Friday, August 22, 2008

Contest: Review the Book Reviewers

http://tkkenyon.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-review-review-contest.html

Over at my author blog, I'm holding a contest for the best mock review that mocks book reviews. Enter by leaving your own mock review in the comments.

TK

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Kunati Book Publishers Wins Prestigious Award

Kunati, the book publisher that published my two novels, RABID and CALLOUS, has won one of the most prestigious awards for indie publishers.

Kunati Book Publishers was honored with the INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR AWARD at BookExpo America in Los Angeles, California on May 30, 2008, by FOREWORD MAGAZINE, one of the five dominant trade magazines in the book publishing field. Joshua Corin, a Kunati author, accepted at BEA on Kunati's behalf.

The new honor was created to celebrate ForeWord's tenth anniversary and to recognize Kunati's innovation and fearlessness.

Kunati, a year-old publisher, produces book trailers for every new release, maintains a blog, and encourages its authors to blog and actively participate in marketing their books. The publisher currently has several movie deals in the works, and its roster of authors includes Pulitzer Prize winner John E. Mack.

Read all of Kunati's "fearless" books at http://www.kunati.com/kunati-bookshelf-main/ .

Monday, April 28, 2008

Amazon Jumped the Gun!

Amazon jumped the gun and is offering my new novel, CALLOUS, for sale ahead of its May publication date ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601640226 ) . When RABID was released last year, Amazon sold out and even sucked dry its wholesaler, so they had to backorder the book from the distributer and it took a couple weeks to get the fresh meat.

If you want to read CALLOUS any time soon, muscle your way to the head of the line and snatch a copy from some milquetoast's virtual shopping cart now!

TK Kenyon
http://www.tkkenyon.com

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Book Trailer for TK Kenyon's Novel *Callous*

Here's a lesson for you: My publisher's marketing guys came up with this.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Interior Monologue: Just Think No!

The whole concept of internal monologue as a device is problematic for several reasons:

A) No one thinks in sentences. Putting your feelings / thoughts into language is the last step after they boil up from your personality / soul / brain.

B) It slows down the action because neither scene nor action nor interaction between characters are progressing while the IM character stops and thinks.

C) It makes the reader ask: well, if we can read his/her mind directly, why don't you just tell us and get it over with? Why didn't you just write a 1 paragraph essay instead of a short story / book?

D) It's telling, not dramatizing. This means that you have told us what the character is thinking rather than the character putting his thoughts into action (a la Aristotle, who said that all character is action, meaning that a change or thought within a character must be expressed in action or else it didn't really happen. If a character's inner life fell in the middle of the woods and no one was around to hear it, did it make a sound? Forrester and Smiley disagree with the concept that character must express itself in action and say that, indeed, thoughts and feelings not outwardly expressed are the measure of a round character.)

Rather than stopping the forward action of your story by having your characters do something like, I considered this, and I don't know what to do, You can use third person omniscient narrator to show us what she is thinking, for example, the excellent IM in Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, where the lazy Lady Bertram, who asks her husband whether she herself is hungry, she "did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points; and she saw, therefore, in all its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavored herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy."

TK Kenyon
TK's Author Blog
Author of RABID: A Novel and CALLOUS: A Novel
Rabid Reviews Blog

Sunday, March 16, 2008

New Yorker's "Raj, Bohemian" by Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru has written an intellectual but ultimately dry short story for The New Yorker (March 10, 2008,) "Raj, Bohemian."

His main character is a first-person, nameless New York trend setter, a la Patrick Bateman, but without the interesting killing sprees of American Psycho. The character discovers that many of the people in his consumer-driven, shallow, trendy lifestyle are actually something like Buzz Agents who "monetize their social networks" because they are "early adopters," and spout buzz lines to their friends whenever appropriate.

Protag feels betrayed because he thought he was hip. He takes a knife to go kill Raj, the first person who he figured out was a buzzer in his social circle, but when he gets there, ennui overcomes him, and he instead succumbs to habitual trendiness.

This is ultimately unsatisfying because Kunzru ends his story with The Shrug. The story falls into numb and mindless violence, or violent and mindless numbness, or whatever.

While I'm no fan of epiphanic fiction, where a story's climax can be summarized as "And then I realized...," or "And everything was blue feathers," a story must end; it cannot merely peter out.

"Raj, Bohemian" is interesting, but essentially numbing. It does not shake you with emotion, which is what the best stories do.

TK Kenyon
Author of RABID: A Novel and CALLOUS: A Novel

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

TK Kenyon: Website Update

Some new stuff at the website:

TK Kenyon

"As You Know, Bob." — When Exposition Masquerades as Dialogue

If your dialogue sounds stilted, you may have written exposition and tried to pass it off as dialogue. Dialogue's one and only purpose is to elucidate tension between characters.

It is not, ever, to convey information.

A bad example of what I mean:

Exposition masquerading as dialogue: "As you know, Bob, we've been stuck on this desert island for twenty years, eating only the coconuts that grow on the one tree and fish which we catch with our hands. We have several vitamin deficiencies, and you've been picking your nose this whole time. Stop it, or I'm going to kill you!"

Or:

Dramatized exposition, and one line of dialogue: Ted pounded the coconut open with a rock. It wasn't quite ripe yet, but he was so tired of fish, and his fingernails stung in the salt water where they cracked and peeled.
Bob sat on the beach a few yards away. He was picking his nose again. Again.
"Stop it!" Ted screamed and picked up the rock he had used to smash the green coconut into meaty fragments.