Repost of a Soltice List: Books and Stories Not to be Missed from 2012

Solstice List: Books and Short Stories Not to be Missed 2012

by Malina Roos on Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 10:01pm ·

I have read a lot of books in the last two years. Well, I have always read a lot of books but in the past eighteen months I started tracking just how many I read. I am up to 623. There were a lot of good books and a few great ones. Fortunately only about a dozen or so were bad, really, really bad. This year I also joined the Horror Writers Association and with that honour I nominated a few great stories. Don't know if they made it all the way through, but I guess we will find out in a few months. The only down side to this is books can only be nominated in the year they were published. That left out a lot of great books. Books that people read a year or more after publication, or books that were written by authors unsure of the HWA and were not members. So I decided to publish my own list of great reads.

I also write book reviews for my own page Only Five Star Book Reviews as well as for Hellnotes. Some of the books on the list you will find have been reviewed on both sites, but others have not. Not enough time in the day right now, to do all I want to do. But I will get to them.

All of these stories touched me in some way. Either the way the author used prose, the depth of characters, or the story. I only had a couple of rules; the story must be edited, no typos, gramamtical, or punctual errors. I don't care about style. If an author chooses to write about a character with a speech impediment, or accent, so be it. But to publish something that has numerous errors makes my teeth itch. If I get to chapter two and already have enough highlighted areas on the pages to make a black and white page look like it is printed on yellow paper, I toss it. Did that to about a dozen novels. Irritated the heck out of me. If you as an author, spend time and energy creating a story, spend some time or money or both, editing it. Please.

Second rule was it had to make me think or engage me in a way to let me get lost in it. That brings me back to rule number one.......if I am reading a story, I want to become lost. I want to wander down the trail of well-spun prose and sharp descriptives and I don't want to trip over poor editing and fall on my face.

That was it. Now the problem......I wanted a Top Ten List. I have 40......so, since this is my list I took the liberty of separating the stories and books into categories, cause I can. I have the Solstice Top Eleven (?)  Short Stories and Long Fiction, Solstice Top Novels (20), and Solstice Anthologies.

On this list you will find a myriad of authors, writing styles and publishing dates. You will also find a variation on theme, voice, tone and style. One thing they all have in comon though is brilliant writing, great storytelling and a way to stick in your mind. Keep in mind these tomes have not all been published in 2012. These are the stories I have read this year that I believe are top notch.

Best Short Stories and Longer Fiction

1. Flesh & Blood Jerry McKinney
2. Tears of Love Jerry McKinney
3. Prison Planet Billie Sue Mosiman
4. Mourning Mansion Billie Sue Mosiman
5. The Girl Bryan Hall
6. Pisswidget Franklin E Wales
7. Mama Said Lee Allen Howard
8. Unleashed: Tail One Lori R Lopez
9. Feed Jerry McKinney
10. Frankenstein:Return from the Wasteland Billie Sue Mosiman
11. Labour Pains Lee Allen Howard

Best Anthologies of 2012

1. Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad Weldon Burge*
2. Dark Blessings John Paul Allen
3. Dead in the Truck Craig Saunders
4. Midnight Hour Neil Davies
5. World Collider Richard Salter
6. Night Sound Jerry McKinney

Best Novels 

1. Scars on the Face of God Chris Bauer
2. 100 Unfortunate Days Penelope Crowe**
3. Apparition Michaelbrent Collings**
4. Gifted Trust John Paul Allen***
5. Seven Point Star Craig Saunders
6. Requiem for Dead Flies Peter Dudar
7. Nightwhere John Everson*
8. Selection Event Wayne Wightman
9. Wishbone Brooklyn Hudson
10. Shining in Crimson Robert S Wilson
11. Don of the Living Dead Robert DeCouteau****
12. Critique Daniel I Russel**
13. Pressure Jeff Strand
14. The Vampire Club Scott Nicholson****
15. One Night Stan's Greg Sisco****
16. Zomblog Todd Brown
17. The Plauge Lisa Hinsley
18. Widow Billie Sue Mosiman
19. World Mart Leigh M Lane
20. Anon Pete Giglio

Series

1. Chronicles of the Vampire Hunters: Creation (Book 1) Judgement (Book 2) Extermination (Book 3) Dustin Palmer
2. Scrolls of the Dead- Legions of the Dark, Rise of the Legend, and Hunter of the Dead  Billie Sue Mosiman

                                        *Dark  **Disturbing ***Dark and Disturbing ****Hillarious

Do yourself a favour and read these books. Read all of them. If you are a writer, read them and see what makes these great. If you are a reader, read them for entertainment and pleasure. I know I will be reading them again and again and again.........

Writing about ZOMBIES--in a way...ZOM ALIVE:2110

Recently I wrote a long novella about "Zoms." The title deliberately didn't call them "zombies" and in the story they aren't called that. In fact, one of the featured characters is a Zom and tells the reader he is not zombie, don't call him one.

The idea came to me when I saw yet another shambling, mindless zombie stagger across my TV screen in some movie or other. Entertainment is rife with zombies at the moment. Zombie TV series, Zombie movies, and Zombie books. Although I have read one zombie novel that I enjoyed, DEADHEADS:EVOLUTION by Franklin E. Wales, for the most part I do not read books about zombies and I don't watch TV shows or movies about them. Why? Because they make absolutely no sense to me. They're DEAD, but animated? Really? They eat human brains, why? In my reality dead is dead. Dead is not going to rise up and walk again and it certainly isn't going to eat anything, human or not. Also, how interesting is a creature that has no thoughts beyond hunger? And the survivors who flee from zombies? How interesting are people who run from dead shambling humans who can't even speak? Ooooo, so scary.

You might say well, what about vampires and werewolves and ghosts and other monsters? I can go for those on occasion. I can find a way to suspend my disbelief if the writer is a good enough storyteller. I've even written an entire trilogy of novels that was published by DAW Books about vampires and I tried to make them as believable and as human as possible.

I simply cannot contend with a creature we call a zombie that is dead, has no thought processes, and moves around only to snack on human flesh. Logic doesn't allow me to accept such a creature.

Therefore, I thought about what kind of creature I could believe in and it was a human being who has been infected by a virus let out accidentally from a laboratory. A human that was "zombie-like" in that the person no longer had control over his own mind when he felt anger and rage. A person ruled by his lizard brain, his primitive brain, the one that has no concept of empathy or control over action. That's how I began writing ZOM ALIVE: 2110. I decided it was time, in the annals of zombie literature, to bring the zombie under the rules of logic and give him back his humanity.

There are trends in literature and in national media that come along and right now it appears to be zombies. There's the Zombie Apocalypse (whatever that could be), there's zombie calendars, zombie bumper stickers, zombie T-shirts. I don't know about you, but I'm zombied to the hilt these days and hoping some other imaginative creature will come along in horror to read about finally. One that makes some sense.

I'm not saying your love of zombie fiction and film isn't your own business or that you are less than worthy for liking it. I'm just stating a fact from my own personal opinion--not trying to make the whole nation who loves zombies come raining down on my head! I understand the world today is in flux and there's a great deal of tension and worry. Anything creative that lessens that anxiety can only be good for us. It's just that zombies don't do it for me. Give me a haunting ghost, a revenge-filled revenant spirit, a skulking werewolf, a Frankenstein, a gargoyle or goblin. Give me a Hobbit. But please, don't ask me to read about the usual zombie, or ask me to watch another zombie movie, or tell me about the latest doings on The Walking Dead because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Having said that, if you're in the mood for something different in the zombie genre, if like me you have trouble suspending your disbelief for the shambling dead, give my novella ZOM ALIVE: 2110 a little try.

Happy reading!

An Artist's Integrity or How Hard is it to be Honest?

Secrets always come out. No, you say, sometimes you can keep them hidden.

Well, probably some can remain secret, but I'll amend my generalized statement to say Secrets Most of the Time are Revealed. Why? Because people aren't stupid.

What does keeping secrets have to do with integrity? It has all to do with it. Writers are like other people and I don't want them to be like other people. In general, people lie about themselves and what they've done, at least now and then. They may only lie to family or to a few friends or co-workers, and the lie may be small, insignificant--or it may be large. It may even be in the human chromosomes to lie when the truth would do as well. I don't know about that. It just sometimes seems that way.

Writers and artists, however, are people I hold to a higher standard. Writers, especially, deal with the human condition and the human heart. If you write well, you write with honesty. Honesty in emotion and in characterization. Otherwise the fiction fails and is junk--worse than junk, it's fodder. Why then would a writer, a good writer of that sort, lower himself to lie about his life and accomplishments? To further himself, you say, and you'd be right. To appear greater than he is, you say. To create a persona that cannot be toppled.

Lately I've dealt with a few secrets artists tried to keep that have backfired on them. One was from a cover artist, MY cover artist, who had grown into being a friend. He always tried to fit my covers to my work, he was fast, and he didn't charge me much because I'd been with him so long and had praised him to high heaven to any other author I could find. Suddenly friends and other writers began to send me messages about how the artist's covers were being reused, showing up on two or more other writers' works with only minor changes. Well, I thought, that's not good, but maybe it's because they were bargain bin covers and he never really told any of us the covers were made only for us. You see we didn't get any of this in writing. We assumed because we were led to assume. Then I got messages about the artist's sordid past and charges of fraud. Well, I thought, that's worse, but that was the past, maybe he's different now. THEN I discovered my cover artist had taken the copyrighted work of other artists and used it without permission. I had to speak out. I felt responsible for encouraging people to use this cover artist and now I felt responsible to tell them he was not as he seemed and their covers, some of which they might have paid top dollar for, might be reused for someone else or the art might not be original. It was a most difficult thing to speak the truth about someone I thought of as a friend. But this friend had not been upfront with me or anyone else and this friend's "secrets" were found out.

Integrity. Had there been honesty and integrity at play, the artist wouldn't have reused the covers without stating in the beginning he was going to do so. Letting the author assume the work was original was in itself a lie of omission, but still a lie. Integrity would not allow an artist to use another artist's work as his own.

Now we come to writers and what all this has to do with them. On the main, writers are the observant, intelligent, and sensitive creatures I expect them to be. Once in a while you discover a few of them are jealous-hearted, revengeful, and even fraudulent, but I think this is rare. Recently I was reading a short story by a fellow writer I've known since the 1980s. I've been around a long time so I've met my fair share of authors young and old. Anyway, I was reading the story, one I'd missed in the past, and at the end was the author's summarized biography. It was an obvious fiction. At least to me, who knew him and his past and his accomplishments, it was fiction. (I am using the generic pronoun "he/his" but that doesn't mean this person was male.) Half of it wasn't true and I knew it. I sat there dumbfounded. Had this friend built his entire reputation on a mountain of lies? How long had these lies been perpetuated? And what was the reason for it? Surely the reason was to empower the author and to help him rise up the ranks to become a grand writer, one others looked up to, one others admired and envied. It certainly didn't hurt to be able to say one had won every single writing award in the known universe. It didn't hurt to claim to have been published years before one really was published. It didn't hold him back to claim numbers of books had been published that hadn't. I was staring into the face of dishonesty and it wasn't pretty. I sat thinking, Oh no, you didn't.

Let's talk about being honest and having integrity. Let's talk about a writer's reputation. A good name is all you ever really have in the end, in any profession. The name precedes you and if you're lucky it will outlive you. In your grave others will be speaking your name, but will they be speaking it in reverence or in ridicule? For secrets cannot remain secrets from people who know you well. If your secrets are about padding your biography or claiming accomplishments you did not earn, the name--all that you really have--is dirtied. Why take that chance in order to claw your way up the ladder? Why not do it with the work, with your character, and with your honest sweat? It's too hard, isn't it? It takes too much time, years and years. It takes your entire life. It's easier to claim this and that and make others believe it in order to leapfrog your way forward. But I tell you this, even if you succeed in turning the lies, told over many years, into what others believe is the truth, someone somewhere will know. I know this author was not as accomplished, not in the least, as he claimed to be. Accolades accepted by him were hollow. His reputation, at least in my eyes, was in ruin.

I know this might sound like a scolding lecture from an old experienced writer, but it's just a fair warning. You do not, young writer, want to one day be found out a liar, a fraud. You do not want a colleague to read your bio somewhere and sit back in shock and dismay at the obvious untruth in it. Can it help you to lie and claim that which you did not earn? Perhaps it can, sometimes it can, and if you want to take that chance, go right ahead. But one day someone who has known you thirty or forty years will come along and write a blogpost (or whatever is being used for communication at that time) saying you lied, you were false, you were ego-driven and ridiculous in your ambition, and you are not an honest, reputable person.

My cover artist fell into ruin and lost his book cover customers and business. Not because of me. Because of his own dishonest behavior. The unnamed writer I speak about? He or she is sailing along fabulously and I won't be the one to name the person to smear that reputation because if it meant that much, let the lies stand. If it meant that much, the insecurity and deceit has to be extreme, which in a way is punishment enough. However, I don't think I'll be the last one to notice the discrepancies and little by little one day that reputation he or she enjoys might yet be tarnished.

That's what can happen if you lie, pure and simple. You are an artist. You are a professional writer. You don't need to pad your resume or claim impossible feats of literary acumen. You don't need to steal when you have the talent to create original work. You need to be honest in all your relationships. You need to stand up for an honest life you can be proud of and not one that might be found to be suspect and lacking in integrity. If you don't achieve the high goals you wish, accept it as truth and work harder. As long as you have breath, you have a chance to accomplish all that you wish. Don't start down the road littered with enhancements, with inflated claims, and with lies. Even if the truth makes you look bad, tell it if you're confronted or asked. Even if the truth is not as grand as you'd wish it to be, take it to your heart and hold it close because what you DID accomplish is real and true. You can then be proud of it.

Any other way lies perdition. Okay, maybe not, that's my writer self penning a literary phrase. But in the end ask yourself--can you live with it? Can you really? Like in the Paloma Faith song title, "Do You Want The Truth or Something Beautiful?" My question is: Don't you know you can have both?

A Small Warning to Authors

It was brought to my attention today that an author felt her e-book had been pirated and put up for free on Amazon. She had it free on some other online book sites, but she wasn't the one who put it on Amazon. Trying to figure out how this happened, I checked the book's Sample and discovered this language, put there by the author (this was the original book with the author's name on it and the author's cover):"This book can be reproduced, copied and distributed for noncommercial purposes provided the book is in its original form." It was right there in the license notes. She essentially gave others the right to put the book on Amazon as long as it was free (they weren't using it commercially) and as long as it was the original book (it was.) 


The warning is obvious. DO NOT put that notice on your work. You are giving away nearly all of your rights. She states her copyright, but by giving it to the world that way, with two stipulations, it is possible she's set the book free into the Public Domain. I'm not totally sure about that and the author will have to do some study on the laws to find out if it amounts to that, but in any event this was a bad move.


Anyone can now even stand in New York City's Times Square and hand out copies of the printed book or electronic copies on any media (CD) all day long every day as long as he didn't charge for it or change the original book. Since the word "reproduce" is in that statement, someone could even make a film from the book and never pay the author a cent, if the film was offered for free. Or that's how I read it.


Authors are often confused about copyright. It is important not only to declare one's copyright to a work, but to then make sure you protect it. If you place a statement as this author did, giving people the right to copy, reproduce, and distribute, then you just blew holes in your own copyright. Once that's done, it's done. It's out there. It's gone--or at least it is holey and apt to be Copied, Reproduced, or Distributed.


The reason I have a copyright notice on this blog is for this reason. I have a free short story here for you to read and the first couple of chapters of a novel, but my blog states they are covered by copyright and no one has the right to use the work in any way or form without permission. I might give you something free to read, but that doesn't mean I am going to permit anyone in the world to come along, scoop it up, and reprint it for free without my permission. If that were to happen my copyright would be infringed and I would be able to bring suit.


Authors, please, be careful what you state, not only on your blogs, but in your e-books and print books. Your intellectual work belongs to you as long as you don't give it away. Be warned.

Introducing THE PUB! Come one, Come all.

 Bryan Hall, ArmandThe Pub-Main Page Rosamilia, and I have opened THE PUB. Here's a link to the front door: THE PUB

Pub Conversation 1
Getting Hooked....or not
With: Armand Rosamilia, Billie Sue Mosiman, and Bryan Hall

(I have joined with my two friends to do a weekly blog called The Pub. This is the first installment. Go to the main Pub page and bookmark it to read conversations we have with editors, authors, publishers, reviewers, and various other people involved with the book industry.)Yo

u know the old cliche'... three horror writers walk into a bar. The first orders a bloody mary, the second orders a bloody mikey...
Ahem. What happens when three (or more) horror writers sit down in a corner, order a few (or more) drinks, and have a casual chat about publishing and reading, but not from the angle of simply being horror writers, but readers first?
Each week the three of us (Bryan, Billie and Armand) will invite a friend or two to join in the conversation, buy the first round (or more) and add their thoughts to a continuing conversation about what makes us tick. Each week we'll tackle a new question, giving our own thoughts and answering your questions... oh, and perhaps giving some of our eBooks away... all because it's fun... and we're drinking.

What hooks you in a story and keeps you turning pages?

Armand: As a reader, I need to be hooked by the characters within the first couple of chapters or I get bored. You might have the greatest plot thrown at me, an eerie or unique premise, but if you don't make me want to invest my reading time in the character(s) you've lost me. I've read several books in the last few months that I couldn't get through the first three chapters because the main character was boring or unrealistic or was so passive with the plot pulling them along that I stopped reading. I have three bookshelves overflowing with thousands of books I haven't read and a Kindle loaded with over 500 eBooks. I'll never get to all of them, so for me, hook me with a great character, or expect me to move on.

---

Bryan: I'll agree, the hooks have to get sunk in quick or I'll stop reading as well.  But as important as I think great, believable characters are - and they're really, really important - if it's just another rehashed plot I'll end up struggling to finish it.  Characters are what you connect with, identify with, and the main thing that draws you in.  But if you just spend 300 pages of them doing nothing at all, just building them up with no kind of real plot action, there's no point.  And no matter how great those characters may be, if you just drop them into another cliched zombie story or the same old haunted house tale that's been told a thousand times over, it's a lot harder for me to keep interested.   So...yeah, I think characters are a vital cog in the machine, but if they're just spinning on their axle with nothing interesting going on, they're doomed to lose my interest. Bentley Little is one writer who really hooks you fast in most cases.

---

Billie: It's almost indefinable. Hooks can be anything from stating a death occurred, a house is being built, or a ship is sinking, but some kind of concrete premise for the character has to be in place. Conflict. Without either an outward action-packed conflict or an inner turmoil conflict going on, the character, no matter how well-developed, has nowhere to go. Building up to telling the story is something that some writers mistake as telling the story. Most stories and novels can have the first scene or chapter lopped off and start better. Hooks can be quiet and ominous. Or they can be fast and pin you to the page. The important thing is that the writer writes with confidence. He first hooks and amuses himself. He has to -see- it, feel it, taste it, smell it, know it is real and it's going to be so thrilling that he can hardly hold onto the mechanics of the writing long enough to get the words down. That urgency and excitement, even in quiet openings, builds within his reader, pulling him deeper into the page, immersing him into the story, holding him in a vice so that he won't wander. If I read a story that opened, "He walked in the dark." I might go on, I probably would, but I'd be skeptical. Yet if the first sentence said, "He walked in thunder." I would not be able to stop. I'd have to know more. Did he walk in real thunder, during a storm or something? Did he walk with high purpose and if so, what's that purpose? Did he walk in anger and that's the thunder wherein he walks? We want fiction to grab us quick and hold us tight. That can be accomplished in a myriad different ways.

---

With all that said, how quickly does a story need to hook you and draw you in before you give up on it?

Billie: I probably give it two paragraphs. Sometimes a whole page, if there's some small glimmer that I'm going to like it.

Armand: I will generally try to finish the first chapter of a story and see if it hooks me. Again, give me something mysterious about the character, give me some questions in my head I need to find out so it keeps me reading. Spelling and formatting errors, however, take me out of the book right from the opening, so if I find them it pulls me away from the story and I will give up quicker.

Bryan: I give it a couple of pages.  Even if there's not a big "Holy Crap" moment or a mystery, I'll give it time.  Unless the writing style is just a struggle to get through.  But after the first few pages if I don't find something interesting, I'll usually skip ahead a chapter or two and read a page to see if something interesting is going on there. 

Billie: Armand is a much more generous reader than I am, I see. I've always been a tough customer. When there used to be bookstores everywhere, I'd pull out a book from a shelf and look at the blurbs, look at the back description, and give it a first paragraph or so check and that's all the chance a book got. Today, browsing on online book sites, I do the same. I sample. Small sample.

Bryan: Good point, Billie. Nowadays, if that Amazon Sample or a few minutes in the bookstore don't catch me, I'll just keep on going.

---

Drop in next week when Weldon Burge, editor of the Zippered Flesh anthology, drops in to talk about what makes anthologies a great read for him. 

Blame the World Outside the Door-A Follow-up

This is just a short follow-up to say the Big Birthday Bash books on Kindle did a gangbuster business. Tens of thousands of readers downloaded copies, especially of UNIDENTIFIED, WIREMAN, and BAD TRIP SOUTH, three of my suspense novels. The short story that did the best was DARK REALITY, and it is one of my favorite stories that I've written lately. The success of the books is due to all you readers and to my colleagues who Tweeted and posted notices and set up interviews with me. I thank you all so much. It made my birthday exciting and rewarding.

I hope the readers who got copies will read them eventually and leave short reviews. Sometimes readers grab books that aren't usually what they read and then are surprised to open and begin reading such dark, terrorizing stories. If you got my books thinking they were going to be light reading, I'm sorry to report they will not. All my work is dark, graphic, realistic, and the subject matter concerns crime, criminals, and the crazy world we live in. I have spent years researching and studying the criminal mind. I've even talked to a few criminals, those incarcerated and those who should be. They fascinate me because I could never commit those crimes against my fellowman and I wonder what they are thinking when they do. So, no, the books aren't light, they aren't uplifting except in the sense justice is served, and they aren't comedic. If you like dark fiction, however, you came to the right place and the right writer.

Few women are writing fiction this dark and realistic, and few women ever did over the years I was writing novels. I don't know if that makes me strange (probably), but it has been the area that interested me most and that has rewarded me with an audience. Readers don't expect women writers to write with such...all out gusto, shall we say. They don't expect us to delve so deeply into the psychotic mind or to define the areas of darkness that lurks in the human soul. Yet, it was always where I wanted to go and explore--the caves, the crevices, the hidden doors in the minds of the people who were broken and either in pain or oblivious to how their misdeeds affected the world. There is never an end to it. Every day a new psychotic personality blooms and becomes deadly. Every day someone chews off the face of a stranger or kills his wife and his kids. Those minds aren't closed to writers. When we look into them long enough, the abyss waits, but some of us teeter there on the edge just long enough to come back and write about mad men and mad women. That is what I do. It is what I have always done. You know what's coming. It is probably what I will always do.

So if you got a few of my books and you're ready for the strange and the dark, step inside, close the door, lock it, and read a book or two. Just don't blame me for the nightmares. Blame the world out there, the one I looked at closely and wrote down in stories. I merely reflect part of the evil that men do. The real monsters out there are a hundred percent worse than I will ever be able to portray them. They just are.

Thanks again! I had a happy little birthday and you got some scary little books!

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