Guest Post by Author Spotlight Darcy Town

This week's Spotlighted author, Darcy Town, is blogging today on why books are still great entertainment:

Ramblings on reading and writing…

I write with visuals in mind.  I plan my scenes like sections of a movie: quick action, witty dialogue, and well-paced eye candy.  I believe readers these days need their books to compete with video games, and movies that look like video games, and the internet as a whole.

That's not a slight of any kind to any of the aforementioned media.  I love video games, and I love the internet (or rather what I can find on it), but in an age where you can see anything (and some things can't be unseen), then the books that are going to get read (and remembered, shared, and purchased) have to be awesome.  They have to be over-the-top even in scenes that seem mundane.  They should be fantastically overloaded with rad action sequences, sexy-sexiness (yeah double sexiness), and memorable one-liners.  And let's not forget a plot that is as epic as it is twisted and intriguing.

A good book is an over saturated text that has whipped you into loving it, and has you coming back for more--no grey and dull, no long and wistful contemplation.  Quick, witty, violent.  Text that dives into seeming commonplace if only to catch a reader off guard when the next dive or rise comes around.  Make the text an emotional brain thrashing.  We readers want to be abused in the best kind of way.

And before anyone thinks that I don't like literary fiction, I do like it!  Nothing about "awesome" excludes that per se.  Rad action sequences can be a well-written chase down an alley, a race to a finish line, a hot kiss, or even something as simple as cookie baking, but damn it, for me...make it memorable and make it frenetic.

Characters should leap off the page, lure you in, and chase you down if you try to put the book away.  What's wrong with delirium and manic laughter?  Is everyday life really that normal?  Maybe I'm viewing through a lens half-blurred with cracks and grime, but my everyday is pretty sweet, funny, and memorable.

And I try to always write that way.

(See Darcy's Author Spotlight here!)