by Lynne | May 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
How to Criticize Constructively
There comes a time in every writer’s life when a fellow writer approaches and asks:
“Will you write a review for my book for my website or back cover?”
“Will you write a review for my book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble?”
“Would you “like” my book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble?”
“Would you “like” my book on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, et al?”
What do you do? On a number of online discussions, I’ve seen many requests for “likes” and many responses in both negative and positive. Here’s what I do.
First, I decide if I want to read the book or not. Except for rare cases (see below) I won’t write a review unless I’ve read the book . If I agree to read, it’s with the caveat that I will try to get to it as soon as I can, particularly if I’m reading another book and have a top ten list of books in line. If I don’t want to read it, however, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not the right person to write a review since I usually don’t read . . . name your genre: horror, sci fi, non-fiction, etc.
For those books I do wind up reading and don’t like, I think about the positives and begin with those:
“Great atmosphere”
“Spunky characters”
“Vivid setting”
“Provocative premise for the book.”
Every book has good qualities. Really. Find them. Give that writer positive, encouraging feedback.
If the writer asks you to post a review on Amazon and you seriously don’t like it, I would be honest and say I can only give it two stars because:
“The writing is inconsistent”
“The characters are rather wooden”
“The setting is hard to visualize”
This might open the door for more conversation about how to improve the book– in your opinion, of course, which could be a good thing for both parties. And, like in critique groups, both writers come away with something valuable.
by Lynne | May 27, 2013 | Uncategorized
How to Criticize Constructively
There comes a time in every writer’s life when a fellow writer approaches and asks:
“Will you write a review for my book for my website or back cover?”
“Will you write a review for my book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble?”
“Would you “like” my book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble?”
“Would you “like” my book on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, et al?”
What do you do? On a number of online discussions, I’ve seen many requests for “likes” and many responses in both negative and positive. Here’s what I do.
First, I decide if I want to read the book or not. Except for rare cases (see below) I won’t write a review unless I’ve read the book . If I agree to read, it’s with the caveat that I will try to get to it as soon as I can, particularly if I’m reading another book and have a top ten list of books in line. If I don’t want to read it, however, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not the right person to write a review since I usually don’t read . . . name your genre: horror, sci fi, non-fiction, etc.
For those books I do wind up reading and don’t like, I think about the positives and begin with those:
“Great atmosphere”
“Spunky characters”
“Vivid setting”
“Provocative premise for the book.”
Every book has good qualities. Really. Find them. Give that writer positive, encouraging feedback.
If the writer asks you to post a review on Amazon and you seriously don’t like it, I would be honest and say I can only give it two stars because:
“The writing is inconsistent”
“The characters are rather wooden”
“The setting is hard to visualize”
This might open the door for more conversation about how to improve the book– in your opinion, of course, which could be a good thing for both parties. And, like in critique groups, both writers come away with something valuable.
by Lynne | May 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
Current Events as Themes for Novels
A brief story appeared on a local news station. It went something like this:
“Giant 11-ton wind turbine blade sheared off and flew hundreds of feet to land (luckily on no living creature) in the desert of Ocotillo, California.”
The actual incident is under investigation, revealing a dark history of serious safety hazards including the wind company’s — Siemens — guilty pleas to corruption on a global scale including accusations of bribery and other serious charges in at least 20 countries.
A press conference was called and the following facts emerged:
1. Wind turbines kill more than 573,000 birds (and bats) every year. Many are endangered birds like eagles and condors. http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=90121&sitesection=ap&VID=24819212
2. Wind turbines are not efficient sources of energy. They can only operate within a very narrow window of wind speed (not too much, not too little) and when they are outside this window they must shut down. However, when they are down they still need electricity to power them, thus “peaker” plants run by electric companies actually generate the power. Very inefficient as an energy source.
3. The wind turbines themselves are making life difficult for those living nearby. The noise is creating health concerns for people and animals. Chickens are not laying eggs, dogs are cowering in the corners, children are developing headaches.
4. The company (that purchased and installed the turbines) cares nothing for the environment. In the case of Ocotillo, they have bulldozed the desert and not replaced the plants, including Ocotillos, a rare and protected desert cactus.
5. This same company has shown complete disrespect for Indian culture. They have desecrated ancient Indian sacred sites with barely an apology.
So what the heck am I going on about? Think about the possibilities for your next mystery or thriller. Small, desert town (with, would you believe, a Lazy Lizard Saloon) is besieged by corporate giant. Lives ruined, litigation ensues, people are murdered to keep the corporate secrets. And what about the environmental effects? Animal rights? Indian sacred site desecration? Local people going mad from the noise and vibration? Not to mention the danger of a blade shearing off and cutting them in half (like it did to some poor fellow in Oregon. It’s true. Hell of a story.)
Now if that’s not enough, here’s the clincher. The company in question here, Siemens, a German company, has a lurid past. The BBC reported that they have past collaborations with Nazis. They used slave labor from concentration camps including Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. These slaves reportedly built electric switches for the Siemens-manufactured V-2 rockets used to bomb the allies during WWII. More recently Siemens sought to register the trademark “Zyklon,” the poison gas insecticide used in Nazi gas chambers.
Is this a thriller or what?
by Lynne | May 7, 2013 | Uncategorized
Vincent Van Gogh – Suicide, Homicide or Misadventure?
The research for my book, Deadly Provenance, took me places I never expected to go. To the dark recesses of the brain, its power over the body, and all that could possibly go wrong with that relationship. How did I get there?
For my premise, I needed a painting that was plundered by the Nazis during World War II and never recovered. There were myriad. I chose Vincent Van Gogh’s “Still Life: Vase With Oleanders” because he’s one of my favorite artists and one whose life touched my heart as much as his art.
I’ve had one of those giant coffee-table books of his artwork for years. I read Stone’s Lust for Life and saw the movie with Kirk Douglas as Vincent. I wanted to know more and the most comprehensive, well-written and beautifully poignant account I highly recommend is a book by two Pulitzer prize-winning authors: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, called Van Gogh The Life:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375758976/ref=asc_df_03757589762502415?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=dealt529148-20&linkCode=asn&creative=395093&creativeASIN=0375758976
The book is astonishing in its breadth of research from Vincent’s history, family ties, relationships, such as they were. But their conclusions about how Vincent died simply blew me away. Only this is certain. On July 27, 1890, Vincent sustained a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He stumbled back from his painting foray to the Ravoux Inn, his residence, in a town twenty miles north of Paris – Auvers, France. Thirty hours later he was dead.
No forensics was available, no gun was ever found. The bullet was never removed from his body. His painting supplies were never recovered. The location of the shooting was never verified. There were, supposedly, no eye-witnesses. When Vincent was asked by the police if he wanted to commit suicide, his answer was a vague. “Yes, I believe so.” When they reminded him suicide was a crime, he said, “Do not accuse anyone. It is I who wanted to kill myself.”
Why do the authors make a case against suicide? They believe Vincent wanted to die and actually welcomed death. Here are the points they make:
The bullet trajectory was oblique and from further away than Vincent’s arm could reach.
If he were indeed painting in the wheat field, as suggested, it would have been too far and difficult to return to the Inn with a bullet to his gut.
The gun and art equipment were never located.
He left no suicide note and he was a prolific writer.
Rather than go into details here, and there are many convincing ones, I urge you to read the book, at the very least the Appendix, where the authors make their case against suicide.
So who might have shot Vincent, either accidentally or on purpose? There were, apparently, in this little town two or more teenagers who enjoyed tormenting the artist, who, unlike, the fiery and handsome Kirk Douglas, was a rail-thin, emaciated and dirty wretch with a bad temper.
A bit more is known now about Vincent’s personality “disorder” and it is suspected that, with family history and symptoms that prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior, the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy is a viable possibility.
An interesting side note: As I was writing this (rather long, sorry) blog I realized there were stunning similarities between Vincent’s symptoms and a young woman in a book I’m reading now entitled Brain on Fire – My Month of Madness: www.susannahcahalan.com/
Yipes. It’s enough to scare the s— out of you.
by Lynne | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
It’s Not Over ‘til It’s Over
Last week I sent out the following link about a battle between a museum in Norway and a family demanding the museum return a Henri Matisse painting, said to have been seized by the Nazis under the direction of Hermann Goering during WWII. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/matisse-norwegian-museum-was-once-nazi-loot
This article appeared in the New York Times on April 6, 2013. Almost seventy years after the war, why are art pieces still being recovered and restored to the original owners or descendants thereof? How is it they haven’t been found and returned long ago?
Consider this situation. The painting winds up in museum, which believes they bought the piece legitimately from a collector or dealer. Paperwork seems in order. And then suddenly a family or individual fights to reclaim it. What’s going on?
Let’s back up. The Nazis looted about twenty percent of all Western art during the Second World War. Today, more than tens of thousands of items remain displaced, destroyed, or missing. At the end of the War, many of these confiscated pieces were found and returned to nations Germany had occupied, with stipulations that they be returned to individual pre-war owners. However, after the first few years, instead of continuing to track down the owners (many of whom died in the war) or their families, (also many of whom died in the war,) some governments and museums chose to keep the works in storage or on display, effectively appropriating them as their own. Here is a link to a survey done on museums where you can see how some were very cooperative, while others not. As a former museum director, it dismays me to read this. http://www.claimscon.org/index.asp?url=looted_art/museum_survey
Despite a number of world and national “conferences” on this issue, there is a wide array of outcomes from restitution claims ranging from decade-long legal battles to resolution through mediation or arbitration. Why all this confusion?
Probably the easiest answer is “provenance.” Defined, provenance is a list of the previous owners of a work of art, tracing it from its present location and owner back to the hand of the artist. Think about this. How often and for how long do you keep receipts for items you purchase? Even important, high-priced items. Now consider — your country is at war. You and your family are arrested, taken from your home. Your home is then ransacked and used for enemy purposes. What would have happened to those receipts?
In many ways, it’s fortunate that the Germans (in this case, the Einsatzstab Reichsletter Rosenberg, or ERR, the agency in charge of confiscating the art and cultural objects from undesirables) kept such immaculate records. Lists exist of the items they hoarded, from whom they were stolen, when and where they were stored ie: the Jeu de Paume in Paris, etc. Without these documents and lists from heroines like Rose Valland, a French curator who kept track of the plundered works of art, this work would have been lost forever. Now, at least, there is still hope of recovery.
The painting in my book Deadly Provenance is a Van Gogh, missing since 1944. Wouldn’t it be grand if it was discovered in someone’s attic or cellar? Garage sales, here I come.
by Lynne | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
The Displacement of Art During WWII
“The transfer of works of art from vanquished to victor is as old as warfare itself.”
. . . Lynn Nicolas, author of Rape of Europa
I open with this quote because it so aptly describes the events that began in the art world long before the outbreak of the second World War. Hitler’s dream of a pure Germanic Empire included works of art and he determinedly set about purging those pieces he considered unsuitable.
What was unsuitable? Works that were “unfinished” or abstract, that did not depict reality. Vasily Kandinsky. Works by Jews. Camille Pisarro. Works by leftists. George Grosz. Degenerate art they were called and exhibitions of them were set up to show the German people what not to like and admire. Shows like “Entartete Kunst” in Munich in 1937 drew thousands. This clip shows actual footage of visitors to the exhibition. Can you tell from people’s expressions what they really thought? Did they hide their feelings out of fear? http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/bryan/video/detail.php?content=germany_art
Hermann Goering was one of the first in Hitler’s regime to recognize the commercial value of some of these works of art and amassed thousands of works for his own personal collection. His “agent” took Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” purged from a museum in Frankfurt, to sell in Holland. The painting eventually found its way to New York and was sold for $82.5 million.
Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi ideologue, set up the ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to systematically collect – confiscate or steal, to be more precise – works of art and artifacts from state museums, citizens and Jews, in particular. Millions of pieces.
As the war came to an end, the Allies closed in. With them were a handful of art-specialists called “monument men.” Their job was to locate and salvage these precious works of art from Germany, Italy and France. Every day these officers would find thousands of pieces on the verge of destruction. They saved what they could; still many disappeared through looting.
The fate of thousands of objects is still unknown, even today. One of those precious pieces is the subject of my new book, Deadly Provenance. It is Van Gogh’s painting, “Still Life: Vase with Oleanders,” which vanished in 1944. Was it destroyed or is it hidden in someone’s secret art collection? In someone’s garage waiting for a sale, perhaps? Will it ever surface to please the world once more?
Can science and technology assist in authenticating the painting if ever it is found? And if so, will it be restored to its rightful owner? Provenance will tell.
