Reader's Eden
Issue One, Volume One

Welcome to Reader's Eden's first Newsletter.

Inside you will find New Release notices, an interview with author Will Greenway, a contest (giving you the chance to win some free books) and Janean's "Editor's Pick" for the month of September 2007.

Reader's Eden Online Bookstore is thrilled to announce that it has expanded its range and now sells software as well as ebooks!

Our opening program is of interest to writers:

http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=605

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This one product includes all the entire Smart Author software range, however you can also buy them separately.

Please note, this is a Windows program.

http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=605

TITLE: The Extra Pair of Hands
Author: Raelene Hall
Illustrator: Kevin Scott Collier

Writers Exchange is thrilled to announce the re-release of the new, improved Ring Realms Universe books by Will Greenway.

The first to get a new polish is the Reality's Plaything Series.

These new versions enhance, clarify and keep consistent the characters and happenings in the Ring Realms universe.

The book schedule is as follows:

Reality's Plaything Series - Tales following the adventures of Bannor Starfist:
1. Reality's Plaything - RE-RELEASED (see below for full details)
2. 'Neath Odin's Eye - RE-RELEASED
3. Gaea's Legacy: Eternal's Agenda - BRAND NEW and coming soon
4. Gaea's Legacy: Savants Ascendant - BRAND NEW and coming soon
5. Gaea's Legacy: The Infinity Annihilator - BRAND NEW and coming soon
6. Savant's Blood Series - Tales following the adventures of Wren Kergatha:

1. Savant's Blood: Shadows of the Avatar

The publisher, Writers Exchange, has had so many requests for the sequel that we released it before the cover was even ready! The cover has now been added, and looks great!
http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=586

2. TITLE: Savant's Blood Series Book 2: Hecate's Bounty
Author: Will Greenway

Hecate's Bounty continues Wren's epic quest to regain her memories, family, and heritage. Even with the potent help of the Felspar clan, the young savant of forces finds herself and her allies on the run from the minions of a pantheon lord.

In order to rescue her parents and brother, Wren must find the lost city of Cosmodarus and confront the evil goddess of the moon. How will she defeat a creature able to ravage worlds???
http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=598&cat=0&page=1

Shaladen Chronicles Series - Tales following the adventures of Corim Vale.

1. A Knot In Time - to be Re-released very soon!
2. Anvil of Sorrow
3. Who Mourns the Creator

TITLE: Jane Doe Series 2: Severance Packages
Author: Wendy Laing

TITLE: Hoven Quest
Author: Michelle Levigne

Centuries later, descendants of the Set'ri throughout the Commonwealth still hunt the Hoven race.

Kendle Fyx is a descendant of the leader of the Hoveni. Her lonely daydreams of a hero to unite the Hoveni and bring them back from hiding and exile, inspire her uncle's newest entertainment series: Hoven Quest.

But if the Hoveni realize that this is an attempt to contact the lost members of their race, won't the Set'ri as well?

http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=575

TITLE: Trial of Cyrhision Book 2: The Quest
Author: Christine Davidson

In Book 2, "The Quest", Holt accepts an apparently futile mission, which leads him to uncharted northern lands, close to the Ice and too close to his enemy's stronghold. This time, not even his immortal friend can help him... While Holt battles, Amrielle has troubles of her own. With Rillodan, she forms a scheme to break the King's obstinacy. But if they succeed, will Rillodan be in time to rescue Holt? And even if he does, can Holt survive?
http://www.readerseden.com/product.php?productid=519

TITLE: Karen Montgomery Series Book 1: Budget Cuts
Author: Jennifer St. Clair

Or it would, if only she could track down Ivy Bedinghaus, a night clerk she has never met. When she finally does confront Ivy, she is thrust into a conflict centuries old, that make her previous troubles pale in comparison.

Contests:

One lucky subscriber to the Reader's Eden newsletter will win copies of two of our most popular new releases:

Win a .pdf copy of Will Greenway's Shadows of the Avatar, and a .pdf copy of the Editor's Pick of the Month, Michelle Levigne's Hoven Quest.

To win, just make sure you are signed up to receive the Reader's Eden newsletter. The winner will be selected by random drawing from the subscriber list. The winner will be notified by email.

Good luck!

Interview:

In this issue, Will Greenway talks about writing, life and his childhood:

RH: What one thing, or one person influenced you to write the most? Was it a favorite relative, a unforgettable character in your own life, or perhaps an interesting situation that led you to the path of writing?

WG: As a child growing up in the 70s one of my big influences was comic-books. Arguably some of the best comic artists and writers were in their heyday around this period as were the two competing major houses (Marvel and DC). The idea of making my own comic was something that just grabbed me. The problem was I couldn't draw. I started learning to draw but really didn't have a natural talent for it. That didn't stop me, but it sure did slow me down! I found though, it wasn't as hard to write down my ideas and construct my own story scenarios. As a kid one of the first books I read was a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and the ideas of the tesseract and mental telepathy fascinated me. The Tripods Trilogy and the Sword of the Spirits by John Christopher (Samuel Youd) were extremely influential on me (the Tripods more because just coincidentally the main character's name is Will). As a kid the big problem for me was that books ended, I wanted to know more, I wanted other questions answered. By writing my own stories I could explore these speculations on my own…

RH: How old were you when you wrote your first story, novel, or poetry, and what was the reaction from your friends, and family?

WG: The first things that looked like stories started around 8th grade in junior high. They were private things scribbled in notebooks that nobody ever saw. A lot of these things were like little amateur comics with kind of stick figure characters saying things in word bubbles. To give you an idea of the kind of mind I had at the time, I would spend hours drawing mazes (why mazes… I couldn't tell you but I have notebooks full of them). In 1977 in 10th grade, I stumbled along book called Triplanetary by E. E."Doc" Smith. For whatever reason that got me fired up to write my own novel. I spent an entire summer writing and reading. I read the two major series by Smith (Lensmen and Skylark) and they gave me all kinds of ideas. My friends thought I was crazy and my parents didn't know what to make of my obsession. There wasn't any school (it was summer) and I just sat in my room and pounded out the story on an old Corona electric typewriter. It was 238 pages (single spaced) of juvenile amateur science fiction junk. It had a beginning, middle, and end… it had a bunch of characters doing stuff and parts of it even made sense. No one ever read it, none of my friends cared (especially at that age), I think my parents were afraid to look for fear they'd discover something defective about their son. Even nowadays most of my friends have never read more than a couple pages of my stuff.

RH: What work are you the most proud of and why?

WG: The Savant's Blood epic (Shadow of the Avatar and Hecate's Bounty) was a major milestone. Myself and the Wren character went through a lot together, I fought some major battles in my writing group over Wren and the all the various works that finally evolved into Savant's Blood. You might say we grew up together. Reality's Plaything has a special place in my heart because I wrote it as a "so there!" dare to the moderator and her second-in-command. I had been writing Shaladen Chronicles (which has multiple viewpoints) and for whatever reason they just got a bug in their ear and started coming after me mercilessly--I didn't know story--I didn't know character--I needed to go back to basics and learn to write. Mostly though, it kept coming back to character. Suddenly, I sucked at character. It got so bad I had to quit presenting the book to the group. It really ticked me off because I knew I had done decent job with those characters. Whilst fuming at my keyboard over the whole affair, I thought to myself, "I'll show those two bozos!". I made up a title ("Reality's Plaything") and I spent a few minutes coming up with a first line and settled on: "'The best gallows job I ever did, and he survived anyway. Guess we'll have to hang him again.'". From there I cheated, I used Wren which I had many many many hours writing and could compose in my sleep and then made up some other characters. I read the first chapter in the group and suddenly the village writer-idiot was a genius. Go figure. Writing groups are obviously not perfect. So, Reality's Plaything stands out as the book I wrote on a dare...

RH: Give us an inside glimpse of who you really are...tell us about yourself, in other words. But make it interesting as though you were writing a dime novel of yesteryear.

WG: Will Greenway was a big kid; a big kid who forgot to grow up. He hung out in comic shops and game rooms. A real lonely geek of guy forced to make his own path because he didn't have many friends. He trained in judo and karate because being a geek attracted bullies. Will's dad was a front-line emergency repair mechanic in the Korean war, they used to drop him behind enemy lines with a toolbox to fix broken down tanks and drive them back. Some of that rubbed of on Will--some--he rode and fixed motorcycles as way to be "cool" and even briefly considered racing. His affair with motorcycles also became an affair with the law who didn't cotton much to his late-night high speed antics around the neighborhood. Somehow he survived childhood, mostly because he got involved with computers and electronics. His father had a talent for all things vehicular; Will's real skills ran in a different vein… an abstract one filled with computer hardware and operating systems. He pursued those skills into business right out of high school by starting his own company.

RH: Did you suffer pitfalls when trying to get published, or was it a breeze? Be honest, your readers will appreciate it.

WG: I hate submitting. I hate marketing. I'm terrible at it. I know what I need to do and I don't dang do it! I get published when I go through bouts of insanity thinking that I'll get lucky and land a sale--so I submit a bunch of stuff--get a bunch of rejections, get depressed and crawl in a hole. Eventually, my ego mends, I send out some more and eventually get a sale. Early in a my career I had a writing group supporting me and it made the process of submitting and networking easier because you have friends to hang out with and talk to. Now that I don't have that anymore it's a lot harder.

RH: Do you stick with one genre or do you venture to several? If so, which ones?

WG: I write anything and in any genre that strikes my fancy. My favorite is fantasy because most of my story ideas (and story inspirations) come from that genre. My alternate is science fiction. I have tried cyberpunk, mysteries, mainstream, and even started to collaborate on a romance.

RH: Most writers have a very private or solitary life compared to others. Describe a typical day in your writing life.

WG: I'm not particularly cloistered. I have a group of friends and we do stuff on weekends. I'm an internet junkie so I have a fair number of online friends on chat boards, in MMORGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games), and other places. I'm writing all the time, any time I have a break at work, I'll open up stuff and either edit or generate new story. When I come home I usually try to carve out some time depending on whether my wife "allows" me the time to write. So my day is writing is usually little "pieces" of writing.

RH: Did you dream of being a writer, or were you meant for other things? In other words, did you just wake up one morning and decide you were going to write the great American novel, or did it happen by accident…like a wonderful essay written in class. Dig deep and tell us why you “had” to be a writer.

WG: I blame being brain-washed by comic books and being influenced by dime-novel pulp fiction from folks like Robert E. Howard and E.E. "Doc" Smith. My junior high and highschool years up to my senior year, I lead a pretty isolated existence. The characters in my writing are what kept me company. I joined a university level writing for publication class when I was 17, and I hooked up with a published author and thereafter became part of her "stable" of writers in that support group. At that point there was no turning back.

RH: What's your greatest ambition, your greatest work? This is your own opinion, not everyone else's.

WG: Most people talk about seeing their work on film. To my eye, Hollywood screws up 90% of the novels they touch. My greatest ambition is to see something of mine in art as well as words. Twenty-five years later, I am still fascinated by stories in sequential art. When I write I always visualize what it would look like in panels. The coolest thing would be to see something of mine in a Japanese anime. The animes have a history of adhering closely to the source material, and because it's usually a series and not a single movie they have the space to really treat a story the way it was done in the original book.

In writing itself, my big ambition is to complete the story timeline that I've outlined for all the novel series that I've created. The current outline calls for nineteen books that basically cover all the "sources" of magic and conflict in Ring Realms universe of my novels. I've written ten of them (two I have to rewrite) so I am a little less than half way done.

RH: Writers such as Poe, Hemmingway, Faulkner, are remembered certain ways by their readers. How would you like to be remembered?

WG: I want to be remembered as the writer who asked the readers to participate and collaborate in the creation of the story. I set up a website and put all the notes and references to what I'm doing out there (http://www.ringrealms.com) and invite people to read and comment. I even have an "interface" where readers can talk to the various characters in the forums. (If you read the forums you can see characters from my novels chatting back and forth with one another.) Before I required registration I would occasionally have somebody stumble into the forums and ask what was going on. The characters usually just gave them a hard time...

RH: What are you working on now, and how soon do you expect it….?

WG: The fifth book of the Reality's Plaything series is what's on the word processor right now. I'm a few chapters from being done. I just put books three and four in the editor's queue for review.

RH: How do you get ideas for novels or short stories?

WG: I think I cheat. Mostly my stories are driven by characters. Part of my inspiration has always been my participation in weekly role-playing sessions (tabletop gaming). I have some very creative friends who came up with some great characters. A number of characters in the stories are complete (licensed) rip-offs of the ad-libbing performed by the players in-game. I just take the character they model and put them in a scenario. I've lived with some of these characters once a week for ten odd years. I don't have to speculate how they will react in a given situation I know. If I don't know I can usually ask the original player for their tilt and work it in if possible. I put all my source inspirers in an entry in my glossary up on the resource site.

RH: Research is involved in most writing, how much do you do, and to what extent do you go to get the facts?

WG: I research every week by going to our game. I suppose keeping up with all the latest scientific developments is research for science fiction grist. I watch a lot of anime which is a great source of ideas (and cliches). Because it is a visual medium and often so very melodramatic it's awesome to see how some fight scenes and other such stuff are story boarded.

RH: At a party would you describe yourself as observant of characteristics and mannerisms or are you too busy being the life of the party?

WG: I am a people watcher. I even have a bad habit of mimicking people's accents. In my job as a support programmer I take calls from all over the United States and sometimes forget that I do that and people think I'm mocking them. (Haven't they heard imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) One of my favorite writing chores is doing dialects in dialogue. I think this goes back to my table-top gaming roots--our group has always handled interaction "in character" and we tend to make up characters with bizarre speech patterns. We all laughed when they cast John Rhys-Davies as the role of Gimli in the Lord of the Rings movies because we always portrayed dwarf characters as having a thick Scottish brogue.

RH: What would you like to convey to your readers, given the chance here to do so?

WG: Be a part of the Realms, talk to the characters and contribute your ideas for things you'd like to see in future books. I think the ultimate writing is to be responsive to what people would like to see. The tradition of story-telling used to be interactive where the storyteller would stand in front of the group and they would participate in the experience. Technology has made it so that we can do that sort of thing again even if we're physically separated by thousands of miles.

RH: Please list your url, and your e-mail so our readers can contact you.

Ring Realms is at (http://www.ringrealms.com) and I can be contacted at greenway@ringrealms.com or d.author@ringrealms.com.

(See all of Will's books on his author page)

RH: You are e-published with Writers Exchange, why did you choose this particular avenue to be published in? And what can you say honestly about e-publishing--is it worthwhile, is it going somewhere, and how do you feel about your own e-publishing career? Elaborate...

WG: Well, Sandy of Writer's Exchange contacted me after reading some of my work on writing technique. When we first started trading emails she wasn't yet into the e-publishing business, everything was about helping the writer community. Our relationship just naturally transitioned from articles to fiction, there really wasn't a lot of discussion. She asked to see a book, I sent it to her, she liked it and asked if I wanted to see it e-published. Sandy has been a great person to work with and extremely generous and patient. On top of that she even likes to read the books I write so there's no downside! E-publishing is still in the throes of "becoming"… the limits of the existing technology, DRMs, and other things are still a challenge. People still like the "feel" of that paper book in their hand. I honestly think there will always be a market for that until the publishers price themselves totally out of reason (it's slowly inching that direction).

RH: Do you have some words of wisdom to pass on to future writers?

WG: Persistence. Persistence. Persistence. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. Write every day and keep writing, find every way you can to improve and be open to learning. So many people hide behind the excuse that they are afraid someone will "steal" their writing in order to avoid any kind of potentially negative feedback. Get over that idea because it's a farce. It just doesn't happen often enough to be a worry. Get your material out, get people's reactions, and develop a thick skin. You need it, because nobody in the publishing industry will spare your feelings... be certain of that.

RH: Are you multi-talented, if so please add other talents to your list of accomplishments.

WG: If being a computer nerd/geek is a talent, then I have that wired. I am a somewhat passable artist and do graphic design.

RH: Will, thank you so much for sharing your time and wisdom with us today. Here's wishing you much success in the future!

Interview by Rita Hestand, author of Nick's Baby, Wandering Heart, Pretend Mom, Strictly Business, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Courting Abby, Hannah's Man, Heart of the Wild. Find Rita's books at http://www.ReadersEden.com or at her own website http://www.RitaHestand.com

Illustrator's Corner

As a children's book illustrator I like to use both traditional and digital techniques in my work. Recently a publisher needed a sky with a cloud and a radiant star. Photoshop helped me paint a wonderful realistic sky with fluffy majestic clouds using digital effects which I could not have achieved with traditional techniques. The key to digital or computer techniques is learning to master them so they become as natural to do as the traditional techniques. Illustrators can begin by taking classes in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, which are a few of the wonderful software programs available. After learning the programs an artist can not only create original work in these programs, but mix traditional and digital work or use digital programs to "clean up" or enhance traditional work.

Bonnie Everett-Hawkes - WEE Artist
See the works of artist Bonnie Everett-Hawkes at her site:
http://www.bonnieeverett-hawkes.com

Editor's Pick:

Don't miss reading HOVEN QUEST, my pick of the month.

Author Michelle Levigne has crafted a truly engrossing tale in HOVEN QUEST. Grabbing the reader's attention from the very first page, HOVEN QUEST is a real page-turner that you won't want to put down. Kendle's story is sheer fantasy, yet her character, and those of the secondary characters, are very realistic and believable. HOVEN QUEST easily transports readers to the world of Gemar, where shape-shifters hide peacefully among the humans, and danger lurks around every corner.

TITLE: Hoven Quest
Author: Michelle Levigne

Centuries later, descendants of the Set'ri throughout the Commonwealth still hunt the Hoven race.

Kendle Fyx is a descendant of the leader of the Hoveni. Her lonely daydreams of a hero to unite the Hoveni and bring them back from hiding and exile, inspire her uncle's newest entertainment series: Hoven Quest.

But if the Hoveni realize that this is an attempt to contact the lost members of their race, won't the Set'ri as well?

To subscribe to the Reader's Eden newsletter, visit the Reader's Eden site and enter your email address in the News section. You'll find the News section in the left sidebar of every page.

There is also a link on the front page right underneath the "What's Hot" section.

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Editor: Janean Nusz, author of The Ogre's Curse, Destiny's Promise, Gryphon's Gold, Lilly Loller's Always Late, Moonlight Medallion, Lady Geyr and The Littlest Cowboy

DESTINY'S PROMISE:
Author: Janean L'Voe