Jo Boone Reads and Writes

Newsletter #7

YOU CAN BUY THE COMBINED SERVICE SERIES HERE!

Jo Boone Reads:

You guys I am SO EXCITED! My birthday was last month and my daughter bought me a book I didn’t know existed! Well, okay, I kinda knew it existed. I actually own the book. Sort of.

But, I’m getting ahead of my story. Bad author! No biscuit!

When I was a teenager, I picked up a paperback book that looked similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books I had loved as a tween, cross-bred with the Dungeons and Dragons-style gaming I’d recently taken up. And that was exactly what it turned out to be: a fantasy adventure game in book form. You rolled your character stats, selected your initial equipment, made choices inside the story that affected the outcome, and had a random-number combat system.

The main character in the books (that’s you, the reader!) is a young warrior-monk named Lone Wolf, the only survivor of his order after an attack by the evil dark lords. Lone Wolf is sent to bring back help for the kingdom—a perilous quest! The book was tailor-made for young teen me, and I bought all eleven sequels, plus a thirteenth “spinoff” book about a different character, and played my way through them.

By then I had started college. For my first two years of college, I essentially gave up pleasure reading, and for years three and four I did relatively little. Then I went to graduate school, which did not help matters. But those original 12 Lone Wolf books lived in my head. I still have my original 13 tattered, well-loved paperbacks—they have survived fourteen moves, including a period after college when I moved every year for six straight years. They survived the time that I purged almost all of my paperbacks, because I had taken up collecting hardcovers. They survived my own daughter, who read them (using my notes to help her survive to the end) and pleaded with me to give them to her. I refused.

But when I talked about my favorite books, I seldom mentioned them. If you talk about Anne McCaffrey, people know who you mean. If you mention Ray Bradbury, everyone’s probably read some. But if you bring up Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf RPG books? I figured they had vanished into obscurity about the time I started college, a complete series at twelve books.

I was so wrong.

My daughter recently told me that not only are the books still in print, they have something of a cult following. They have their own website, and they’re available as a playable app! I immediately downloaded the app, and have been dying in Book 2 for a couple of months now. Not only that, but there are more of them! Dever and his son, Ben, eventually penned 32 books in the original series. There’s also a junior edition of the first five books aimed at 7-9 year olds, a second spinoff series featuring a female hero, a set of novels, and a parallel set of gamebooks that follow secondary characters and original characters from the series. And that may not be all. This is quite a sprawling fandom! And I was completely unaware of it until just this year!

Even better: the first book is available in an expanded hardcover edition, that my daughter bought me for my birthday.

My hardcover-book-collecting heart is full.

New Book Goodness!

If you’re a fan of the Salvage Title universe, you won’t want to miss David Alan Jones’s Salvage Race.

If you need a new audiobook for your drive to work, the tenth book in The Last Marines series by William S. Frisbee, Jr., Mother Earth, is out now in audio!

Jo Boone Writes

More than one of the reviews for The Celestial Sea has said that it “took the story in an unexpected direction.” I have puzzled over this: how was the story “unexpected?” It’s a difficult question for me to answer, because I knew all along, in basic terms, where Book 3 was going. Of the first four books in the series, I knew that Book 1 would delve into the octopods’ culture; Book 2 would show us the avians up close; and Book 3 would take place largely among the gu’ul. Book 4, as you might guess, will take place largely among humans. I knew that I planned for each book to have a different secondary genre: Book 1 would be a mystery, complete with finding a body in chapter 1; Book 2 would be action-adventure; and Book 3 would be a ghost story. Book 4, if you’re interested, will be a gangster novel—which shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. I hinted at it in Books 1 and 3 for certain. But the overarching genre has been science fiction/space opera all along, and all 3 books have had their share of space battles, technological wonders, and weird alien stuff. Book 4 will have all of that, also.

Maybe the unexpected direction was thematic? I’ve been asked about theme in my books, and it’s a more difficult question for me than plot or character. The largest theme in the books, I think, is ordinary courage. Charlie is not a superhero, and has no superpowers. I try to keep her personal battles small-scale, even if they’re high stakes (in Book 1, she has to decide whether to act to save the Magnetar; in Book 2, she has to decide whether to act to save a life). I try to make sure that she solves the challenges she faces using skills she would reasonably have (for example, when she makes use of skills that she has learned in the Magnetar’s shuttle bay during a daring escape in Book 2, or when she makes use of those same skills during a car chase in Book 3). That same theme, of ordinary courage, is key in Book 3 (Charlie saves a life, just in the course of doing her job, and the outcome of the plot hinges on that one small, diligent act). But there’s a larger theme, that we see the biggest hint of in Book 3, which is how that ordinary courage is, in fact, extraordinary.

So, I don’t think that could be it, either.

When I think about other series featuring young protagonists, there tends to be a formula. In Harry Potter, each book is a year of school, and at the end of the year, Harry has to defeat Voldemort in some form. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, Count Olaf appears in some disguise to try to cheat the orphans out of their fortune. Perhaps the “direction” of Book 3 was unexpected because, for the Combined Service, I have no formula. The Ninth Arm were the antagonists in Book 1. The avians were the antagonists in Book 2, but they were a different sort of antagonists than in Book 1. In Book 3, there are gu’ul antagonists (two different groups of them), but there is also the ghost ship, which is an antagonist of an entirely different sort.

If I were to choose a series that has influenced how I handle plot and antagonists in the Combined Service series, I would say it’s probably Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books. Those books have different protagonists, depending on the book (some feature Miles, some feature his mother Cordelia, one features his cousin Ivan, and there are a few others), and different plots, objectives and settings in each book. I conceive of the Combined Service as similar. Although the ship and the characters will be continuing, I don’t intend for the plots to follow any particular formula, and I may even follow other characters now and then.

I don’t know if doing it that way counts as “unexpected.” But none of the reviews that said this treated it as a negative, so while I am curious, I do not intend to let it worry me. I’ll just keep writing. Right now, I am working on a short story, and on Book 4, and on odds and ends like this newsletter.

Until next time,