The Midwest Book Review's October issue includes a review of Sparrow Alone on the Housetop by mother and daughter writing team: Jean James and Mary James.
Sparrow Alone on the Housetop
Jean James and Mary James
4RV Publishing LLC
PO Box 6482, Edmond, OK 73083
9780982659489, $19.95
"She ran toward the cavorting plane, positive something terrible would happen in the next few seconds, but it still took her totally by surprise when it did. She plunged into the large hole of Ruben's stump. Her foot went down deep beside the taproot, and her chin hit hard on the ground. A ton of loose dirt slid into the hole along with her, filling her shirt and shorts and even her mouth. When she tried to climb out, her left foot wedged under the root, and she couldn't make any progress except to bring more dirt into the hole. She wiped the dirt from her eyes in time to ascertain the plane had landed safely after all, and she was the only casualty.
"A-Are you okay?" the pilot shouted and ran toward her. She suffered the most humiliating moment of her life when he stepped halfway into the hole to render aid.
"I'm fine. I can get out.""
So goes the ignominious introduction of Anne Sumner to Jim Orr. Their relationship will take them back and forth between the United States and Mexico on a mission to solve the mystery of strange illnesses in the small towns where Anne has been working as a missionary. Jim is a pilot for her father's company. He transports the payroll for the large company and does some crop dusting for them.
Several of the villagers who work in the fields start becoming ill with a mysterious flu-like disease. When Anne is struck down by this same disease and is rushed to a hospital in Houston, the questions begin. Why won't the doctor give her any information about what might be wrong with her? Why did her father put her to work in her old job in public relations? Why did only she and a couple of others get sick in their little village, but many in a neighboring village were struck down? The answers to these and other questions lead her to the horrible truth. She begins to unravel the mystery through talking with many of the villagers who had become ill and by getting a second opinion about her own illness. What she uncovers is the inner machinations of her father and her sister to cover up the true reason for the mysterious illness, as well as other questionable events. She does not know who she can trust - her new friend, Jim, her cold sister, Angeline, her brother Fred - but she certainly cannot trust her father.
Anne's faith is tested, even as Jim's grows. With his help, she begins to regain her conviction and trust in the right people. Together they untangle the web of deceit that has overtaken the whole Sumner Company and the small towns in Mexico.
This book, written by the mother and daughter team of Jean James and Mary James, tells an exciting story about death, intrigue and romance that the reader will enjoy. The very interesting final confrontation between Anne and her father leaves the reader wondering.
Jean James was active in many outdoor pursuits before becoming a full-time writer. She collected live mammals and reptiles for international distribution, collected live venomous snakes for antivenom production, and worked on sundry wilderness construction projects. She's married to WW2 veteran, William James, and they have six children.
Mary James has spent half her life writing and the other half making music. From age five she has written songs and performed as a touring singer/musician. Today, she spends most of her time on the road but is always anxious to come home to her photographer husband and troublemaking horse.
Katherine Boyer
Reviewer
Sparrow Alone on the Housetop is found on 4RV Bookstore, and all books are on sale.
Mother and daughter authors Jean and Mary James took their new release Sparrow Alone on the Housetop, copies of Mary's music projects, and copies of other 4RV books on the road.
The first book festival they manned (uh, womanned?) a booth was the Baltimore festival. There they met -- gallons of rain, rain, and more rain. Note the river flowing through the tent in the photo below:
Booth without showing river
Then the James duo packed up books and headed for Nashville and the Southern Festival of Books.
One display with other books out of view
Next, Jean and Mary will be packing books and heading for the Miami International Book Fair. Now these writers have gone above and beyond the call of duty. If you visit the website, vendors and exhibitors, 4RV Publishing is listed under the General category.
We hope you sell many books, James Writers, at this last of the trio of festivals. Thank you for your hard work and efforts.
Sparrow Alone of the Housetop by Jean James and Mary James will be released in two weeks. As I do when we don't have a contributor, I'm sharing a review of the book to spark interest and to promote 4RV books and authors.
Review of Sparrow Alone on the Housetop
(James, Jean and James, Mary, 2011 4RVPublishing)
by Denise Hall Dickinson,
founder of hiswitnesses.com, Missions Promotion and Support Network
Jean James and Mary James have written an incredibly compelling tale of wealthy corporate American power and corruption amid the backdrop of a single Christian woman’s efforts to make a difference in the lives of the poverty stricken residents of two small villages in the Mexican highlands. Her successful mission is abruptly interrupted by a sudden chain of events and she finds herself back in her former life, unwillingly and yet just in the right place and time to still make a difference to her friends in the villages, now suffering, possibly at the hands of her father’s corporation.
Sparrow’s main character, Anne, full of spunk and tenacity, searches for the truth while vowing to maintain her Christian integrity. Complicating that search is her new friend, Jim Orr, a pilot who works for her father’s corporation, which makes Anne unsure of his trustworthiness. Anyone with a respect for mission work or ministry will appreciate the selfless attitudes and actions woven into the storyline. Scripture and suspense meet in the pages of this unique story of faith and family- for better or worse.
Denise Hall Dickinson, August 23, 2011
The novel may be pre-ordered on the 4RV Bookstore, and it will be available through any bookstore as well as online sites after September 15.
Late last night we completed the live-action trailer for 4RV novel, Sparrow Alone on the Housetop (coming out next month). Earlier, we taped about forty scenes we could possibly use for it. That was the fun part. This week we had to sort through what we’d taped, transfer it to our software, and start the arduous task of editing.
This final stage of the production took approximately 50 hours. That’s much longer than usual for this type project, but this was a more complex book that others we’ve worked with.
A special note:
Live-action video trailers follow more closely the guidelines of a movie trailer than a conventional book trailer. Standard movie trailers generally last around two minutes and twenty seconds. They use about one hundred words per minute, either as dialog, or as a combination of printed words and dialog. We stayed as close as possible to those times and word counts.
There is no more important work in this world, no greater duty, than to help others to keep up their courage. He is our best friend whose words of cheerful confidence give more life to the heart; and he is our enemy who, by his words of doubt and his spirit of fear, saps this ardour, and take from us our courage.
Anon
(Nineteenth century writer)
The wonderful, terrible power of words:
There is no work on earth as challenging as creating something. It generally involves risk taking, thinking out of the box, and, at times, stepping out of the box. The more daring our venture, the greater our chance of setbacks and discouragements. But what if everyone gave in to doubt and fear? What if everyone did everything alike? What a dull world this would be.
How many times have we heard, “It’s too late for anything now,” or “It’s never going to happen,” or “Just resign yourself, it wasn’t meant to be”? How can anyone succeed when they're loaded down with doubt? It's like when a computer picks up a virus and gets slower and slower as it's bogged down with spam.Too much discouragement from others can be death to our faith and our will to accomplish, just as our own dismal words might kill someone’s bright dreams. We might be surprised what effect our words have on others.
Give the gift of words, spoken from the heart:
As we go out to conferences, book fairs, and other public events this last half of 2011, we want to remember we’re not just there to receive, we’re there to give. The more we give, the more we will come home with when it’s all over.
Below is a partial list of literary events coming up in the next few months. Try to attend a few. They can be a wonderful help and a great opportunity to give and receive encouragement.
Weintended to post the live-action book trailer of our new novel, Sparrow Alone on the Housetop, in this blog, but we’re hopelessly behind schedule. We have taped most of the scenes, but the editing is still before us, and we’re working on four other projects due to come out in the same month. Now I know how it feels to stand under a giant tsunami! Guess we should run a little faster. The trailer will be out shortly, along with more info on how to handle the final stages of that type video production.
By the way, we could use a couple more reviewers or influencers for the novel. If anyone is interested in this, please email us at: jameswriters@yahoo.com
It was time for Mary (my co-writer/daughter) and I to make the final edits on our book, SPARROW ALONE ON THE ‘HOUSETOP, prior to the printing of the ARCs. It was also time for those awful storms to blow down two large trees at my home while I was in town with my husband. The trees destroyed a sizeable section of pasture fence, so when we got home, two horses ran free: my son’s horse, Rogue, and Mary’s horse, Apache. Naturally both Mary and Frank were out of town.
Now we live on this little rise above Highway 45, which is similar to an Interstate. It maintains a constant flow of tractor trailers and other anti-horse type vehicles. I immediately pictured crushed horse flesh and million dollar lawsuits, so when I actually started out after the horses, I prayed and trembled with equal vigor.
My dear husband, who is 91 and has failing eyesight, had to wait in the car since I couldn’t spare time to help him into the house. Rogue wasn’t difficult to lure home. I called him and beat the grain cans, loudly. That was enough – he loves his grain.
When I had him secured in a small, unbroken area of corral, I went after Apache. Now Apache is a different matter. He loves to pretend he’s wild, and if he gets free, those proclivities intensify. No grain would lure him in when he’s having so much fun. I ran for a bag of marshmallows while he ran all over creation, bucking, kicking out his hind legs, and whinnying something that sounded like, “I’m free, I’m freeeeee!’
Meanwhile, Rogue became horrifically excited watching his buddy run loose. When Rogue works himself into that state, he can break out of almost any confinement. He goes sort of crazy and either uses his weight against whatever’s in his way or else he pretends he’s Superman and tries to leap over tall objects much too high for him.
My forgotten husband got tired of waiting for me and was making his way slowly up the front steps. I decided he wouldn’t sue me if he tripped, so I went after Apache with the marshmallows. At that point I was shaking so much I was dropping marshmallows all over the ground. That helped. Apache immediately identified them and after tasting a couple of samples, he followed the marshmallow bag into the corral with Rogue.
My husband had made it to the front door so I breathed a sigh of relief, sat down on the steps, and ate the rest of the marshmallows. While I ate I contemplated the editing that awaited me. Then I contemplated the broken fence, which would have to be repaired or history would repeat itself. The fence won my mental battle and I spent the next couple days with hammer, saw, and posthole digger. Come Saturday evening I had the horses secure and had 94,000 words that needed to be edited before Monday.
Sunday, Mother’s Day, I got up at 2 in the morning and started editing. I worked nonstop (except for a couple half hour breaks to fix meals) until 3:30 Monday morning. At least now I know I can edit 94,000 words in twenty five and a half hours. Of course I had a complete book’s worth of edits Mary had already marked, so I had to do those first before I started at page one and made my own edits.
Is there a moral to this long story?
Yes, there’s an important moral, (beyond the fact you need to keep a bottle of eye water nearby if you intend to edit 25 hours straight). The above story tells us how important food is to our prospective client, reader, or audience. I caught the horses by offering food. One horse was lured by substantial fair, the other caught by sweetness, and we need to be sure we offer a little of both in anything we do, but that still isn’t the moral.
Those horses were stopped by offering them food, but the reason they followed me into the corral was because they thought they would get more of the same. So whether we are writing a manuscript, drawing a picture, making a book trailer, or promoting any type business, we need to offer something that will actually catch our prospective client. That’s why the old TV shows would end an episode with the heroine tied to a railroad track and a train coming.
We don’t just want someone to tell us how great our production is and then walk away. We want them tobuy the object, so they can learn what happens next. We want them hungry to know whether the “sun shall rise” and “the lark shall sing.”
Today’s application:
Though this moral applies to almost every kind of business, today we’re applying it to our live action book trailer. No book trailer is very beneficial if it doesn’t tempt someone to purchase the book. So before we start on the very first step of video production, we should be sure we have at least one scene aimed at intriguing someone to buy. We probably don’t have a railroad track scene, but surely we have something useable in our book. If we tell a tiny piece of that story, and tell it well, we’ll tempt someone to hear the rest.
LIVE PROMO VIDEO? LIVE BOOK TRAILER?
In last month’s blog we mentioned the benefits of making a live action video for business promotion or for a book trailer. Below are some special notes before you begin.
Use your imagination!
It doesn’t take a lot of money to make an interesting scene. For an illustration of how imagination can save you money, below we give a YouTube link to a music video we made: Mean Mary’s Funny Horse. Music videos are made exactly the same as promo videos or live action book trailers. The only difference is that the audio is slightly more complicated on a music video because you have to line everything up perfectly with your recording. You have much more leeway on a regular video with just background music or talk.
Regarding this video:
The horse (Apache) is the one mentioned in the story above. The scene where Apache steals the drink actually happened as shown. Apache loves to steal people drinks and then rush to drink them before they can take them back. The guy who destroyed the tent stage and the purple gown is Frank James (my son, Mary’s brother, and one of the other James writers).
In the Video’s opening scene you’ll see an example of imagination replacingmoney.
We needed: a generator that sounded like it was on its last legs.
We had: an old broken generator that wouldn’t start, a cheap fogger that musicians sometimes use
on stage, and a lawnmower that barely ran. With those three items we created what we needed. For
the audio, I pulled the choke in and out on the lawnmower to get the dying generator sound. For
smoke we hid the little fogger behind the broken generator.
Check list before video production:
1) Camera: Any type recording device will work, even the one in your cell phone. Of course, a better quality camera will make a clearer picture.
2) Scenes: You can’t have too many, because many won’t work at all and some won’t come out like you imagine them. We usually start with about 20-30 possible scenes.
3) Locations: For each scene, pick where you plan to shoot it. Remember to plan for the right time of day. Sunrise and sunset are best. You want to avoid hot spots and shadows (unless for effect).
4) Other people: Plan whether you need other people for any scene and make sure of their availability. If you use someone you’re not closely related to, have them sign a simple release.
5) Props: Collect your props for each scene. You can’t have too many. Just like scenes, some props won’t work like you planned. Small props don’t show up well on camera.
6) Costumes: Plan extra of these too. One may get ruined or may not look good on camera. Stay away from busy prints. They don’t tape well. It’s usually better to avoid red (which bleeds on screen).
7) Software: There are many cheap brands of video editing software. Most are easy to use. You may already have one on your computer. We use Pinnacle Studio (it costs around $100).
8) Music: If you’re not a musician and can’t make your own music, check out your editing software. Some of them offer free audio samples (Pinnacle has free samples you can use). If you have a friend who’s a musician, often they’ll be glad to give you free background music in return for recognition.
We hope to have a live action video trailer for our new novel ready by June’s newsletter (June 20th). We’ll present more video production information then.
