My summer reading for the last few weeks has been re-reading bits and pieces of my two latest books – “What Haunts Us” and “Point of View and the Emotional Arc of Stories”.
Why?
Because the former, which is a volume of collected and original “ghost” stories just won a 2020 Midwest Book Award in the “Fantasy / Sci-fi / Horror / Paranormal” fiction category. Yay for me!! It is chock full of the kind of stories that you wish had been told around summer campfires. Cursed BBQ, foot races through the moors, misbehaving computers, and of course, the tale of the immortal Count Saint Germaine’s seventh wife which if there was any justice in the world would be made into a HOB or Netflix series.
Sponsored by the Midwest Independent Book Publishers Association and as they said in the on-line broadcast of the ceremony, they had over a hundred librarians serving as judges. I do love those librarians for the nod and hope that one of more copies make their way into your local library systems. You can get it on-line through Amazon, Barnes & Nobles or Moonfire Publishers (https://moonfire-publishing.com) who brought it out.
The latter, is just coming out now from Parkhurst Brothers Publishing (https://www.parkhurstbrothers.com) is co-authored with Nancy Donoval and is a summation of what we have taught on point of view and the emotional arc of stories for the 17 years we shared a classroom at Metro State University. It is also the companion to “The New Book of Plots”. One of the delights of “”Point of View” is with the exception of a couple of personal stories, all the example (and there are plenty of them) are variations on Little Red Riding Hood as told by mother, grandmother, Red, the woodsman or the wolf.
Think of it this way. “Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories” which I co-authored with Elizabeth Ellis on the value and necessity of tell stories that are hard to hear and harder to say is the theory. “The New Book of Plots” is ½ of the application – a how-to of narrative forms – to help you construct the path from start to finish for those stories once you choose to tell them. “Pont of View and the Emotional Arch of Stories” is the other ½ taking you through who is telling the story and why it matters. It is also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the publisher, Parkhurst Brothers.
If you’d like an autographed copy, you can get any or all of them directly from me for a price that is slightly more than list price but includes postage. Send me a note – neimistory@gmail.com - and we’ll go from there.