I Suck At Doing Fundraisers!
I like to put in a “no purchase necessary” entry in my giveaways so everybody can play – but maybe I shouldn’t have done so with the LC Evans fundraiser.
If I don’t get at least 10 verifiable entries for the second question in the Rafflecopter widget, I’m going to have to cancel the giveaway. It’s not a fundraiser if it doesn’t raise any funds.
EDIT: So I did cancel the rafflecopter, and I donated the $25 to the Zapstone LC Evans fundraiser.
FacebookThread Preservation 1A
Forgive the redundancy if you were just following this convo on fb, but I didn’t want to lose Misty’s final observation to the ether – so I preserve it here.
KindleObsessed shared a link.
Zapstone’s LC Evans Fundraiser & Giveaway
You know the drill – give the secret word in the comments to win a copy of Discovery: A Far Out Romance.
Please name the format you’d like.
The usual profit from the book will be donated to the Zapstone LC Evans fundraiser.
Second Chance to Win: Enter the Rafflecopter widget below to win a $25 gift card, Amazon or B&N, winner’s choice. No purchase necessary – answering the first question gives you an entry. BUT you get 5 extra entries for each LC Evans book you’ve purchased (or do purchase) throughout the month of February. If you’ve purchased Discovery, that counts too!
You can find Linda’s books here:
Kindle
Nook
And here is the Zapstone fundraiser page with all the options.
Good luck – and happy reading!
NOTICE … GIVEAWAY CANCELED
As I explained in the post “I Suck At Fundraisers” – I designed this one badly. There were no entries that denoted any actual fundraising activity for the LC Evans family. I’ll make sure everyone in this one gets an extra entry in the next giveaway, and it will be for an equal or better value prize.
read more…
Zapstone Makes February LC Evans Month
In January, LC Evans lost her battle with cancer. I didn’t know Linda that well. We’d “met” at Kindleboards over a year ago. I remember her fun covers and mulling over the title for The Witness Wore Blood Bay.
I remember that she was always nice. Never insane (as authors are wont to be). Classy.
I didn’t know Linda well, but her death hit me hard. I cried when I learned about it. I’m sure I projected things onto her.
LC Evans’s last book is a space opera, SFR (science fiction romance) romp called My Planet or Yours? In keeping with the theme, Zapstone Publishing is donating all the proceeds throughout February from their book in a similar genre, Discovery: A Far Out Romance. It’s available in about every format.
I’m sure readers of this blog will remember how much I like Discovery. We had a fun giveaway here when I was in the middle of reading it. Well, Zapstone liked my review and lifted a blurb from it for their gorgeous new edition of the book – and they included an excerpt of Give Me in the ebook version as well. How fun is that?
Long story short: Tomorrow in conjunction with Zapstone, this site will give away more copies of Discovery: A Far Out Romance, and the usual profit for each book donated to the February LC Evans fundraiser.
-oOo-
But wait – there’s more! We’ll also have a Rafflecopter giveaway for a $25 Amazon/B&N gift card – winner’s choice.
You know how it works! Only newsletter subscribers can play – so your odds of winning are very good!
Open your newsletter tomorrow to find the password to the rafflecopter gift card giveaway and the secret word to win a copy of Discovery – in either Kindle or epub format.
Nathan Fillion – Super Hero
I’m just saying …
A Story About Charlotte Sometimes
I’ve copied in their entirety two posts from 2007 by Penelope Farmer simply because they are wonderful and I don’t want to lose them in some future internet wipe. (Thanks to Mark Coker via Theresa Weir for finding this.)
This is a story about how we often touch each other without knowing we’ve done it, and how sometimes the connection comes back to us in surprising ways.
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
SATURDAY, JUNE 09, 2007
= = = = =
Granny seems to remember promising the story of The Cure and Charlotte Sometimes – the song -a long while back. She is about to start posting more, much heavier stuff, about the care home for people with mental problems. But she thought she’d post this first as light relief. Yet again, though, she’ll be writing in the first person.
*****
Years and years ago, in the late sixties, I wrote a book called Charlotte Sometimes, a book set in the kind of English boarding-school my twin sister and I attended/were incarcerated in – take your pick – for part of the fifties. The main character – Charlotte – finds herself switching back and forth between the year 1918 and her own time, taking the place of another girl in 1918, while that same girl takes her place in the 50’s. The whole book turned – though I didn’t see that when I wrote it – on identity; how do people identify you as you? How could they accept one person as quite another (assuming the two people look reasonably similar to start with as Charlotte and her 1918 equivalent did)? This happens to be a particularly relevant question for twins in general, and still more so for two not identical but similar looking twins like my sister and me, quite different in character and ability – even opposites in many respects, she right-handed, me left – but always taken together not singly. This was another connection I did not make at the time I was writing. The book would probably have worked less well if I had.
But other people made connections; the book struck chords; became my most successful by far. Just how successful I didn’t realise till more than twelve or thirteen years later when one of my children came home from school and said ‘Did you know, mum, there’s a song called ‘Charlotte Sometimes’?
No, Mum did not. Nor did her agent, whom she alerted immediately. Neither listened to rock much, neither had heard of the group called The Cure that performed this song. ‘Get a copy’ ordered the agent, so Granny went out and bought the single. The lyric to the song was on the record sleeve. Not only was it about confused identity, much of it consisted of quotes from the book. The title of the instrumental track on the B side, what’s more, was another quote from the book.
Now copyright law at the time was a very crude instrument. ‘Moral’ and ‘intellectual’ rights, acknowledging an author’s ownership of themes and ideas, as well as the actual text which incorporated them did not exist. The sole criteria for judging whether copyright had been breached was the proportion of a text used. Taking a mere two lines, from a poem, from a song lyric, in any book of mine would have constituted a breach of copyright unless permission was given for it, and, often, a hefty fee paid. On the other hand the amount of text used in a song lyric, even a longish one like this, was such a relatively small part of an entire novel that it would not count as breach of copyright. Nor did an author have any right to a title. Nor do they still. Googling Charlotte Sometimes for this piece I discovered a relatively recent film of the same name, not related to my book in any way. Such a title is unlikely to be pure coincidence. I suppose it’s a kind of flattery really- even though I’m sure the inspiration here was the Cure song not my book – perhaps I shouldn’t mind; but I do; a bit. I thought up that title first.
The blatant use of the text in the song was another matter; even then, it was, possibly, contentious, despite the limitations of the copyright law. Letters, faxes, were exchanged between my agent and the Cure’s management. The Society of Authors took the matter up and went to consult counsel; counsel’s advice was that yes there might be a case for breach of copyright in this case, but if the matter went to court they couldn’t be sure of the outcome. The Society of Authors, a fairly timid organisation on the one hand, and a fairly poor one on the other, decided to take it no further. As I couldn’t afford to follow it up myself, as the company were threatening to delete the song, and it was already clear it was doing wonders for my sales – and adding somewhat to my fan mail – we decided to back down.
So things went on for ten years or more. The extra income fromCharlotte was useful; it was less than a pittance compared to what the Cure would have earned on their song, but at least it kept the book in print – it is the only one of my books that has always stayed in print, going through 3 or 4 separate editions. I enjoyed some of the other fallout too; the letters from people I wouldn’t normally have expected to hear from; the reports in music journals like New Musical Express about girls deciding they were schizophrenic and renaming themselves ‘Charlotte’ because of the song – and directly or indirectly – because of my book; the naming of a yacht, ‘Charlotte Sometime’ – one year it came second in the round-the-Isle-of -Wight race. I ceased to be annoyed, even enjoyed the whole thing. It’s good to be remembered for something as a writer, if only for one book. Many other writers disappear altogether but I didn’t, entirely.
The Cure themselves went quiet for a while, They issued some new albums from time to time but did not tour. But in 1996 I think it was, I saw that they were going to tour again, starting with a huge gig at Earl’s Court just up the road from Hammersmith where I was living. I decided to try and get tickets; to get myself backstage if possible, to meet the Cure themselves; in particular to meet the group’s lead singer and song writer, Robert Smith. It wasn’t easy getting in touch with them; even when my agent and I managed it between us – discovering in the course of this that The Cure’s base was in a building they’d named ‘Charlotte House’ – the management was deeply suspicious. The law had changed by now, moral ownership was acknowledged, they appeared to suspect I was going after them again. Finally my agent and I convinced them this wasn’t so. They agreed: yes, there would be tickets for me at the Box Office. And yes if I came early and went back stage, I would be allowed to meet Robert Smith himself.
And so it was I offered the second promised ticket to my twin sister’s daughter, my niece, born a year after the book came out and named, appropriately for the evening, ‘Charlotte’ (if I so much as hinted that she might have been called after the fictional Charlotte, my sister would rise up out of her grave to clobber me, so I won’t). On a June evening – or was it July?- we set off together for Earl’s Court for my – if not Charlotte’s – very first – and probably last – rock concert. To be continued.
Labels: Charlotte Sometimes and The Cure
The Cure(d): Robert Smith for ever…
‘Hi,’ he said, thrusting it towards me. ‘Could you sign it for me, please?’
He opened it up: from the first page onward, line after line had been underlined in pencil. ‘You see how inspired I was,’ he said, adding behind his hand, looking at me sideways, ‘how I nicked it.’
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. Then I signed, as requested, with more than the usual flourish. ‘To Robert,’ I wrote, ‘love from Penelope.’ And added my whole name to the title page, the way writers do.
Robert Smith apologised for the beer can. ‘I have to keep my throat in good shape,’ he said. Then he apologised for not being able to play the song in the main part of the concert, ‘We’ve got to publicise the new album, you know. We’ll play it as encore,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ Underneath the lipstick, the standing on end hair, the Gothic everything, I can promise you, wombats, that Robert Smith really was just a nice, not to say very nice, very well brought-up boy from Sussex who not only loved his long-term wife but also probably loves -or loved – his mother.
Even eleven years older, he probably still is a very nice boy at heart. Why shouldn’t he be?
Then he told me the story of how he’d come across the book in the first place.
‘My elder brother used to read to us at bedtime,’ he said, ‘I was about twelve or so and he was still reading books to us. Your book was one of them, it never got out of my head. Once I got into music I wanted to make a song about it. That’s how it happened.’
We didn’t mention copyright. I admitted I liked his having written the song, and we agreed it might be nice to be in touch again, in slightly less rushed circumstances. ‘Have to go. I’m running late’ he said and sloped off, still clutching his beer can, still clutching his tatty copy of Charlotte, now with my signature inside. And ‘Love from Penelope.’
I can’t quite say the concert was an anti-climax. Unlike some later Cure concerts that year it got lousy reviews in various places; among other things there was a lot of trouble with the sound system. Yet it still seemed amazing to me, from my innocent standpoint, much more noisy even than Royal Tournament, and much more spectacular, lighting-wise, though I wasn’t so sure about the music (I gathered afterwards it was far from their best album). I suppose it would have seemed tame to anyone who’s ever seen Madonna, which I hadn’t and still haven’t except on television, briefly. But it didn’t seem tame to me. The way the sound, the light, took me over, thrummed through me, physically, was outside anything I’d had experienced before. It was thrilling, as opera can be thrilling, though in an entirely different way. (Still, probably, I prefer opera. Sorry about that.)
The band went out and came back before the encores. And then it happened. A few familiar chords sounded; everyone started cheering. Robert held up a hand – stilled them – ‘you all know the song’, he said – more cheers, but stifled – ‘this evening,’ he went on, ‘the writer of the original book is here in the hall with us.’ The cheers rose again and he didn’t stop them this time as the lights swung round to where Charlotte and I were sitting and picked us out. People craning round to see, I got up, put up my arms, waved my hands about and acknowledged them; the first and – certainly – the last time I’d get that kind of buzz, the kind rock stars are used to, but writers most certainly aren’t, even the best known ones. Then the chords swelled up again, the cheers faded and I sat back and listened with everyone else to what was by now, even to me, something deeply familiar, even effecting in its way. My tune you could say; yes, really.
Robert Smith and I never did get round to communicating. I don’t know we’d have had much to say to each other if we had. I seemed to remember sending him a Christmas card that year, but that was it. If he was grateful to me for the book – I think he was – I suppose I have to say – through slightly clenched teeth, being, among other things so very much poorer than he is – I have to be grateful to him too for that brief moment of pop glory, and for all the rest. Charlotte after all is still in print, has even gone into a new American edition. Cheers, Robert, wherever you are; though wine rather than beer is my tipple, I’m raising my glass to you.
Labels: Charlotte Sometimes and The Cure
Orpheus, Eurydice, and The Loves of Leopold Singer
Most people know something of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: When Eurydice died from a venomous snake bite shortly after their wedding, Orpheus was distraught.
He journeyed to the underworld and begged Hades to return Eurydice to life.
When Orpheus played his lyre, the music was so sweet that for the brief duration of the song the sufferings of all in the underworld were eased. As reward, Hades granted Orpheus’s request.
With one catch (there’s always a catch). Orpheus was forbidden to look at Eurydice until they were both back on the earth’s surface. You can probably guess from the picture what happened.
In The Loves of Leopold Singer, Leopold Singer (singer – get it? get it?) is an Orpheus figure. When Leopold’s wife is traumatized shortly after their marriage, she sinks into a kind of depression. He’d love nothing better than to save her from her pain, but in a twist on the myth, she has to find her own way through the passage of Taenarus to the bright, sunshiny day.
I’ve strewn references to the mythology of Orpheus throughout LOLS. It isn’t at all necessary to know Greek mythology to enjoy the story, but I hope people who do like it will enjoy that aspect of the novel.
Some other tidbits:
The Lost Bee is the name of a London coffee house in LOLS. According to Greek mythology, Aristaeus was the first to domesticate bees. He’s also the villain who chased after Eurydice, driving her into the path of the deadly snake who killed her. Later, when Orpheus was inconsolable having twice lost his love, the nymphs responded to Orpheus’s grief by destroying Aristaeus’s bees.
Orpheus’s power is centered in his music – his voice and his harp. When the Maenads tried to kill him (because he refused to make love with women, among other things), the sticks and stones they threw were enthralled by his music and failed to hit him. This drove the Maenads into a rage. When their loud frenzy drowned out Orpheus’s song, the projectiles hit their mark with deadly force, and the Maenads ripped Orpheus to pieces. In LOLS, after Leopold refuses the advances of a woman not his wife, a storm drowns out his voice to dire effect.
Flash Giveaway – JL Bryan New Release: FAIRY BLUES
This week JL Bryan, author of Jenny Pox, is releasing Fairy Blues, the second book in his Songs of Magic series.
With their enchanted instruments charming the crowds, the Assorted Zebras attract interest from record producers, and soon they’re off to cut their first album and music video. Jason and his friends don’t know they’ve just become pawns in a sinister plot by a cabal of evil fairies…
Let’s have a giveaway! I’ll give away two copies of Fairy Blues at the end of today (9 p.m. PST). Enter the rafflecopter widget below, and answer whether you want a Kindle or Nook format if you win.
But wait! There’s more! I’ll give a copy of Fairy Metal Thunder to the first ten commenters who leave the secret phrase in the comments. Winner’s choice, Nook or Kindle.
Secret phrase: Am I blue
Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in the series:
Jason plays guitar in a teenage garage band called the Assorted Zebras, but they have no fans and no gigs, and they’re going nowhere. Even worse, Jason has a crush on the lead singer, but she already has a near-perfect boyfriend.
One night, Jason steals enchanted instruments from the fairy world. Suddenly (with a little help from YouTube) every kid in the Midwest is crazy about the Assorted Zebras...
REMEMBER THE BOOK GIVEAWAY GOLDEN RULE: Redeem your loot right away! It’s good for the author, and it makes you eligible for the next giveaway.
UPDATE: Congratulations, Rochelle and April!! The Kindle copy of Fairy Blues has been sent, and the Nook will be sent as soon as B&N has it live and available.
Giveaway Alert – Fairy Blues
Giveaway Alert! At 10 o’clock this morning (Pacific Time) We’re having a JL Bryan-palooza. A flash giveaway of 10 copies of Fairy Metal Thunder, and a Rafflecopter giveaway of 2 copies of his new release in the series, Fairy Blues! (remember the secret phrase: am I blue)
(The post below will be unlocked at 10 o’clock PST)
Bawling My Eyes Out
UPDATE … It’s finished! And I think it’s good. I was bawling my eyes out at the end. LOLSM – The Loves of Leopold Singer: Maenads will be available shortly.
I’ll put it up at B&N for a day or two before putting it into Select.
Protected: Assassin’s Curse and $25 Amazon/B&N Giveaway (find password in the newsletter)
Password Protected
To view this protected post, enter the password below:
Assassin’s Curse Giveaway Today
Assassin’s Curse – The Witch Stone Prophecy is the latest epic fantasy by Debra L. Martin and David W. Small. This released only last week, and it’s racing up the fantasy charts – and today, author Debra L. Martin is giving away five Kindle copies through the newsletter.
You know the drill! Find the password and secret phrase in the newsletter to enter the post and win. It’s that easy. Plus, we’ll have a $25 gift card giveaway through Rafflecopter – Amazon or B&N, winner’s choice.
When elite assassin Jeda received his assignment to kill a witch and deliver her twin daughters to the Countess of Berkshire, he had no idea it would be his last. The witch stuns him with an elemental blast, but not before he’s able to throw his knife.
When Jeda regains consciousness, the dying witch is performing a compelling spell between him and her twin daughters . Now bonded to the girls, Jeda’s old life is forfeit. His only thought is to take the girls and run as far away as he can. He has no idea that the twins are the ones spoken of in the long-lost prophecy of The Witch Stone.
Forces are gathering: the white witches want to teach them; the Countess wants her grandchildren back, and the guild has sent their best assassin to bring Jeda back, dead or alive. Jeda must use all of his assassin skills to stay one step ahead of them all, but will it be enough to save himself and keep the children of prophecy alive?