Roland D Yeomans Blog Tour and Giveaways!

Today I am honoured to host an interview with Roland D Yeomans, who hails from Lafayette, New Orleans way. The fabulous Roland is doing a blog tour to promote his new e-book, The Bear With Two Shadows,  a Native American Lord of the Rings tale.

First I wanted to know, why self-published?

All of us are writers and so we are drawn to topics that might help us grow as writers, becoming published.  Yes, I am self-published, but that is a lot like kissing your image in the mirror -- it doesn't mean very much.

     Unless you are noticed by an agent when she downloads your first or three sample chapters from Amazon.

     I wrote THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS with that thought in mind.  We as authors have to deal with weary-eyed agents.  And if you are self-published by Kindle, you have to impress readers sampling for free your first chapter.

     The ugly truth is most agents and prospective buying readers are only reading the first paragraph or, at most, the first page.  Those words must be magic to sway the agent to ask to see for more or to persuade a total stranger to part with $4 to read your work.

     Most writers are doing the exact same thing wrong : they fail to connect with the reader on a gut, primal level.

     Look at your first sentence dispassionately.  Does it sing?  Does it grab a reader by the lapel?

     My first sentence in THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS :

The face of shadows looked down upon the standing bear from a bright full moon. 

     Can you hear the magic in your mind?  If not, I have failed in my task as a writer who would be bought.

     You have at the most 30 seconds to win over the agent or new reader.  That usually means the first paragraph.  What was mine?

    

     The face of shadows looked down upon the standing bear from a bright full moon.  Hers was a face that few had seen and fewer still had lived to describe.  Her features were terrible and beautiful beyond any singing of them.  There was a haunted melancholy to them.  Like a windmill, her memory was slowly turning through the fleeting lives that had been born upon her shores to walk soft across her green fields like prayers only to fade away into the blood-rimmed edge of the sunset. 

 

     Does that paragraph make you want to read more?  Look at your novel.  Would your first paragraph make a total stranger, agent of would-be reader, want to read more?  Oh, but it gets better in the second chapter.  What good is that if the person reading puts aside your manuscript after reading the first paragraph?

 

     And eBook publishing is growing.  People with an iPad or a Kindle soon learn to like it better than paper.  No bookmarks needed.  No nightlights to fiddle with.  And the convenience of having access to hundreds of your books in a devise the size of one of your paperbacks is enormously freeing.

 

     The internet and Twitter is all a'flutter with Amanda Hocking, a millionaire from her Kindle-only books.  Money has a way of grabbing the attention of agents, calculating what 15% of all that money would mean to them.

 

     And Kindle only self-publishers have little or no overhead.  Not bad, right?  The giant authors will stay with print.  But the beginners and the mid-liners in authordom may well see that their path belongs to eBooks.

Then, I asked him how he chose the title, so he replied:

Being that THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS is an odd title for a book on merging all the worlds myths into one mosaic, I thought it would be enlightening to explain the title and its connection with the Australian concept, The Dreaming, in which Hibbs finds himself throughout the novel. 

     Why two shadows?  Why is The Dreaming, an Australian Aboriginal construct so important to first, the title itself, and to a fable whose hero is a Lakota legend?

     The myths of the Australian aborigines tell of the lives of the great ancestors of humankind in the creation time, The Dreaming.  This time is not seen as the remote past  ...

          ... but as the actual present.

     The Warlpiri people of central Australia call the Dreaming, the Jukurrpa.  What has this to do with Hibbs, the exiled Lakota bear in ancient Ireland?

     Jukurrpa myths are closely tied to the ancestral land in which they live.  These tales, describing their wanderings across The Dreaming, create a map of this realm.

     In like manner, the adventures of Hibbs create a map of the world's myths that slowly merge to make a whole.  Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Warlpiri lived entirely in The Dreaming.  Afterwards, they have to maintain a careful balance of two opposing world views.

     In THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS, the reverse is true.  Without the Europeans and their influence, the world and the living creatures of myth have become out of balance.  It is up to Hibbs, a creature of two natures, two shadows, to restore the balance and bring back the Europeans from oblivion.

Myth in its living, primitive form is not merely a story told but a reality lived.

Myths told the Lakota about life, his purpose in it, and his path through it.  It is not that the Lakota does not care about physical comfort or material possessions, it is that we do not measure ourselves or others by these things. We believe we are measured by how well , or how little, we manifest the qualities of our mythic heroes in our own lives.

And so as Hibbs wanders up and down the world and back into the distant past, he holds up to the reader what the myths of different lands say those people felt to be important.  And in doing so, Hibbs asks us to determine what is important to us and to make our own personal mythic journey one worth taking.

Friends, Roland is offering some AMAZING signed editions to all of you! So don't forget to leave your email in the comments section. JUST LOOK AT THESE BOOKS! DID YOU GET THAT THEY'RE SIGNED!! BY THE AUTHORS!!

A comment offers one entry per host. Another two entries for linking the book to twitter or Facebook. Make sure to email Roland @ rxena77@yahoo.com And any blogger who posts a legitimate review on Amazon by March 31st will get three entries into the drawing. Believe me you don't want to miss out on any of these amazing signed books. Drawing will be on April 1st.

Thank you Roland for giving us an insight on self-publishing and at your reason behind the title of your book! If you'd like to read the whole of Rolands journey you could go here and here! He also stopped and gave more insights and at L'Aussie's you can find out the whole schedule!

Now look at these books, which could be yours!