James Cardona's Blog

I was interviewed today on Layered Pages, a super cool book blog featuring lots of great new authors.

The interview covered lots of different topics concerning my writing and especially, Community 17, my last book. Click here to check it out.

My book, Santa Claus vs. The Aliens, is featured today along with a nice list of other great children's literary award winners. Check it out!

As I previously mentioned, my book, Community 17, was named a finalist in the Wishing Shelf Book awards. I had been sitting on pins and needles all month waiting for the winners to be announced. Well, the winners list just came out. And it won! The book took the gold medal in the teenager category. The contest is centered in London, but the judging takes place in both London and Stockholm with six different groups of judges. I also just pushed out a pdf excerpt of the book to the free section of my website, so please check it out.

Community 17: A Dystopian Novella

Community 17: A Dystopian Novella was published just 3 short months ago and so far the early reviews have been very positive. However, I have the feeling that the too-plain may be holding it back.
I wanted some second opinions on changing the book's cover.

With the original cover, I was shooting for a stark, plain cover similar to those of 1984 or Brave New World.

I had a few ideas. One involved the concept of society forcing people to conform, that is, the stifling of freedom of expression and putting people in a box. To illustrate this, I drew a woman twisted up in a yoga pose. For the background, I had the idea of an menacing, big-brother type face. Another idea was a futuristic urban city, with a barrier in front of it to keep the unwanted out.
Please let me know what you think of these.

Starting tomorrow the ebook version of Prayer Warrior's Guide will be free for 5 days. Please down load it! Feb 4th 2016 to Feb 8th 2016

Community 17: A Dystopian Novella, is just published in ebook form. Finally! Print will come out in a few weeks. I like to think that it is the best book I've written so far and I am really proud of it. I am also entering it into a few book contests so I have my fingers crossed there as well.

Here is the amazon link.

One of the things I have been doing to combat writer’s block is to shift my attentions to other forms of creativity such as creating 3D images and scenes. This has been doubly productive as I can use the images on my website. I thought I would share a few, some finding their way to the site and others that did not.

I am using a free program called Daz Studio, also called Daz3D. It allows for three dimensional objects created in programs such as 3D Studiomax to be imported, morphed, posed and skinned in order to create a scene. It gives the creator full control over camera angles and adjustments and lighting.

It is great fun with something of a shallow learning curve. I created many, many images just to figure out how adjusting sliders affected the final rendered scene. Here are some images I did early on with different lighting models. This was my version of Gabriella from my book Gabriella and Dr Duggan’s Secret Dimensional Transport Machine. Cleary shifting the lighting makes a huge difference and can take a cartoonish looking model and give it some pop and perhaps make it look a little more life-like.




I took the image and, using Photoshop, put it in front of the background image from my book cover. The final version below.



Here is another series of images that show what a difference lighting makes. This is Leonna, an apprentice wizard of the creature-kind who can control birds. She is something of a naughty girl and a seductress. If you want to read about her, look for The Worthy Apprentice in 2016.




In the Gabriella and Dr Duggan’s Secret Dimensional Transport Machine two-book series, one of the very cool things that happens is that people using the dimensional transport machine can reach different dimensions (obviously). One of those reached is a place of bright-white light where Gabriella meets the Void-man, a character who looks exactly like her dead father. For this image I turned the lighting up very high for the render.

[image error]

I took that image and placed it over a white background then drew a hazy shadow in the distance. It was really easy to do, but I think the technique gives a great effect in displaying one of the pivotal moments in the book.



I also have been experimenting with adding multiple characters to a scene and adjusting the focal length and F-stop of the camera to blur out the background and make the foreground images pop. This is something that I am already very familiar with from portrait photography (you’ve probably noticed I like to do this a lot in my family pictures that I post on facebook).





The pictures above are from scenes in the yet unreleased book, The Dragon’s Castle. The book is with my editor and scheduled for publication on December 1st, 2015. As you can see in the one image, there is overhead lighting that casts shadows of the characters down on the ground and highlights different portions of their bodies. Additionally, the front of the scene is in focus while the rear of the building and soldiers standing in the rear are slightly out of focus. This image took me about 12 hours of playing, rendering, adjusting, re-rendering, etc, etc, to get right. I used iray for it instead of 3delight as the render engine, since that is supposed to generate more life-like skin, but still I would have liked the characters to look less like they were in a video game. It was good progress considering some of the earlier images I produced. I had been using the program for about 1 month at this point.



Above is a scene from The Worthy Apprentice, the third book from the apprentice series. It adds characters to the series that use magic to control birds and cats. This picture is of Felicia and her cougar and leopard. It is one of my favorite images that I’ve done so far. I repainted portions of the texture map for her face in order to create her character and make her more cat-like. I used the male Viking hair for her and some jungle clothing. I really like her menacing yet nonchalant poise. The book should be published in the first quarter of 2016, but as yet I don’t have a firm date for release.


Below are a few images that I created for the website of ghoul-kind coming through the forest for my book, Under The Shadow Of Darkness, in which a tear to the underworld is opened and blood-thirsty dead stream out and feed on the living.





You can see volumetric fog in the background of the one picture. This is still something that I haven’t quite mastered and I have been playing around with a lot. Unlike some other 3D modeling programs such as Poser, Daz3D doesn’t have a particle engine, so in order to do things like fog, magical electric sparks and the like, the program has to be tricked using primitives and lighting to approximate the effect. It can be frustrating since render times can sometimes be long, but it is very rewarding when the image comes out right.

Speaking of magic, below is one of my early images when I still hadn’t gotten a handle on how to do magic. It looks pretty good, but is not perfect to my eyes. The magical balls at Bel’s hands are actually flat 2D images. I rotated the flat magical swirls on their y and z axis before the render. The flare coming out was added in photoshop and is also a flat image. Not the best method, but I think it looks okay.




Below is a more recent attempt. Shireen, a character from The Dragon’s Castle, battles soldiers in the wood around the city of Sha’mont. The red magical orbs are three-dimensional objects that have translucent portions, thus allowing the background to come through. Again, these are not particles but one large solid mesh, only the map wrapped on the mesh has some see-through spots thus tricking the program into looking like particles. It fools the program and the eye into thinking there are particles instead of one fluffy cloud. I like working with 3D objects much more than adding effects in post, since the objects do not have to be on the surface but can be deeply layered into the scene and even float around other objects such as Shireen’s hands.





Okay, so that’s all for now. As far as the images, I am hoping to soon get the volumetric fog mastered then it’s on to learning how to do godrays which are those very cool-looking, streaming fingers of sun light. I am really excited about making a few scenes with those. If I get good at this I might even attempt to create my own book covers—we’ll see.

And by the way, don’t fret! I’m still writing too. The fourth installment of the apprentice series, Into Darkness, is in my mind at the moment. Look for the release of Community 17 on November 1st and The Dragon’s Castle on December 1st. Happy reading!

Someone said—I don't remember whom—that we cannot define a novel, a chapter, or even a paragraph, but a sentence—we know what that is. I find that to be right and true as any definition of a literary object larger than a sentence can be refuted using counter-examples. The variety is so vast that we cannot define what they are exactly. But a sentence—we know what that is.

I am a person who reads novels but loves sentences. I don't know why, but I find myself enraptured by them. A finely crafted sentence is a thing of beauty and such prose can approach the finest poetry. I feel this so much so that some of my favorite books, stories that I read solely for the scrumptious sentences, were, overall, horrible novels. Case in point, the often-debated Great Gatsby. I find the story boring and painful to read, yet the sentences are a thing of beauty. Here are a few:

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. (F Scott Fitzgerald)

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. (F Scott Fitzgerald)

Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion. (F Scott Fitzgerald)

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motorcars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. (F Scott Fitzgerald)


As an author, I have become a student of the sentence and often jot them down for later dissection and study. I want to know exactly why a certain combination of words strung together elicits such a magical, euphoric response. In my log book you will find many sentences by a variety of well-known and not-so-well-known authors. I was looking it over the other day, searching for inspiration and noticed a dearth—I might even say a plethora—of long sentences.

I have been at times accused of overusing long sentences in my own writing so it is something that I've been aware of and tried to tone down in my last few books. I've had people tell me that “genre readers don't want to read that #@%!” and “leave the long sentences to the literary—no one reads their books anyway.”
So this is a topic that greatly interests me and in my anecdotal observations, I find that older books tend to have much longer sentences. That may not be true and I am open to correction on that point, but if true, there must be a reason for this. Is the general education level decreasing? I think so, but I am not sure if this has had an effect on sentence length of genre fiction. I think people are as capable of reading and understanding longer sentences today as they were in the 1900's, only that they are not accustomed to doing it so these longer sentences stick out more.

Basically I think people are unaccustomed to seeing them because contemporary authors are not using them. So why is that? My supposition is that American colleges and universities have been teaching that the terse, brief and to the point sentence is best and that anything containing a few verbal phrases leans toward the flowery. Hemingway = good. Faulkner = bad.

I think this is horrible advice and there are some well respected professors who would side with me. (Brookes Landon, for one).

Here are some great, long sentences I've collected by some names you might recognize. (And yes, Hemingway absolutely wrote long sentences.)

Here's a 142 word banger by my all time favorite author, Ursula K. LeGuin, from her book, A Wizard of Earthsea. This book was made into a movie twice and is quite a well-known gem. And, ahem, this absolutely is a genre book!

So to Ged who had never been down from the heights of the mountain, the Port of Gont was an awesome and marvellous place, the great houses and towers of cut stone and waterfront of piers and docks and basins and moorages, the seaport where half a hundred boats and galleys rocked at quayside or lay hauled up and overturned for repairs or stood out at anchor in the roadstead with furled sails and closed oarports, the sailors shouting in strange dialects and the longshoremen running heavyladen amongst barrels and boxes and coils of rope and stacks of oars, the bearded merchants in furred robes conversing quietly as they picked their way along the slimy stones above the water, the fishermen unloading their catch, coopers pounding and shipmakers hammering and clamsellers singing and shipmasters bellowing, and beyond all the silent, shining bay.

Here's one from the champion of the short, terse sentence, Ernest Hemingway in his 1925 book, Cross Country Snow. It clocks in at 74 words:

George was coming down in the Telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

Here's another grand-daddy of a sentence from Hemingway which rolls in at 279 words:

If you could make the yellow flames of candles in the sun; that shines on the steel of bayonets freshly oiled and yellow patent leather belts of those who guard the Host; or hunt in pairs through the scrub oak in the mountains for the ones who fell into the trap at Deva (it was a bad long way to come from the café Rotonde to be garroted in a draftly room with consolation of the church at order of the state, acquitted once and held until the captain general of the Burgos reversed the finding of the court) and in the same town where Loyola got his wound that made him think, the bravest of those who were betrayed that year dove from the balcony onto the paving of the court, head first, because he had sworn they would not kill him; (his mother tried to make him promise not to take his life because she worried most about his soul but he dove well and cleanly with his hands tied while they walked with him praying); if I could make him; make a bishop; make Candido Tiebas and Toron; make clouds come fast in shadows moving over wheat and the small, careful stepping horses; the smell of olive oil; the feel of leather; rope-soled shoes; the loop of twisted garlics; earthen pots; saddle bags carried across the shoulder; wine skins; the pitchforks made of natural wood (the tines were branches); the early morning smells; the cold mountain nights and long hot days of summer, with always the trees and shade under the trees, then you would have a little of Navarra. But it’s not in this book.

One last one I'll through in from Mr. E.H. That comes in at 117 words. This sentence is masterful in its effect:

Wilson who was ahead was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson's gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragment fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo's huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the on-coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.

Here is another wonderful sentence from Loren Eiseley from The Firmament of Time:

It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open up in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planted—escaped it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master.

Another from Joan Didion from The Year of Magical Thinking:

This is my attempt to make sense of the periods that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

While I'm not pretentious enough to compare my own writing against these masters, I thought I might provide a sampling my attempts. I was quite proud of this first one as it was one of the first things I wrote in my very first book, although in retrospect it is not very good:

My hands trembling, carrying another box out to a half-Spanish half-Indian woman, mumbling the shoe size through shaking lips, my pulse pounding, my heart bursting, I stare through the store front window at my father, barking excitedly, pleadingly, fearfully, shaking his arms at the two militant looking young men wearing blue-black suits shimmering in the dark, dull, cold red of the fading sun, sinking low, extinguishing itself, falling into darkness and gloom, as if death draws it down deep.

Oh, I’m cringing right now. With about five years of experience, I find that sentence quite over the top. I tend to write much less long sentences now. My first book contained 207 sentences clocking in at 40 words or more. Some of them were over 100 words long. In my last book of similar length there were only 14 over 40 words long and none longer than 80 words. Here are some others that I actually liked:

I really liked writing this 74 word long sentence in my fantasy book, Under The Shadow Of Darkness:

There was nothing mean or condescending in his dark eyes yet there was something there that made Bel feel small and the rest of the world very large, the world that Bel did not know and had only heard rumor of, something there, in those eyes, that had seen too much, a vast land of power and intrigue, war and pain, love and loss, and it made Bel feel insignificant and very, very tiny.

Here’s another at 90 words from the same book:

"I've had about enough of you," Bel said as he flashed his staff full of bright white light, pushing all his anger and frustration into it, the anger at watching people who were good and upright reduced to babbling blood-drinking fiends, the rage at watching children run in terror from their dead parents lest they be drained by them, the disappointment at being picked last and somewhat reluctantly and then his first assignment, a suicide mission; he poured it in, bright white and hot, and the glare shone for miles.

One more:

The sky lit up brightly in hazy greens and blues, shining full of unnatural mage-light and about ten paces away stood a small, frail boy, staring at them, grinning intently, his ragged, dirty and torn clothing the color of a urine-stained sun, a short mage-wood staff in one hand and a blood caked flask hanging from his shoulder, a young child of a man, a boy with only one arm, grinning wildly.


So I guess, I have migrated away from overusing longer sentences in my own writing, although I still very much enjoy reading and writing them. I am unsure exactly why I have changed, but it is certain that the “peer pressure” induced by the mistaken notion that terse is more correct pushed by American Universities has had an influence.

The last month has been way-hectic-mega-busy with the math showcase and my son's graduation from university.



My mom came up from Ohio for the graduation ceremony at Rutger's University. We were all really excited to see Bill Nye the science guy who was the main event speaker.



May was also hectic with the preparations for the math showcase. I run a local mathematics competition called the PSEG Nuclear Math Showcase. It was our 15th year and attended by nearly 400 students from 4th through 8th grades.







Now that the big push is over I will be returning to my writing for the Summer. I am finalizing Community 17: A Dystopian Novella and The Dragon’s Castle based upon the comments and feedback I've received from my beta readers. Also I am putting together outlines on three other books that I will be working on into 2016.

The Dragon's Castle is currently out with the beta readers. Looking to publish this Summer.

I've just finished writing The Worthy Apprentice and am tentatively scheduling it to be released in November. It should be going out to the beta readers soon.