An Innocent A-Blog

Shelter

2010-12-09T13:30:00.003-05:00

My new little cast iron wood stove sitting snugly on its slate pad in front of the old cavenous fireplace. I may need its emergency heat this weekend if the monster storm forecast for my area brings down power lines. It yet lacks an appropriate mantle. The old one with its charming detail had to be removed by a mean crowbar because of the safety allowances. Fortunately, the long bookcases on either side were beyond the necessary parameters.

I've managed to walk the dogs some days (though my wee behind is dragging after two circuits of the block.) Being country bred, I always watch for spoor on these forays, amused by the bear-sized pug marks of my Shepherd, the delicate patterns of little cat feet and the erratic, rabbit-like prints of squirrels in the urban snow.

But somedays, when the wind hisses from the North, snakes of snow writhe across my path like the pale and vicious offspring of the Ice Dragon.

On such days I am glad of walls.

My computer is slow as cold molasses--a problem that probably not be rectified until after Christmas-- which is why I haven't been by. Still, I found on my alerts another wonderful review of Dark and Disorderly by Cholla on Long and Short Romance Reviews who calls it "an exciting and engaging read" and gave the story a 4 and 1/2 of 5.

I am so grateful to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to read and review D&D.

Come into my kitchen

2010-12-01T12:16:00.003-05:00

I am not a good photographer. This shot shows part of the east wall of my kitchen-of-the-seven-doors, above the cluttered kitchen table.

To the left on the shelf, you can see a bit of an old mantle clock...well, its pendulum anyway...behind the milk glass hen. One of those odd items that have stuck around the family for five or six generations.

This is the clock that appears in D&D. The clock that the sudden boingboingboing when it struck scares the livingshit out of Lillie St. Claire when she's searching the house for other paranormal intruders after her dead husband shows up in her bathroom.

I can testify that it sounds sepulchral and definitively doom-laden in the quiet and listening dark.

We all do this, don't we? Integrate not only bits of people we know and thoughts we've had but also incidental personal property into our narratives?

Faint But Pursuing...

2010-11-24T07:51:00.003-05:00

A friend sent me a selection of Dormats with a Difference. This one made me cackle.

I've been re-surfacing so often I feel like an old hardwood floor.

I've been trying to clean up my gmail, only a few thousand to go.

Found an article on Follow the Reader, a Net Galley blog ( http://www.netgalley.com/) where someone from Carina mentioned D&D as one of their most popular paranormal titles.

?? and ???

!! and !!!

Jessica from Novel Reaction posted a nice review and a guest post by me on the values of research.

A fantastic review (and an interview) by the Wayfaring Writer here --I hope. I often screw up links.

Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?

And why is "abbreviated" such a long word?

Our trees have been flensed by the knives of the wind, but I discovered images of leaves brown-etched by leached tannin on the new pale pavement of our sidewalks.

Like a memory.

Imagining Toronto

2010-11-16T13:23:00.003-05:00

The cover for Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris, Mansfield Press, 333 pages.
I'm sorry I've been offline. My son-in-law kidnapped me to Toronto so I could attend my daughter's book launch--you can imagine my pride!
When I arrived back home, ready to pimp, my computer took fits. I just got it back last night. I need a new one but this one kinda/sorta works for now.
Quoting from the back cover:
"In Imagining Toronto, Amy Lavender Harris ventures deep into the imagined city--the Toronto of fiction, poetry and essays--where she dowses for meaning in the literature of the city on the lake as its inhabitants understand, remember and dream it.
By tracing Toronto's literary geneaolgies from their origins in First Nations stories to today's graphic novels, Harris delinates a great city's portrayal in its literature, where the place of dwelling is coloured by the joy and the suffering, the love and the sorrows, of the people who have played out their lives on the written page.
Through tales of the city's neighbourhoods and towers, it ravines and wild places, its role as a multicultural city, as a place of work and leisure, Harris reminds us that the realty of Toronto has been captured by its writers with a depth and complexity that goes far beyond the reductive cliches of Toronto as either a provincial 'Hogtown' or a pretentious 'world class' city.
Michael Ondaatje once noted that 'before a real city could be seen it had to be imagined.' Imagining Toronto shows just how richly and completely it has been, if only we would look."
~beam~
There was standing room only at the launch.

Surfacing II

2010-10-09T12:15:00.003-04:00

From my collection of yardsale paintings.

The first sign of autumn is sound. Leaves no longer sigh and whisper with the wind. They clatter and complain above the gutteral of seed pods and the rasp of dry grass below.

Here, the trees are about a third turned, but already some leaves are falling. They scatter and scurry along the sidewalks and streets in the wake of passing cars like demented brown mice.

Sometimes, Fall is described as a resignation, a gentle melancholy of fading embers, a quiet, golden passage into the stark of winter.

Here, in the North Country, the forest flares and flames in unreconciled bonfire fury. Equinoctial storms are full of rage and resentment at the dying of the light.

Scorched earth.

Uppers:

Have you noticed that versatile word up has acquired additional usage?

The cliche about "stepping up to the plate/challenge" is reborn by "ramp up" and "man up," and even "hug up."

Downers:

Why do doctors call what they do...practice?

Why is the man who invests your money called a broker?

And why is an airport called a terminal?

Surfacing

2010-09-18T11:13:00.003-04:00

The Pool of London,

Peter Cornelis Dommersen,

oil on canvas, 1861.

I've been a bad blog friend for not posting and I'm sorry. My energy output has not exceeded the wattage of a glowworm. Frustrating--because I've never knuckled under to stuff before.

Written and Fairy, thank you.

Clutching my remote in my blue recliner, I've overdosed on cable television in the past weeks and have some observations:

My opinion of that Bin Laden clone nutjob cleric in Florida who planned to burn the Qur'an is not printable.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, has a gorgeous voice.

Deana Troy and Seven of Nine from TNG and Voyager have the best figures on TV.

Reruns of M*A*S*H are hilarious.

Terms in the news like "landfall", "riptide" and "wildfire" have been used as book titles.

Operation Repo is an exhibition of hysterical vulgarity-- not from the tattooed reposession crew--but from the people whose cars are being reposessed.

Mantracker, from a show by that name, uses the same bad words as I do.

Commericals which rely on expanding and contracting graphics are so much visual noise.

And the single kiss between Lancelot (Richard Gere?) and Guinevere in First Knight is the most hungry, passionate movie kiss I've ever seen.

A Yellow Ribbon

2010-08-22T10:19:00.006-04:00

My son leaves for Outremer.

And so the vigil begins again.

Again, far away places are included in the geography of family mind.

God keep.

***

Crawling back to the computer today I found that three more lovely ladies have reviewed Dark and Disorderly.

Carla at www.romfanreviews.com/2010/08/review-dark-and-disorderly-by-bernita.html gave D&D a 4 out of 5 review. This review is due to the good offices of my dearest Ric who recommended D&D to her.

Anna at http://www.annathepiper.org/ also gave D&D 4 out of 5 stars.

And Marissa at http://sizzlinghotbooks.blogspot.com/ gave D&D five stars.

I appreciate these wonderful reviews so much, not only because they justify the chance Carina Press took with D&D but also because their consistency emphasizes the strengths of the book and reassure me about what I'm doing right with Lillie's adventures.

***

Don't You Just Hate It? Dep't:

When a real live person has a name you'd like to use in a novel.

There's a lovely television journalist on CNN by the name of Solidad O'Brien...a perfect name for a heroine. I love it. It's mysterious and beautiful, just like Raine Weaver in her Secret Garden--but it's already taken...

***

Floppy Disks:

Wary of another relapse, but some improvement.

Hurple-ing Along

2010-08-18T13:12:00.003-04:00

The cover of one Ellis Peter's medieval CSI Brother Cadfael stories--which has to be one of the best series ever for both quality and consistency in every aspect of the writer's craft through twenty volumes. There is no falling off.

I have been offline due to sheer exhaustion. I ran away from the net to indulge myself in such comfort reads as the Cadfael books and did damnall else. From a critical standpoint, I think one could spend a lifetime analyzing the virtues of this series.

A couple of posts ago I enthused about the figurative language and imagery in another series. But the Cadfaerl stories reminds me that imagery must not only be clever, it must be consistent with the period, the characters and the settings. (I retain a sense of anachronistic outrage over a story set in the 12th century I read once that had someone collapse "like a sack of potatoes.")

With Ellis we may put away such suspicion. We have such passages as "time was snapping at his heels like a herdsman's dog," "Behind them the looming clouds multiplied with black and omnious speed, dangling like overfull udders of venomous milk."

And " In the hall, the servants had begun to kindle the first torches and set them in their sconces, but in every corner, and in the smoky beams of the lofty roof, darkness gathered and clung, draped cobwebs of shadow."

Moreover, so good are her descriptive passages in general--whether of river, fields or interiors, of moonlight, starshine, or sunrise, of storms or seasons and their passing--that I remember and recognize these landscapes, seen that torrent, felt that heat or cold. She has found wonderfully visual words for those sights and the inchoate thoughts and feelings they engendered in me since childhood.

But besides the beauty and skill of her language, it is reassuring to read stories that invoke the values of courage, honour and duty and the basic decency of humankind.

Holy Irreverencies, Batman

2010-08-08T15:10:00.004-04:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged... that on the day you scrupulously scrub your kitchen floor that within hours you will spill a vast container of fast-spreading liquid all over it and you will have to do it all again. This domestic law of consequences has never failed in my household.

Yesterday morning, rather than the lick and the promise it usually gets, I sat on my wee behind and did a thorough job on my psuedo-marble flooring. I even gave it a light polish. I beamed to see its dogfoot beige return to the original white and gray.

By noon I had upended a bottle of coke all over it.

Glug, glug, splatter, splash.

Sigh.

A friend sent me this. And since it is Sunday...

Of course we know that Jesus was Jewish. He went about his Father's business, He lived at home until he was 33, and his mother was sure he was God; but...

There are three good arguments that Jesus was Black:

1. He called everyone brother.

2. He liked Gospel.

3. He didn't get a fair trial.

Then there are three good arguments that Jesus was an American Indian:

1. He was at peace with nature.

2. He ate a lot of fish.

3. He talked about the Great Spirit.

And three that He may have been Irish:

1. He never married.

2. He was always telling stories.

3. He loved green pastures.

And three that he may have been a Californian:

1. He never cut his hair.

2. He walked around barefoot all the time.

3. He started a new religion.

But the most compelling evidence suggests that Jesus was a woman.

Because:

1. He fed a crowd at a moment's notice when there was virtually no food.

2. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn't get it.

3. And even when He was dead, He had to get up because there was still work to do.

Amen.

Time Out

2010-08-03T09:35:00.003-04:00

Why Dinosaurs Are Extinct.

A friend sent me this cartoon. You may have seen it before as it is probably one of those gigglers that sweep like solar dust through the blogverse.

That wonderful Jennifer from Reading with Tequila who wrote such a terrific review of Dark and Disorderly invited me to write a guest post for her site. It's about the ghostly types identified in paranormal research and it's up today.

One of the reasons I like to read various low-brow mysteries and thrillers ( and I'm not suggesting that mysteries and thrillers are "low-brow"--just some of them) on occasion is the smartass language--the exaggerated, visual (and sometimes fresh and clever) comparisons, similes and metaphors.

And low-brow or not, sometimes it's a relief to read straighforward, knock-em-down-blow-em-up stories...On the otherhand, maybe I have no taste...

Here's some examples I've culled from a novel while on my latest binge:

An entertainment center with "more switches than the cockpit of a 747;"

Chances '"so slim they were anorexic," something or other "dropped faster than the price of icecubes in Alaska." A bar's decor "had all the class of an aging camp follower, and needed twice the paint."

Or," he knew just how dessicating the desert could be, leaching juice out of mind and body alike. It could turn most Westerners into whispering husks fit for little else but blowing away to crumble like old corn leaves in the desert, bleached of color by the pitiless and constant sun."

Visual is good.

Days of Gab

2010-07-29T07:42:00.004-04:00

I highly recommend blog friends visiting each other whenever possible. To have time to yack about writing in detail or anything else that comes to mind, to not be constrained by the brevity and insecurity of emails.
Had a truly wonderful visit from Writtenwyrdd last week, and am so grateful that she tolerated the dust and doghair and my semi-invalid status. The dogs thought she was wonderful too.
Since then I've been reading a low-brow genre series, the kind replete with meticulous descriptions of eighty-five types of hardware--not the kind on kitchen cabinets--detailed hardsite penetration, and gun battles so sizzling with testosterone that balls bounce off every page and I have to kick them away to get up from my chair.
Very relaxing. And sometimes useful.
Noticed a couple of interesting ways to illustrate and underline that a character's first language was not English without the usual application of native tongue exclamations and maledictions, such as "mon Dieu" or "perro" etc., or the ubiquitous " how you say in America..."
One secondary character used present tense all the time, even when obviously describing past incidents. From my own experience in languages foreign this rang true, as present tense is usually the easiest to get right.
Another, less common than a scatter of non-English words of endearment or curse, is the use of what in English we sometimes call malapropisms-- the use of a noun or verb closely related in sound but with a wildly inappropriate meaning-- the misue of "pneumatics" for "pneumonia" is a lame example.
Other "infelicities of verbal diction" such as the reversal of intitial letters or syllables are often used , mostly for comedic effect, for English speaking characters. One of my favourites , incidentally, is "The Canadian Broadcorping Castration." And I'm sure you are all familiar with Spoonerisms such as Cinderella and her two sistyuglers.
If pure comedy is your ambition, the possibilities are endless. A book suitable for the bathroom called Nothing Risque, Nothing Gained by Richard Lederer provides such springboard examples as "The Screwing of the Tern, French the Lieutenant's Woman, Even Blowgirls get the Cues, A Sale of Two Titties..."
All comedy aside, one way to individualize a character is to have them misuse the language--tips of the slung--as long as one doesn't get carried away with one's own cleverness and overdo it.

Six Words

2010-07-19T13:00:00.004-04:00

Another illuminated drawing for an SCA scroll, based on early 16th century Floretine silk brocade.

First six:

Can't wait to see my friend.

Writtenwyrdd will be arriving sometime today or tomorrow, braving the dog hair and the dust. I have been looking forward to this for months. I may not blog the rest of the week depending on her schedule and how long she can stand me.

I expect we will be occupied with gossip, giddiness and giggling.

She will be the first, but I hope not the last, of my long-time blog friends to visit me 'humble 'ome. If any of you ( you know who you are) should happen to be in this area some day, I hereby issue a formal invitation.

Next Six:

From www.25hourbooks.com/ on Dark and Disorderly:

"Best paranormal mystery read this year."

Of course, that statement might well be altered by the very next book she reads; and, of course, reviews are always subjective... but...

I think my jaw is permanently dropped.

And D&D will be released in audio from Audible.com this Wednesday, July 21st.

Last six:

Check out Clarity of Night contest!

Captive Spirit

2010-07-15T10:39:00.003-04:00

Today I'm really pleased to present Liz Fichera, the author of the historical romance Captive Spirit.

We scratched backs. Today while I interview her, she is interviewing me on her blog. Liz and I have more than just a publisher in common. Our interest in history and myth...and a certain what if? and why not?

As usual, any mistakes and typos in the following are mine.

Liz Fichera is an author from the American Southwest by way of Chicago. She likes to write stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, oftentimes against the backdrop of Native American legends. When she's not plotting her next novel, you can find her on Facebook or her blog, discussing writing, books, hunks du jour, LOST re-runs or the best brands of chocolate. Please visit her at her website because it can get real lonely in the desert: http://www.lizfichera.com/

CAPTIVE SPIRIT is available from Carina Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and whereever digital books are sold.

If it hadn't been for my sister Mary, my historical romance novel CAPTIVE SPIRIT might never have been finished. Every time she read a new chapter, she kept asking me, "What happens next?"

Music to a writer's ears.

You see, I was in a kind of blue funk when I started this book. A young adult novel that I had written and loved was continuing to be rejected, beat up, and generally abused by probably every editor in New York City. An agent gave me great advice though. She sais, "keep writing."

And so I did.

I decided to write something completely different and CAPTIVE SPIRIT was born. It contained all the things I love:Native American characters, epic themes, suspense, an American southwest setting and, of course, a love story. I loved writing this novel, almost as much as I enjoyed doing the research behind it. It gave me a chance to learn about the Hohokam Indians, who happened to be the original inhabitants of Phoenix, Arizona, my adopted state. (I'm originally from Illinois.) The Hohokam have a fascinating history in that they lived in the Sonoran Desert from 300 BC to roughly 1500 AD when they vanished for reasons unknown. Cool, eh? This was the piece of little-known history that inspired me to write my novel.

***

About CAPTIVE SPIRIT:

CAPTIVE SPIRIT is the story of a young Hohokam Indian woman named Aiyana who isn't like the other girls of the White Ant Clan. Instead of keeping house, she longs to compete on the Ball Court with her best friend Honovi and the other boys. Instead of marriage, she daydreams of travelling beyond the mountains that surround her small village. Only Honovi knows and shares her forbidden wish, though Aiyana doesn't realize her friend has a secret wish of his own...

When Aiyana's father arranges her marriage to a man she hardly knows, she takes the advice of a tribal elder: Run! In fleeing, she falls into the hands of Spanish raiders and finds herself being taken over the mountains against her will. Now Aiyana's on a quest to return to the very place she once dreamed of escaping. And she'll do whatever it takes to survive and find her way back to the people she loves.

I keep the first chapter and book trailer on my web site.

Texas Tangle

2010-07-14T08:58:00.005-04:00

Today, I'm pleased to provide you with a guest post from Leah Braemel, a fellow Carina author, who wrote the torrid, contemporary erotic novel Texas Tangle--which has received some equally sizzling reviews!

Due to my total inability to cut'n paste a google doc. into Blogger, I've had to type her post--just so you know that any typos are mine. (But if someone could tell me how to manage it, I'd appreciate it!)

Here's Leah!

Until I was ten I lived in towns around eight or ten thousand people. Enough that you had a little space around you but small enough that everyone knew your business. Then when I was ten we moved to the country. We moved to a rural area that only the year before finally consolidated all its one room school houses into a single school of sixteen classes! I think there were about six surnames in the township when we moved in, families who had lived there for over a hundred years and everyone was related to everyone else. There were no secrets in that township. None.

Now this was back in the days before texting or email. Back then they still had the old telephone system where when you picked up the phone you didn't dial, the operator came on and you asked for the person by name, then you'd add their version of the person's "ring tone." As in "Hi, Lizzy, can you connect me with Patti Smith over at 3894--they're three long, two short." Anywhere up to ten or twelve families shared the same phone line, so each house had a specific ring to identify who the call was for. Two long rings followed by a short might mean it was for the Strong family a half a mile down. Two long with no short meant Old Len was getting his weekly call from his brother. You know, the brother who had a thorn in his foot and moved from the family farm all those years back? Yup, he was a real wanderer--yup, his brother Dale moved to a farm on the line (road) a mile and a quarter north. Then there was the scandal of when my friend Bob came home to find his wife had up and left him. Not only that but she'd completely trashed their house--she'd taken everything they owned, smashed or destroyed what she didn't want or couldn't take, stopped up the sink and left the water running, taken everything from the fridge (ketchup, mustard, jelly, you name it) and dumped it over every single carpet in the house, then smashed all the plants and ground the dirt from them in on the top. That tale blew through the grapevine faster than a wildfire.

Unless you wanted everyone to know your deepest secrets you had to keep your conversation short and bland because everyone and their brother could--and did--listen in. Before you think I was raised with Laura Ingalls in a little house on the prairie, we're talking early seventies here. Nineteen seventies that is.

Since I'd set Texas Tangle in a fictional rural community in the fictional Barnett County in Texas, I figured country life would probably be the same everywhere. Everyone knows everyone else's business in barnett county, same as my little corner of rural Ontario. Living with the gossip and the whispers about everything they did, especially if they were in a permanent relationship between three people, would have to be taken into consideration by my characters.

Eventually, like all of us, you just have to decide if you're going to live your life based on what other people think. it was a great source of conflict, both external and internal for my characters.

Somedays I'm really glad I live in a city where I don't even know my neighbor's names...

(Blurby)

Thanks to her cheating ex-husband and her theiving brother, all horse breeder Nikki Kimball has left is a bruised heart, an over-drawn bank account and an empty home. When sex-on-legs Dillon Barnett and his brooding foster-brother Brett Anderson start showing more than just neighborly attention, Nikki is intrigued...and a little gun-shy.

Dillon and Brett have a history; back in high school, the two friends fought a bitter battle over Nikki. Now, then years later, Brett still longs to be the man in Nikki's life, but he's determined to stand back and let Dillon win Nikki's heart.

Society says Nikki must choose between the two men she loves. Is Nikki strong enough to break all the rules and find happiness?

It's very frustrating but Blogger ( or google doc.) doesn't wish to co-operate regarding the links which Leah provided for excerpts and a download of the first chapter, but you can find them at her blog here.

World Gods

2010-07-12T09:11:00.006-04:00

Ptah, the patron deity of artists and craftsmen. His cult believed he created the world, the gods and all living things by uttering their names, according to the dictates of his heart. An instinctive ubergod, one might say, a panster.

From Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, New York, edited by Katherine Stoddert Gilbert, ISBN: 0-394-41170-6.

A beautiful book with 100 full colour plates as well as 103 in black and white taken by Harry Burton at the time of the tomb's discovery. Included are photographs of a number of the exquisite but lesser items found among that golden, cluttered magnificence.

(Art books such as this are not only a valuable research tool for those seeking an accurate details for their fiction but are also instructive on many levels. I didn't realize, for example, that the boomerang is not exclusive to Australia, and was used by hunters of that era among the Nile marshes.)

All writers are Ptah initiates, are world builders. Though we usually think of world building to be a function of fantasy and science fiction, I think the Ptah effect applies whether a writer choses to delineate a small contemporary town, a medieval castle or a setting of international intrigue The mechanics and challenges are simply more apparent in fantasy.

High fantasy/SF involves the creation of a total world, from geophysical features to political structure, language, religion, etc. and etc.

Urban fantasy tends towards the development of a society within a known and existing world. The mores, the social constructs, the anthropology of a specified and alien group: the dynamics of a wolf pack of shapeshifters, the conventions governing vampire interaction. A fascinating world within a world, so to speak.

What is not so often explored, except in generalities as a useful conflict, a background canvas, is the style in which the larger, conventional world reacts to these subcultures. And that reaction is one thing I have tried to reflect in Dark and Disorderly.

Can anyone suggest other urban fantasies/paranormals which integrate the "normal" world with the paranormal? Beyond nightclubs run by vampires, that is?

Apologies: While I was offline, my gmail was hacked, so many of you have received spam. I'm very sorry.

A review here gives D&D 4/5 hearts. More !! and !!!

And another I just found at Famous last Words!

EXTRA!

Thanks to mt dear Demon Hunter I'm also guest blogging at Obfuscation of Reality today about kick-ass heroines.

The Wings of Ma'at

2010-07-10T09:20:00.003-04:00

Egyptian goddess of truth, balance, order, justice, etc., and, appropriately, the overseer of scribes.

It's been a physically wretched week. I've left my old pc unbooted for fear that a small mushroom cloud would instantly coalesce above my hard drive. Even this morning I'm typing with one hand on top of my tower to gauge its heat level, as this house does not support air conditioning.

The bulging disk in my lower back has also been decidedly unco-operative.

In the meantime I went on an Anita Blake binge--the first half dozen and a couple from later in the series, Blood Noir being one. Blood Noir was such a disappointment--a good plot basically, if one could discern it under the yawning weight of pages and pages of excruciatingly dull sex scenes.

The first half dozen, Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse, Circus of the Damned, and so on, cetainly justify Diana Gabaldon's cover comment about Laurel K. Hamilton..."I've never read a writer with a more fertile imagination."

So do a collection of her excellent short stories, Strange Candy, and the first two of her Merry Genry novels that I also found. But after Blood Noir my binge left me with the impression of a brilliant writer gone wrong. And I do consider Hamilton a brilliant writer, not only for the originality of her characters but for her use of figurative language and acute social commentary.

One interesting technical aspect of her novels is that her final chapter is always tidy and straighforward and epilogic. Very satisfying to any reader who likes their t's crossed, and a style that surmounts certain difficulties about providing information--a problem which always surrounds first person narration. One of those instances where "tell" can be more effective than pages of "show."

I'm way behind on everything. The last review I saw was from a really cute site with a charming logo called Books and Things. The reviewer gave D&D 3 and 1/2 stars--which according to her scale rates D&D between like and love!

Writing and Believing

2010-07-02T06:29:00.005-04:00

American Country Life,

Currier & Ives,

Museum of the City of New York.

For pleasure and relaxation I've been reading once again The Talera Cycle (Sword of Talera, Wings over Talera and Witch of Talera) a heroic fantasy series by Charles Gramlich and enjoying Charles' deft treatment of action scenes and sword fights.

I have a peculiar fondness for stories utilizing sharp pointy things and Charles does them extraordinarily well. If one wants a short course in the use of appropriate, active verbs, they could do much worse than read the Talera books. Moreover, one never receives the impression he wrote with one finger marking a place in a dictionary of synonyms.

When things settle down a bit, I want his collection Bitter Steel.

As usual, the analytical part of my brain could not be entirely suppressed and I came away with several craft observations and one general conclusion.

Assuming we all know our craft reasonably well in terms of character and plot and all that stuff, two types of detail applied (as Charles does) will lift the prose of a story from merely competent to really good and memorable.

One is the the judicious use of a striking figurative phrase or image ("we walked along inside our own silences like ghosts".) Any descriptive passages should be clean and vivid, of course, but some should be deeper, unique.

The other is the brief interpolation of minor observations, almost asides, to which a reader may relate. These might be something as simple, as small and intimate and human as the effects of a hangover, a realization one hates the taste of liver, or two characters comparing the size of their feet.

Serious heroic fantasy demands themes and examples of honour, courage and nobility. I don't think a cynic could write the genre effectively unless he believes in those virtues and disdains their opposites. So I suppose my conclusion is a variation of the standard advice to "write what you love."

Yesterday:

Reading with Tequila, under her June 2010 Wrap-Up picked Dark and Disorderly as her favourite Book Read in June. She had given it 5 shots.

Today:

An interview with Lillie St. Claire at Southern Fried Chicas.

Apologies:

I screwed up. The Question-and-Answer at Wicked Jungle will be posted July 5.

All My Fault

2010-07-01T07:11:00.003-04:00

While the problem is with ghosts, not vampires, maybe Dark and Disorderly isn't so fantastic after all!
Dave Fragments send me this priceless link on FB. http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-vampire-crash-txt,0,4980779.story

Dazed and Delighted

2010-06-30T09:11:00.003-04:00

Another scroll motif. This one is based on a bow brooch found in Wittislingen, from the Migration period (ostrogothic most likely) probably 6th century.

Delighted at how kind everyone is and dazed ( and not just because of the oxycodone ) at the reception of Dark and Disorderly.

(I am a bit dazed from oxycodone. After considerable progress, I'm having a relapse to agony. I only hope this post will make sense.)

Dear Fairyhedgehog described D&D as "bloody brilliant!"

It's an exaggeration, but I love it!

Darling Stacia also put up my guest post on her Live Journal site.

Today or tomorrow, an interview at Wicked Jungle.

And to celebrate the Launch, my three darling daughters sent me (1) two snappy new outfits ( because, digital or not, she thought Mom should have something to wear besides sweats and jeans.) (2) an e-reader (!! and !!!), and (3) a huge, gigantic bouquet of roses and carnations, mums and painted daisies, all the exact same colour as my Carina cover!

Launch!

2010-06-28T13:10:00.003-04:00

The party is LIVE at Bitten By Books!

Here's the link!

And their reviewer gave Dark and Disorderly 4/5 tombstones!

Launch Week Calendar

2010-06-26T19:27:00.006-04:00

You are invited to attend a launch party at Bitten by Books this Monday, June 28th, to celebrate the release of Dark and Disorderly.

No champagne, but there are prizes of gift certificates and silver jewellery to be won.

I'm updating this post to include a promo link to Bitten by Books here. Everyone who comes and RSVPs will get an additional 25 entries in the contests! I'll provide another direct link on Monday.

And I have to say I'm really lucky to have them host this launch because they gazillions of books to review at any given time.

I couldn't connect to the internet until just now and assume it was because my internet provider decided this morning was a good time to do maintenance.

(Unless I can blame the G20!)

Tomorrow (Sunday), I'll be answering questions at fellow Carina author, Leah Braemel's (Texas Tangle, etc.) site.

Tomorrow is Today! Here's a direct link to the interview at Leah's ( http://leahbraemel.blogspot.com/2010/06/bernita-harriss-dark-and-disorderly.html )

Also, on Monday, I'll be guest bloggging with Dawn Jackson at Para-fanatics about why I write.

On Tuesday, my darling Stacia (Kane/ Personal Demons, etc.,Unholy Ghosts, etc.) has invited me to visit. I'll be discussing D&D sex.

Another darling girl, Raine, (Hotter than Hell, The Last Man on Earth, etc.) may interview Lillie St. Claire on Friday.

Neat Publicity Trick

2010-06-25T06:32:00.006-04:00

A Venetian Bather,

Paul Peel, 1889,

oil on canvas,

National Gallery of Canada.

"Twilight Star Related to Real-Life Vampire" shouts a Yahoo headline this morning. One can hear fans screaming "oooohhh!"

The suggestion of authenticity is really clever promotional item.

Writers (or their publishers/publicists) do it all the time. The bio of a thriller writer may suggest work experience as a CIA operative--even if the author was merely an accountant with that organization. Some writers of erotica, both well-known and lesser-known, go to extraordinary lengths to encourage readers to identify the author as the heroine of their novels--as real-life Mary Sues whose lives are filled with continual sexual escapades. I can't help but include L.K. Hamilton in this category.

Because writers do fashion their stories out of bits and pieces of their own lives, it's not that difficult to find hooks on which to hang legitimate revelations of credibility/authority/authenticity for the reader's enjoyment.

The fact that Elizabeth Moon served in the US Marine Corps, for example, adds value to her combat scenes and the military structure in her novels for me as a reader.

Certainly, it would be decidely dim for someone trained in martial arts not to make reference to their abilities when discussing their action/spy novel/ assassin hero.

And we've all read, no doubt, of an author who claims an ancestor hanged in Salem as the impetus for her witchy heroines. (I just hauled several boxes of genealogical research out of my office and stuffed them in a bedroom closet and I think I have one of those arrested. She wasn't young and sexy though. As I remember she was an elderly and bewildered lady who disappeared from goal before trial. Not everyone in Salem joined the hysteria.)

Though I rather retreat from the idea of any reader identification of myself with Lillie in Dark and Disorderly, I can't help but mention that Dumbarton, the Doom Dog who becomes Lillie's watchdog in D&D is based on the fact that my husband's family has a personal Black Dog apparition.

What items from your experience have you used (or intend to use) as promotional hooks?

And Two to Go:

NightOwl Reviews: ( http://www.nightowlreviews.com/nightowlromance/reviews/Review.aspx?daoid=6924 ) gives D&D a score of 4.25 out of 5 and calls it "a fascinating paranormal mystery...with a pulse racing scenario...filled with entertaining characters and delightful plot twists."

Amberkatze's Book Blog:

(http://amberkatze.blogspot.com/2010/06/91-dark-disorderly-e-by-bernita-harris.html ) says D&D is a"a breath of fresh air" "delightful" and "stimulating"--"Think Sookie Stackhouse..."

Not So Vicious Sidhe

2010-06-24T06:55:00.006-04:00

The Four Seasons of Life: Youth, "The Season of Love"

Currier and Ives,

Bridgeman Art Library.

Before Carina made arcs available for reviewers from Net Galley, I timidly contacted a few reviewers interested in paranormal novels, including epubs.

Since a sidhe figures in Dark and Disorderly, I could not resist approaching a review site by the name of Sidhe Vicious Reviews.

She rates D&D a score of 4 Fangs Addicted--It's Awesome! and says:

"Bernita Harris writes a brilliant story with interesting and quirky characters who drive the tale. A wonderfully written dark and edgy paranormal world..."

Her entire review may be found here.

And the cover girl is exactly how she imagined Lillie!

Since I've often read complaints from readers about the lack of--perhaps co-ordination is the most politic word--between cover and story, this comment is particularly gratifying. As another Carina author put it, the cover artist at Croco Designs is "a bloody genius."

Further, Judi generously offered me a guest blog spot. My post may be found here, with the chance to win a free arc of Dark and Disorderly.

We had a 5-5.5 earthquake in the area yesterday. Unfortunately, I was napping and missed it, but none of my bad yard sale art fell off the walls. So the only item trembling with excitement here is me.

Choirs and Quires

2010-06-21T08:02:00.004-04:00

An idle cartoon from the days when most of the family sang in the choir, with the obligatory church mouse.

We weren't bad, actually. It was something to see a congregation rocked back on their heels when we thundered out "A Mighty Fortress." We had a good bass section.

One of the odds and ends that surfaced as I continue the archaelogical dig in my office.

Another was a twelve-year old newspaper clipping about an author being charged with uttering death threats--via a self-published book that outlined a man's plan to kill a wealthy relative. The novel was appropriately titled "The Return of the Family Idiot."

Usually authors, self-published or no, acquire legal problems of a different kind. Besides plagiarism, the most common being that a novel influenced people to commit crimes similar as those described within its pages--the life imitating art scenario. Lacking the devil these days, society needs to lay blame elsewhere. I suppose the modern sense of social responsibilty combines with a lingering Victorian concept that books should be improving, elevating and instructional to produce charges of this sort.

Still, death threats are usually directed against specific politicians and attorneys-general, general groups such as feminists, or domestic and business partners and usually communicated by letter, email or telephone. This is novel method of conveyance.

I wonder how many death threats the CEO of BP has already received.

The Glory of War

2010-06-17T12:17:00.003-04:00

Taken in front of the little white cottage. He is about ten, I think. His big catch is a lake trout, I think.

You gave seen photos of him before on this blog: one with the Vimy memorial in the background when he was a member of the honour guard to bring home our Unknown Soldier. His great-grandfather served in those killing fields in WWI. One taken on the parapet of a palace in Kabul. One on his wedding day with the beautiful girl he married.

My son will serve outremer again this year.

I have always maintained that there is a glory in war.

But the glory for me lies not in the combat and clash of armies and men, but in the conscious decision of those who are willing to stand between a rapacious enemy and the innocent and the helpless.

Those who, like policemen and firemen, are willing, if need be, to lay their bodies down.

Those who are willing to do hard things so that the rest of us can live our lives with a conscience clear and untroubled.

And that is a glory of human spirit and sacrifice that too many do not comprehend. And no greater love.

****

D&D News:

STRiCTLY ANTiSOCiAL gave Dark and Disorderly a score of 9.5 out of 10.

She said so many nice things like, "I believe this is the first book I have really really really enjoyed in quite a while," that I'll just post a link.

The amazing thing is that while in fairness she mentions some aspects of the story another reader might not like, she asserts these points do not matter to her.

And another at I READ GOOD, with words like"hooked, gripping, amazing, fantastic!"

Of course, one hopes one's book will be well-received, but to repeat a line I stole from somewhere, my gast is totally flabbered.

Two more I didn't disappoint. My sense of gratitude is like a pail of water so full it slops over! ( I've been trying to house clean my office, so you know where that commonplace image comes from!)

The Thickets of Memory

2010-06-14T07:42:00.004-04:00

A riff on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.

Once upon a time we lived in a tiny white cottage on a property called The Millrace. It was named so because of the crumbling remains of the water gates and because the remnant hollow of the race ran the length of the property. A conservation area along a creek protected many acres on one side of us and a vast corn field occupied the other.

Ours was the last house at the end of a street. Situated as it was on the boundary between village and country, between urban and rural, our property was a wonderful place to raise children to a knowledge and appreciation of the natural world. And to teach them not to fear dark woods at night.

We taught them to identify birds and nests and trees and animal tracks. We examined old overgrown stone foundations and gathered raspberries. We collected fossils from the creek bed. We dug yellow clay from its banks, moulded it in imitation of Indian pots and platform pipes and sundry other items and fired them in a bonfire in the back yard so they could understand a primitive but effective process. We showed them how to survive and escape if they fell through ice.

One child said later that geology 101 was a breeze--she had already learned all about ox-bows and Ordovician shale from our forays along the creek.

Our place, with its hawthornes and lilacs and willows and apple trees, where foxes ran in moonlight, contained a certain magic. One wintery day we saw a partridge in a pear tree.

And one day the children discovered this fawn hidden in the tangled brush at the very back of our property. One of them carefully snapped this photograph.

It reminded me how bits and pieces of our lives work their way into our stories ("O ghost...come back again.") The old cemetery beside Lillie's white house where Dumbarton chases wraiths in Dark and Disorderly stretched its narrow length along our street.

Our little cottage is gone now, swallowed by development ("gone and by the wind grieved")

A BTW: Most of you already know the tale, but this morning, Dark and Disorderly appears in Dear Author's weekly First Sale feature.

My First Review!

2010-06-11T09:15:00.004-04:00

Lilly (daughter of John Noble)

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt.,

oil on canvas, 1864.

I have been desperately afraid.

Readers are the final judge. Readers are the ones who plunk their hard-earned money down, hoping to be transported and entertained.

What if readers disliked Dark and Disorderly? What if I totally disappointed them?

This morning my google alert brought up the review site Reading with Tequila.

She gave it five shots which means she "absolutely loved it." You can read the entire review here.

Some of her comments:

I never had a clue what was coming next...It was fantastic. Every twist and turn was a complete surprise and you just don't get those kind of experiences often enough...

I loved Lillie. She's strong, determined, has been through hell and she's not going to take it anymore. Still she cries for others pain and vomits in the face of grisly death. She is a balanced, realistic character that's easy to fall in love with.

I could go on at length about how wonderful this book is but the point is that (D&D) is a twisted and completely unexpected paranormal thriller that shocked me time and again. Bernita Harris is a fantastic new voice in the paranormal genre.

She liked the book. She loved Lillie.

I think you all know how much this first review means to me.

Speculative Fiction

2010-06-10T07:07:00.004-04:00

The cover art--called, I think The Curse-- of the latest issue of Electric Spec.

The following post by editor Betsy Dornbusch (aka Sex Scenes at Starbucks) is part of a blog tour to promote the quarterly. Something I'm very glad to do--especially since the issue also includes an interview with me about Dark and Disorderly!

Again, cut and paste proved impossible, so any typos are mine.

Editors spend a lot of time spouting off about what writers do wrong. For one, it's really easy to pick out what's wrong. It's tougher to see what's working and why. I think it's important to know how to do both. And, if I can be blunt: bitching about writer's wrongs are a fuckin' bummer. So without wasting a ton of words (I'd rather you spend your time reading Electric Spec!) I thought I'd point out why the stories in our latest issue made the cut.

First up is "Streetwise" by Phil Emory. This is a story we bought early in the year when we committed to going quarterly. I edited it, and I liked it even better upon second and third reading. Why did we choose it? The story takes the trope of cloning and mines the emotions around it. Emory bares his protag and lets him look ugly and pathetic, but he gains a sort of everyman nobility. He also uses setting and voice to enhance and strengthen his premise.

"A Cold Day in Crisis" by Matthew Sandborn Smith. What can I say? I love me some conspiracy-laden anti-hero-driven urban fantasy. What made it stand out is character, character, character though. The conspiracy is a subplot compared to the characters and their personalities and problems. As a bonus, they get problems they didn't even know they had. Very cleverly wrought, this one.

"Lee Harvey's Assistants" is by Mark D. West. To me, the first line sets it apart. It stages the premise and makes me want to read on: As it did every time, the crowd on the grassy knoll was milling about in the brilliant sunlight, two or three deep in spots, waiting for the motorcade to appear. See what West did there? With the first phrase he puts a twist on an iconic American event, with enough detail to remind those of us who've seen the footage where we are. More importantly to a speculative fiction reader or editor, the mere mention of time spurs hope that we might get to hitchhike the 4th dimension.

"Wings More than Wishes" by Steele Tyler Filipec is a steampunk tale, and, honestly, we don't see a great deal of steampunk. It uses the reliable old bane Religion to battle progress in a steampunk setting and puts the tale squarely on the shoulders of the guy with the most to ponder. The writing has elegance, the voice fits the scene, and Filipec uses details (again! I sense a trend...) to draw us into the world.

"Identity Theft" by Greg M. Hall is another story I edited. It's more a straight fantasy, though it has some modern edges like a curious con man and gender issues that never occurred to medieval kings and queens. By the third paragraph, we know our protag is up to his armpits in fusty magicians and an emperor who likes to swing an axe when in a foul mood. We guess early that the protag will have to solve a nasty problem or lose his head. Good stakes, ornery characters, and a sense of humor with this one drove it through the voting process.

These stories do one other thing: they grabbed us on the first page. In these days of 140 character fiction, I'm guessing you have about as much time as it takes for a YouTube video to load to grab and hold readers' attention.

Betsy's Bio:

Betsy Dornbusch splits her time between Boulder and Grand lake, Colorado. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online venues asuch as Sinister Tales, Big Pulp and Spinetingler. She has a novella out with Whiskey Creek Press, another forthcoming, and serves as an editor for Electric Spec. In her free time, she snowboards and pretends to be a soccer mom( nobody's buying the soccer mom bit though.)

The Tavernier Stones

2010-06-09T06:57:00.005-04:00

The cover of The Tavernier Stones by Stephen Parrish.

Subjective, of course, but as a cover, I would rate it as only "fair."Good colour, though.

However. There is much more to a book launch than just the cover. I've broken it down this way:

The Blurb.

When the well-preserved body of a seventeenth century mapmaker floats to the surface of a bog in northern Germany, a 57 carat ruby clutched in his fist, the grisly discovery ignites a global race to find the fabled Taveriner Stones.

Look at the the two main elements:

the bog body-- all those images of bog burials and sacrifices flash in our minds-- all the aura of secret rituals and ancient crimes.

the ruby--instantly reminds us of those stories of buried hoards discovered by accident by a farmer plowing, by children investigating a cave, the workman and the hidden cache found behind the walls of an old house during renovation-- and the secret hope we all have to discover lost treasure.

Treasure, mystery, danger, intrigue!

This I rate as excellent.

The Promotion.

Steve will give away a one carat diamond to the first person who can find an image of the one he's hidden somewhere on the web. Details of this contest here.

Whoa and damn! For my taste, this challenge beats out a Sony reader anytime.

Excellent, again. Now if someone named "Hope" wins the prize...

Title and Image.

A book title, of course, is important to grab a reader's attention. The Tavernier Stones title hints at all the things mentioned above; and Steve's author photo (see yesterday's post) fulfills a reader's expectation that an author look like someone who could write such a story. His bio will confirm it. Even better, the field jacket suggests Steve is a man who could find such treasure.

I rate both as good stuff.

In my private, secrit, book launch test, The Tavernier Stones scores 21 out of 25. Win!

Boggart

2010-06-08T05:49:00.004-04:00

My very first Guest Blogger is Stephen Parrish, author of just-released thriller/mystery, The Tavernier Stones.

Steve and I had a mild argument. He thinks no one cares what an author looks like. He's correct in that the author should be secondary to the story and that the point of blog flogging is to promote the novel, not the ego. However, today I've attached his photo to his post--simply because it is always nice to see who is talking to you.

Besides, I think his photo provides an excellent example of what constitutes a good author shot.

Besides, I like his face.

Note: After numerous tries to cut and paste Steve's post to this blog, I said bad words, gave up and typed it. Therefore, any typos are mine.

The Art of Language

Works of visual art frequently illustrate Bernita's blog, though it's devoted to the art of language. I can't help appreciate what surely is not a coincidence.

I grew up among artists who encouraged me to draw and paint; my room always smelled of turpentine and linseed oil and my pants were often streaked with charcoal dust. And since I write visually--I first see the scenes in my head and attempt to record them faithfully--it was only natural that I come up with an approach to writing that paid tribute to all the canvases I sacrificed.

First, I "scribble" the scene by brainstorming, by slappingwords and expressions down and trying to empty the vision from my head:

start with where she lived

then the train station at the end of her street

It was where you last saw her alive

somethnig about the dirtiness of the place, for contrast

cigarette butts, old newspapers

the train emerging from the fog

after a pregnant pause, you're in each other's arms

(this can go on for pages)

An advantage of scribbling is that I can ensure my purposes are comprehensively addressed; I vent everything that comes to mind. Another is that I get to fill up blank paper with little creative cost. After scribbling, I "sketch" the scene, placing elements in the right order, filling gaps:

you start with the street she lived on, how it wound around obstacles long since removed, how the remaining buildings seemed tired, seem to lean over the sidewalk. at the end of the street is the train station where you last saw her alive. the floor of the platform was covered with cigarette butts, old newspapers, and grime.

as the train approached you saw only its distant headlamp through the fog. when she stepped onto the platform the two of you as though waiting for enough joy to fill your eyes. finally the joy overflowed and you were in each other's arms. one last time, you felt her skin beneath your hands.

only time is inaccessible, never place. you can always go back to the place. you write to preserve moments in time.

I write only in lower case, and I use no indentation or quotation marks. Consequently the piece feels like a draft and I don't have to worry about how it sounds. If you're a perfectionist like me, this will spare you obsessive tooling. Finally, I "draw" the scene, I go final.

I keep a journal. I think everyone should: a journal is to language what a sketchbook is to art. The scribble-sketch-draw analogy has helped me fill quite a lot of empty paper.

But that's not what this post is really about.

When Bernita shares a painting on her blog she shares a window into a world the artist has created. Likewise when we write a scene we attempt to describe a world in a way the reader can grasp. The writer needs to provide just enough detail for the reader to draw the lines and paint the colors in her imagination. Some details the writer will insist on: the scar was on the left side of the bad guy's face. It was rain rather than crickets the lovers heard, or rather didn't hear.

Most of the details, however, the reader must decide for herself. I have little patience with writers who want to show me exactly what a character looks like, by inventing traits and dimensions, by scanning figures from head to toe. If you tell me the bad guy has a scar, I'll fill in the rest. Likewise, if you tell me the lovers don't even lnow it's raining, don't even notice they're getting wet, I can pretty well guess what's on their minds. A visual artist who skimps on detail risks failing to achieve his goal. A writer who is heavy on detail stands little chance of achieving it; the reader doesn't even make an attempt to engage.

When I paint, I fill my canvas with color. I leave no spot untouched. When I write, I provide as little information as I can get away with: less is more.

Still, that's not what this post is really about, either.

Anyone who has been moved by a great poem knows the art of language has as much to do with sound and rhythm as visual detail. With rhyme and alliteration. With contrast, the foundation of all beauty. When it comes time to draw, after you've scribbled and sketched, there should be one thought in mind; to push your work beyond what you've visualized; to take chances; to grapple with the fear that no one will understand you, no one will be moved by your words or will share your vision of light and shadow.

You start with the street she lived on, how it wound narrowly around obstacles long since leveled by bankruptcy and wood saw; how it shouldered stayed and acquitted buildings that retained most of their dignity; except now they seemed to cant forward slightly, like opposing rows of aging chess players.

You describe the train station where you last saw her alive. The paint was yellow with age and smoke and the sour smell of unclean men. It peeled in the damp air and fell to join the cigarette butts, the empty bottles, and the foot-trodden newspapers; litter that clothed the cement floor no better than the rags on the men who drank and dreamed there.

The first you saw of the train was its headlamp; floating ghost-like over the fog, then the engine broke from the mist and rumbled into the station where, here, the sun had burned the valley clean and the trunks of the Bruchweide were amber columns of light. When she stepped onto the platform the two of you stood apart at first and let the smile fill your eyes. Like spring-fed wells. Until the wells overflowed and you were in each other's arms.

The first time was outdoors, as all first times should be. You felt her flesh beneath your hands, soft, pliable, giving, welcoming. The pine needles against your back. Her voice, the rhythm of her chatter, a tonic, the day washed of its drabness. The smell of cut grass, of burning leaves, of moss and humus and primeval soil. A viseral sense of early and distant rain. It's only the time that's inaccessible, not the place, not even the person. You write to preserve moments in time. That's what art is for. You write to capture the love you felt before it broke something inside you. The volume set too high, yet never high enough. A timeline, a Cartesian grid, curved space, a forest of stars, darkness at night, and an abacus in the hands of a man gone mad.

That's what this post is about.

Of Scrolls and Scribes

2010-06-06T18:32:00.004-04:00

The latest scroll.

The design is based on the Oseberg ship burial.

As many of you known, scrolls are given by the Society for Creative Anachronism for meritous service; the scrolls themselves are created by volunteer members, in this case my daughter.

The runic legend on the ship reads thus in English:

Thorolfr inn Smithr Silent and steady

Your longship of service Rides high in the waves

Lapstraked with offices Riveted with modesty

Through winters of counsel And summers of action

Quilliam intrepid Dagmar, most kindly

Make you a fine gift Heart of a maiden

Born from the sky jewel Wed to the swan's path

Heralds your conquests Safeguards your sailings

Award of the Maiden's Heart, etc.

You can now download the first chapter (or prologue) from each and every novel released this launch month by Carina Press, including Dark and Disorderly.

And as a relief from the my book-me-me-my book blog flogs I've inflicted on you recently, tomorrow fiendishly clever Steven Parrish will be my guest blogger, discussing "The Art of Language."

Steve is the author of the just-released thriller/mystery The Tavernier Stones from Midnight Ink ( a Llewellyn Publications imprint).

P.S. You know you have been on the internet too long when, on your phone, you try to punch in the dash for the number you are calling.

Exclamation Station

2010-06-04T07:47:00.003-04:00

Femme Assise,

Pablo Picasso,

ink on paper, 1938.

Probably what I look like this morning as I settle my wee behind in this derelict office chair. I've been massaging my chin to remove the imprint of vbn on it after the news about Dark and Disorderly being picked as one of the five first from Carina Press to go audio .

This morning I received a charming email from a narrator at Audible.com requesting my assistance in the event he runs into difficulties with Gaelic expressions used in D&D.

One acquires the impression from various blogs over the years that once an author signs a contract and negotiates a copy edit, they are relegated to file-and-forget.

I have not found that to be the case.

I am technologically inept. It is an irony. Since a web page with all those neat links for samples and free stuff that authors have will not be available until early summer, and I would like to give you a taste of the final product, I thought I might post portions of the first chapter here on the blog.

I was standing there naked when a dead man sauntered into my bathroom.

That was the first frightening thing. I knew he was dead. I'd seen him buried beneath the cold clay of the old cemetery. His gravestone was due to be delivered within the week.

He sauntered. He didn't shamble.

That was the second frightening thing, because I always thought such creatures did. Stumble and stagger, that is.

I emitted an "Eeep"--like a paralized parakeet--and skittered backward until the shelves holding soaps and pretty bottles bit into my bare behind.

"Nathan!" I gasped. I shouldn't have. His name stopped the slow, blind swing of the sleek blond head and gave the viscous brown eyes focus. On me.

He curled back his sulky lips and leered.

That was the third frightening thing.

The Pixie Warrior

2010-06-01T20:43:00.007-04:00

The cover of Pixie Warrior, a bewitching story by Rachael de Vienne from Drollerie Press. She is also, with collaborator B.W. Schutz, the author of a non-fiction work of serious and painstaking scholarship, Nelson Barbour: The Millennium's Forgotten Prophet.

Those of you who frequented Miss Snark's blog during those glory days may remember her better as Sha'el, Princess of Pixies, who often posted highly entertaining comments from Bill E. Goat.

She still blogs at Who Said Pixies Were Rational Creatures? If you take the time to read her archives, you will be enchanted. She often posts pictures of fantasy artists's work, historical photographs of street scenes and people, and old post cards, some naughty, always nice.

And the particular reason I mention this is that the Pixie Warrior has weighed in on my side in the promotional war and invited me to guest blog on her site today.

Out of the blue she emailed me. Once more, the numinous unites with the mundane.

LATE BREAKING NEWS!

Here I go with the exclamation marks again!

After lurching off to a doctor's appointment, then to physio, I staggered back just in time to hook up for a Live Meeting with Carina--and learned that Dark and Disorderly will be one of the first five Carina Press books to be made into an audio book by Audible.com. in July!

!! and !!!

ElectricSpec!

2010-06-01T10:38:00.003-04:00

Another graveyard photograph on which I based these lines for Dark and Disorderly:

The lots in this part of the cemetery ignored the tidy rectangles in the newer section on the flat field below the hill. So I found myself muttering "sorry" under my breath as, by necessity, I ducked under bushes and trod on resting places and sunken slabs to take a quick catelogue of names as I spiraled the pit...

Thank you so much, those of you who took the time, which is always in short--sometimes desperately short--supply, to visit the Carina Press blog and/or leave supportive comments on my debut posts as a Carina author!

And the latest issue of ElectricSpec, that e-magazine of "shockingly good works of science, fiction, fantasy and the macabre,"contains an interview with me by editor Betsy Dornbusch, aka, Sex Scenes at Starbucks. My very first interview as a soon-to-be-published-for realz-novelist!

~beams at Betsy~

For those of you who might be interested in submitting something to ElectricSpec, the editors's blog with news and clues may be found here.

The Ello Basket of Goodies:

Besides a large package of large and individually wrapped Choco-Pies, Ello sent me a package of Shin Ramyun gourmet spicy noodle soup and one of Sapporo Ichiban soup.

And the squid. Wild squid. Shredded into ivory, noodle-like strips.Smells of fish, lobster, shrimp, of the sea. Chewy. Tastes a bit like smoked herring, but milder. A handful makes a nice snack.

And that's the lot, and it was lovely.

Blog Flog II

2010-05-30T00:01:00.005-04:00

As part of the Carina Press promotion, each day Carina features a launch author on the Carina blog, and, as well, Carina posts fun facts and favourite lines from each book on Facebook and Twitter. Comments are contest entries for free books.

Today I am blogging at Carina's blog about Dark and Disorderly. I have three posts, up at morning, noon and night, that include an excerpt and some context, setting and backstory.

Since I am a total techidiot, my darling Kas, ie. K.S. Augustin--whose science fiction romance, In Enemy Hands, will be released June 7th-- uploaded the requisite pictures for me. Essays about her novel were posted on the Carina blog back on May 2.

I hope you will find time to drop by.

D&D is up on Amazon for pre-order at $6.79 in Kindle edition but without the cover and other stuff for the moment. I suspect there are Amazon things for me to learn about!

Memorial Day:

Did the rifles fire o'er you when they lowered you down?

-Eric Bogle.

You all know how I feel about the military.

This Memorial Day I want to mention 4TROOPS, a new quartet, one girl and three guys, all ex-military, who perform in support of military charities. They have that rare, pure blend of sound that makes one want to weep.

Keeping Up:

A Hidden Magic, an urban fantasy by Angie (Angela Benedetti.) Visit Angie for links to Torquere and to read an excerpt.

One thing that delights me in the excerpt is Angie's meld of magic and the mundane. "Cold iron" is a specific against witchery--so why not have it in the form of crow bars and wrenches? This sort of detail is true magic realism. And she has a gang of goblins!

More from the Ello Basket:

Muscat Gummy Candy. Heart-shaped, translucent green. Delicate true taste.

Gummy yummy. Addictive. Gone.

Physio:

At physio Friday I thought the therapist was a little too knowledgeable about medieval torture techniques. The reference to the rack when he strapped me to the traction machine didn't bother me. "The rack" must be a common comparison/cliche in his business. I was good with that. But when he added, "If you're not taller after this session we'll have to bring in the horses..."

And a BTW:

This is my 1,000 post.

WARNING!

2010-05-28T00:08:00.004-04:00

One of the photographs taken in a local cemetery which I drew on for a scene in Dark and Disorderly.

[personal photo]

I mentioned Wednesday Stacia's new book Unholy Ghosts is just released to excellent reviews.

After a controversy erupted in the comment trail following a review on Dear Author, over the fact that Stacia warned readers that the heroine is a drug addict, DA actually instituted an opinion poll to gage reader's opinions about the need/necessity of an author delivering such and similar warnings about the content of their novels.

Some readers approved of the idea; others thought authors should keep their mouths shut. Both views often articulated the same reason: reader's hard-earned money.

It all struck me as rather funny--considering that book blurbs generally go out of their way to entice readers with hints and claims that a book's content and characters are different and exciting and dangerous to one's morals.

And it all gave me furiously to think.

Thoughts both honest--and promotional.

No author wants to induce wall-banging because s/he has touched on a topic that offends a reader; and in some quarters there is thought to be a certain obligation toward readers, a responsibility known quaintly--and perhaps paternalistically-- as "a duty of care."

On the other hand, controversy does sell books.

Personally, whenever one of those standard TV announcements are made that "the following program contains scenes of violence (or as one protect-the-public speaker pronounced it, vi-lence) and coarse language..." I reach for my popcorn.

So I've been trying to assess if anything in Dark and Disorderly might qualify for any type of ominous warning.

Does contain scenes of vi-lence. But, ho-hum, any book that includes bad people--dead or alive--gunning for good people does contain rough stuff. Or it should.

I wonder a little about the mutilation scene. And there is a righteous killing...but he deserved it. Really. And Lillie doesn't go into oh, oh, anguished conscience stuff...that might disturb some people. Still, I don't think there is anything outre.

Doesn't contain scenes of explicit sex--mouth-to-mouth, body-to-body contact, yes--but not sex. No fuss can be raised there.

More apt to be a disappointed fuss because the book doesn't contain explicit sex scenes, come to think of it. Can't help that. Not logical in the circumstances. Maybe later.

I can't come up with anything in particular to justify a WARNING! banner on D&D. A good thing. I am not the sort to enjoy nasty e-mails.

How about you? Do you have reservations about possible reactions to certain elements in your work? Have you ever been castigated for what you've written?

Blogging the Flog

2010-05-26T07:19:00.003-04:00

My New Puppy,
K.Witkowski (1860-1910)
oil on canvas.

It used to be easy to keep up.

However, some of them:

Anne Frasier's agent just sold her memoir, The Orchard, in a very nice deal on pre-empt. I particularly like that "very nice deal" and the pre-empt. So delightfully understated.
Also, I particularly like to crow I told you so!

Charles Gramlich's collection of sword-and-sorcery/heroic fantasy tales, Bitter Steel, is just out.
I fully expect Charles's book will come to be regarded as a classic in the revitalization of the genre.
I admire good titles--the essence of a novel distilled and concentrated in so few words--and I think Bitter Steel is a great one!

Stewart Sternberg's scary zombie novel, The Ravening, is now available.
I have issues with Stewart though; he thinks the ghost story is dead. I feel vaguely slighted. Hummph...

And Stacia Kane's Unholy Ghosts, first of her second series, has just been released with to-die-for reviews. Hummph, again.

Me? Yesterday, I made a daring effort to promote Dark and Disorderly. I pinned a copy of my cover on the bulletin board at the local supermarket...

Another sweet thing from sweet thing Ello's gift basket: Sold under a silly name--"Pocky"-- which is entirely misleading.
Biscuit sticks about six inches long covered with strawberry cream. About an inch uncovered so one's fingers don't get sticky as you munch. A dainty treat to add to an afternoon tea on a nice, pink-flowered china dish...
Or, you can stuff three or four in your mouth all at once until you look like a Star Wars creature in desperate need of an orthodontist like I'm doing right now...

Distractions

2010-05-24T09:03:00.003-04:00

Among the swag Ello sent me in her gift box were packages of biscuit-and-chocolate goodies.

I don't have to describe chocolate to writers, do I?

Choco Boy were little finger treats as depicted on the package. Kancho were tiny biscuits the size of a quarter,also as illustrated, filled with chocolate.

Notice the verb.

Finally, I understand why, near to or upon publication, some of my blog friends tend to partly disappear from blogland.

It's the promo. Opportunities come at you from all directions. I wrestled with one overnight -- a mere paragraph -- but the opportunity to reach a lot of readers. This morning my email included another offer for a guest blog post. Some writers do a blog tour. I haven't even begun to think about that possibility.

It's wonderful, and scary, and time-consuming.

My doctor has me in physio in an attempt to ward off surgery. Seems there's a small tear in a disk in my lower back. Hopefully it will heal itself and the physio will reduce the bulging disk and the subsequent pressure on the nerves as well. Certainly, things have improved and I'm much more mobile. I have some neat exercises to do at home too.

Of Widgets and Stuff

2010-05-20T20:37:00.006-04:00

Remember when widget meant some hypothetical gadget or, more often, just a doohickey gizmo or a whatsis thingy?

Do check out my Carina doodad above this post!

It allows Carina to rotate titles, authors and excerpts with an automatic refresh and update, so readers can sample chapters and bios and stuff within the widget!

The widget is so avant-cool! Boggles my mind.

Something else boggles my mind.

Seems there continues to be in some quarters a confusion about the nature of Carina Press-- probably arising from the fact that Harlequin Enterprises announced their intention to launch a publishing service in association with Author Solutions within a week or two of announcing the launch of their new e-pub imprint, Carina Press.

Dell Art, as it came to be called, is pay-to-publish venture, a vanity press. Carina Press is most emphatically not.

And I hopetogeesus none of you think I am paying to have Dark and Disorderly published. The idea is, frankly, mortifying.

* * * * * *

Yesterday, Francis, my grinning Parcel Man, delivered to my door a box from Ello.

If you remember, I won, in her recent contest, Ello's basket of oriental treats, which promised to include such delicacies as dried squid and Monaka (two items I lusted after in particular.)

Ever since I read a passing reference to bean paste in some book or t'other I've wanted to try it. And the squid! Wouldn't you? Though this town of mine sometimes imitates Alice's Restaurant, such products for taste exploration are unavailable.

And I promised to report my sensations about each item, because, to me, everything would be new and adventuresome and exotic.

First, the Monaka - bean cake.

A package of eight round cakes of sweet red bean paste between thin rice wafers imprinted with a chrysanthemum design, individually wrapped in translucent waxed paper. The wafers taste like ice cream cone but with a more delicate flavor. The bean filling is gummy but yummy. A nice, medium sweetness. For those who care, 100 calories per cookie.

There are two left...

Under Heaven--A Review

2010-05-19T06:47:00.005-04:00

The cover of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, published by Viking Canada (the Penguin Group) 2010, 567 pages, ISBN 978-0-670-06809-8.

The novel is a gift from my daughter.

Under Heaven is a historical fantasy set in the Tang Dynasty of eighth-century China.

Remember the Tang horses? Their power and grace caught in clay? They are there. The distant thunder of their galloping hooves drives the novel's plot like the pounding beat of a racing heart.

Kay's occasional use of parentheses annoys me and when I begin one of his books, for the first few pages, the writer in me makes a few mental editorial criticisms--then I become lost in the sheer and simple beauty of his style and the adventure of his themes.

For my taste, Kay is one of the best living fantasy writers. Since he has won multiple awards, it seems my taste is shared.

As always, Kay's main characters have courage, both physical and moral. They have honour and decency; and no named character, however brief and minor on the pages, is insignificant to the total story.That is not to say his people lack human frailties or are one dimensional. They are not. But for this reason alone, I read Kay with a kind of relief. His characters reassure me.

In Under Heaven, Kay explores the concept of human choice. Specifically how a decision made by any person, whether they be a person of obvious influence or a peasant, whether the decision is made consciously or merely as a result of something in their nature -- to speak out or not, to take this path and not that one-- alters the future irrevocably, for all.

Choice is a dilemma of the human condition, whether we are the sort to perceive future consequences or the kind that examines them only in retrospect.

Inevitably, one of Kay's characters is always faced with some problem which often bedevils me personally. For example, that by the time I have learned the arbitrary rules of some sub-set of society-- the rules will have changed.

To illustrate:

In that moment, Tai arrived at a decision. It seemed obvious enough, and it had the virtue of simplicity. He'd only needed to grasp something: that he would never be subtle enough to match those waiting for him. He didn't have time to know enough, or to gain awareness of relationships, at the level that would let him move with these men and women to their music. He wouldn't even hear the notes they heard...play the game of words spoken and unspoken with the court and the higher civil servants and even some of the govenors, in and around the Ta-Ming Palace and the emperor."

Another small and intimately coincidental thing: His novel begins with ghosts.

The ghosts were outside in all seasons, moonlight nights and dark, as soon as the sun went down.

He knew some of their voices now, the angry ones and the lost ones, and those in whose thin, stretched crying there was only pain.

As a matter of honour and filial duty, the protagonist Tai has spent the last two years in a remote valley of the Empire burying the bones of the countless dead, of soldiers, Barbarian and Empire alike.

And, of course, this simple act of respect has enormous consequences.

My Cat Puked Up A Hairball

2010-05-17T10:14:00.003-04:00

The photo I should have posted with Matutinal Maunderings last May 9.

I could also have titled this post as What I Did On My Weekend. In other words, a tedious personal account of activities that few will find worthy of even the most cursory interest.

But. I has laptop!

Of course, as I tentively poke at various icons I wonder if this sleek, black machine will turn me into vapour and draw me in like mist to its sleek, secret innards; and I will become a ghost in the machine, to the wonder of the neighbourhood and the confusion of my family... Anything so sleek and black and proficient is dangerous.

My daughter brought it for me.

She also brought my son-in-law avec a chainsaw and he proceeded to sunburn and sawdust himself removing three problem trees.

I could expand on why they were problem trees but I will spare you that.

And they removed from my office--by clever application of the laws of spacial physics and brute strength--a six-foot long, five-foot high, sonofabitchheavy, oak card file cabinet.

I has space!

Of course, she also brought my tiny grandaughter with the dark blue eyes and the Gainsborough curls and the wee warm hands--who already knows that if she says "Daddy" in a sweet and melting voice, he will move the moon for her. We watched Daddy work mightily, she and I, and then we sat together in the big recliner and ate popcorn.

Best of all, when I woke at 1:00 A.M. my daughter appeared and we talked in our dressing gowns through the dark hours about writing and books, and the past and the future.

I has love.

The Editor

2010-05-14T07:11:00.005-04:00

The Ice Cone, Montmorency Falls,

Robert Todd, c. 1845,

oil on canvas,

National Gallery of Canada.

Just for the record, my editor for Dark and Disorderly, was Michael A. Banks, the internet guru and historian. His website is here.

His latest of, oh, twenty-eight books or so, On the Way to the Web, may be found here.

And he just happens to be one of those who can claim to be a New York Times best selling author.

Just a bit intimidating for a first time author like me, no?

He began his edits by emailing that my story had stuck in his mind. A comment which is one of the best--and the most reassuring statements in the circumstances--a slightly terrified writer could ask for.

The ravening howls of the racing wolf pack, red tongues lolling, great claws churning the snow, which seemed poised to leap into my sleigh of prose-- to slash and kill and dismember-- suddenly receeded in the distance.

And so it was. No horror stories from me.

For while he pointed out, for example, that my world-building was scant and reminded me to employ more senses in scenes, he paired those criticisms with casual references to lines he enjoyed.

And, believe me, I was totally grateful to have such omissions and any specific errors caught and highlighted by a professional eye.

Thank you, Michael. So. Much.

DARK AND DISORDERLY

2010-05-11T07:14:00.004-04:00

Some of you have already seen this on FB, but I can't wait until tomorrow to blog post it here.

My cover for DARK AND DISORDERLY.

And here's the blurb!

"I was standing there naked when my dead husband walked into my bathroom…

Lillie St. Claire is a Talent, one of the rare few who can permanently dispatch the spirits of the dead that walk the earth. Her skills are in demand in a haunted country, where a plague of ghosts is becoming a civic nuisance.

Those skills bring her into conflict with frightened citizens who view Talents as near-demons. Her husband has come to see her as a Freak; so when Nathan dies after a car crash, she is relieved to be free of his increasingly vicious presence. Lillie expects to be haunted by Nathan’s ghost, but not to become Suspect #1 for her husband’s murder and reanimation.

But what’s most surprising of all is the growing attraction between her and psi-crime detective John Thresher. He thinks that Lillie killed Nathan—and Nathan must agree, because his zombie is seeking revenge. Now she and Thresher must work together to solve her husband’s murder—before his corpse kills her…"

Really, yesterday, in spite of sciatica ( which is improving, btw) if I'd gone out doors, they would have had to shoot me to stop me from bouncing.

Edit to Add: My cover is by Frauke of Croco Designs. As I said in comments below, they captured Lillie exactly as I imagined her, right down to the steady level gaze!

Matutinal Maunderings

2010-05-09T10:20:00.005-04:00

More of my daughter's scroll work.

Based on incipit pages from the Book of Durrow, a 7th. century MS.

Cleo, my German shepherd, woke me early Saturday morning with gentle nudges of her cold nose on my arm.

It was one of those mornings when a translucent veil of mist shrouds my dim, green garden with magic.

A morning when one might hear a faint cascade of song, a whisper, faint as the scent of lilac from out the blossom-laden air.

When one wonders if one should put down the coffee cup on the sunroom steps, go down the flagstone walk to lay a palm against the gray bark of an old red maple, run fingers around the millstone than leans against it and bend and turn a certain stone on the top of the low stone wall three times, one wonders then if one might see a portal shimmer in the gentle air...

Calvin, my almost-corgi, trotted over, lifted his leg and destroyed the illusion and my fancies.

Have you ever felt compelled by a longing? To seek out some secret place, some wild place, away from people and buildings and streets, to go there and linger and wait for something otherworld to reveal itself? Have you ever found a place of magic?

I realize I don't like zombies. I wonder why I have one, full and frontal, in Dark and Disorderly. Perhaps it's just the name/word - staled by commerce - I don't like, or the fact I feel it should apply only to the undead from Caribbean graves.

I like the term revenant. Draugr, from Norse myth, has a nice ring. Repossessed and Undead are acceptable. But when one wants instant reader understanding, one must say zombie. Grump.

I've noticed that some commentators on CNN have suddenly introduced "awe" into Pakistan and Taliban, it's now Pakistahn and Talibahn.

Yes, perforce I've watched too much TV lately; and yes, I think it sounds phony as hell.

I hate this keyboard. My fingers retain a physical memory of my old one, so I am constantly kitming the wrong keys. Backspace hell.

Other News

2010-05-07T02:21:00.007-04:00

One of over 300 photographs from the 1893 World's Fair, known also as the Columbian Exposition, from a heavy, tatty book I rescued years ago, don't know what to do with, and am about to consign to the attic.

This photograph is of "Kalihl Nasair, an Arab from Deir-el-Kammer in Syria. He is a grandee in his native village and conducts affairs with a high hand. This man has a peculiarily fascinating face, the average scowl of his race being absent. He is well aware of his good looks and is never so pleased when he can promenade the Midway, knowing he is admired..."

The guy is actually taller than he appears. My scanner shortened him by at least a foot.

The Wikipedia article gives fair coverage of the Chicago event.

Whee!:

Ello held a contest for a basket of Asian treats (including dried squid and Monako cookies) and an Amazon gift card.

Carrie Harris and I won it!

Visit Ello to see the goodies. I will try a different one each day and give a comsumer report here on the blog.

Ello also posted an interview with R.L.LaFevers - author of the Theodosia books - conducted by her daughter Summer. It's the best interview I've ever read. Period.

Good writerly stuff:

See Jim Butcher's blog.

Fashion Trend?:

Have noticed many women newscasters are wearing elaborate pectoral necklaces.

Hither, Thither and Slither

2010-05-05T08:21:00.003-04:00

View of Murano,

Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768)

oil on canvas.

Murano, the island of glass.

Writerly Tips:

See Sean Ferrell's beautiful essay, On falling in love again, for the first time, about not deleting ooparts (out-of-place artifacts) you may find in revision of your MS.

And Nathan Bransford's post yesterday on the value of a Series Bible. No need to make your brown eyes blue.

Hitting a Nerve:

I am pleased to report improvement -- in spite of Saturday's MRI from Hell. Suitably drugged up, yesterday I managed to walk to the corner store and back, a total distance of about two blocks.

Walk is, of course, a gross exaggeration, I shuffled and drunk-lurched and probably attracted a few disapproving stares. ( Has Widow Harris been hitting the bottle? I never would have thought! And at this time of day? Disgusting!)

The need for pain-killers has also marginally improved. I will be glad to get my mind back.

A Comparison Some May Find Offensive:

Recently I've wondered if landing a book contract may be compared to graduating from high school and entering college: new scene, new friends, new standards...

The Last Corny Joke:

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver's license.

First, of course, he had to take an eye test.

The bored optician showed him a card with the letters

C Z W I Z N O S T A C Z

"Can you read this?" he inquired.

"Read it?" the Pole replied. "I know the guy!"

A Writer's Most Valuable Asset

2010-05-03T08:19:00.003-04:00

Boy with Pomegranates,
Pieter de Hooch, c.1632-1681,
oil on canvas.

Empathy.
The ability to put one's self in another's shoes, whether those shoes are Manolos Blahniks or Ho Che Min sandals.
Wikipedia provides several definitions of this affective quality.They all serve to amplify the concept.
I like this one:
William Ickes: A complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others...
I didn't see the following when I hastily scanned the topic this morning to double-check the quote - it may be there - but it also struck me as pertinent: the ability to imagine one's self as another person is a sophisticated imaginative process.
I consider empathy the most important tool in our toolbox.
Without empathy how can we expand our own emotions and experience to write dimensional characters?
With empathy, a small moment of private humiliation or an instant of rage can provide the key to creating a realistic victim or killer.
Probably the condition is so natural to a writer, we don't even think to name it, but empathy is responsible for our capacity to create a murderer without the necessity of offing an annoying neighbour.

******
Am slowly learning my way around Face Book. At first it was more than Greek to me - it was ancient Sumerian.
It's vastly different from blogging in some ways. While my blog is a tiny island in the blogger sea, I am the Miranda of it.
On Face Book, for all the walls and settings, I feel like those tiny swimmy things that whales filter through their corset stays.
On Face Book I am but krill.

******
Another Silly Joke:

A wife was making a breakfast of fried eggs for her husband.
Suddenly, her husband burst into the kitchen.
'Careful,' he said, 'CAREFUL! Put in some more butter! Oh my gosh! You're cooking too many at once. TOO MANY! Turn them! TURN THEM NOW! We need more butter. Oh my gosh! WHERE are we going to get MORE BUTTER? They're going to STICK! Careful. CAREFUL! I said be CAREFUL! You NEVER listen to me when you're cooking! Never! Turn them! Hurry up! Are you CRAZY? Have you LOST your mind? Don't forget to salt them. You know you always forget to salt them Use the! salt. USE THE SALT! THE SALT!'
The wife stared at him.'What in the world is wrong with you? You think I don't know how to fry a couple of eggs?'
The husband calmly replied, 'I just wanted to show you what it feels like when I'm driving.'

Women of Flowers

2010-04-30T06:48:00.003-04:00

Illustration of an orchid by Margaret Mee.

One of the 150 floral paintings and botanical prints in Women of Flowers: A Tribute to Victorian Women Illustrators by Jack Kramer.

Published by Welcome Books, New York.

First published in 1996, the book won the Garden Writers of America's Award of Excellence.

The book celebrates the contribution to the art and science of botanical illustration by women who received little or no recognition during their lifetime for their exquisite work.

It's an exquisite book.

******

I was waiting for my cover to give you a T'da! post on the new title for the Lillie St. Claire adventures - but since the release schedule ( oh, oh, my book, my name!) is out on the Carina Blog, there seems little point in restraint. Only my sense of something or other...fitness, maybe?...held me back anyway.

Editor Guy liked A Malignity of Ghosts. The production team emphatically did not!

Sooo...the new title is DARK AND DISORDERLY.

I like it.

******

During the Countdown to Carina, each day an author will blog anecdotes about his/her book - which I think is a terrific way of introducing readers to both the author and the imprint.

First one up is Kelly Lynn Para. Her Carina title is Criminal Instinct, a romantic suspense.

******

On some blog or other, someone asked what boys want to read these days.

Earlier generations had the Hardy Boys detective-type mysteries and Tom Swift for SF and countless others. Girls had Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Ginny Gordon, etc., Sweet Valley High and more.

Is there a similar mystery/science fiction series out there for boys, one not as complicated as Harry Potter?

If not, why not?

******

Another Really Bad Joke:

A Mother Superior called all the nuns together and said: "I must tell you all something. We have a case of gonorrhea in the convent"

"Thank God," said an elderly nun at the back. "I'm so tired of chardonay."

Important Trivia

2010-04-28T05:59:00.004-04:00

The lovely cover of Anne Frasier's novel Bad Karma - just re-issued by Samhain Publishing - that won the Daphne du Maurier Award.

It's easy enough to find reasons to admire an author one encounters on the net, Anne Frasier is the best-selling author of nineteen novels. Pale Immortal (an Onyx Book, a Penguin Group imprint) ranks as one of my favourite titles for a paranormal.

Admire for their talent, yes. It's not as easy to find a famous author that, as a person, one likes.

I like Anne.

For trivial reasons: such as she's a Libra like me, and a widow. And for less trivial reasons as well. I like her courage and her painful honesty.

******

Was disappointed yesterday. A Yahoo headline announced the discovery of the Fabled Giant Palouse Earthworm.

Oh. Oh. Fabled. Giant. Worm. Oh. Oh. Oh. Fabled. Giant.

I expected something Fortean.

Turns out an adult is only 12 inches long.

******

Doubt demons can shunt praise aside like an out-of-service train.

When Editor Guy emailed me to say he's been at a writer's conference and mentioned my book as a good example to several urban fantasy/magic realism writers, I had a major doubt demon episode.

My first thought was probably as a good example of what-not-to-do....

Which wasn't fair to Editor Guy. Such thoughts are not healthy. I hope it's the oxycodone.

******

Corny joke for Wednesday:

Fifty-one years ago, Herman James, a North Carolina mountain man, was drafted by the Army.

One his first day of basic training, the Army issued him a comb.

That afternoon, the Army barber sheared off his hair.

On his second day, the Army issued Herman a toothbrush.

That afternoon, the Army dentist yanked seven of Herman's teeth.

On the third day, the Army issued him a jock strap.

The Army has been looking for Herman for 51 years.

A Fallen Woman

2010-04-26T02:09:00.005-04:00

A Landscape attributed to Paul Cezanne.

At times I find him wonderfully medieval; other times, decidedly renaissance.

And always good.

I'm a fallen woman.

"Some falls, some's pushed, and some lays down all by themselves, " observed the madame of a London bordello about her girls. (The quote is from a novel about the Boer War with a title I can't remember, by an author whose name similarily escapes me.)

This weekend I had my eldest infant set me up on Facebook.

I friend you, you friend me,

We're a funny family...

has been oodling through my head ever since.

So many charming old blog friends. So many new and fascinating people. I'm in serious danger of forgetting about whoring my book - which, after all, was the initial and immoral impetus behind signing up. It's not easy being a reluctant trollop.

Finished my author's bio. Have always preferred the term writer as the word best at describing my coffee-swilling activities at the keyboard. However, the conventional advice is that writer is too democratic, and that author is the appropriate and proper term if one has a book to flog.

Corny Joke for Monday:

One day a man came home to be greeted at the door by his wife dressed in a sexy nighty.

"Tie me up," she purred, "And do anything you want..."

So he tied her up and went golfing."

BDSM fail.

Bouncing Off the Walls

2010-04-23T07:14:00.004-04:00

Bracelet with a Scarab Clasp.
Gold and semi-precious stones.
18th dynasty, reign of Tutankhamun,
Thebes, Valley of the Kings.

Found in the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Treasury in a box in the shape of a cartouche. The scarab is attached to a flexible band of seven panels.

While attending the Toronto King Tut exhibition, my daughter bought me this replica bookmark in brass.

In truth, I would be bouncing off the walls if it were physically possible!

My urban fantasy has a new title - which I like better and better and better the more I see it. The book will be promoted as paranormal suspense.

I'll post the new title as soon as I have a final cover.

The production team were torn between two possible covers and asked Editor Guy and me for our opinions. I am delighted with the representation of Lillie, figure placement and the background of both.

More than that, Carina sent me a schedule for the ramp-up for launch in June. Everyone at Carina has/have been working like indentured demons but they manage somehow to keep their authors up to date.

!! and !!!

I am HUA and hot damn and giggling with excitement !

* * *

You might like to drop by at Stacia Kane's blog and read her excellent and impassioned post on bullying, both in schools and on the internet.

After reading again Steven King's struggle after his accident in On Writing, I'm ashamed to have bleated about my sciatica/pinched nerve problems here on the blog.

Since mother is perforce reclusive at present, my daughter and I quietly celebrated the arrival of my Carina/Harlequin contract at the kitchen table with a bowl of big red strawberries, a bottle of cheap champagne (but in my best flutes), a shrimp ring and a Tuscany dip for soft buns.

What is your favourite form of milestone celebration?

Addendum: Forgot to mention: This is the 4th anniversary of Evil Editor's blog, EE being a hilariously worthy and valuable successor to our beloved Miss Snark.
To celebrate, go here.

Of Stopcocks and Such

2010-04-21T09:38:00.004-04:00

The "bonnet" of an 8-day walnut case clock
by Benjamin Chandlee of Nottingham, PA,
circa 1770.

Last summer, in need of a new one for my rain barrel and confused by the rows and rows of bins of plumbing stuff at my local hardware store, I inquired, in all innocence, about a "stopcock."
The clerk smirked at me.
It seems this standard item is now more modestly named a "gate valve."

Perhaps this post should have been titled On Being An Anachronism.
Because it doesn't stop with occasional maladroit language.
I have a tea wagon. Worse, I've used it - though rarely. And charger plates and linen napkins, and a hand-crank meat grinder that I still clamp to the kitchen table to mince stuff.
Perhaps I shouldn't reveal these mild facts. They may create the impression that as a writer I am irrelevant to our quick-time culture with its swift cascade of technological advances, of texting and iPads and twitter - which next year may be dismissed as "so last year."
Yet I sell to e-publishers.

I have been asked for a brief bio. It appears that - barring any technological melt-down/act of God - my paranormal romance/urban fantasy is scheduled to be released in digital format by Carina Press in the third or fourth week of June.

Shedding and Shredding

2010-04-18T09:16:00.006-04:00

A samurai suit of armor, containing 4,500 small steel scales, covered with 265 yards of silk braid.

To me, Japanese art is visually either complicated, even crowded, or achingly pure and subtle as in the contrast between a samurai's suit of armor and his sword.

My daughter stole this from someone's FB and sent it on.

Hello, welcome to the Psychiatric Hotline:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press one, repeatedly.

If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.

If you have multiple personalities, press 3,4, and 5.

If you are paranoid delusional, we know who you are . Just stay on the line so we can trace your call...

Speaking of paranoia...I've been shredding print-outs of early drafts. Now, the chances of someone in the recycle chain lifting pages of my novel and publishing them on Lulu are statistically about the same as my winning the Giller. I know that. Just the same, I spent part of the weekend shoving paper into the maw of my shredder. When in operation, the machine sounds like a chainsaw...

Discovered something about reverse volume. Paper is like maple syrup, shredded paper is like maple sap. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make syrup.

Shredded paper occupies about 40 times the space the original stack of sheets did.

Do you have a secret paranoia? Confess.

Discovered something else: one can successfully vacuum layers of dog hair while sitting on the floor - a position made necessary by sciatica and possible by a shop-vac. Long ago I discovered the genteel suckage offered by most vacuums was insufficient. One could call this method bun-walking.

Sylvia has the most cunning device on her Can't Backspace blog, whereby comments are rendered in a variety of elegant scripts, and thereby making even pedestrian comments like mine look impressive.

Flower Fairies and Copy Edits

2010-04-16T06:10:00.004-04:00

A spring card from my daughter.

The Flower Fairies were the the creation of illustrator Cicely Mary Barker. In addition to their gentle magic and enduring charm, her drawings are noted for their botanical accuracy.

I believe the dainty daffodils depicted here are of the type called "poet's narcissus."

Years ago on a ramble this daughter and I discovered flowers struggling against scrub and litter and stone near a tumbled and overgrown foundation on a long abandoned farm. We rescued a few bulbs and they have flourished in my garden ever since.

Each of my girls has a flower as part of their name -- and so each has their own flower fairy.

* * *

After a day of (the following is NOT a link)#%%&##!!!&***&@@$$%###@!!!@ and QUERTY -- all due to my technical incompetence and/or my computer's malicious habit of hiding files in obscure places, lying about their location and accessibility and then refusing to share the results correctly, I finished and sent off my copy edits.

Many edits revolved around punctuation, particularly commas -- my inconsistency in use or my deviation from house style.

She caught a mis-spelling that had evaded the eagle eyes of both my editor and me (mantel/mantle), an improper choice between discrete/discreet, and an instance where I had lost the final "e" in St. Claire.

Corrupted and imprinted by early memorization of lines from Scott's The Lady of the Lake (And faint from further distance borne...) I also have the bad habit of using further in place of farther.

About our only disagreement involved hyphens. I dislike the modern style of smashingwordstogether. For instance, cooperate in place of co-operate gives me actual pain.

While I acceded to many hyphen removals (gladly in many cases, because at heart I really don't like hyphens all that much) I drew the line at hyphen-loss in some words on the basis of reader recognition. Without a hyphen, a reader might absorb an entirely different word than the one intended, or suspect a typo, or think I was sticking them with some obscure new term. For example, what do you see skimming along past the word megadryers?

Annoying readers by making them stop and parse a word is Not A Good Thing.

But I am going to have to speak to Lillie about her prefix habit so to avoid this problem in the future. However, the fact is, without a hyphen, some words just look silly.

Except for my technical problems, I found this stage easy and painless also; and the hard-working copy editor, bless her heart, told Editor Guy she enjoyed the story and hopes to see a sequel.

Cover Art

2010-04-14T07:21:00.003-04:00

Lady of the Lange Lijsen,

James McNeill Whistler,

1864.

Below are my answers to some of the questions from the Carina Press cover art fact sheet. It was an interesting exercise to try to put oneself in the place of a cover artist and describe story elements appropriate to a cover.

Genre: urban fantasy/magic realism.

I learned later that the novel may be marketed as a paranormal romance/paranormal mystery. Readers are not as interested/fussy about precise classifications as writers tend to be, so I'm good with that. Further, Marketing knows more about what currently invites readers to pick up a book than I ever will.

Sub-genres/Themes: romance, suspense, justice.

Visual Hook/Mood: dark, with an undercurrent of dry wit.

I interpreted this question as one necessary to determine primary colour choices for the cover. Since danger surrounds Lillie straight from the opening line when a dead man strolls into her bathroon, cheerful shades (or pretty flowers and butterflies) would not be appropriate.

Level of sensuality: Low. Heated kisses, no sex.

An answer useful to the artist to determine placement, position and number of any figures on a proposed cover. Should they be entwined in a hot embrace or separate -- a hero standing protectively behind a heroine, for example. Should a hero even appear at all...

I answered questions concerning time period, location and specific setting. I provided an elevator pitch and descriptions of main characters, ie. Johnny Thresher is big, hard-faced and wears semi-SWAT black.

Another question asked what visual elements - either place or object - have significance in the story and one can easily see how this might translate to the cover.

I chose graveyards since several scenes are set in cemeteries; and Lillie's antique bracelets - her heavy, solid silver, two inch wide, Celtic clasp (or "cuff") bracelets, inlaid with copper knotwork and gripping beasts, and inset with blood garnets -- as two significantly visual elements.

And we shall see.

I just hope my answers do not cause the cover artist to hurl things against walls in frustration while muttering wrathful words about visually impared authors.

While Still We Live

2010-04-12T06:39:00.003-04:00

Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California,

Albert Bierstadt,

oil on canvas, 1865.

I had just finished re-reading Helen MacInnes' 1944 spy thriller by this title (a phrase from Poland's anthem -- Poland has not yet perished/While still we live) about a young English girl caught up in the fall of Warsaw and subsequent Polish resistance to the Nazis, when the news broke about the tragic plane crash near Smolensk in western Russia.

Poland's president and his entourage were on their way to a memorial at the site of the butchery of 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals by the secret police during WWII.

Now Katyn forest will forever remain dark and cursed in Polish memory.

* * *

My experience with editors and editing has been remarkably slight. And from some stories I read, I have been remarkably fortunate.

My first fiction editor was M.E. Ellis for Wild Child Publishing, who was a joy and a delight with whom to work. My first story went through three edits, my second, one. My last with none, except perhaps for the odd punctuation correction/paragraph alignment.

When Carina Press assigned me an Editor Guy, I expected wrath, wrenching and bad language. Not so. Editing has been astonishingly painless: a few vague passages, inconsistent spellings of names, continunity double-checking...

His most substantial revision required the insertion of more context/world building/background details here and there - a request which happily expanded my word count by three or four thousand words.

I write too lean.

And as Writtenwyrdd pointed out when she did an early beta reading of the partial manuscript, it sometimes doesn't hurt to remind the reader in chapter six of an important detail mentioned casually in chapter two.

Another thing Editor Guy did (which I thought both practical and brilliant) was to list all the unusual/obscure/arcane words which appear - words like caoine, dullahan, Da-Shealladh - for me to double-check. A list which he then provided to the copy editor to save her from going WTF and much time.

I have made a note to keep a running list of any peculiar/specialized words used in future stories. Copy editors work hard enough as it is.

This weekend I completed an Art Fact Sheet for the production of the cover.

Careening with Carina

2010-04-09T07:38:00.003-04:00

Spring Joy,

A greeting card from my sweet aunt.

Original by Jung Eon Hwang,

mouth painter.

Three.

The number three has special resonance in many cultures, finding its tidy, balanced way into such power words as triumvirate, triptych, triskelion ... and, of course, into a word beloved by both writers and readers -- trilogy.

This is an over-blown way of introducing a simple fact: I had three main reasons for submitting my urban fantasy to Carina Press.

(1) Angela James. Carina's executive editor. I have long admired Angela James, noting over the years her level-headed, straightforward comments on various topics on various industry-related blogs such as Dear Author. Therefore, any house smart enough to hire her ...

(2) While their emphasis is naturally on romance and its sub-genres, Carina was open to a broad range of submissions and might not automatically dismiss a novel where romance did not constitute the primary and entire plot.

(3) Carina is the digital-first imprint of Harlequin. Not exactly a fly-by-night-here-today-gone-tomorrow publisher. No troubling gambles/questions about competence or expertise.

Of course, there were lesser reasons: submission guidelines were clear, uncomplicated, and complete; to a digital publisher, my e-pub credits, though meager, would not be sneered at; the royalty rate was fair and on cover, not net; and there was the Carina blog.

Again, straightforward, open, informative, author-friendly, and responsive: introducing editors and authors, providing submission and acquisition updates, posting preliminary blurbs and inviting covers (really good covers), keeping hopeful writers current with progress and the process.

Any writer interested in Carina would do well to read and absorb the wealth of information provided in every post on the blog.

The entrails don't stink and the auguries are favourable.

More on the Temperature of Hell

2010-04-07T08:27:00.003-04:00

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,

Hokusai.

wood block print.

Seems the temperature of Hell remains below freezing.

I've mailed off my contract with Carina Press. I've been asked for a dedication and acknowledgements. The book is off to a copy editor.

Feeling much like a very small pup in a kennel of big dogs, I kept my acknowledgements brief and conventional: my family, my blog friends, Miss Snark, Writtenwyrdd for her generous and valuable beta reading, my editor - the standard style.

Totally inadequate.

A true list would be chapter length. It would include all of you for your unfailing encouragement and support, your advice, your friendship, your kindness and patience. For the sheer joy and pleasure of your company.

Straight from the "Anne" Books

2010-03-30T10:02:00.003-04:00

Among the ephemera in my Box of Treasures was a small book of "Class Autographs" dating back about ninety years - its pages bound with a blue ribbon. A necessary companion to the "Class Photograph," and a convention of the era.

Some are sweet, some are funny, all are quaint to modern eyes.

I thought you might enjoy a few samples out of the past!

Some love one,

Some love two.

I love one,

And that is you.

(signed) V.M.

May you go through life

With a song on your lips,

With no more trouble

Than a snake has hips.

With just as much joy

As a pup has fleas,

And with no more trouble

Than a flea has knees.

-Always a friend, Jerry.

Tell me quick before I faint,

Is I yours or is I ain't!

-Hank

Remember me when far away

And absent from your sight,

And I will do the same by thee,

With pleasure and delight.

Tho' ocean waves between us roll,

And distance be our lot,

The only boon I ask for thee,

Dear Friend, forget me not.

-Ever your friend, Katie.

Can't think, brain drunk

Bad ink, poor pen

Inspiration won't come

Here's luck. Amen.

-Blois

Flowers will wither,

Flowers will die,

Friends will forget you,

But never will I.

-From Eva.

Stunned and Stupid

2010-03-22T10:37:00.003-04:00

Perhaps lilacs are a little premature but crocuses are blooming under my smoke tree.

Sorry I've been absent. My doctor has been trying various combinations of pain pills and relaxants to unknot my pinched nerves. As a result, I alternate between vacancy and mild agony and possess the mental depth and capacity of a bug.

Another thing that leaves me stunned is the discovery that in spite of all the valuable information/advice available on the net one still sees in excerpts put up for critique the infamous mirror scene wherein our lovely young heroine catalogues her hair and eyes, nose and mouth. Extensively and in detail. Sometimes including ears, brows, chin and throat.

Mind you, I'm prejudiced against this method of character description since I seldom examine my own face in a mirror -- except to anxiously examine my wrinkles, to wonder if my eyebrows need plucking, or if my mascara has run. (In fact, I usually reel back in horror at the ravaged remnants of a once fatal beauty. Especially pre-makeup, in the morning.)I think people examine their reflections for something specific and seldom indulge in general admiration.

So, besides the tiresome cliche which agents plead with us to avoid, a character's facial vanitas examination doesn't ring true for me.

Maid in Canada

2010-03-15T06:13:00.003-04:00

Photo of a house maid

from Canada's Prize Recipes

complied by the Canada Starch Co. Ltd.,

1930.

Among the family ephemera in the Treasure Box was this little cookbook.

In those days cookbooks weren't just a collection of recipes, but included all sorts of housewifey advice.

To wit:

The Necessity of a Modern Kitchen,

The Value of Good Utensils (a list is included)

The Maid and Her Uniform

Table Service

Correct Table Etiquette

How To Carve

The Feeding of Children

Table of Measurements

It's this housewifey advice which provides any researcher into a given era with useful information about domestic conventions and social attitudes.

Many of the recipes in this booklet were familiar; but I'd never heard of Magic Murphys, Roman Delight, English Monkey, or Angels on Horseback.

And, finally, I have a recipe to the bland pudding so often-referenced in novels: Blanc Mange.

Triskele of Dwarves

2010-03-11T07:19:00.004-05:00

More detail from my daughter's

illuminated scrolls.

The eagle motifs are based on a 6th c.Saragossa bird fibula, and the step work from the 7th c. Staffordshire Hoard.

Blame my blogging absence on three dwarves.

Grumpy:

Because -- until x-rays prove otherwise -- I have a pinched sciatic nerve that makes lying, sitting, standing and walking more than mildly excruciating.

Dopey:

Because of the pain-killers my doctor prescribed -- drugs which apparently carry the street name, hillbillie heroin.

!! and !!!

Happy:

(1) Because I have a perfectly good excuse for the tumbleweeds of dog hair rolling down the front hall.

(2) Because my son, who made a flying visit to take his poor old crippled mother to x-ray, pick up her medications, buy her groceries and do her banking, also up-dated her programs and installed new speakers on her PC.

(3) Because a real, live editor sent me real, live edits, and so far he has not denounced any points or passages I hold dear. He even wrote that it was good to work with someone who isn't indiscriminate with commas. (Ha! I'm sure I have fits of comma-itis like everyone else!)

Further, he sent a list of odd words from the MS -- like souterrains -- for me to verify before he sends them to the copy editor so the copy editor will not waste time querying their spelling and/or usage.

No sympathy, please -- just have patience with me.

Do you have any editing stories/procedures to share?

Added:

Charles Gramlich has another story out, Chimes, from Damnation Books.

I don't dare read it -- because my heart was pounding too hard after just the excerpt -- but I recommend it!

Waiting Is For Tables

2010-03-05T11:11:00.003-05:00

Portion of another illumination.

Since I've already taken part in a Live Meeting and received an editing question from a real live editor, I guess that it's real, even without all the I's and T's.

To wit: Carina Press -- Harlequin's new e-pub which debuts in June-- has offered me a contract for my urban fantasy, A Malignity of Ghosts.

Carina's Executive Editor, Angela James, told me the acquisition team "loved it."

I am pleased, relieved, and just a little scared.

Sythian Gold

2010-03-03T05:32:00.003-05:00

Gold Finial, 5th c. B.C.,
Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,
Photograph by Lynton Gardiner.

The cover for Sythian Gold, Treasures from Ancient Ukraine; edited by Ellen D. Reeder; c. 1999, The Walters Art Gallery; published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., N.Y.; ISBN: 0-8109-2938-4, 351 pages.

A coffee-table size book to do justice to the wonderful photographs of archaelogical items discovered in kurhans (burial mounds) of the Scythian horse tribes which supplement the text, and an excellent resource for any writer heeding an editor's call for new settings and cultures.
The book includes an extensive bibliography as well as a list of selected ancient sources - Anacreon, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Lysias, Aristophanes, etc., etc.
The Scythian nomads are particularly interesting because sufficient evidence exists to indicate their fearsome cavalry included units of trained women warriors.

For me, pictures and photographs often inspire a thousand words. Many bloggers are as adept with a camera as with prose. Four of my favourite oh-God-that's-gorgeous bloggers are: Frank, Gabriele, Scott, and Lana's The Dreaming Tree.

On February 23, Barbara Poelle at Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room, wrote:

"Can it pul-LEASE be spring already? Is there some sort of fairy or patron saint or muse or something of spring? If so I would like to find her and knock her down and choke her and scream SPRING NOW in her face over and over as I rapped her skull against the pavement."

Blissful image. My sentiments exactly.

Especially since Whirl -- whose comments in his Comments are almost as good as his posts -- recently compared me to a "crazed Ninja" ( is there any other kind?)
The sound you hear is me giggling. The Woman in Black.

Love you all.

Round in Circles

2010-03-01T05:10:00.004-05:00

An illumination in a more traditional style.

A weekend of going round in circles. But the circles were golden!

I realize that admitting this fact is enough to have my citizenship revoked, but... I didn't watch all the hockey game last night. Couldn't.

Could. Not. Watch.

Heart flipping faster than the puck over the blue line, I avoided cardiac arrest by switching channels to Will Smith and I, Robot at crucial moments. Sometimes, long, long moments.

I'm sure there are writing lessons in there somewhere. Stakes, tension, powerful enemies, Oh Noes...but I'm too limp to construe them.

Have noticed a lot of urban fantasy covers feature a female with a sharp, pointy thing in her belt.

I like it.

Handy things, knives. Bit of a stealth weapon in some cases, an I-can-carve-your-carcass-from-arsehole-to-appetite image in others. Close and personal.

And while an AK-27 or a neat Sig Sauer might be more efficient, I don't think any other weapon evokes dangerous and deadly quite as well as a blade. Daggers, sabers and swords arouse the archtypal in a way a machine-made weapon does not, and as such are appropriate to a genre that relies on myth and legend for part of its appeal.

Not quite so fond of the prevalence of tribal tattooes that take up an excessive amount of body scape. For me, less is more in that department.

What is your view?

Still Scrolling Along and Ironing Prunes

2010-02-26T05:52:00.004-05:00

An earlier scroll. I think the script is half uncial in the style of the Lindisfarne Gospels but I'm not a calligrapher so I can't swear to it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero ( 106-43 B.C.) the Roman statesman, orator and author is reported to have said, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

My houseplants sulk on window sills, roots curled like impatient fingers in their pots, their leaves flattened against window panes like children watching rain.

I'm certain this can't be original, but if one writes about sexy zombies should it be called rotica?

Feedback: We wants it. We craves it continually. Preciousss. I sometimes wish we had a different word for it. Because of my country childhood, the term makes me think of a horse barfing up his oats.

Publishing's Official Nice Guy, Nathan Bransford, asked yesterday Do You Own Your Characters or Do Your Characters Own You?

(I'm fond of Nathan because he requested a partial from me once. A request based, I'm sure, solely on the fact that the zombie-revenant in the opening pages is also named Nathan and he was curious.)

I'm always a little leery of Frankenstein/Pygmalian explanations for those times when a story careens off its intended track and one is left wondering from where that particular impulse came. I prefer to blame my sub-conscious and its peculiar logic -- but then, I'm so mundane I don't hear voices in my head either -- but a lot of writers blame their characters for taking over.

I wonder if they mean it literally or are indulging in a form of prosopopoeia or a hyperbolic conceit.

What is your take on the subject?

In the Blood

2010-02-24T06:48:00.003-05:00

Illuminated header derived from the Lismore Crozier, circa 1100.

Winter fought a rear-guard action last night, but I know it is in retreat.

The first, most secret signs are here: in the surprise of sunrise in a pewter dawn a full hour earlier than before, in the sudden chatter of little birds in a cedar hedge, in the slow seep of snowbank ichor across the sidewalk.

One more ides until the equinox.

I sometimes think that winter invades my writing -- with sharp-edged, brittle words, with the finality of things lost never to return.

Winter nights are too white and the days too dark. In winter, I count my dead.

And I write as a pallid prisoner scratching crude runes on the cold stone of my dungeon walls.

Do the pull and suck of tides and seasons affect your style? The tone and tint of your prose?

Guessing Games

2010-02-22T06:29:00.003-05:00

Portion of another illuminated scroll. My scanner refuses to replicate gilt and gold.

The motif is based on the early 8th century Tara brooch.

The empty roundel awaits the Kingdom seal.

Have been engaged in "dunging out" -- to use my mother's expressive phrase -- my office this weekend, and have produced enough excess paper from old files to herniate my recycle guy. Am not sure just what to do with my collection of old journals and newsletters from the American Society of Criminology. Though I dislike tossing anything that resembles a book, anyone who would want them probably already has them.

This synapse-switch to a form of spacial delete (you have no idea how much floor space I've uncovered) left me without a blog topic, so I stole one.

As the result of a reader's comment about guessing the ending of a story, Raine Weaver posted an interesting question at Southern Fried Chicas:

how does a writer keep an ending fresh within the confines of genre?

We are, after all, somewhat restricted in our choices.

Readers of romance usually expect a happy-ever-after -- or a happy-for-the-time-being. Love triumphant.

Mystery readers expect the mystery to be solved and the wicked caught -- or, at least, revealed.

Readers of horror/ may expect evil to triumph - or not -- but with a price.

Readers of fantasy/SF all expect certain satifying ending rituals. A galaxy/civilization ( or a remnant of it) saved, a war won, hero/heroine bloody but unbowed.

Lines from The Mummy movie sum up expectations rather well: kill the bad guys, rescue the girl, and save the world.

I think most readers like resolution to a tale, and usually prefer a positive one. The world's too full of weeping as it is.

Seems the answer to the question revolves around not so much the What but the How.

How do you keep your endings ( which perforce must follow certain genre tropes), like Tim Horton's coffee, "always, always fresh?"

Flash: Hell Just Froze Over

2010-02-19T05:25:00.004-05:00

My eldest daughter designs and illuminates award scrolls for the Kingdom of Eldomere of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

This scroll's motifs are drawn from St. Patricks's Bell shrine, an 11th century house reliquary, and the enamel medallions from the 7th century Ardagh Chalice. The runic calligraphy uses the Elder Futhark.

As most of you know, my current urban fantasy novel also maintains an incidental Celtic continuum by upgrading certain creatures from Irish legend -- a Crom Dubh, who drives a black SUV, a bean sidhe who frequents a local laundromat, and the suggestion of a Leannan sidhe, a fairy sweetheart.

Yesterday, an editor phoned me. I cried all over her. So much for proper, professional composure.

If I am not in the middle of a Midwinter's Night Dream -- and barring all those cautionary proverbs about counting chickens/ cups, slips and lips that were dinned into me as a child -- I will have a formal announcement to make in a week or so.

The Death Detective

2010-02-17T06:50:00.004-05:00

Portrait of General The Hon. Robert Monckton,

Benjamin West,

oil.

While purging the files I found another old clipping: one about James Starrs, who is considered the grandfather of forensic sciences, who formed the first program at George Washington University at the request of the FBI, and who is, I suppose, in a way responsible for all the CSI series I like to watch.

According to the clip, Starrs has a personal penchance for historical mysteries and takes leave every couple of years to investigate them. (Had/took -- he may be dead now -- I didn't google.)

He solved the question of whether Jesse James was really in his grave (yes), as well as the case of the Colorado Cannibal, Alfred Packer (yes).

Starrs seems the perfect person on which to base a series of historical crimes and mysteries -- either real or imaginary -- solved by today's science.

Lizzie Borden is, apparently, out though. Descendents of Ma and Pa prevented Starrs from digging them up.

I don't think either Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs have exhausted the anthropological possibilities, and I didn't want to toss the clipping without putting the idea out there for extrapolation. (The idea is probably already out there, but nevertheless...)

More Cabin Fever Quips:

Visa la France: Paris on a credit card.

Veni, vedi, vice: CSI Sunglasses.

Cogito, eggo sum: I think, therefore I waffle.

Now Playing: Sins of the Mouth

2010-02-15T06:01:00.006-05:00

English Lass with Apple,

unknown artist,

oil, 18-19th century.

Blogging is exploration.

One can always discover new people, new landscapes, new ideas.

Since winter often reduces me to the level of a growling beast gnawing on bloody bones in an icicle-hung cave, I counter atavism by a little mental tourism -- and encountered Alex Fleetwood, the Hampshire Flyer.

Who -- for my sins of the mouth -- promply bestowed on me A Prolific Blogger Award.

Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love!
Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award.
Every Prolific Blogger must link back to This Post, which explains the origins and motivation for the award.
Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name in the Mr. Linky, so that we all can get to know the other winners.

And thus I name:

Writtenwyrdd

Jason at The Clarity of Night

Laughingwolf of paws and reflect

Charles of RAZORED ZEN

Betsy of SEX SCENES AT STARBUCKS

Bernard (aka The Hunk), Bernard's Blog.

Beautiful Raine Weaver in her Secret Garden

And then there's Archer, and Whirl, and Fairy,and MoonmouseDear, and Natasha, and...

I'd better stop now.

A couple more in The Abuse of Foreign Phrases Department:

Bun jour - a daily special at the bakery.

Ah, mon char: what you say when you burn someone you don't like anymore.

The Treasure Box

2010-02-12T04:43:00.004-05:00

Francis, a genial giant as big as a fairy tale, delivers packages and parcels in my part of town.

Francis must believe in parcels because his face always splits in a satisfied and cheerful grin when he deposits a brown paper package into my surprised arms.

I suspect he sees himself as a bringer of gifts and good things. I don't think he's wrong.

Francis hammered on my door last week. My sister-in-law had sent me a box of family ephemera.

Sitting on the living room floor, I ripped off the wrapping and opened the box -- and listened to the whispered voices from the past that rose up like dust motes in the late afternoon sun.

Old photographs, an autograph book, a box of vintage jewellery, a tarnished baby spoon, a fragile Christmas ornament that bore a story, invitations and programs, letters and cards to people long dead.

On the back of the valentine from some shy and anonymous suitor above is written in ink "From one who loves you Best of all," and a date "Feb 8, 1935."

The verse on the front reads:

This valentine is sent

With friendly wish and good intent

And greetings warm and kind

And if some loving thoughts should hide

Beneath the lace or way inside

I hope you will not mind.

My Valentine to each and every one of you.

Visual Violence and the Writer's Risk

2010-02-10T06:08:00.004-05:00

A portrait of Martin Forbisher,

Cornelius Ketel, 1577.

What follows is the rough draft opening of another Lillie St. Claire story -- short or long, I don't know yet.

He'd been castrated.

His dismembered penis lay like a little pallid sausage in the grass a foot from the drawn-up knees.

The body of a muscular man in his late thirties, wearing a brown t-shirt and dusty Wellington boots, lay hunched in a semi-fetal position, toppled on its side and facing away from a picnic table at the edge of the park. He'd been in the habit of shaving his head but the heavy eyebrows, dark against the pale, pocked face, provided the necessary descriptor. Below one staring eye an old scar stretched from cheekbone to his right ear.

Above bloody brown chinos, his bloody tattooed hands still clutched ineffectually at his groin.

The size of the blood pool -- skimming over now but glistening in the bright sun of this cool June morning -- indicated he'd bled out. The dead don't bleed.

He'd been gelded while he was still alive.

I knew now why the constable who escorted me here and the men at the crime scene all walked with a stiff, knee-locked, tight-assed gait. And why, presumeably, PC Bert Wiggins was puking up his breakfast all over a bush about ten feet behind me.

What I didn't know was why I had been called in.

***

I think it may be risky to begin a story with visual violence. There's the obvious risk of inducing an instant and emphatic wall-banger. So it may be better to produce any necessary noir scenes later in a narrative.

A writer also runs the risk that the rest of a story may seem anti-climatic, so an immediate and delicately functioning suspense factor is particularly critical.

Of course, for some readers, any graphic, gritty scene -- even a short one -- can be too much. They prefer corpses and death off camera, not in their face, so their imagination can select the degree of horror they want to assimilate or ignore it altogether.

So my question is: do you include violent visuals in your stories and where do you place them?

Science and the Supernatural

2010-02-08T06:01:00.003-05:00

The last one.

All my life I've had a love/hate relationship with science.

In school I loved literature for its parables of the human soul, for its magic and mystery of myth and legend -- and excelled in math and physics.

So, regarding the supernatural, I am a skeptic who yearns to believe.

While tossing files last week I came across a newspaper clipping from 7 July, 1999 ( Nicholas D. Kristof, The National Post) discussing a disorder called sleep paralysis.

The article goes a long way toward destroying the anecdotal evidence used to support various claims of alien abductions, flying broomsticks (the primitive tech version,) demon attacks, perhaps even near-death experiences and visitations from the dead.

According to Kristof, sleep paralysis has been reported in many cultures from antiquity.

In China, the condition is described as gui ya - ghost pressure. The Japanese call it kanashibari. In the West Indies: kokma; in Newfoundland: old hag.

The symptoms remain remarkably similar, only the interpretations of the hallucinations vary.

Researchers explain these illusions (of transportation/panic /suffocation /malignant presence) occur when the body is still in REM sleep but the mind had disconnected from dream and is half-awake.

Seems logical. Ah well.

And then I think that science has merely provided an explanation for the conditions of the event. Moreover, at basis, the research remains anecdotal.

Bugger.

And while I don't really believe my dead father walked into my bedroom and spoke to me early one morning, still...

Skepticism goes both ways.

Three Homos Walked into a Bar

2010-02-05T05:20:00.006-05:00

More S'quick art.

(I'll stop soon, I promise.)

My friend also sends me selected samples of viral internet jokes (which circle the world endlessly, I imagine) like the one about the question why -- when brain transplants become available -- will women's brains be cheaper than men's brains?

Have found myself tsk-tsking a lot lately over the abuse of homonyms like reigns and reins, altar and alter, pour and pore, pair, pear and pare.

And I've wondered if our more aural society -- cell phones, channel TV availability, audio books, iPods and stuff -- if these are responsible for what strikes me as a looser grasp of language. If our vocabulary is influenced more by what we hear than by what we see. After all, there is no audible difference between it's and its, until one translates the sound into writing.

Purists discriminate between homonyms, homophones and homographs. I'm not grammatically finicky -- in spite of my stay at Miss Bustlewhistle's Academy for Proper Young Ladies -- so I don't. I'm just irritated to see homonyms abused in general.

And the Brain Transplant question? Market economy -- women's brains are cheaper because they are used.

No Other Love

2010-02-03T06:45:00.004-05:00

Obiit February 3, 2009.

As he was when I first met him, long years ago.

In three weeks we were engaged, married in three months.

This year I have filled out endless documents, shredded files, sent his things to charity, given away his favourite music -- Louis Armstrong, The Four Aces -- music I could not bear to keep.

And still...

The tape of time spins back and forth over those years without sequence, switched on by almost every object that I touch -- until it freezes on the quiet horror of that morning.

I beg your pardon for inflicting on you such a personal post.

This is not a good day.

We're All Gonna Die!

2010-02-01T05:13:00.003-05:00

More s'quick art from my friend...by popular demand...

Remember the Millenium Madness?

While purging more files this weekend, I found a number of old news clippings about calendar compulsives -- the World-Enders certain that yet-another-Doomsday would arrive, all neat and tidy and ship-shape ( pardon me for that) at the last reverberating stroke of 12....12:30 in Newfoundland.

Now the Mayan date of 2012 looms out of the Cthulhuian depths of some collective psyches and their persistent desire to see the lot of us offed in flood, fire, brimstone and wormwood.

When these prophets and death-apostles run out of cultures to appropriate, I suppose they will just re-cycle the old ones. Fu Manchu will replace Machu Picchu - in a disambiguation sort of style.

Saw a git-the-wimmen-and-childrun ad on TV recently by one group or another warning us of our approaching cataclysmic END.

I wonder in my languid way if publishers who never got the memo are quietly acquiring another set of apocalypse novels to be released around that time to take advantage of the inevitable hype.

While in sort-and-shred mode, also found a list someone had forwarded from one of those newspaper fun-with-foreign phrases contests from 10 years ago.

Still good for winter blahs:

Respondez s'il vous plaid: Honk if you're Scottish.

Posh mortem: Death styles of the rich and famous.

Pro bozo publico: Support your local clown.

Visa la France: Don't leave your chateau without it.

Quip pro quo: A fast retort.

S'QUICK ART

2010-01-29T04:02:00.003-05:00

A friend sent me this.

Under the heading: What To Do When You Are Really, Really Bored.

With directions:

1. Kill a few house flies.

2. Put them in the sun to dry for an hour or so.

3. When dry, find pencil and paper...

More examples of domestic gross-art followed.

My reaction switched back and forth between a kind of eeeuuu distaste and fits of semi-perverted fascination at the idea of musca domestica as a creative art-form-antidote to ennui.

I couldn't help imagining other possible illustrations. I just couldn't.

My friend is twisted.

I am twisted. Swat me.

My daughter just sent me a copy edit of a WIP. She caught about 25 typos all told -- articles evaded, plurals absent, punctuation (such as commas , periods and close quotes) missing. I realized that most of these occurred when cut-and-pasting. Something to watch for.

Weirdly, Volume III

2010-01-27T04:38:00.004-05:00

Released yesterday from Wild Child Publishing.

Weirdly, Volume III, A Collection of Strange Stories.

e-book,

$5.95.

Several strange and weird events occurred during the compilation of this anthology -- but I am pleased to report that this book contains my urban fantasy short story: another Lillie St. Claire adventure, titled Ding, Dong, Dell.

Yes, the title and the frame of the story comes from the nursery rhyme which begins:

Ding, dong, dell,

Pussy's in the well,

Who put her in?...

Other Lillie St. Claire adventures with the paranormal -- Stone Child and Corpse Candles -- appeared in Weirdly I and Weirdly II: Eldritch.

A funny thing. I've always been a bit anxious about the ending of Corpse Candles -- the bad guys get creamed by a transport truck. I worried that their retribution might appear too neat, tidy and ex machina -- until I watched a recent episode of Criminal Minds ( the TV series involving a team of FBI Behaviorial Analysis investigators) where the bad guy gets creamed by a transport truck.

If the big dogs think that solution realistic, so can I!

Walk-Ons and Exits, Pursued By a Bear

2010-01-25T06:30:00.004-05:00

A colour illustration by Clarence F. Underwood for the novel Beau Brocade by The Baroness Orczy.

I came upon a brief but interesting discussion at Fangs, Fur and Fey about tertiary characters.

Please note that, by and large, the following quotes or paraphrases a number of the points raised.

One writer neatly summarized the role of tertiary characters as (1) those who help -- or obstruct -- the protagonist, (2) those that symbolize some element of conflict or conundrum, and (3) those that provide a useful revelation about the protagonist's character/actions/motivations.

One could be finicky and mention that there is really a fourth type of character with which we populate our novels, those sometimes rendered en masse (crowds, mobs, hordes, throngs, packs, hosts, troops and such), sometimes as a singular and equally anonymous wandering walk-on -- those types whose main purpose is to provide local colour, texture, and background to a scene, lest the stage seem unrealistically empty and bare.

Even so, one writer suggested these nameless backgrounders can provide added value beyond just stage dressing, not only to trigger a reminder, an observation or a conclusion from the main character, but also to insert some necessary prop in the story line.

Double duty - always our job.

Brought to You by the Letter D

2010-01-22T05:51:00.006-05:00

Passing Parade

Doris Lee (1905-1983)

oil on canvas.

Delight and Divination:

In spite of miles of shelving and many bookcases, in my house books tend to collect together in shifting, polyamorous piles -- on the stairs, beside the recliner, on the bed, the dining room table...

While waiting impatiently yesterday for the kettle to boil for another desperately needed infusion of caffine, I flipped open the top book from the kitchen pile to a page at random.

Eurekaeurekaeureka!

All day I had fiddled and fumed over a passage in my MS in a futile attempt to clarify my protagonist's peculiar visual acuity regarding specters and spirits.

And there it was. Da-shealladh.

Not the fore-telling second sight of future events as most translations of the Gaelic apply the phrase, but, literally, two-sighted, the double vision of one who perceives the real world and the paranormal world at the same time.

Different and Diverse:

Lynn Viehl's post (Wednesday, January 2oth) at Paperback Writer discussed the condition known as Blog Block and suggests cures for it.

I have earned a lot about writing and publishing just tooling through Lynn's witty and informative archives.

Danger and Disturbance:

It just got harder to find an agent.

In a couple of posts this week agent Rachelle Gardner discusses potential changes in agenting agreements as a result of the lower advances offered by publishers and the inevitable impact on agent's commissions and agent's aquisition of new clients.

There's Diverting and Then There's Diverticulosis:

Discovered Gordon Jerome's blog. It's...interesting.

He avers, among other things, that polite bloggers are butt-kissers and agent bloggers are assholes.

O Tempora! O Mores!

2010-01-20T04:58:00.004-05:00

A picture I cut from a magazine years ago and so lost any attribution.

I have no idea who painted this picture or when, but I believe the artist is American who flourished sometime in the last century.

The setting and the small boat make me think New England.

Similar flat-bottomed boats were common among farmers with fields and barns on both sides of a river in my grandparent's day, though they preferred paddles rather than oars for propulsion.

I assume the artist intended a subtle pastoral depiction of the Three Graces, New World style, but I am fond of this charming picture because the young women in their dainty Edwardian dresses bear a remarkable resemblance to my three daughters.

And so might they have idled away some late summer afternoon gathering wild flowers had they lived a hundred years ago.

In this time-line, however, the one in white is a VP's strong right arm and secret weapon.The brunette in blue teaches at university and has a non-fiction book coming out later this year. The little one in the boat with flowers in her hair is a major in the CF.

Such coincidental resemblances form a familiar literary trope of the gothic type -- but it's one I cannot dismiss as merely creative imagination.

Have you ever felt that instant of shock when a face you know intimately leaps out at you from some portrait painted hundreds of years ago?

Dogged

2010-01-18T06:18:00.003-05:00

Dog Rattling Pheasant,

George Armfield Smith (1836-1875),

oil.

A fit of sneezing seized Calvin the Corgi as he bounced down the front stairs this morning. Imagine a slinky shaped like a dog.

My dog indentification continues.

Having flushed game, I'm yipping and yapping in vain pursuit, i.e. am hock-deep in revisions, dog hair and dirty dishes.

Could have said crotch-deep - but I don't write erotica.

Moot -- because I can't. But am glad I don't.

Recently read a review of a novel which made it obvious the writer had decended into pure porn, having decided that an endless sequence of sex scenes are a perfectly adequate substitute for a plot. Made me wonder if the elastic sides of that particular box had been stretched as far as they can go and are likely to snap back on on the genre.

Revision is something like running through an endless swamp. One teeters from one tussock to another, unsure what is solid and what is not. All the time terrified that a single mis-step will dump you into quicksand and rejection will close over your staring eyes and twitching head with impersonal finality. To be truthful -- which isn't publically wise, I know -- I'm betting on the quicksand.

All the news isn't horrible. Saw last week that after snow storms swept the country, bobbies in England used their riot shield as sleds.

Old Dogs and New Tricks

2010-01-15T04:51:00.003-05:00

By an unknown artist of the English School.

oil, circa 1840.

Over time, every occupation (and each niche within it) develops its own casual dictionary, its own vocabulary and vernacular, its peculiar set of acronym and slang.

I remember puzzling over such basic but new-to-me terms as man titty, TSTL and Mary Sue.

So when I was told recently that I maintained "good continuity" in my writing, rather than barking triumphantly like a dog who discovers a skunk under the front porch, I circled and sniffed around the phrase suspiciously before retreating to my cushion. I sat there, cuffing at my ear, wondering if I should whine or wag my tail.

Because of the perennial presence of various intent young women trotting about with clipboards during my brief career as a fifth-rate actress, I was dimly aware of the meaning of continuity in film terms. I told myself that didn't mean squat. Interpretations do not necessarily transfer from venue to venue and the plain meaning of a term is always subject to industrial nuance.

This time, however, it seems that it does. Close enough, anyway. Seems continuity is the formal term applied to the degree of internal consistency in a work. In fact, I knew its necessity, I just didn't know the name for it.

More than brown eyes turning blue, or an only child who suddenly acquires siblings , continuity means the natural what ifs/yeah, buts/hey,wait a minute -- those questions which might be raised in a reader's mind -- are pre-empted and satisfied within the parameters of the stated reality.The if this, then this makes sense.

Shit-eating grin. I have "good continuity."

Minor Key

2010-01-13T06:29:00.005-05:00

Woman Reading,

Eastman Johnson,

c.1874.

In preparation, some writers outline their main characters in almost excessive detail -- down to their favourite colour, song and food, and whether or not they clean the tub after a bath. If nothing else, this premeditation saves one (in the middle of chapter five) from staring at the screen for forty minutes while one tries to decide on a suddenly significant/useful mannerism or minor fact.

But sometimes, one receives the impression that writers are so entranced with providing a full-frontal of their major character(s) that they neglect the minor ones.

While they seldom require equivalent depth, secondary characters should not appear as cut-out dolls or mechanical pieces. Certainly their prime use is to provide information to advance the plot, motivation for the protagonist, or revelations about the lead character, but they are most effective in these respective roles when they live.

Of course, one has to guard against over-development of minor characters, else they may disclose an alarming tendency to run away with the story.

Both Angie and Written obligingly produce links on occasion to various markets.

Jason's Clarity of Night flash fiction contest closes tonight at 11 pm.Wildly popular. Last I looked he's received 200 entries. Fascinating reading and tremendous variety. Counters winter blahs and seasonal ennui.

Doggery and Floggery

2010-01-11T06:05:00.003-05:00

Spring Blossom,

Adolphe Castex-Degrange (1840-1918),

oil.

Yes, I know. A decidedly unseasonal picture.

But since every single morning for the past week and more the sky has dropped about two inches of dandruff over everything and did I say every single morning and left me muttering about atmospheric Head 'n Shoulders as the piles of snow get higher and higher and even when it's barely warm enough to walk the dogs I have to load myself down with forty pounds of arctic fleece and encase the canines in those affected little doggie coats with the velcro fasteners and worry if the little one lifts his leg he'll freeze to the fire hydrant up the street like the bulldog in the Batman movie and...

Thank Dog (TM Miss Snark) Jason's Clarity of Night contest is still running with new entries to read or I'd be blub-blub-blubbing my bottom lip.

Congratulations, albeit belated, to Betsy (aka Sex Scenes at Starbucks). Her novel, QUENCHER, was released about January 1 from Whiskey Creek/ Torrid. A nice interview can be found in a January 8 post on Erica Orloff's site. Sounds as if the novel contributes substantially to global warming. Which we need.

The Best Contest Around (con't)

2010-01-08T06:13:00.003-05:00

Yup, I'm still pimping Jason Evan's Clarity of Night contest.

Even if you don't choose to enter, please go read the extravaganza of sheer talent, the exhilarating variations on a theme. You'll find entries which are chilling and thrilling, brilliant and brave, funny and sad -- in every possible style and approach.

Jason deserves a world of credit for his generous encouragement by instituting these contests.

Here is my somewhat mediocre entry (and that is not false modesty but a fair assessment.)

The Tower

All night I have stood by this narrow window and stared down at the Thames. No torch-lit barges, no revelry of lute and mandolin and song disturbed its course. The river runs dark as my damask gown, as cold as stone.

All night only moonlight troubled the waters like a sword...

A sword, not the axe. He will allow me that and no more. Such kingly courtesy...

Now dawn has stirred the ravens that strut and swoop about this fortress. I think they must feed on the silent curses of the condemned -- for they are fat and black...

A thousand days. A thousand days to dance and glitter like sunlight on a blade. A thousand days which end this May morning. I finger my necklace, the one he clasped about my neck with his own hands...

A bustle at the door. Footsteps ring slow across the floor. I turn as the Constable approaches. An uncouth man, but kind in his fashion. He jerks a bow and avoids my eyes. I notice his ruff and doublet are splatter-stained with red wine.

I clasp my hands at my waist and wait.

"Majesty," he says. He coughs and looks away.

"M'lady...Mistress Boleyn....'Tis time."

The Best Contest Around

2010-01-06T06:01:00.005-05:00

I love this photograph.

It's the prompt for Jason Evan's The Clarity of Night Contest which opens today.

Complete and clear directions on how to enter may be found on his blog, linked above.

Even if you do not feel compelled to enter, please stop by to read the entries as they are posted each day for the duration of the contest. They will be many and varied and vital.

Did I say I love this photograph?

Images cascade: The folk rhyme: One crow, sorrow. Two crows, joy; Odin's ravens: Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory), omens, sorceries, scavengers, avatars, Thunderbirds, Tricksters, black wings, broken wings, winged gods, nervermores...

They are right you know,

Fear is like black wings,

swooping and soft,

That hover like a raven

Outside your window.

And sometimes the feathers

Flicker against the panes.

A True Confession

2010-01-04T05:40:00.003-05:00

Central Park, New York, Winter, The Skating Pond,

Bridgeman Art Library.

I am functionally illiterate.

S'truth.

I eshew, abjure and even actively avoid those writers who hit the New York Times "best seller" lists.

Some might call this habit a form of reverse snobbery, but when everyone else is shouting whoa and damn and f**king awesome, I get stubborn.

It's my contrary streak. (Where I grew up, streak was the word used to describe an ingrained personality trait. My mother often wrung her hands over this tendency of mine. Poor Mum.)

My juvenile habit toward rebellion has not diminished over the years, it seems, and I continue to resist the automatic and monetary worship of such public gods as Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi (Whatever. I do like his blog) and Neil Gaiman.

It's not that I don't buy new novels or that I never read such writers. I remember the names. Sometimes I will pick up their books second-hand or encounter them in the family book exchange. Because allied with my obstinance is a timid and protective caution. I fear being disappointed. My private enjoyment does not always aligne with public taste (James Patterson being only one case in point.) And I dislike paying top dollar for that disappointment.

However, to make a long story even longer, I recently came across -- by my usual means -- Gaiman's Coraline.

Coraline was described in the New York Times Book Review as "one of the most frightening books ever written." Or so says the blurb on the front.

Bullshit.

I read it. It's a lovely story in the vein that children need to know that monsters can be killed. Has a certain Edward Gorey/John Bellairs flavour. I'd recommend it for my grandchildren when they are past the cuddly bunny stage.

Magic Realism

2009-12-30T02:39:00.003-05:00

A 1994 Tom Doherty reprint of Charles de Lint's (1984/Ace Fantasy) mythic classic, Moonheart.

Cover art by David Bergen.

Though de Lint has expressed a preference for the term magic realism, there is no doubt he is one of the chief animators of what is now commonly called urban fantasy.

Since urban fantasy is often perceived as the province of vamps and weres ( somewhat humanized from their predatory roles in the horror genre), the expansive term contemporary fantasy has gained some credence.

What the genre boils down to is myth and magic in a contemporary setting. Particularly an urban setting. Previously, the country was the historic home of folk lore and legend.

In de Lint's world, magic exists but is secret and unrecognized except by those people who are attuned to the mythic or places which form a nexis with the Otherworld. The "normal" world continues oblivious.

In urban fantasy, paranormal powers and people are often recognized, real and nearly mundane, if sometimes restricted to exclusive communities. In a sense, ordinary superheroes. The secret is out and accepted to varying degrees.

An interesting progression of "what if?" in the evolution of genres and societal reaction.

Feast and Fondle Week

2009-12-28T05:33:00.006-05:00

Some eighteenth century silver -- and no, not my dining room table.

Some years I have gone all out formal, with candelabra and chargers, brocade and linen, ruby glass and glitter - but not this one. The pack are dispersed and could not all congregate.

So we just shoved the piles of papers and laundry to one end of the table and ate at the other.

Still, I am so stuffed with bird and wine, with Belgian chocolate and exotic cheeses, that I should be on a plaque on the wall.

And, ignoring my Luddite timidity, my daughter gave me a digital camera. I fondle it, fearfully. I hope it has directions for dummies. She assured me it did, but I am dubious.

There are those, like Scott, Gabrielle, and Frank, who capture scenes of sheer magic, pictures that linger in the memory, many-worded photographs that send my imagination soaring. I do not have their skill, but it will be fun to try.

The world revolves from night to day.

Waes hael to the New Year!

How Lovely Are Thy Branches

2009-12-21T04:59:00.003-05:00

A loving Xmas card from my 87 year old aunt.

The tree in the foreground is silver but my scanner would not comply.

This is the darkest day -- when the world hestitates in its headlong plunge into darkness, when the earth trembles on its folcrum before yearning back toward the light. A day when I understand the pagan urge for blazing bonfires and a ring of flaming torches in high places. A day of defiance against the dark. A day of hope and faith in excelsis gloria to come.

Since I am unsure if I will blog the rest of this week, I want to wish each and everyone of you dear, dear people a blessed Christmastide.

May you each experience that instant of stillness and wonder that comes with an indrawn breath just before a burst of delight and joy.

May you join revels and drink spiced wine and gorge on sugar plums. And may nothing disturb and dismay you.

God rest ye. Be merry.

Committing Minor Sacrilege.

2009-12-18T04:17:00.004-05:00

The Night Before Christmas,

unknown illustrator,

published, M.A Donohue, 192?

When the children attained a certain age, after choir and hot chocolate and before a reading from Luke, they were regaled each Christmas Eve by corrupt and seditious parodies of A Night Before Christmas. Included were such lines as: the stockings were hung by the chimney with care/they smelled very bad and they needed the air, and laying a finger inside of his nose...

The kids loved it. It became a family tradition.

I am fond of fantasy and some SF. I hunt down the backlists of my favourites, like Moon and Modesitt, Jr. I re-read Jordan and Eddings. I trade boxes of books with my son-in-law.

A recent rotation included Robin Hobb's Tawny Man trilogy. Having read at one time part or all of her Farseer series, I envisioned quiet evenings of pleasure cuddled under a comforter with the dogs at my feet and a drink by my side. Several evenings, because the volumes run around 700 pages each.

Ah well.

I reached page 300 and so of The Golden Fool when I committed an act of minor sacrilege and tossed the book back in the box.

Perhaps my tastes have changed. Let me make it plain that I still consider Robin Hobbs a witty and brilliant writer who builds characters which are exquisitely human.

But.

Our hero, the former royal assassin, climbed up secret stairs, he climbed down secret stairs, he conferred with people, occasionally he rode out of the castle or walked into town. Three hundred pages of suggestions of danger to come. Of slow set-up. Nothing of substance truly happened. Irresolute interpersonal conflict, yes. Action, no. Eventually, I found it tedious.

Which makes me consider if -- for some or many Fantasy and SF fans -- the lure lies, not in the plot, but in the created and detailed society, world or universe, not in the story but the setting itself. That might explain the profusion of fanlit.

Blogeist

2009-12-16T05:38:00.005-05:00

A Visit from St. Nicholas,

wood engraving signed R. Roberts,

New York Mirror, 1841.

Carnegie Mellon University.

Is it just my imagination or is blogging on the decline?

Going through my favourite's list, I am appalled at the number of people who have deleted their blogs -- their words gone like the ghosts of Xmas past. And the many (like myself) who post less frequently.

I hope it is a seasonal thing -- holidays demand much of one's time and effort. A troubled economy and a troubled world also suck time from contemplation and creation.

And as the light dies toward the solstice and darkness pads closer to our windows, there may be more who huddle scentless by their hearths and who, like me, fear another Winter of the Wolves.

Perhaps Twitter - which reminds me of nothing so much as those old contests demanding an entry of "twenty-five words or less" -- is a significant factor. I can see its facile attraction, though I have not (as yet) succumbed. One can slide on superficiality as on ice, only suggesting depths beneath.

As a light in the darkness, Jason as announced another Clarity of Night contest in January, with his usual evocative and stunning photo prompt.

May your mind soar like the image.

Home Fires Burning - An Envirorant

2009-12-14T04:40:00.003-05:00

A Winter Evening,

Currier & Ives,

Bridgerman Art Gallery.

The fireplace guys installed my cast iron wood stove on Friday -- which is why I wasn't here. An all-day job, including the insertion of about 40 feet of a silver anaconda/chimney liner and a slate heat pad over the original hearth.

Now, if the bitter winds of winter take down the power lines I won't have to flee my brick igloo. If need be I can cook on it.

An alternate source of heat is especially important here to prevent freezing pipes because I have those elegant, old-fashioned radiators/hot water heat in addition to the usual domestic water pipes.

It's a sweet little stove with glass doors and a catalytic function. I beam at it.

I have also, beyond the garden, a wood-burning bbq. Not propane, not charcoal. And made, incidentally, out of re-cycled concrete blocks and re-cycled racks. I have mature trees which need, on occasion, pruning or removal. The ashes go on my garden for those plants and shubs that like it.

Now for my rant.

Rigid enviromentalists are apt to exclaim about the evil of carbon emissions/ air pollution from wood burning items such as mine.

They fail to factor the carbon emissions produced should my tree cuttings and other untreated and burnable wood be put at the curb to be hauled off to landfill by a lumbering/gas burning garbage truck. Or the emissions produced to supply electricity for my electric stove and microwave should they be used in lieu of firing up the bbq.

I think the carbon credit is in my favour.

Flakes and Fakes

2009-12-09T05:35:00.004-05:00

The Road --Winter

Currier & Ives,

Bridgeman Art Library.

I awake to find my small world under a snow globe this morning. The steady gentle fall turns the light from my Lantern Waste street lamp into a soft golden haze. Beyond is the encircling, silent dark.

Apparently, a good half of the continent is under a Storm Watch. The driving blizzard winds will come later and the speeding rumble of plows; but for now, my world is surrounded by tranquility.

Did you believe that sometime the acceptance of a manuscript depended on the toss of a coin? Think again. The Canadian Medical Association Journal reveals in a Yahoo report that "coin tosses can be rigged."

The CMAJ's annual report on quaint studies also indicate that "quarantine and cure would only delay the inevitable spread of a zombie outbreak."

(Another good reason to keep road salt by my front stoop.) And they have a mathematical model to prove it.

And last night I received a call informing me I had been selected by Ma Bell to receive a free cell phone, a hundred free minutes, etc., etc. -- if I would only provide -- for verification purposes only, you understand -- my SIN number or, failing that, my credit card number. Riiiight.

The zombies haven't gotten my brains yet. I didn't even have to toss a coin.

BAD ICE

2009-12-06T15:53:00.003-05:00

Bad Ice,

Sandra Cormier,

romantic suspense,

Champagne Books.

I had to steal the cover shot from Chumplet's blog.

Bad Ice is another book I intended to review last fall -- during that time which remains, in a peculiar co-existant way, both near and distant.

All this week I hunted for the novel to re-read, both for my own pleasure and for this belated review, but the book seems to have disappeared. I suspect one of my daughters has walked off with it.

So my apologies for a book review from memory.

Basically, Bad Ice is a competent romantic suspense about a hockey hero, a psychotic girl friend, and a single mother. The hockey milieu is well done and realistically portrayed.

What raised the book above just an average well-crafted/ nice story/ good read for me, however, was its psychological accuracy -- a certain chilling veracity in the character portrayal of the psychopathic girl friend. Moreover, the actions and reactions of the hero and heroine to her stalker machinations are, from my own experience, entirely authentic. Normal people do not, as a rule, recognize or even understand how truly twisted other minds can become.

And Sandra/Chumplet nailed it.

She is also the author of The Space Between ( Wild Rose Press) and The Toast Bitches (Ravenous Romance.)

When I first began blogging, e-pubs were frequently viewed -- and often dismissed -- as a bottoms-up escapade in dubious taste.

Times have changed.

J.A Konrath's Dec 1 post: 2010 EBook Predictions and Booksquares Nov 30 post: Trendwatching 2010 make the shift clear.

I don't think e-books have to use the back door much longer. What do you think?

Maneki Neko: The Beckoning Cat

2009-12-04T03:50:00.005-05:00

A maneki neko,

early Meiji period (1868-1912),

28 cm.

( with the kind permission of

Alan Scott Pape, Antique Japanese Dolls)

Other exquisite images of Beckoning Cats and graceful, intelligent text about them may be found here.

Warning: You may experience distracting moments of covetous lust.

Mr. Pape tells me that the Mingei Museum in San Diego will be staging a maneki neko exhibition next year.

~yearning, yearning~

I have been researching ghost cats for another Lillie St. Claire adventure (maybe for a short story like Stone Child and Corpse Candles, maybe for a sequal to A Malignity of Ghosts)

As you may remember, A Malignity of Ghosts is an urban fantasy featuring exorcist/paranormal investigator Lillie St. Claire.

The city fathers have reacted to a pandemic of ghostly visitations by deciding that the ensuing problems are simply a more exotic violation of municipal standards -- an extension of by-law control issues, like parking meters, barking dogs and garbage -- and hire Lillie as ghost-buster to eliminate any intrusive spirits and specters found disturbing the peace and privacy of its citizens.

Of course, Malignity becomes more complicated and dangerous than a series of fritzzz -- ghost begone episodes of the casual exorcism of ...er... merely mundane entities...

This established municipal context led me to consider the story potential of a cat lady/cat hoarder who collects cat ghosts. That idea led me to Wikipedia and bake-nekos, neko-matas, considerable folk and fake lore -- and the intriguing, contradictory legends of the Beckoning Cat.

Goodies:

My Demon is running a contest on her blog, Obfuscation of Reality. The prize is a signed copy of Faith Hunter's urban fantasy Skinwalker. If you link to the contest you gain two entries. Heh. Go here for details.

Wind and Water, Fume and Spume

2009-12-02T04:03:00.004-05:00

The Lock,

Theodore Robinson (1852-1896)

oil on canvas.

In an effort to coax the creativity creature out of its tiny closet in a corner of my mind, I hauled up a couple of last year's files, added and exorcized, and sent them out to market like little pigs.

I hoped that the process -- the pattern of guidelines, query, synopsis and sample -- in itself would do something.

It didn't work.

All I could think of was that rejections would arrive in due course -- just in time to mark the anniversary of my husband's death and the quiet horror of that morning.

Then I began reading the archives of this blog -- and spun in a whirlpool of ideas, a mist of partial scenes, fragments of dialogue blown hither and yon, a stream of dim characters, all crying for release or capture.

And I hope I may have found, finally, an arc to link those pieces called The Minor Annals.

For an example of really good storytelling, read Scott's November 24 post, Crossing Smokey.

And for photos that send the imagination soaring, Gabriele's posts on her trip to Oban, particularly the one dated 21.11.09.

Personal Demons

2009-11-28T07:15:00.004-05:00

The damned-near perfect cover of Stacia Kane's

mmp Personal Demons.

Am really not sure just whom to credit

because the back cover says "cover art

by Dmiti Koksharov" and the frontis page,

"Timothy Lantz(http://www.stygiandarkness.com/)"

From Juno Books, a Pocket Books imprint of Simon and Schuster.

I intended ( but I don't think I did) to review Personal Demons last Fall, back in the time of Before -- not only because Stacia and I go back a long way in blogtime (we met on the blessed Miss Snark's blog when Stacia published under the name December Quinn) and also because Personal Demons is such a delicious read.

I read it again this weekend and it's still a delicious read. I can't really improve on the blurb for a plot teaser. The following both quotes and amends the back cover:

Megan Chase promises listeners to her new radio call-in show that she'll slay "their personal demons," and they believe her. (She's an accredited psychologist after all.) But: So do the demons. Delicious twist #1.

The demons realize she will be a valuable weapon for any demon "family" that gains her allegiance, because their internecine heirarchy includes a dangerous soul-sucker called the Accuser and Megan has certain skills. Megan acquires - without wailing - a handsome demon lover from the demon mafia ( Delicious twist # 2,) and a trio of demon bodyguards: Malleus, Maleficarum - and Spud. Delicious twist # 3.

A thoroughly enjoyable urban fantasy, plot driven, with a nice dry wit and just enough situational comedy. Megan isn't exactly kick-ass but she is no wilting wimp and stands up for herself. Though he "doesn't want to be a hero", her demon lover is also engaging and unusual. And you gotta love Malleus, Maleficarum and Spud.

I am glad I didn't review the book last year after all.

Now I can also report that Demon Inside and Demon Possessed (Megan Chase books # 2 and 3) are or will be available from Juno Books.

And that Unholy Ghosts will be published by Del Rey in 2010.

And I get to name drop. Stacia Kane. I knew her back when!