian Lawry would feel like plagiarism, as if I was claiming to be the sole author of the mystery. Hence, it ended up being coauthored after all, by Vivian Lawry and W. Lawrence Gulick.

The Real Michael Field

Little did we know that shared pen names have been around for awhile. 

  • Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece, Edith Emma Cooper, shared the pen name Michael Field, as well as what appeared to be a lesbian relationship for more than forty years. 
  • Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch shared the pen name Magnus Flyte.

Perhaps they chose male pen names for marketing reasons as well.

To Bypass Gender Stereotypes

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë as painted by their brother Branwell

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell because, according to Charlotte, “…we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” 

Many other women have written under men’s names in order to get published and/or to be taken seriously.

To Jump Genres

Yet another reason to adopt a pen name is to publish in very different genres.

  • The Cuckoo’s Calling
  • Joanne Rowling has used pennames to confront both of these issues in the publishing world.
    • Her editor suggested that a fantasy series published by a woman would only appeal to a female audience, so JK Rowling published the Harry Potter series and all the other books in the “Potterverse“
    • She switched to Robert Galbraith for her 2013 crime mystery, The Cuckoo’s Calling
  • Louisa May Alcott published Little Women under her given name
    • She used the name AM Barnard to write gothic thrillers with unladylike subject matter
  • Nora Roberts a.k.a. JD Robb
    • When writing romance, she’s Nora Roberts
    • When writing futuristic suspense, she becomes JD Robb 
  • Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) also used many pen names
    • Isak Dinesen published Seven Gothic Tales 
    • Pierre Andrézel, The Angelic Avengers
    • In German-speaking countries, she is sometimes published as Tania Blixen
Fantasy and science fiction are still heavily male-dominated genres.

Indeed, many publishers advise writers established in one genre to take a different name for a different genre so as not to confuse or frustrate loyal readers.

To Improve Marketing

PD James, aka
Phyllis Dorothy James White,
Baroness James of Holland Park

And not to be overlooked, some authors choose a pen name or use only initials purely for marketing purposes. Besides JK Rowling and PD James, consider these three:

For more on this topic, pick up Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Psuedonyms  by Carmela Ciuraru. That’s not a pen name – the author really is named Carmela Ciuraru.

Downside of Pen Names 

Ghostwriting is not quite the same as using a pen name.

Yes, there is a downside. If one chooses to keep two (or more) writing names, and to keep them separate, it multiplies the workload: separate blogs, separate websites, separate social media accounts…  

And one can’t handily promote the other!

For those of us who have a “private” name and a pen name, visibility is often lost: people know me as one or the other. In spite of leakage over time, personal friends and family members sometimes forget my pen name, and often haven’t “liked” Vivian Lawry’s Facebook page. Thus, they don’t keep up with publications, talks, etc., even though they might be some of the best word-of-mouth advertising.

Bottom line: Think carefully before taking a pen name.

What I’ve Been Up To

Posted on by vlaw759

In the past few years, I’ve been writing a lot more than I realized. Without realizing it, I’ve managed to publish more than a dozen new short stories! Some of these have come out of various writing classes and workshops, but others have just popped out of my head onto the page.

All of these new pieces are listed on my Publications page now. Feel free to stop by and read some of my work for inspiration!

Things in the world are pretty chaotic at the moment. It’s easy to be pulled into a world of grey hopelessness. A reminder that anyone can still create something beautiful can be good for the soul.

Giving First Rights

Posted on by vlaw759

Sometimes life gets on top of you. You aren’t dead, just buried. And accidents happen. Such was the case for me once upon a time. When two on-line journals went live nearly simultaneously, I realized that I had granted first rights to both of them. My attempt to set things right follows.

To the OxMag Editorial Staff:

I am embarrassed and extremely regretful to have to tell you that I inadvertently granted publication rights to two literary journals. On May 8, 2015, when I granted OxMag rights to my short story “Trust,” I did not recall that I had previously (on March 27) granted publication to Diverse Arts Project Journal. All I can say in my defense is that over the last several months I’ve been distracted by two surgeries, daily hospital care for a persistent non-healing wound, various other health complications, family issues, and a flurry of short story acceptances. Once I discovered my error, notifying you seemed the only honorable thing to do.

As an on-line publication, I suppose that you can—and may wish to—remove my story from this issue. Alternatively, should you choose to allow the double publication to stand, please add an appropriate footnote acknowledging the Diverse Arts Project Journal.

Again, my apologies for the error. Please let me know how you decide to handle this. And thank you for your time and efforts on my behalf.

A little more than three weeks later, I received the following response:

Thank you so much for coming forward with this issue, we appreciate it.

Because it is our policy generally to only publish previously unpublished work, we will remove your story “Trust” from our Spring 2015 issue. We did enjoy your story, and re-reading it gives us time to again appreciate why we chose to publish it initially. We encourage you to continue submitting work to OxMag, but also remind you to in the future keep us informed of the status of any simultaneous submissions. (Submittable actually has an option to withddraw stories from consideration once they’ve been accepted without you having to notify everyone.)

We wish you good health, and also congratulations on the other short story acceptances—that’s very exciting!

Avoid First Rights Blunders

There are several take-aways for writers. One, with e-publishing, this sort of error can be corrected. Unlike a print journal, where making changes of this sort would be prohibitively expensive, it’s a relatively easy fix. Two, if you screw-up—regardless of the medium—admit it. Besides easing your conscience, doing so reflects well on you. In this case, OxMag thanked me and invited future submissions. And, three, take care of the paperwork (either yourself, or through a third party). It’s much better to avoid this sort of situation than to try to repair it!

You can read “Trust” at The Diverse Arts Project.