Kenneth Wayne
Biography
Kenneth Wayne was born and raised on the West Coast of the United States, but has spent the past couple of decades in Asia. He has written six novels, dozens of stories, a novel-length travelogue, and two ESL textbooks.
He is the founder of the Electronic Text and Literature Cloud (eTLC), a great way to discover the work of independent (indie) authors. The majority of writing on this cloud is available in a digitalized format, which provides indies a viable medium to distribute their work. Our focus is self-published material since we believe it remains closer to the "vision" of the writer than work reshaped by publishers with "elusive" marketing goals.
Where to find Kenneth Wayne online
Books
Kenneth Wayne’s tag cloud
Smashwords book reviews by Kenneth Wayne
- Prismatica
on April 30, 2011
I was pulled into this collection quickly. As a reader I was captivated by the originality and cleverness of the plot underlying this collection of stories and poems. Rather than being described as a collection of stories, it is a novel with the stories and poems being used to arrange the material in much the same way that chapters are usually used to organize. I was absolutely fascinated with what Hesler's imagination has done with this variation of going down a rabbit hole. I'll never look at dirt in the same way again. In particular, I loved the surreal portrayal of the characters and the world(s) they inhabit. I don't want to spoil the story for other readers by describing too much of it here. Simply, I want to urge everyone to allow this book to pull them into it as well. Buy it!
- Parallels
on Aug. 17, 2011
This one is very hard to categorize. It’s a thrilling, sci-fi, young adult romance verging on the erotic that carries the reader along a roller-coaster of twists and turns. If I weren’t so busy, I wouldn’t have put it down until I was through. Unfortunately, I had to pick it up in fits and starts. That, however, turned out to be a good way to read this intriguing novel since there were about as many twists and changes in the plot as there were the numbers of times I had stop reading and do something else. By the time I got back to reading, the plot would transform again.
Without giving too much away about the story, there are elements of a conspiracy concerning the propagation of special beings, important elements about traveling through different dimensions and parallel universes (from which the novel gets its name), a subplot or two about living in rural communities in modern-day southwestern Washington, the coming to terms with what it means if you have special abilities, a love triangle or two, and lots of action that appears to be a wild hybrid, parallel mix reminiscent of a Japanese animation like Dragon Ball and an American comic like the Fantastic Four, Superman, or other classic super hero stories.
To be blunt, Parallels is loaded. Buy it today, you won’t be disappointed.
- Electronic Crime in Muted Key
on Oct. 08, 2011
I was very impressed with this very well-crafted thriller. Mr. Wastnage has done a fantastic job in drawing the reader into a complex scheme conceived and executed by a complicated protagonist with several aliases and leading double lives with a wife occupying one and a girlfriend in the other, while orchestrating an elaborate network of tasks for a half dozen people to perform if they want to change their lives for the better. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away in this review. I’m sure anyone wise enough to purchase this book will be as impressed as I was at how easily the story flows in spite of the overall intricacy of the plot. The competence and control that the author shows in laying the groundwork for this story is impressive. I was absorbed with it to the end. Well done!
- Lucid Membrane
on Jan. 29, 2012
As the many reviewers quoted in the first few pages of Lucid Membrane, I love this intriguing collection of stories. It starts off with a surreal situation of a man in a yellow suit witnessing lucid windows being washed with cream. For some reason, it bought back warm recollections of Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. Perhaps, the seemingly simple sentence structure and word play interwoven with an underlying humor and dreamlike atmosphere of windows that “turn their backs to be washed on the other sides” bring out a very similar playful reading experience. In the same story (“The Accidental Voyeur”), Besko is able to get me to recall a Danish folktale about a fat cat that tries to eat everything it sees. Simply, this first story is a delight and a great beginning to a potpourri that weaves through the fringes of the reader’s peripheral vision in which other worlds or extra dimensions may be accessible to flirtations with rather straight-forward, in-your-face musings like that of a young woman as she decides what best to wear to a concert/happening in which she is to perform as a broken doll with a clown she knows who claims he “couldn’t stop fantasizing about killing women.” Include with this a feverish story of a lonely woman who falls in love with a female Sasquatch she encounters in the woods and subsequently coaxes to be a care-giver for her senile father. Then there are ducks and stories full of hallucinogenic visions that help the reader touch for a moment out-of-the-body realities. Of course, I cannot forget the playing cards tattooed on the asses of self-coined dorks and geeks in high school. Sound like a ride you want to take? So is, buy this book and enjoy.
- The Same Moon
on April 29, 2012
The Same Moon was a delight to read. At times I felt it was a little over reliant on minutiae, but such detail did help make the the live of Pearl Zhang come alive. While reading, I was able to inhabit the body of the protagonist and see the world through her eyes. I was able to enter the mind of a girl growing up in the final years of China under Mao and share the highs and lows she experienced maturing in that environment. It was intriguing to discover that even in a so-called State-dominated society, the loves and hates that develop between those interacting with you predominate in much the same way as they do in a supposedly freer society. Ms. Kirk made it possible for me to experience what life was like in world far removed from my own, but full of 90% of the same daily anxieties, hopes and ambitions that dominated my own experience of growing up. I loved the way Pearl would periodically display ethnocentric notions of psychological qualities she believed to be uniquely Chinese, but which turned out to be similar to some that I believed to be unique to the local community in the U.S. in which I was raised. Pearl may have grown up in China during the seventies and eighties, while I grew up in a rural community in the western U.S. during the fifties and sixties; even so, we experienced 90% or more of the same hopes, dreams, hassles, and setbacks. Regardless the differences in countries, political systems and even gender, I could relate with almost everything in this novel.
The only parts that put a definite gulf between us were the few times that the writer felt it necessary to have Pearl bask in the "elite" aspects of her educational background. I myself have been far from being an "elite" in anything. Even in this regard, though, I could understand the rationale for making this uniqueness plain. After all, at the time, Pearl would have been unable to study in England if she had not excelled in the Chinese educational system. Therefore, her being a member of an "educational elite" was such a prominent part of her life.
Most of the second part of the book focuses on her life living in Scotland and England. It was fascinating to read her experiences as she matured and assimilated, but, for me, the depiction of life growing up in China was the best part of the novel. It was the part that made it clear to me that we do live under the same moon. I'm looking forward to reading the next volume of this trilogy.
- Playing Harry
on Sep. 14, 2012
Playing Harry is the second thriller by Nick Wastnage that I have had the pleasure to read. As with Electronic Crime in Muted Key, the protagonist is a white professional comfortable with the tools of the IT age. Where Electronic Crime focused on an elaborate plot of false identity and deception of family members, friends and the police, Playing Harry focuses on deception of the protagonist by friends, co-workers and governments (both domestic and foreign). In ways the beginning of the novel reminded me a little of the Stieg Larsson novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo since Harry is also a journalist on trial facing prison if convicted. That fate is narrowly missed, but very quickly he finds himself involved a situation beyond his control when he discovers the existence of a mysterious computer file on the harddrive of his recently deceased brother's computer. From here stranger events begin to escalate rapidly involving the deaths of others seemingly connected, corporate backbiting, spying and espinage; all of which appears to involve international corporations, foreign governments, organized crime, MI6 and even the American CIA. What is poor Harry to do and who is it that is actually playing with him and to what end? Oh yeah, I can't forget the interplay with his ex-girlfriend and a couple of other sexual encounters that add more heat to the whole .
If you want to curl up with a thriller constructed by a real master, you cannot go wrong with Playing Harry.
(4.50 from 4 reviews) 