Welcome My Ukrainian Visitors

I don't often check the stats to see where people are coming from because I imagine most are now coming to see the image of the Neapolitan ice cream but apparently some have been showing up from my distant homeland.  Yes, the Morgenroths lived near Lvov.

The history of Ukraine is fascinating and unfortunately quite difficult to find written about in English but I did get one very good book on it and one book by James Bailey on Russian folktales.  What do Russian folktales have to do with Ukraine?  1000 years ago Ukraine was the leading force in the region and most of the so-called Russian tales were based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, which may I add had paved streets before Paris.

If you read my book Flash, you know that Alex is in Ukraine shooting a movie called Paper Wings.  This is a tale about a warrior, a bogatyr, by the name of Alyosha Popovich who meets the monster, Tugarin, at a dinner held at Prince Vladimir's castle.  As monsters go, Tugarin is right up there and winds up throwing a knife at Alyosha so a fight is called for.  They go out into a field and Tugarin flies into the sky on his paper wings.  It all ended well for Alyosha and for Tugarin, not so much.

What, if anything does all this have to do with writing?  I research quite a lot before and during every project.  It adds color and texture and details.  Characters have lives, they have a past.  They have a present that may be happening off the page.  You can bring these elements into your work in order to have a more fully developed story.

Or not.  Does this kind of thinking impact sales of vampire books or slasher stories?  No.  Useless, actually.  Maybe there are several different sorts of books which address themselves to different results.  You have the entertainment books which are really read for plot.  It's like an action/adventure movie.  You just want to read it and get caught up in the action (could be a chicklit) and then have it all resolved in the appropriate way and then it's over.  Well done!  Or maybe there's the sort of book that's savored and enjoyed because the characters are people with lives and some kind of reality and it's not so much about where they get but how they get there.

As ereading expands and transforms people will come aboard with all sorts of expectations from their reading material and they'll be able to find it.