Book Title: The Company Files: 1. The Good Man by Gabriel Valjan
Category: Adult Fiction, 251 pages
Genre: Thriller, Historical Fiction, Crime Fiction, Espionage
Publisher: Winter Goose Publishing
Release date: December 2017
Tour dates: Feb 12 to March 2, 2018
Content Rating: PG + M (No bad language but there is an attempted rape scene, and some violence.)
Book Description:
In 1948, Vienna was divided among four powers: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Jack Marshall had served with Walker during the war, and now, working together for The Company, they are tasked to do the inconceivable. Could former Nazis really be recruited to assist the U.S. in the atomic race? As their team moves forward, they quickly discover they are not the only ones looking for these men. And the others in the search may just have the objective of murder.
In this tale of historical noir, of corruption and deceit, no one is who they say they are. Who is The Good Man in a world where an enemy may be a friend, an ally may be the enemy, and governments deny everything?
To read reviews, please visit Gabriel Valjan's Page on iRead Book Tours.
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Meet the Author:
Gabriel Valjan is the author of The Roma Series from Winter Goose Publishing. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he enjoys the local restaurants, and his two cats, Squeak and Squawk, keep him honest to the story on the screen.
Writing Beginnings and Endings
Writers make the mistake of thinking of their writing as performance art. They dazzle their readers with a stupendous sentence and awesome imagery, a lilting cadence and twenty-dollar words. In the search for the Wow Factor, they violate the pact they have made with their reader, and that is to tell a story. Established writers violate this pact, this implicit trust with their fans at their peril.
Writers are entertainers, no different than stand-up comedians and actors. The difference is in the material, but the common ground is delivery. A Beginning should engage; have an element of mystery in the first sentence regardless of the story. A Beginning should contain the 5Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Endings often answer the Who and Why. In the race between first and last page, there is misdirection and twists and turns in what happens.
In reading mysteries, we strive to learn who murdered whom, and why. In historical fiction, we often know the outcomes but read to discover some greater insight or motivation behind the great person. A teacher had criticized Hitler for mediocre artwork. Better yet, a Jewish critic had humiliated him in a review of a student’s gallery exhibit. The world is forever changed.
Writer Unboxed runs a monthly feature called Flog the Pro. The premise is simple: the first few paragraphs of a bestseller are posted, the author’s name is masked, and the question is posed, “Would you read more?” The verdicts vary with each reader’s taste.
So many writers seem to be thinking of Fifth Avenue and Mad Men when they write their first sentence or paragraph. The jingle, the “Hook.” They are not too far off the mark. Writing is a form of warfare. Authors use words to entice, to enchant; to earn and keep those readers. The fight for eyeballs is real, the competition is fierce, but a firecracker of a first sentence fizzles out if the rest of the writing can’t sustain the momentum. The pace is impossible to maintain.
All writing is predicated on Persuasion – so the writer should think of the story as seduction, the creation of a dream, to paraphrase John Gardner. Ease the reader into the dream of the story, where the eyes will move from word to word and the ears will hear the music, instead of using a bat. The writer’s talent is knowing which strategy to use, or to switch metaphor – the key in which the story should be told. Technique varies with each writer and that is why writers develop fans. They deliver on expectation. Knowing the strategy, the pitch and scale for the story comes, I believe, with a writer’s lifelong habit of reading and understanding genre. Tension and turning the page are the result of a reader’s anticipation of what the writer will do, or not do next.
Endings are harder than Beginnings. The story must resolve on an authentic and logical note after all the suspense and tension. The Ending must be satisfactory, consonant with the world the writer created.
My advice to authors is to write in medias res. Start in the middle. Get the story down on paper. Revise and work with an editor, trust your instincts, and work from Beginning to Ending until you disappear and only the story remains. Readers are there for the music and not the conductor.
Enter the Giveaway!
Ends March 10, 2018
Sounds like a good book.
ReplyDeleteSounds good.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed the book description.
ReplyDeleteI love historical novels, it looks interesting.
ReplyDelete