Author: lazloferran

D.O.A. (1950) and Helen of Troy (1956)

As many of you know I am a big movie buff. After a solid afternoon’s writing on Sunday I settled down to watch two movies in the evening, D.O.A. (1950) and Helen of Troy (1956).

D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) is a noirish movie about a guy with a shady business who goes on an unexplained break to a city in US and gets poisoned. Thinking it’s just a bad hangover he goes to the doctor who tells him it’s fatal and he has days to live. He then goes on a desperate hunt for his own killer before finally reporting a homicide at the Police Station. The officer asks him who was murdered and he says “Me.” This is actually the film’s opening scene and surprisingly the officer, far from being incredulous, actually hunts for the report of the guy’s murder which he already has. Continue reading “D.O.A. (1950) and Helen of Troy (1956)” →

I am Getting Some Useful input

Well, I have done another rewrite of the first chapter of Ordo Lupus – even though it is already available.
Basically one of the last crits I received on critters.org (they come in for about a week after you submit) was by somebody who I feel is a very experienced writer. Rather like what they are advising me to do more of with my writing, they actually showed me what do do with parts of my text, rather than just tell me.

The problem was with thoughts or more specificaly POV thoughts (another acronym I learned – Point of View). In many places, because my book is in first-person he expresses thoughts which are left unsaid. Until now I didn’t know what the convention for this was, so I just put them in single parentheses, thus ‘thought’. Continue reading “I am Getting Some Useful input” →

Update on Things I’m Working on

Not sure what I am going to write but a friend mailed me today asking how things are going and it occured to me I haven’t posted for a while.

Ok – Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate
It’s being professionally previewed: ie a company reads it and assesses the cover, narrative cohesion, story, pricing, characterisation etc against its market. It’s relatively cheap at about 60 dollars and I think it is better value for market than these so-called ‘promotional’ packages where they just give you a banner on some obscure site and then add you to a db which is used by US book sellers to locate books. I mean why would they even find my book, let alone actually decide to stock it without reading a decent review?

Continue reading “Update on Things I’m Working on” →