I’m pleased that people are taking me up on the offer. Last night as I watched a movie, I packaged up the pieces of upcoming Christmas packages, and they’ll go out in the mail soon.

You can still participate. Read about the offer here.

Christmas is coming.

Pick up any of my five books to give as Christmas gifts, and I’ll mail you the following as a no-charge bonus: 

• signed bookplates to put inside the covers, with a personalized message for the person receiving it
• Auralia Thread postcards
• Auralia Thread bookmarks

Just email me at joverstreet@gmail.com with the details. (Young readers seem to enjoy getting personal notes from authors.)

Here’s how this deal works…

Take a photo of yourself buying a volume from THE AURALIA THREAD at a local bookstore… like Barnes & Noble, or even better, an independent bookstore.

Post that picture on Facebook or your blog, and then send me a copy of the photo.

I will send you another book in the series… whichever title you choose.

This offer is only good for the first three people who deliver their photographs to me at joverstreet@gmail.com.

No, purchases from online bookstores don’t count. Go give your local bookstore some business! Make sure you take the picture *in* the bookstore! (No, copies you already purchased don’t count. No cheating! I’m going to trust you on this.)

Consider this a gesture of love for bookstores. Join me in showing your support.

Remember bookstores?

Can you find one in your neighborhood?

On your mark, get set…

How about Live at the Hollywood Bowl?

My friend Chuck writes to say,

I had the privilege of playing with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl tonight and I had The Ale Boy’s Feast with me. Here are some pictures from on stage. Sorry for my phone’s photo quality… I think you’ll still get the idea.

Wow. It’s the next best thing to being there!

That’s only one of this two big surprises. Here’s the other one…

My uncle called on Saturday night. He and my aunt were camping near Bend, Oregon. While sitting at his campsite, he overheard voice from the next campsite. He heard a man talking about what he was reading. And he mentioned that the author “really likes Tolkien.” Then he mentioned a book called Through a Screen Darkly.

My uncle, who has always been very encouraging to me in my writing, got up, walked over to the next campsite, and introduced himself. And he said, “That writer you’re talking about… he’s my nephew.”

Then he called me, and put his new friend Mark on the phone. So I ended up joining this conversation about my books at a campfire far, far away.

Mark had just started reading Auralia’s Colors. Now I’m going to send him a copy of Cyndere’s Midnight.

If you take any of the Auralia Thread books with you anywhere this week, send me a photograph for the collection that I call Auralia’s Colors Around the World, which I keep on my Facebook page.

My thanks to my friend Mary McCleary, who alerted me to a new review…

… by Lars Walker, a novelist himself has just written up a piece about Auralia’s Colors for Touchstone. Check it out here.

Many thanks, Mr. Walker. I am grateful. I worked on these stories every evening and weekend for about five years, so it is extremely encouraging when somebody picks up a copy and enjoys it.

As a matter of fact, I may have to go write another chapter in my brand new story right now. Maybe I’m getting a little carried away.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Want to respond? Visit Jeffrey on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life played at Cannes this week, and there are suddenly dozens and dozens of reviews all over the Internet. The differences in viewers’ reactions are striking, sometimes even confounding. And many of their responses read more like reactions than reviews.

But some reviewers have taken the time to think deeply about the film, about what it might mean, about the risky decisions that the director made in juxtaposing scenes about the origins of the cosmos and scenes about a family in Smithville, Texas in the early 1950s.

I wonder if Malick pays any attention to reviews. I doubt that he does. He seems to be focused on the work.

Me? I do read reviews of my work, partly because I love those moments when readers discover ideas in the stories that didn’t occur to me as I was writing. I also learn from those reviews… sometimes…

This week, just as there is an explosion of reviews for The Tree of Life, so there is an explosion of new reviews for The Ale Boy’s Feast, the last book in my fantasy series called The Auralia Thread. That’s because the Waterbrook Multnomah Publishing Group hosted a “blog tour.”

For a novelist like me, a blog tour can be like a week-long party. The publisher sends free copies of my latest book to a long list of bloggers, on the condition that they will then blog about their experience of it. When they do, a whole crop of colorful opinions bursts into view.

If the readers take the time to read the whole thing and turn in thoughtful criticism, the experience is not only enjoyable but immensely rewarding. If they just read the book and say, “I liked it!” or “I didn’t!”, well, it’s a little disappointing.

But this tour has been full of encouragement for me, as even those readers who read the fourth book of the series first seem to have enjoyed the experience in spite of some inevitable confusion.

So, if you’re curious about the CSFF Blog Tour, peruse the various articles on these sites. Sometimes, the bloggers have written two or three times about different aspects of the book.

I also invited those bloggers to send me questions about the book, and when they did, I sent them answers by video. So watch for those blog entries, where the readers have posted my video responses.

Many thanks to all of the readers who gave thoughtful attention to The Ale Boy’s Feast!

And if I missed anybody’s links here, please email me at joverstreet@gmail.com.

√ Gillian Adams
Red Bissell
√ Grace Bridges
√ Beckie Burnham
√ Morgan L. Busse
√ Melissa Carswell
√ Valerie Comer
√ Karrie Compton
CSFF Blog Tour
√ √ √ Shane Deal
√ √ √ Chris Deane
√ Cynthia Dyer
√ Andrea Graham
Katie Hart
√ Ryan Heart
√ Bruce Hennigan
√ Jason Joyner
√ Carol Keen
Dawn King
Inae Kyo
√ √ Shannon McDermott
√ Shannon McNear
√ √ Eve Nielsen
√ √ √ John W. Otte
√ √ √ Sarah Sawyer
√ Kathleen Smith
√ Donna Swanson
√ √ √ Rachel Starr Thomson
√ √ √ Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
√ √ Fred Warren
√ Phyllis Wheeler

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Want to respond? Visit Jeffrey on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Many bookstores around the country have been supportive of my four-book series The Auralia Thread.

But Barnes and Noble has been especially helpful…

…shelving the books in the Fantasy section where they belong, from the beginning.

Moreover, one Barnes and Noble here in Seattle has actually given the series its own end-cap display. If you can find it, you’ll find all of these copies are signed, waiting to be discovered by new readers.

A signed copy of The Ale Boy’s Feast, Auralia bookmarks, a map of the Expanse signed by artist Rachel Beatty, posters for True Grit and The Adjustment Bureau, and two issues of Response magazine.

Want to have your name in the drawing?

To be eligible for the drawing, you must be a follower of The Auralia Thread’s Facebook page (choose “LIKE” there).

On the Wall of that page, post a comment naming your favorite character in The Auralia Thread, and give a short explanation. Respond by 9AM (PST) Thursday, and your name will be thrown into the hat for a drawing.

Caution: No spoilers allowed!

My opinion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or No Country for Old Men or Never Let Me Go will be different from yours, even if we both give them a thumbs’ up or a thumbs’ down.

As a reviewer, I know that there is a huge difference between a review — a thoughtful examination of plot, style, character development, point of view, etc. — and a reaction. (A reaction is something along the lines of “I liked it” or “It sucked” or “It inspired me” or “It made me feel sick”.) After all, a review requires that we attend to much more than the immediate emotional response that we experience when we look at someone’s work.

As a storyteller, I am thus prepared to encounter many different responses from readers of my own novels. I have no doubt that what delights some will disgust others.

It’s not my job as a writer to worry about what you like or what you don’t like. It’s my job to bring my subject to life and engage it in the best way I know how.

The Ale Boy’s Feast has arrived in stores, and I’ve already seen many different opinions. Other writers have told me that it’s bad manners for a writer to respond when readers have negative reactions. I don’t intend to respond to negative reactions. I fully anticipated that I’d experience those. The Ale Boy’s Feast wasn’t written to make people happy; it was written as an invitation to a difficult, but hopefully rewarding, journey.

But I do feel that I need to address a different kind of dichotomy in some of the reviews and reactions that I’ve seen on various blogs.

I’m not talking about the difference between “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.”

Here’s what I mean: Some reviewers are taking the time to share thoughtful opinions, positive or negative, about this fantasy novel. Others are just raving (positive) or ranting (negative) without much evidence that they’ve thought about what they encountered. In fact, it seems that some of them didn’t even understand what kind of book they’d been served.

It’s like this: Imagine I’m a cook and I offer a full chicken dinner to some food critics to consider. Some of those critics discuss the chicken dinner — its strengths and its weaknesses, its ratio of meat and potatoes, the quality of its ingredients. Some will be pleased, some won’t. That’s as it should be.

But some of them… let’s call them the Pastry Chefs… jump to conclusions and judge the meal as if it’s just a kind of pastry. They don’t take time to investigate what it is that they’ve been served. To them, everything is a pastry, and thus they only apply pastry standards to what they’ve been served.

Wouldn’t it seem strange to you if I served a chicken dinner and the diners responded, “As donuts go, this is very unsatisfying,” or “This is a first-rate donut!”

I welcome all kinds of opinions on my book as long as they examine it with the standards suitable for examining Epic Fantasy. But if a reader responds by judging the book as a Sunday School Lesson, a Religious Allegory, a Children’s Book, or a Formulaic “Happy Ever After” fairy tale… well, that reader should have read the label before he responded.

So, if you’re bothering to read the reviews of The Ale Boy’s Feast or any of the other books in The Auralia Thread series, here are a seven points to help you understand what the Food Critics have been served. Then you can decide if they’re giving it the right kind of attention, or if they’re judging a chicken dinner by how it fulfills the purposes of a donut.

•••••••••••

1. The Ale Boy’s Feast is a novel of epic fantasy. Thus, we’re in the realm of make-believe and fairy tales, where magic is meant to suggest mysterious aspects of our own real world, but not to represent our own world literally.

2. The Ale Boy’s Feast is the fourth book in a series.

It is not a standalone novel. It is, in a manner of speaking, the last few scenes of a very long play.

This will be clear to any reviewers who read the introduction, who read the press materials that came with it, or who read the back cover carefully. To read this book first would be like reading the second half of The Return of the King before reading The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, or The Two Towers.

Note how many reviewers complained about being confused by the book. Almost all of those readers admit that they read the end of the series first. Perhaps if they had read the series in order, they would not have suffered.

3. It’s an epic fantasy, but not an allegory.

It is far too elaborate, and explores many different themes and questions. Its characters are meant to be just that—characters—and not symbols or representatives of specific people or institutions in this world. This isn’t Pilgrim’s Progress. Nor is it The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe with an obvious Jesus figure. It may address some of the same themes, or occasionally remind you of passages from those books, but it is a meal of a very different nature.

4. It isn’t “Christian Fiction.”

Not every book that is written by a Democrat is “Left-Wing Fiction.” Not every book that is written by a scientist is a science book. A comedian might write a book that isn’t a comedy. A pastor might write a detective thriller in which religion is never discussed. And actors like, say,  Mark Wahlberg, may profess Christian faith, but that doesn’t mean that their characters or movies are Christian movies.

Like Mark Wahlberg, or Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” or J.R.R. Tolkien, or Johnny Cash… I am a Christian. But if you heard me tell a joke, it probably wasn’t a Christian joke. If you watched me cook up some gumbo, I doubt it was Christian gumbo. And when I write a fairy tale, it isn’t “Christian fiction” unless I am crafting a story with the specific intention of trying to persuade you on points about Christian faith. And I had no intention of doing that with The Auralia Thread.

I was, I admit, thinking very much about Art as I wrote these books. I couldn’t help it. Many of the characters in my stories are artists, and many of them have their lives changed by art. Should these books be shelved in a section called “Artist’s Fiction”? I doubt it. I’ve never seen that section in a bookstore.

And why should I? Good stories explore all kinds of themes.

Those who decide that my books are “Christian fiction” are going to expect a certain kind of thing, and they won’t get it. They’re going to be reading it through the wrong kind of lens. And they’ll probably end up frustrated.

But that’s because they were trying to drink a milkshake through a straw, when they weren’t holding a milkshake at all. It was a cake.

So if you come across reviews of this kind, positive or negative, please keep this in mind.

5. Some writers make it a top priority to entertain the reader; others write for other purposes.

Entertainers seek to give readers what readers expect, and to be sure that they are happy. Others, like me, write stories because they have certain questions on their mind, and they want to see where the questions lead them. This series led me on a journey in pursuit of some difficult questions. I came to understand some of them better. Others questions are still haunting me here, at the end of the series.

Thus, I am not surprised when readers realize that they still have some questions at the end of the series. That’s because there are big questions hanging in the air at the end, which I hope will lead readers back to the beginning of the story to think about them further. This is a series about characters who are trying to solve tremendous mysteries. They solve some of the mysteries, and are wiser for it. Other mysteries teach them humility, and they learn to live with the questions.

Readers who want the book to hand over all the answers are going to be frustrated. Many answers are provided. Others are there along the way for those who read more than one, and those who read very closely. Others… well, maybe you’ll find them, but I did not–the story became a way of asking the question. I hope that the journey is worthwhile for you anyway.

And if you are offended by a conclusion that is more complicated that Good Guys Defeating Bad Guys or “They lived happily ever after…”, you will be offended by this book.

6. This is a story about imperfect people.

Some of them kill. Some of them are killed, either by the wickedness of others, or by their own mistakes. Some of them are reckless in their relationships. Some of them are too fearful to take any risks at all. Some are poisoned, and some are poisoners.

If it troubles you to read about people who do terrible things, you may not want to read this book. If a reviewer is upset with me because I’ve written a book in which people behave badly, then the reviewer is interested in very different books than I am.

Me, I love literature from The Bible to Shakespeare, from Lord of the Flies to The Road, from The Lord of the Rings to The Tale of Despereaux. Characters do terrible things in all of those books. I learned things from all of them about storytelling.

And to the reviewer who was troubled when one or two of my characters appear in a state of undress, well… I am sorry to have offended you, but the characters in my world do not always wear clothes.

7. These are not children’s books.

Many children have read them, and many have enjoyed them. But the books were written for adults, and thus, while there is nothing explicit or gratuitous or pornographic in these stories, the characters do behave like imperfect adults, and there are political, spiritual, and sexual implications to many of their deeds. I make no apology for this.

Parents, you might want to read these stories before your children do to decide if they are age-appropriate. I’d say that, in general, these books are appropriate for ages 14 and up, but I have received some wonderful letters from 10-year-olds who showed remarkable discernment in their reading of these stories.

•••••••••••

Having said that, I am grateful for those who take the time to express their thoughts on these books. But I do hope that The Ale Boy’s Feast will be seen for what it is: The last installment in a long and complicated story, an epic fantasy (not an allegory), and a saga about individuals and societies who are changed forever by the transforming power of art, which leads them from one kind of understanding to another.

You don’t have to like it. But please, before you respond, take the time to recognize what it is. Pixar’s movie Up is not a “Christian movie”—it is a story for the whole world, even though its primary director/storyteller is a Christian.

In the same way, I meant for the books in The Auralia Thread to be for the whole world. And I do hope that you enjoy them.

Here are the details…

THE PRIZES:
The Waterbrook Multnomah Publishing Group is giving away five Auralia Thread gift baskets – five! – that include the following:

• autographed copies of the entire four-book series: Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, Raven’s Ladder, and The Ale Boy’s Feast
• a print of a map of The Expanse, signed by the artist, Rachel Beatty, and suitable for framing
• a cherry-wood teleidoscope, crafted by The Wood Merchant (La Conner, Washington – one of the small towns in which Jeffrey Overstreet wrote The Auralia Thread)

HOW TO ENTER THE CONTEST:
Easy Steps:

1. LIKE. If you haven’t already, choose “LIKE” at facebook.com/TheAuraliaThread
2. RECOMMEND. On your own Facebook page, post a status update encouraging your friends to “LIKE” facebook.com/TheAuraliaThread
3. SHARE A STORY.* Auralia is a young woman of imagination and creativity. Her revelations inspire some people, bewilder others, and turn the world upside down. In 50-200 words, tell us about an “Auralia” from your own life: a person with a great imagination. It might be a friend, a stranger, a famous artist, or an unknown. Describe what they’ve given the world. Describe how it changed your world. POST THIS at facebook.com/TheAuraliaThread as a comment on one of the updates marked “GIFT-BASKET GIVEAWAY.” Or send it via email to joverstreet@gmail.com.

DEADLINE: Monday, April 18, 2011, at Noon (Pacific Standard Time).

*Please note: We reserve the right to share any of these entries on websites related to The Auralia Thread.

WINNERS: Jeffrey Overstreet will choose the most thoughtful and interesting entries, and five winners will be drawn at random from those selections.