DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

In the last post, I noted that a first mention of Drop Edge of Yonder had appeared in Woodstock’s Blog. Interestingly, a reader of that blog asked Woodstock about my books, and she very obligingly posted full reviews of Buzzard and Hornswoggled and an early sketch of Drop Edge, all of which appeared or will appear in CrimeSpree magazine. They’re very nice. If you’d like to see them, Dear Reader, the web address is www.journalscape.com/woodstock/2007-05-23.

I grow to like Woodstock very much.

While I was at it, I did a Google search of Drop Edge of Yonder just out of curiosity, and much to my amazement, I came up with 90 hits. Unfortunately, only a couple of them had anything to do with my book. I was surprised to find that the phrase “drop edge of yonder” is apparently still in much wider use than I knew. In fact, I nearly dropped my teeth to see that there is another book with exactly the same title coming out in 2008. Lest you wonder if that’s kosher, I hasten to assure you that even though authors try not to do it, it really isn’t uncommon, because titles can’t be copyrighted – just the stuff that in the book. This other Drop Edge is a Western novel by a very much more famous writer than I, one Rudy Wurlitzer, who has written many books as well as the screenplays for several well known movies, including one of my favorites, Little Buddha.

The thing that amazes me is that I have never said that title to a single person who knew what it means, so I was pretty sure it isn’t much used any more. I begin to think that if I still lived on top of Texas, I’d have known better. Rudy lives in California, I’m sure, but he obviously is from my part of the world, or at least knows somebody who is.

I did find one early review of my book, though, other than Woodstock’s. This one is by Joanne Benham for a web site called Reader Views. It’s a nice review, over all, even though she did find Alafair “annoying”. She tried to cut Alafair some slack, however, since she was “trying to save her child’s life.” Joanne does a good summary of the story, if you’d like to get the jump on it, Dear Reader. She also said “…all in all it was a nice book, fun to sit down and read with your coffee. But there was one mystery I had to read through to the end to solve, and that was what the heck The Drop Edge of Yonder meant. So relax, you’ll find out.” (www.readerviews.com/reviewcaseythedropedge.html)

The new book is still not up on the Poisoned Pen Press web site, as of last check, but should be momentarily. As soon as it is, I’ll be adding a page for it to this web site.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Writer Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.