Category Archives: Books/Literature

The Ebb Of Time, part deux

Yesterday I received what I’m hoping is the final cover material for the paperback version of The Ebb of Time, my latest novel, and it’s been sent in and, if all checks out, I should order a proof, receive it soon after, and either accept the material -after which time it will become available to be bought- or need to make some (probably very minor) modifications.

Anyway, the full cover image:

Frankly, I love this. Easily my favorite cover/back cover combo so far!

Again, if all is good on the printer’s end I’ll order a proof copy and once I see it in my hands and it does indeed look good, then off we go!

If you can’t wait, the book is available now digitally via Amazon Kindle. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you may “borrow” the book and read it as well!

Here’s the link:

Amazon.com: The Ebb of Time eBook : Torre, E. R.: Kindle Store

The Ebb of Time (2022)

While the cover for print still requires a couple of small tweaks, the digital cover to my new novel is for the most part good and I went ahead and uploaded all the information onto Amazon for the Kindle digital publication.

Within 72 hours, hopefully less, my latest novel will be available for purchase or, if you have Kindle Unlimited, borrowing.

As soon as that information is available, I will present it here and it will also appear at my author page, which is here:

Amazon.com: E. R. Torre: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

In the meantime, here’s the cover to The Ebb of Time.

Hope you guys like it!

The novel’s description:

They called it the Frenzy and in a matter of days it caused the fall of Civilization.

Ten years later, inhabitants of a small settlement receive an eerie signal originating from a distant military base.

Who sent it and why?

To investigate, they need to journey outside the safety of the settlement walls and face a savage world that hides many dark secrets.

Secrets which could not only destroy what’s left of humanity but destroy the world itself.

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #20

Last time I posted I noted how quickly I was getting the revisions into the new novel (Draft #8) and was hoping by this week to be done.

Welp, not only did I put all those revisions into the book, but I went back and found a few pages in particular where I had some more lengthy revisions to do (there were some pages that required very minimal revisions and some were a little heavier), printed them out, and went over them in a quasi-9th draft and…

…I’m done.

Sure, I could go over the entire book one more time but at this point whatever changes are done will likely be incredibly minor and I’ve come to realize after so many years of writing that there does come a point where you gotta let the book go.

So as of today, Tuesday the 14th of June, the novel is effectively finished up and all I’m waiting for now is the commissioned cover to show up. If its good (I really hope it is!) and doesn’t require any major fine tuning, I can see this book becoming available perhaps next week digitally via Kindle and, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks as a paperback.

The book took a lot of effort to get done, perhaps more than most of my others because of the things I went through the past year, but I’m proud of the work and feel it fits beautifully with my other works.

Now to keep checking my emails to see when the cover comes in…!

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #19 

Quick and thrilling update to offer:

I finished reading through my latest novel and adding all the red notes/revisions and yesterday was the first day of putting those revisions into the computer.

In one day’s time, I managed to revise a little over 1/3rd of the book!

Now, this was the earlier sections of the novel and I’m keenly aware there is at least one section near the midpoint where I felt it needed a little more work but that amounts to no more than a few pages and, at least in the section I just finished, there may be only 1 page I wish to give a quick other look before declaring those pages done.

This is my 8th draft of the novel so plenty of hard work has been done on it but it is such a pleasure to see things finally sorting themselves out and looking like we’re near the end.

I have already commissioned the cover so I’m looking forward to seeing that soon as well.

I strongly suspect by sometime next week this novel will be completed and then I’ll post it to Amazon’s Kindle for purchase. The actual paperback will take a little longer as I have to see the proof and approve of it (provided there are no glaring problems) but the reality is that this book will be available in all formats no later than the later parts of this month or very early parts of next month.

Hoorah!

THE NEW 2021/2022 NOVEL UPDATE #18

So on 5/31 I finished putting in the revisions into my Word file to my latest novel and, as of today, June 5th, I’m reading through it and writing down notes/corrections in red ink. I’m not quite halfway through reading this latest draft (it will be #8) but at least so far I’m confident this will be the last revision needed and, further, I am confident I’ll have the book available, at least via Kindle, by later this very month.

Fingers crossed!

The book has taken quite a bit more out of me than some of the other books I’ve written and that’s in part to the tragedies I’ve faced this past year. It’s been an incredibly rough year and, at this moment, I’m very busy with other stuff so finding the time to finish this book up has been a little harder than usual.

But I will get it done, dammit!

Soon, dear readers, very soon…!

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #17

So last week Saturday I posted that I had finished reading through and putting down the red ink revisions for Draft #6 of my latest novel.

I wrote I felt the novel was nearly done and, as if to prove that fact, today and six days later I can announce that I’ve put all those red ink notes into the Word file and the book is ready to be printed out one more time and given a -perhaps last!- red ink-revision before putting those edits into the Word file.

If you’ve been around here you’ll know that as my novels get closer to be finished up, I tend to need less time to do these revisions. The earlier drafts require quite a bit of reworking and revisions and it is not unheard of that a draft can take me several months to finish up. The fact that I was able to put all these revisions into the Word file in less than a week speaks to how close I feel the book is to being finalized.

So perhaps tomorrow (its getting a little late today) I will print this puppy out and give it a read through.

If all goes well, my next announcement should confirm whether we’ve reached the last draft or not!

Fingers crossed!

THE NEW 2021/2022 NOVEL UPDATE #16

It’s Saturday the 14th of May and its not quite lunch time and I’ve just finished the read-through and red ink revisions of Draft #6 of my latest novel…

…and I’m freaking ecstatic.

One of the very best feelings in the world for an author is reaching a point where you feel like your novel is just about done. With regard to this book, that’s exactly where I’m at at this point in time.

The revisions happened pretty quick considering I did spend one weekend flying out -and therefore was unable to do any work on the book- so in reality I’ve taken maybe a little over two weeks to go over this books and write my revisions down.

Even better is the fact that, in looking over the revisions, I suspect it won’t take me much more than a week to transfer those revisions into my Word file and print the whole thing out once again.

When I do that, I intend to give the book one more read through but I feel confident in saying this will be the final one.

So, if all goes well and I’m not delayed by anything, maybe another week or so to add those revisions to the Word file, maybe another couple of weeks at the most to read it one final time, then maybe less than a week or so to add whatever final revisions are necessary.

The book will be ready by June, there is no question about this.

Let’s see when exactly I’ll have it available for purchase!

Stay tuned, it won’t be long now!

On Writing…

Got into an interesting commentary tangent yesterday with some people online about writing and figured I’d cut and paste it here, if you’re interested…

The first bit is rather brief and involves what I think are two things all authors should keep in mind and/or do:

1) Ingest a lot of fiction, chew on it, see what works and -sometimes even more importantly!- what doesn’t work. The more awful a work and the clearer you can see what makes it “awful”, the better because that teaches you the things you may not want to do.

2) I feel author Elmore Leonard created a fascinating list of 10 writing tips but its the final one that I like the most: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Yes, it sounds snarky as hell but there is a startling clarity to this.  What he’s saying is don’t run up the page/word count just for the hell of it.  Hone your story into a razor sharp book, one where a reader will love every word and won’t find their eyes glazing over at any points.

That led to this longer posting where I elaborate a bit about what I wrote above…

Like many would be writers way back when, I also looked into the “How to” books on writing, up to and including the Stephen King book which I mentioned way upstream.

The bottom line, I’ve found over time, lies in the two things I pointed out. I’ve always been super curious about reading and/or watching stories (whether on TV or Movies, etc.). After a while, I began to detect patterns to stories, some of which were eventually categorized in other works (the “hero’s journey” being one of the biggies, though at the time I didn’t recognize its categorization!).

And I was highly critical about the things I would read and or watch. I would see where the things worked and very much paid attention to what didn’t. If a book, for example, started very well but lost me at some point, I would try to figure out why it did so. Likewise with movies. And if I felt everything worked, I’d also try to understand why as well.

This subsequently becomes applicable to one’s own fiction writing. You develop that understanding of what is in your mind “good” versus what you feel is “bad” and you obviously try to steer your work in the former rather than later direction.

Experience becomes key. My first novel took forever for me to write because not only was it my first attempt at such a beast (I had written shorter stories before that) but also I was just finding what worked for me from a technical standpoint.

Today, as I’m about to finish off my 13th full work, I have an understanding about the techniques I didn’t way back when. As I noted upstream, I tend to want to start a novel with a reasonably clear idea of how it begins and, even more importantly, how it ends. This doesn’t have to be written completely in stone, but the general ideas should be there and should be intriguing enough for me to take the next step.

The biggest struggles I have are in writing the connective middle, getting the reader (and me, the writer!) from Point A to Point Z. Here I fall back on my memory of all the stories I’ve ingested and try my hardest to create something that is as unique as possible. I loathe the idea of retreading a story and strive to make something that is my own. By virtue of the fact that there are so many stories out there, mine cannot be some 100% “new” thing -that’s impossible- but I do strive to give readers a ride and surprise them with whatever it is I’m offering them.

And that’s where the Elmore Leonard quote comes in, especially when I get to the later stages of the revision process. I also loathe the idea of having readers’ eyes glaze over with either paragraph upon paragraph or page upon page worth of stuff that doesn’t in the end make your story any better.

Back when I was in College and had a creative writing class the teacher talked at one point about Henry James’ theory of the “organic form”, ie the idea that a novel or story is like a human body and that every organ, muscle, cell, etc. has a purpose in said story. In some ways this ties in directly to Elmore Leonard’s quote in that you want your story to be razor sharp and not have any extraneous (beware, highly technical literary jargon follows) bullshit muddling the overall work.

When I finish my first draft of a novel, in general it can be at a low of 50,000-60,000 words. As I revise the book in the early stages I’m often adding material into it and the book can bulge up to 100,000 to 130,000 words. But once I have the book “locked down” and know all the elements I’ve wanted to include in the work are there, I start to pare things down, to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. The book will then generally become thinner, word count-wise, and by the end I’ll have a work that usually (but not always) winds up in the 85,000 to 110,000 word range. 

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #15

Yesterday, April the 25th, I finished putting all my notes/revisions into the Word file of my new novel. It’s been almost a month since I finished putting in those inked revisions and now putting them into the actual pages and I have to say…

…I like where I’m at.

One of the most satisfying things about being a writer is when you see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the point where you feel your book is really, really close to being done.

Yesterday, when I finished up putting those revisions into the Word file, and as I was going through those last pages, I was hit with a wave of pride at the work. I felt like I accomplished what I was hoping for and am really close to delivering the story I’ve tried so very hard to deliver.

So Draft #5 is done now and, unfortunately, I’ll have to wait a few days -busy with other stuff!- and let it sit during that time before getting back to it. I strongly suspect the book will need not much more than two more drafts and that Draft #6 will feature mostly edits toward the later pages and where a little more polishing needs to be made.

It’s impossible to give an estimation as to how much longer it will take to get all this done, but I suspect we’re looking at a Summer release of the novel at this point. Perhaps sometime in later June or July if -and that’s a BIG if- I can really get things going in the next few weeks.

We’ll see.

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #14

Yesterday, March the 27th, 2022, was a truly magical day, at least for me.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that, since last year and the passing of my parents in the collapse of Champlain Towers South on June 24th, that I’ve been in a sort of mental fog.

I suppose I knew this to some degree. Things that usually gave me joy didn’t. I was doing the things I needed to do to get through each day but I did so on a sort of autopilot rather than with any pleasure.

I worked on my new novel during this time, but it too was done in such a piecemeal fashion and without the mix of love and frustration (truly, writing a novel is usually a combination of extreme pleasure and frustration!) I normally have for my works. Not that what revisions I was doing were bad, mind you, only that the emotions behind it weren’t there like before.

And this went for pretty much most of the activities in my life this past nearly a year.

Unless there was no good relationship between offspring and parents, the loss of one’s parents is a traumatic event. And for me, for my family, the shocking way they died made the situation all the worse. From the collapse itself to waiting for their bodies to be found to dealing with all the lawyers and trying to settle their estate (not only did I lose them, but all the paperwork they had in their home) to running their businesses… its a lot to take one and find the time to properly grieve as well.

But yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself a little after twelve noon feeling extremely exhausted and needing to take a nap. This is not totally unusual for me, there are days here and there where my body simply reaches the point I need to rest.

Only this time, when I lay down and took a deep thirty minute or so nap and woke up, I felt… different.

I felt incredibly refreshed and, for the first time in far too long, alive like I hadn’t been in too long.

Perhaps for me the extreme sadness which came from the trauma of the building’s collapse and their deaths has finally crested, though it certainly isn’t anywhere near gone. I still miss my parents tremendously, but it felt like after that nap I was energized and for the first time in a very long time I felt I was past that emotional fog.

I picked up my new novel, which printed out runs to 195 single spaced pages and of which I had the last 1/4th of the book, some 50 pages or so, left to revise and, in the course of yesterday afternoon, I did that revision.

I read through it and made my red ink notations and it was such a freaking joy to do so.

Time eventually heals all and while I don’t feel like I’m fully healed yet, at least as of yesterday and for the first time in too long a time I felt like I was a little bit back to my old self.

Let’s see if it lasts.