A Strange Relationship--Mary Shelley and Frankenstein's Monster

My guest post, A Strange Relationship--Mary Shelley and Frankenstein's Monster--is featured today on the English Historical Fiction Authors' Blog.

http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/

The Victorian Technological Revolution

I've guest-posted on the above referenced topic: The Victorian Technological Revolution. You can read the post at the English History Authors blogspot. Comments are welcome and encouraged!

Gary

http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/

Confessions of the Creature Back In Print

My first novel, Confessions of the Creature, is back in print in a new Fireship Press edition. The new edition looks great, and I've corrected some minor errors, including a couple of issues of historical fact, that appeared in the first edition. I'm very grateful to the folks at Fireship Press for helping bring my creature back to life.

The story of Frankenstein's monster continues... In the Arctic waters of the Barents Sea, the creature has taken the ultimate revenge on his creator, Frankenstein. He travels south, where a chance meeting with a witch gives him the opportunity to overcome what he is, and perhaps become who he was meant to be. Transformed into a normal-looking man, but retaining his superhuman strength, the creature journeys to Moscow, where he becomes the protégé of a wealthy natural philosopher and the lover of his daughter, Sabrina. Taking the name Viktor Suvorin, the creature wins acclaim as a military hero while Napoleon rages across Europe. Following the wars, Viktor and Sabrina travel to Switzerland, where they meet Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who bases her novel on Viktor's memoirs. Viktor faces a final challenge to his hard-won humanity when tragedy strikes his family and he returns to the Arctic. There, on a frozen sea under the shimmering Northern Lights, the creature must confront the meaning of his creation and his life. "... a compelling, thought-provoking novel with an undercurrent that made me always a little anxious about what will happen next to the characters." Camellia, Long and Short Reviews "This wonderfully written novel will have any reader hooked right from the beginning. It is an enjoyable and extraordinary story! I hope this will not be the last we see of this author, who obviously has a wonderful talent." Ann Marie Chalmers, Front Street Reviews

Confessions of the Creature is now available in paperback and e-book formats from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers.
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Creature-Gary-Inbinder/dp/1611792096/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1328660419&sr=1-3

The Flower to the Painter Reviewed in The Copperfield Review

Jessica Garamondi wrote a very favorable (4 Quills) review of The Flower to the Painter for The Copperfield Review, an online journal devoted to Historical Fiction and Non-Fiction.

"This book is recommended for art fans and for anyone who wants to look at the art world from a woman’s point of view."

You can read the entire review in the current (Winter) issue of The Copperfield Review.
Gary

http://www.copperfieldreview.com/reviews/The%20Flower%20to%20the%20Painter.htm

The Flower to the Painter Reviewed in Neo-Victorian Studies

Marie Luise Kohlke has written a scholarly critique of The Flower to the Painter for Neo-Victorian Studies, a peer-reviewed academic e-journal published at Swansea University, Wales, UK. You can read the entire review online in pdf format.


http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/

Guest Post - English History Authors

Debra Brown, author of the fine Victorian Historical Novel, The Companion of Lady Holmeshire, has invited me to guest post on the English History Authors' Blog. The subject is: Writing Another Gender, Another Time.


http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/

Character's the Thing

I write character driven fiction, trying to create interesting, psychologically complex, believably human characters, placing them in situations where they must deal with problems. For dramatic effect these problems ought to be bigger than deciding between coffee or tea for breakfast—although such mundane choices can precipitate a dramatic scene, such as an emotional flare-up having little to do with what to drink for breakfast—but they don’t have to involve life or death alternatives. I think of such choices as forks in the narrative road; the characters needn’t make the “right” choices, at least not according to the reader’s idea of right or wrong. There are many ways to get from L.A. to Chicago. For example, after having been instructed by his father’s ghost, Hamlet’s “right” choice, with twenty-twenty hindsight, might have been to kill his treacherous uncle in the first act, but that would have made for a very short play.

Much popular fiction follows a predictable pattern of character development that many readers have come to expect. The typical “character arc” can be worked out over a canned outline and a skillful writer can use mechanical plotting to produce a satisfying and marketable result. Character driven fiction is riskier, but when successful the literary rewards (though not necessarily the monetary ones) can be great.

In his preface to “The Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James referenced Ivan Turgenev concerning “the fictive picture.” According to James, Turgenev’s fiction almost always began “…with the vision of some person or persons who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were.” Those characters were “available” to the writer “…subject to the chances, the complications of existence, (Turgenev) saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and feel.” I don’t think you can do that with a canned outline, although a writer might give the semblance of having done so, though it’s rather like painting the Sistine Chapel by the numbers.

For more than a century readers have asked, “Why did Isabel Archer make the choices she made?” as though they could have chosen better under similar circumstances. That’s like asking, “Why didn’t Hamlet kill Claudius in the first Act?” I think the better question is whether or not those characters acted plausibly, and most important “humanly” within the context of the story, even though the outcome is not the one the reader might have wished for, or in the end found most satisfying.