A couple Fridays ago a short story of mine was featured on Sci Fi Saturday Night. The story is titled “The New World” and follows two young boys in a world where humans have almost died out because of disease, and vampires rule.

Check it out here:

Fiction Friday – The New World by Samantha Boyette

It seems like spring might have finally arrived in my little piece of the world, so I’m taking advantage of the weather and editing on the porch swing. Ahhh, life is good.

Just finished a new draft of Prime, adding in a little extra emotional turmoil for main character, hopefully that will be the last one and it will be on it’s way to being shopped around! In the meantime, I shared another book with the Sci Fi Saturday Night crew and they posted a nice review here: http://www.scifisaturdaynight.com/?p=3075

Other than that, I’ve just been editing a dozen different things, and sending out some short stories, hopefully there will be some news on those soon!

So for years audio books have existed in their simplest forms, just people reading the words of the author as they were written, telling the story as it was meant to be. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I always thought that was enough.

I have a wonderful job that allows me to listen to audio books while I work, and I have noticed a recent trend to add a soundtrack or sound effects to a book. This seems completely unnecessary to me. That’s right James Patterson, I’m talking to you. The fight scenes in the Maximum Ride series are not enhanced by the strange hyper techno music played in the background, and the helicopter landing scene definitely doesn’t need background music.

To me the music in audio books just feels forced, it also is a bit insulting/ a cop out. It’ s like just because we like giant action movies with crazy special effects and emotional music cues they we can’t appreciate a well written work without adding those same things to it. A cop out because it feels like they didn’t think the author’s words were good enough on their own to create the excitement that music would make a reader feel. With a well written book there is no need for any such music. Take “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” by Carrie Ryan, that book was terrifying to listen to without any sounds added and it would have been easy to add threatening music to it. Thankfully, no one decided to do that.

Books are words, let’s leave them that way.

Finally decided what book to start posting on Textnovel. It’s actually the first book that I ever wrote called “Through the Loop”. This book follows seventeen-year-old Hailey, her fourteen-year-old brother Craig, and their friends as they fall through a portal into another region known as Rownomfer. The region is at once more and less developed than our own. Once there, they take up with a band of rebels made up of cyganics and splices. Cyganics are humans genetically altered so they have computer-like intelligence and sometimes mechanical parts, while splices are humans altered to have animal senses and strengths. This group of rebels know that a trollish war tribe from another region is trying to take over their region, but cannot convince the King because he is too busy trying to kill them simply for existing. Magic and technology move hand in hand through the story as Hailey and the others help fight to save the region and the new friends they have made there.

In posting the book on Textnovel the last few days, I can really see where my writing has improved over the years. I find myself deleting a lot of it and re-writing. At the heart of it I think it was a good story to start with, but I feel the need to change things like a paragraph where every sentence starts with ‘she’ as in the following:

She went to the cupboard and took out a glass. She looked over her shoulder at her brother, but he shook his head. She shrugged, and poured herself a glass of water. She went to sit beside the window, waiting for their father to come home. She wasn’t sure how she would explain what happened.

That’s not a real paragraph, but it is similar to one I deleted. So what started out as an easy, ‘Oh I’ll add this one’ has ended up a lot more work than I expected.

I am adding new chapters as often as possible so follow this link to read.

http://www.textnovel.com/story/Through-The-Loop/6153/