Ruby Barnes's Blog, page 8

How about this? My nine year-old was on a two day camp here in Ireland a few weeks ago, with a club that shall remain nameless. Instructions to parents included "please ensure that sun protection cream is provided."
He returned from a great time a bit sore. He does tan but it had been very hot and sunny, and his upper back was badly burnt. The adult supervisors told the kids they weren't allowed to apply sun protection to the children's skin as the rules prevent them touching the kids. Also the kids weren't supervised to apply cream to each other where they couldn't reach. My son had managed to smear sun cream on most of his body except the upper back.
We've always been so careful to avoid the kind of burning and peeling of previous generations. A couple of nights of bad sleep, after-sun lotion liberally applied, then the peeling. I was pretty angry at the time but the club was closed for summer and I soon moved on to being a grumpy old man about other things.
Today we were buying lunch at an outdoor event when a man with kids said hello to my son. He said he knew him from the camp club wotsit nameless thingy and asked me if my son had been one of the burn victims. His own son had been hospitalised with second degree burns and given morphine; things had been much worse for him than for my son. I began to express my opinions on the neglect exhibited, lack of supervision, risk to future health and the nonsense of no one exhibiting some common sense. He said he had been there but they weren't allowed to touch the kids and the kids wouldn't have applied the cream to each other.
What was today's event? It was a fundraiser for cancer.

From KINDLE BOOKS AND TIPS ...


Peril , by Ruby Barnes, is regularly $2.99 but has been discounted 67% to just 99 cents today in the Amazon Kindle store, and this book has received an average user rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 37 customer reviews.

Category: Mystery / Thriller



Here is the book’s description from the Amazon website:

A moment of madness. His choices. Their lives.

Ger Mayes doesn’t stand out from the crowd and life is passing him by. He thinks the world owes him a living but is held back by his own minor daily misdemeanors. That is until he kills a mugger and is blackmailed by a vicious Romanian crime gang. Ger keeps the secret from his wife, Jo, but bares all to her best friend, his mistress Renée. He also trusts his pal, high-wheeling drug dealer Tom, but gets dragged out of his depth into a world of darker deception. In a deadly struggle to cast off the gang’s net, Ger becomes more entangled. Can he find a way out and save those he loves?

Contemporary crime fiction set in Ireland, PERIL is the picaresque story of an anti-hero. Men want to be him, women want to redeem him. Ger’s story is fiction, but his origins are real – everyday folk living and working in a Dublin city center wracked with organized begging, drugs and violent crime. It’s not all leprechauns and shillelaghs in Ireland.

PERIL is the first of the Ger Mayes crime fiction series. (The second is Getting out of Dodge - Ed.)

Click here or type in http://smarturl.it/peril into your web browser to pick up your copy of Peril .

Weird Soundsby Eoin, age 9Kilkenny, Ireland
The quietest sound in the world must beAn ant trying to crawl into the sea.
The saddest sound in the world must beA dog whining because he wants his tea.
The funniest sound in the world must bea person burping as loud as me.
The loudest sound in the world must besomeone screaming like a banshee.

The first Ger Mayes crime novel is featuring on Ereader News Today on offer at 99c.


Ger Mayes doesn't stand out from the crowd and life is passing him by. He thinks the world owes him a living but is held back by his own minor daily misdemeanors. That is until he kills a mugger and is blackmailed by a vicious Romanian crime gang. Ger keeps the secret from his wife, Jo, but bares all to her best friend, his mistress Renée. He also trusts his pal, high-wheeling drug dealer Tom, but gets dragged out of his depth into a world of darker deception. In a deadly struggle to cast off the gang's net, Ger becomes more entangled. Can he find a way out and save those he loves?

Contemporary crime fiction set in Ireland, PERIL is the picaresque story of an anti-hero. Men want to be him, women want to redeem him. Ger's story is fiction, but his origins are real - everyday folk living and working in a Dublin city center wracked with organized begging, drugs and violent crime. It's not all leprechauns and shillelaghs in Ireland.

PERIL is the first of the Ger Mayes crime fiction series.



Peril
by Ruby Barnes
Rating: 4.4 Stars
Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Price: $0.99 Save $3.00

Marble City Publishing is doing a Goodreads Giveaway of two paperback copies of the Knife Edge Anthology. This collection of twenty-five crime / thriller / mystery / suspense stories has had a great reception in online bookstores and all profits go to the children's literacy charity Booktrust.org. There are twenty-three writers involved including Marble City authors (Jim Williams, yours truly and others) and winners from the recent genre competition at multi-story.co.uk. Click below to enter the giveaway.

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Goodreads Book Giveaway Knife Edge by Jim Williams Giveaway ends August 12, 2013.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win

One of the advantages of independent publishing is the freedom to choose your own title, character names etc. One of the risks of independent publishing is making a bad choice of title, character names etc. The double-edged sword of freedom. Readers, authors and bloggers, I need your help again, please read on.

As described with excruciating honesty in The New Author, I've made many beginner's mistakes. Peril was originally titled The Rise and Fall of Ger Mayes, in honour of a BBC TV comedy series from the 1970s. Not the greatest choice of title for the global village of digital publishing. Ger's name is common in Ireland and is pronounced 'Jer' but does that work around the world? Too late now. Ger Mayes is established with thousands of copies out there, a ton of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and Ger reappears in Getting Out of Dodge: Peril 2. I'm going to let Ger enjoy his small infamy in perpetuity.

But this post isn't about Peril and Ger. It's about another mistake I've made. My fiction tends to be first person narrator, (picaresque) crime, set in small-town Ireland. I have another series of novels which differ to this and the first title is The Crucible Part 1. Unlike my other books, I get a lot of returns for The Crucible. Really rapid returns. It is a controversial novel, dealing with a conspiracy of AIDS in Africa and Evangelical Christianity in the USA and Europe. I figured that the returns were from irate purchasers who disagreed with the book's storyline attack on religious fundamentalism, corporate greed and corrupt politics. The reviews on Goodreads and Amazon for The Crucible Part 1 are good and I was expecting some scorching one star reviews from those who returned, but no. Any negative reviews were related to the complexity of the conspiracy.

Then, during a recent e-publishing workshop I was running in darkest Tipperary, it came to me. One of those "Aha! I'm an idiot" moments. The quick returns were from dissatisfied customers who thought they had purchased the famous play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. I was flattering myself to think my novel was provoking an extreme reaction from readers; it was just a dumb choice of title. To top that, I had named my Crucible main character Thomas Thistlethwaite - an unpronounceable surname even for Brits. The name was chosen in memory of an early girlfriend (Thistlethwaite, not Thomas!) So now it's time to re-title my novel and rename the MC.

Ezra Barany makes some interesting comments about book titles and search keywords in his post here but I'm also looking to solicit direct reader and fellow author feedback on some alternatives below.

Here's a US reader review of the novel to give the flavour of it:

Ruby Barnes' latest novel is as revealing and surprising as his last. Expecting a military/covert thriller a la Tom Clancy, from my initial skim-over, I was struck by just how insidiously the author has led me into a deep, very moving and highly skeptical look at the effects of post-colonial "colonialism" in the name of aid in Africa. Mr. Barnes has suggested a collusion of terrifying proportion, acting completely outside the realm of governmental intervention. This is a book to make you think, then think again. But don't assume it's not a rousing journey. There are few storytellers as gifted as this author. His story carries you at high-speed. His subject and characters are gripping, fully fleshed and researched with a scholar's thoroughness. I would highly recommend it to readers of Clancy or Le Carre, political science fans, and all those whose views of European and American intervention in Africa, the cradle of human life, need revision.

Titles I have in mind to replace The Crucible are Into Africa (the main story is Europe recolonising Africa) or Koobi Fora (a Kenyan village thought to be the origin of Homo Sapiens and the setting of the novel climax). What do you think? Do you have an alternative suggestion?

Names I have in mind for the MC (British assassin turns good guy) instead of Thomas Thistlethwaite are Thomas Wolfe or Thomas Blackwood or Thomas Jakeman. Am I too hung up on Thomas and which of those surnames appeal? Alternative suggestions also welcome.

Please share your thoughts with a comment below. I'll be sending a paperback copy of the revised book to a randomly selected winner.


Oh, not to forget a free e-copy of the novel if you sign up to Ruby's News .

The other day I had a writing friend make a very astute observation about my Ger Mayes series of crime novels (I can say series now since the second book was released on 15th June.) He said, "Well, you've written another picaresque novel." I had to wonder about his spelling and, considering Getting Out of Dodge: Peril 2 is set in the medieval Irish city of Kilkenny, I agreed that it might be considered picturesque. But, before I wrote back with my smart-arse comments, I thought I'd better go Google, as people do when they suspect that they're not as smart as they'd like to think they are.

This is what I found (courtesy of Wikipedia, similar definitions on Merriam-Webster, the free dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica and others):

The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca," from "pícaro," for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which might sometimes be satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. This style of novel originated in 16th-century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It continues to influence modern literature.

Well, I always thought I was a learned type of guy but I had never heard of picaresque before. Sure, I recognise the character and it fits Ger Mayes to a T. What it made me realise, as I push into my second half-century, is that learned I ain't. I just have a very good memory for what I read and see. This humble pie tastes good. I've been calling Peril urban noir ever since a reviewer wrote that about it. The moral of the story, for me, is that sometimes you don't know what you've written until someone reads it and tells you. That's the beauty of reader reviews.

Getting Out of Dodge: Peril 2 is out now in your favourite reading format, be it epub , kindle or paper .
If you haven't read Peril then you can get that free by signing up to Ruby's News .

  
  

It's been two years since the launch of Peril but nine years have passed in the world of Ger Mayes. He didn't die but he did go to prison for his part in the biggest drugs heist Ireland has ever known. Now Ger's back on the loose, looking for love and finding trouble. Getting Out of Dodge: Peril 2 is the latest Ruby Barnes release in paperback and e-book from Marble City Publishing.


Here's the blurb:  
After nine years in maximum security prison for crimes against the state, Ger Mayes is on release. Free to try and recover the life he destroyed, free to rediscover love and normality.
"The worst criminal I have ever met," the judge stated at Ger's trial, and it wasn't a professional compliment. A decade of rubbing shoulders with Ireland's criminal elite hasn’t improved Ger's skills.  
Two weeks after release Ger sits on a Dublin park bench, the uniformed authorities to his right, the gangsters with their bad trousers to his left, a blonde woman's fragrant head in a bag at his feet. He should have got the hell out of Dodge when DI Andy McAuliffe told him to. How has it come to this? 
His wife is ex, his son estranged. The authorities have his number and so do the local criminal fraternity. A couple of choice decisions place Ger in the middle of a brothel turf war, and he decides to rescue somebody that he used to know. He chases his dreams but murder, kidnap and blackmail catch up with him. Fate hasn't had its fill of Ger but will his natural survival instinct win out again?
Peril has great reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, and fans are sure to enjoy Getting Out of Dodge.
Want to read more? Here's the first chapter:
Read more »

Bad news. Turns out I'm not the father of the boy. After nine years estranged and wondering every day if I should have done more, I finally faced up to it and went on a surprise visit (a.k.a. stalked) my ex. The kid is a mini-me of her yoga instructor, Ciaran. No doubt he'll grow up to be just as flexible. 
The good news is it's just fiction. Getting Out ofDodge - the sequel to Peril. From Marble City Publishing.
  

In a recent Goodreads Giveaway my publisher shipped a paperback copy of The Hitler Diaries off to Canada. In the business of book marketing, publishers and authors have to put themselves out there and many review copies go out. Sometimes you hear back, and sometimes you don't. In this case the result was a perfect match. The Fatman loved The Hitler Diaries and wrote a very insightful review for Fatman's Couch Reviews, giving The Hitler Diaries four and a half burgers out of five.

The story doesn't stop there. To spread the word, Marble City are offering up to five e-book copies of The Hitler Diaries to winning entrants on his website. Go here to enter.
Thanks.