The Dog Days of Pear Summer

Today's blog entry is brought to you by dogs. And pears. And maybe a cloud or two.

But we'll start with Lou Ann, who is neither pear nor cloud, but all dog and proud of it.

That's Lou -- Lou Ann Tuttle, in full. She came to us from a shelter in Olive Branch, Mississippi four years ago, I think it was. I just took this picture, out on the patio.

Lou is part Shepherd and all Alpha Female. She's even got Thor under control, and Thor is easily twice her size. Maybe three times. But when Lou Ann lifts those ears and gives him that look, Thor sort of nods and accedes. Which is good, because (don't tell him I said this) Lou Ann is far more suited to be pack leader than Thor, who is still in goofy-puppy mode.

It's still hard for me to understand why someone put Lou in a shelter. Her time (and her number) were nearly up when we got her. She's a loving, well-behaved dog who is genuinely eager to please. Yeah, she's not a full-blooded anything, but for that matter, neither am I.

Next up in the non-sequitur parade are pears. Specifically, the pears produced by a scraggly five-dollar pear tree I bought on a whim at a big-box store years ago. It was a little more than chest high, hardly more than a weed, really. But now it is a pear-producing machine, people. Seriously. There are hundreds of not particularly beautiful but certainly very tasty pears hanging from this determined little tree right now. Here's a shot of just one branch:

Yes, I was after a pear when I took the photo of Lou Ann. Do I always take my camera when I go outside for a pear?

Yes, because if Bigfoot is at the tree again I want proof. 

Finally, a cloud. Or a bunch of clouds, doesn't matter, just take a good look at this, and tell me what you see!

I see a dog, running. Playing. Happy.

That was the cloud, over the pear tree, being watched by Lou Ann.

What does any of that mean?

Everything. Nothing. Sometimes a dog is just a dog, and a cloud is just a cloud.

And sometimes they're all a part of something far bigger.

I suppose that's up to you to decide.

Me, I'm going to eat a pear and rub Lou Ann's head and watch that dog romp across the sky.

Art For Each of Your 29 Eyes

I've been on an art spree for the last couple of weeks.

Maybe it's because I've gotten hooked on a couple of comics -- er, graphic novels. That's one huge advantage the Kindle Fire has over the e-ink models; I can download and read graphic novels that I just cannot find anywhere in Oxford.

Naturally, I've enjoyed The Walking Dead series, as well as a few other works. Sure, I still love books, but seeing characters come to life on the page as art is a pleasure all its own.

I even took a stab at designing my own cover. The result, which I'm still proud of, is below:

One characters I've wanted to see an image of for a long time is Mug. Mug, as you may know, is a character from my YA fantasy series (which includes the novel All the Paths of Shadow and the novella Saving the Sammi). Mug isn't a human, or even a biped. He is a snarky, sarcastic enchanted houseplant with 29 mobile eyes and a dead-seated fear of aphids.

Even armed with a modest array of powerful graphics manipulation programs, my attempts to create a passable image of Mug were, shall we say less than successful. Less than successful as in so embarrassing I won't post them here.

So I shelved the 'Let's draw Mug!' project. Sure, I could hire an artist, but I'm on a tight budget, and the derisive laughter of artists is hurtful.

As it happens, though, I did find an artist who I could afford. Her name is Laura LaRoche, and she works with an outfit called Hercules Editing and Consulting. Hercules did my book trailer last week, and when I mentioned I'd always wanted to see Mug, Laura agreed to take on the project.

So, I am happy to present to you, for the first time anywhere, Mugglesworth Verity Ovis, Tirlin's foremost authority on theoretical mathematics and problematic beetles:

I know. Ms LaRoche did a fantastic job. That's Mug, single yellow eye, five red eyes, assorted other hues looking on, bemused by all the attention.

That's not the only image of Mug, either. I've added a new area to my webpage, which contains a variety of images (Mug and others) which I've resized and made available as posters and downloadable desktop images.

They're all free. You can grab any or all of them, and use them as you wish. I am particularly fond of the posters.

So head on over to my new art gallery page and take anything you like! Here are a few small samples...

Like I said, all free, just click and save! Oh, and if anyone wants a desktop sized for a particular screen, just email me the dimensions and I'll cobble one together for you.

New Mug & Meralda novella! Book trailer release! Dancing elephants! S'mores!

It's a busy day today here at Casa Tuttle!

In just a few sentences, I'm going to announce the publication of a new Mug and Meralda novella. And I'm going to put up a link to the book trailer for All the Paths of Shadow. I'll even talk a bit about the new novel now in progress.

But first, a few words of thanks.

No matter how careful I am, typos rceep in two everY man-ewe-screept. And no number of thorough editing passes ever quite catches them all. In fact, I hereby propose a new Law of the Universe, which shall hereafter be known as Tuttle's Truthful Ratio of Typos to Effort, expressed thusly:

The number of undetected typographical errors in any manuscript is equal to the number of editing passes plus 1. Or maybe plus 3, or 6, or 16, depending on how ornery the Universe is feeling on any given day. 

In simpler terms, I suppose one could say of typos 'You never correct them all.'

Which is where beta readers come in. The purpose of a beta reader is threefold. The beta reader sees the complete and uncensored ineptitude of a writer, takes steps to point out the writer's errors, and then keeps this dreadful knowledge a secret, lest the writer be revealed for the quasi-literate poser they are.

So many thanks to my faithful beta reader Kellie, and now her husband Stephon and daughter Ava, who helped stamp out the scourge of missing letters and doubled quotation marks (and that is all I will admit to).

So, without further ado, I present to you the world premiere of the new Mug and Meralda novella, Saving the Sammi!

You can pick it up now at Amazon for a mere buck and a half. I'm working on a Nook version, and should have that ready later this week. I will of course let you know!

I enjoyed writing Saving the Sammi. Without giving away too much, it's a very straightforward adventure story, involving the rescue of the family trapped aboard a storm-stricken airship trapped in a deadly ascent. Market testing even among eight-year-olds (okay, a market of one, but still) placed it just below Harry Potter and possibly even with Warrior Cats, which I consider high praise indeed. Adults will enjoy it too!

So go grab a copy. It's a quick read, and you'll never look at a rowboat quite the same way again.

Now, for book trailer news! That's right, I have a book trailer, which is to a book what those ads before the movie starts are to motion pictures. My book trailer is for All the Paths of Shadow, and it was created by the fine people at Hercules Editing and Consulting. I heard about Hercules through a fellow author (thanks Elyse!), who said they did excellent work at prices authors can afford.

The phrase 'at prices authors can afford' is understood to mean 'whatever loose change you can shake out of the couch,' so I did some checking, liked what I saw, and hired Hercules to produce a short book trailer for All the Paths of Shadow. The result is lovely -- but hey, see for yourself!

Click here for the book trailer!

I love the trailer. So a huge thanks to Beth and Syd at Hercules!

I hope you enjoy Saving the Sammi and the book trailer for All the Paths of Shadow. Both represent a lot of work -- not so much by me on the book trailer, since my skills in that arena are limited to spelling the words 'book trailer,' but I know just enough to know putting it together wasn't easy. Writing Saving the Sammi was fun, and I learned a lot about airships and the early days of flight in the process. Mostly what I learned was you have to be a special kind of crazy to climb aboard a huge cloth envelope filled with hydrogen (the word hydrogen comes from the Greek hydro, which means 'wants to explode,' and gen, 'very very badly'). But climb aboard they did, usually while smoking big cigars, and for that, I salute them albeit from a safe distance.

So now it's time to get back to work on the new Meralda and Mug novel, All the Turns of Light. There may be another short story (or two, or three) released in the near future, depending on how work on the novel goes. Look for more airships in Turns of Light. Because darn it, I like airships.

I'd love to hear what any of you think about the story or the trailer! My email inbox is always open, so drop me a line at franktuttle@franktuttle.com.

A Book by Its Cover

If you've heard those rumors I started a couple of weeks ago, I'm here to tell you they are indeed true.

A new Meralda and Mug short will be out soon. Soon as in 'as soon as I can get it formatted, converted, uploaded, and out there.' It's written, so all it needs is the conversion into e-reader ready formats.

This one is a novella, which means it's about 11,000 words long. So it's not a full-blown novel. No, this is just a short piece as a sort of thank-you to the fans. Something to read and enjoy while I work on the next novel, which will be considerably longer than 11K.

Even novellas need covers, though. And since I've decided to just put this short piece out there myself, I'm acting as my own cover artist.

Now, given that I have the artistic skills of a mollusk, making a book cover represents quite a challenge. Let's face it -- you put a book out there with a lousy cover, and you might as well emblazon the words THIS BOOK BLOWS right below it, in flashing red letters.

I won't buy a book with an ugly or amateurish cover. Call me shallow, go ahead, but I figure if they can't make a good first impression with the art the words inside are even worse.

I suppose there have been a few times when I bought a book despite seeing what I thought was a lousy cover.  Thud, by the brilliant and infallible Terry Pratchett, leaps to mind. Here's the cover:

I hate that book cover. Love the book. But for reasons I can't even express, the cover absolutely makes my skin crawl, and that's no easy feat.

So, when I set out to design the cover for the new Meralda and Mug novella (still trying to decide if I'm going to reveal the title yet), I knew a couple of things I didn't want to do.

1) No depictions of clubs bearing the title of the work about to strike armed heads.

2) My name should probably not take up a fifth of the cover. Terry Pratchett can and should take up that much space. Frank Tuttle should not. Such is the way of the world..

With those points out of the way, I had to ask myself what elements I did want to include on the cover. Here's what I came up with:

1) Meralda. She's the heroine, so she needs to be the primary figure on the cover. 

2) Mug should probably be there two. Wait, did I really just write Mug as an enchanted houseplant with mobile, gripping vines and twenty-nine eyes of various colors? I did, didn't I? And now I'm supposed to draw that?

3) An airship. The story centers around the unlikely rescue of a stricken airship, so putting a dirigible-like craft up in the sky is a must.

4) The title, the author byline (that's me!), all that jazz.

So, armed with this list and the finest in modern drawing implements, I laid out my supplies, put some Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, naturally) on the turntable, and unleashed my Muse Artistic.

Minutes crept by. Hours. Then days. Victuals were brought to my garret, and hurled down in contempt, such was my fevered determination to bring forth Art.

I drew. I imagined. I erased, I crumpled, I despaired, I started anew. In a corner of the room, a passing wind blew the pages of a by-day calendar up and over. Calendar pages were ripped away, one at a time.  Seasons changed. My beard grew long, and housed a den of foxes.

In the end, I looked wearily down upon the hard-won fruits of my labor, and I cried out in a great voice, 'How much does Photoshop cost again?"

First, you'll notice two things about this image. One, I slipped and revealed the title of the new novella, which is Saving the Sammi.

Second, the cover really stinks. Although I think I really nailed the magical effluent around Meralda's wand. That is some Impressionist masterwork there, people. Each dot a masterpiece.

After long and careful consideration, I decided against drawing my own cover art. Which sent me scurrying back to the net, in hopes of finding legal, suitable images I could use.

It was the legal aspect of this I found most daunting, originally. I'm no Intellectual Property lawyer, but I know you can't just snag any old image that catches your eye and make your own book cover out of it. That would make me as bad a book pirate, and I hate those guys.

So I did a little research, and was glad to find a number of sites which sell royalty-free images that are licensed for use on book covers. And the prices aren't always the hundreds or thousands of dollars I was afraid of finding, either. Many were well within my budget.

The legal hurdle crossed, I settled on www.dreamstime.com and began my search for suitable cover images.

Now, I knew I wasn't going to find a ready-made image which depicted the scene I had in mind. But I have Corel Paint Shop Pro X4, which makes it easy to edit and combine multiple images and which offers a vast array of effects and graphics features. I've seen it called the 'poor man's Photoshop,' and at $75 I concur.

So what I was looking for turned out to be three images -- one of Meralda, one background image, and one of a steampunkish airship.

Searching on 'steampunk female' or the like inside Dreamstime pulled up a wealth of images. Some were drawn. Some were photos. Some were....

Well, let's just say that wardrobe malfunctions must be common among steampunk females. Not quite what I was looking for, since Meralda is adamant about remaining clothed. 

Finally, I found what I was looking for -- a young woman wearing flying goggles, black gloves, and a scarf. 

And she's got a smirk. I liked it, so into the cart it went. 

Now I needed a background. Something stormy and ominous. I found plenty of photos of storm-fronts, but they tended to include cityscapes, and modern-day Chicago doesn't really work for depicting steampunk Tirlin. 

But then I stumbled across this:

That had it all. Some clouds, an airship, a steampunk porthole and vintage maps.  

I was set.

All that remained was to resize and combine the two images. 

The optimum size for an Amazon catalog image is 1562 pixels wide by 2500 tall. So I resized my background -- no problem. Then I did a rough insert of Meralda, and quickly found she was facing the wrong way, which covered up the airship.

No big deal. Paint Shop let me mirror her, and also extract her from the dark background in her image. Then I resized her extracted image, over and over, until I found one that fit.

Then, just for fun, I added a title and a byline, and voila! A rough draft of a book cover, all done by a guy who has yet to manage stick figures on paper...

No, this isn't the final image. I'm still messing with a few things.  But I thought a few of you might be interested in a behind-the-scenes walkthrough  of how book covers are born here at Casa Tuttle.

Oh, and yeah, no Mug. I suppose the demand upon artists for depictions of many-eyed houseplants is still relatively small. I'd have drawn one myself, but -- you saw how that went.

So if you're a fan of All the Paths of Shadow, keep a lookout for the new Meralda & Mug novella, coming any day now. I'll announce it here, on Twitter, on Facebook, from my cell at the Lafayette County Detention Center, all my usual haunts.

And if you like the cover, now you know its story!

Snug Nugget Open for Business!

As a long-time resident (some would say nuisance) of the Amazon Kindle discussion boards, one of the complaints posted most frequently is that e-books cost too much.

I'm not one of the people posting these price complaints. E-books are almost always cheaper than their paper counterparts, and if they aren't, factors such as portability, accessibility, and zero-shelf-space more than make up for a few pennies in cost.

But if you do feel that e-books cost too much, I'm happy to announce you now have the chance to set your price! A new publishing venture opened this morning, which means when you buy from Snug Nugget, you pay whatever you feel is fair.

Better still, Snug Nugget sells e-books by the bundle, and a generous portion (nearly 15 percent) of each purchase price is donated to Book Aid International, which supports literacy, education, and development in sub-Saharan Africa.

So you get good books at a good price and you do good. Which is good. And a blatant over-use of the word 'good.'

If you're curious as to why I'm touting Snug Nugget's new business model and you decided Frank is enthused over this pay-as-you-want strategy because Frank is a forward-thinking philanthropist, well, I'm afraid you're dead wrong. Frank has a small role in this enterprise, in that the three Wistril stories included in Wistril Compleat are a part of the bundle.

So you get Wistril Besieged, Wistril Afloat, and Wistril Betrothed as part of the bundle.

The other four entries are novels in genres ranging from mystery to SF to fantasy, which allows you to visit the Mars of the future (Mankind's Worst Fear, by David L. Erickson), confront a saber-tooth cat on the loose in the present (Smilodon, by Alan Nayes), solve a mystery in Florence (Intrigue in Italics, by Gayle Wigglesworth), and visit an alternate Earth during a very different Renaissance (The Plight of Angels, by Ian Hodge).

All for the low, low price of whatever the heck you wish to pay.


So browse on over to snugnugget.com and grab a bunch of e-books. And remember a portion of the purchase price goes to some genuinely deserving people in a hard-hit part of Africa, so pat yourself on the back as you click that buy button.

http://www.snugnugget.com/

The Writing Olympics!

As everyone on the planet knows, the Summer Olympics are underway.

I didn't see the opening ceremonies. From what I've managed to piece together from assorted tweets and bits of Facebook postings, the Olympics opened with Doctor Who and Mary Poppins joining forces to defeat James Bond. Or the Queen. Frankly I'm a bit fuzzy on that bit, although I do think the same little old lady who stared Hitler down back in the day could probably shove Mary Poppins' umbrella in an entirely undignified spot.

You may have surmised that the Olympics hold little interest for me. And you'd be right, because at the risk of posting heresy, it all boils down to people running, people chasing balls, or people running while chasing balls. They don't have cheerleaders. I can't even pretend interest in any sporting event that lacks cheerleaders.

No, if the Olympic committee wants my viewership -- and let's face facts, they lie awake at night hatching plots to get it -- they'll have to include events that appeal to me, Frank the writer.

And that will have the happy benefit of attracting my surly circle of fellow writers, many of whom last saw the outdoors (or even an image of the outdoors) the last time they changed houses.

So here is my list of suggested Olympic Events for Writers. Olympic Committee Members may direct their checks and adoration to my email address.

OLYMPIC EVENTS FOR WRITERS

1) The Fifty-Yard Coffee and Sandwich Run -- Look, if we had time to prepare real food we'd be cookbook authors. But we've got people to kill, worlds to ravage, forgotten subplots to tie up. Check bread for mold, smear one slice with peanut butter (if any), smear the other with whatever we can scrape out of the jam jar, nuke seven-hour old coffee, balance the cup, saucer, and sandwich in one hand while running through a darkened room toward the dim glow of a flat panel display. That's our life. So make it an event -- with a timer, horns, and of course a couple of dogs running underfoot. Oh, and make the coffee an unstable, explosive fluid. We've got ratings to worry about.

2)  The Just A Quick Email Check Relay -- This one will be a hit. Put two computer workstations one hundred yards apart. One station is set up for word processing, no net, nothing else. The other station, one hundred yards distant, is equipped to check Twitter, Facebook, email, Fark, Cracked, and various other sites. Authletes (that's my word for 'author athletes', and I get $1500 PER WORD, Olympic Committee) must compose a brilliant paragraph of prose, race to the social media station, and return within an allotted and ever-shrinking time. Naturally a few authletes will die trying to beat the buzzer after a marathon session of defending their paragraphs from critics on Twitter, but hey, this is the big time.

3) Query Letter Hide N Seek -- Fiendishly simple, yet endlessly entertaining. A fit young runner is handed a blank sheet of paper in the middle of a circle of authors. When the pistol sounds, the runner chooses any author at random and dashes toward him or her. If the runner manages to touch the author with the blank paper, that author MUST sit down and, in one pass, create the perfect query letter, or be lampooned mercilessly by a panel of New York literary agents.

4) Rejection Selection -- A modern-day reboot of a gory Roman favorite. Authors are placed into the arena. Each author may defend themselves only with the printed copy of their current work in progress. From the stands high above, editors and first readers take aim with finely-honed harpoons, while Strunk & White's timeless classic 'The Elements of Style' is read aloud over loudspeakers. The last author standing is awarded a gift basket filled with moist towelettes and a complementary copy of the current 'Writer's Market.'

5) The Dangling Participle of Death -- Authors and their grammar skills are put to the ultimate test within this maze of boobytraps and deadly machines.  At every turn, authors must use state-of-the-art graphic displays to correctly diagram complex sentences. Once the sentence is diagrammed, a door opens -- but is it the door to freedom, or death? Was that a gerund? Was that a dependent clause? Do you feel lucky, punk?
Correct answers lead the way to the next sentence. Incorrect answers result in amusing but gruesome spectacles. Don't you wish you'd paid more attention to Mrs. Fitzgiggens now, Mister All Knowing Author?

Add some of those events, and I'll watch. Otherwise, I'll stick to reruns of South Park.

Data Stream Lost

What is the significance of the image above?

None. Sometimes a wooden skull superimposed against the sky is simply a wooden skull superimposed against the sky.

Hey, I never promised I'd start making sense.


It's been a busy week for me. Taught my last Summer Writing Course on Thursday evening. The Library has plans to start an adult writing course in January of 2013, so if you're in the Oxford area and you have an interest in listening to me babble for an hour and a half once a week for a month or two, hit me with an email and I'll keep you posted on dates and other specifics.

Since the new Markhat novel Brown River Queen sold a couple of weeks ago, I've started on the new Meralda and Mug novel, All the Turns of Light.  I'll keep posting here about my progress or lack thereof. I would welcome emails of encouragement, especially if they arrive as credible threats to my physical well being. I'm having a hard time writing these days, folks. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's my own innate slothful nature, combined with a complete and utter lack of any discernable work ethic.

Sure, I sit at the keyboard and pound away. Like I've done all afternoon, just now.

I deleted it. Every word. It was awful, and no amount of editing was going to fix it.

They say every writer has a million bad words inside they have to write down before the good ones start emerging. I thought I'd gotten rid of the bad ones already.

Guess not. You learn something new every day, which as far as I'm concerned is a compelling reason to stay in bed with the covers pulled over your head.

That's my pal Thor. We call him Thorazine sometimes because he's nuts. But in a good way. Like any German Shepherd dog, he's attentive and protective and always, always eager to please. He's at my feet right now, half-asleep, ready to get up and play should I do anything but type.

Thor's a rescue dog. All of our dogs are. He was a year old when we got him, and it took him about 15 minutes to fall utterly and completely in love with Karen and I. His former person gave him up because he stopped being a puppy. News flash, idiot former owner. That's what dogs do. Stop being puppies.

I hope Thor doesn't remember Former Idiot Owner. I bet he does. But he seems very happy here, and this is his home, forever.

Thor is the second GSD (German Shepherd Dog) I've had the pleasure of knowing. Maggie, bless her soul, was the first. She was twice Thor's size, and he's no dwarf. Honestly, Maggie was the size of a small horse. I'm not exaggerating. She frightened people from considerable distances, even though she was a gentle, kind giant.

And she loved me. As, perhaps, only a GSD can. Once upon a time -- I won't go into the details -- I found myself face to face with an angered redneck, of the gap-toothed and tattooed variety. The guy was puffed up and ready to fight.

Until Maggie, who never had a moment of formal training, squeezed her massive frame through a partially-opened pickup truck window and joined me, at my side.

Redneck lad went from furious to calm and submissive in a heartbeat.

Maggie never growled. She never bared her teeth. She never breathed hard. She sat, right by my side, but we all knew that if Redneck started trouble Maggie would be the one to end it.

I walked away unscathed. Maggie obeyed my 'girl, truck' command like she'd been trained by the Mossad.

Maggie is buried, along with seven others, here on the property. She died of sudden acute kidney failure. 

I think of her daily. As I do of the others. They were all amazing animals, all our friends. All rescues, all strays, all judged worthless by the wide, wide world.

Which just shows what the wide world knows.

You may have seen this pic before. It's a steampunk gun. Okay, truth time -- it's a Nerf gun I modified so that it appears to be a steampunk gun.

I like making things. It's relaxing. Throw some Pink Floyd on the stereo, grab the super glue, dump a bin of spare parts on the workbench, and get busy. It's therapy, people, for minds that don't respond well to any other kind of therapy.

It's a bit like the gun Markhat now carries. You know, the gun Evis and his pals created in the catacombs beneath Avalante. First they created gunpowder, which allowed them to create cannons. Then some bright tech thought 'You know what? Scaled down, a man could carry one of these!'

And thus the handcannon was born. Markhat first carried one in The Broken Bell. Haven't read it?

Then get thee here and grab a copy! Look, it's got magic. Gunplay. A film noir detective. Intrigue. Adventure. Love. Hate. Hope. Despair. 

It's five bucks. 

Give The Broken Bell a try!

That's my bike.

She's a Honda Rebel. 250 cc, so we're not talking hog here. She'll do an easy 85, though, so she's no scooter.

Karen has a similar bike a Suzuki GZ250. Both get around 68 MPG. We ride them to work when the weather is nice, and kick around in the country on the weekends. 

I'd never ridden a motorcycle before buying the Honda. I laid her down the very first day, when I learned the hard way that making a turn into gravel at speed is a good way to test your protective motorcycle gear. I walked away without a scratch; the Rebel has a tiny ding in her gas tank, and since I've learned to ride a bike.

The first thing a motorcycle teaches you is speed. More precisely, the significance thereof. 

You're in a car. You're doing 65. You're bored, you're listening to the radio, you're thinking about work and a thousand other things.

Get on a bike. Do 65.

Oh, boys and girls. You suddenly understand, down to your bones, that this speed can and will kill you.

There's no illusion of safety. There's no deceiving simulation of your comfy couch in your living room.

The wind is screaming past your helmet. It's grabbing at your jacket. It's pelting you with bugs and debris, the tiniest of which sting like bullets.

The bike is roaring and shaking. Every miniscule bump in the road causes you to jump and lurch. The seat slams your butt with every rise, every dip.

The cars you barely glance at, when you're one of them, are each driven by Death himself. Because -- and this is true, gentle readers -- NONE OF THEM SEE YOU. 

They don't. I don't know why. I see motorcyclists, when I am driving my car. I recognize them as vehicles, and act accordingly.

And if you do too, I salute you.

But most don't. They go right on texting, go right on changing their radio stations while they pull out four meters in front of you, or merge right into your lane.

Just to survive, motorcycle drivers have to be twice as good as car drivers. Three times as good. Four times faster.  

That's why you'll see bike drivers waving at each other, when we meet on the road. 

We share a common fear -- that of the old lady in the Cutlass Supreme, who will turn in front of us and tell the Highway Patrol she never saw that awful motorcycle, it just came out of nowhere.

Here's me at my last book signing.

Hold the Dark is old news. I've written and sold and published two more books since then (The Banshee's Walk and The Broken Bell). But I like that photo, since it proves I still have hair.

And now, for an audio segment!

Click here for a new segment of Out on the Patio!

Hope you enjoyed the audio segment. I promise that's the last installment of 'Big Dogs Howling.' 

My friend Elsye Salpeter, author of Flying to the Light, just sold the sequel to Cool Well Press. So congratulations, Elyse! Well done!

See you next week!

And the beat goes on . . .

Some afternoons you write.

Some afternoons you take old barn lumber and make wearable skull masks, complete with display stand.

No wonder people worry about my mental state.

Normally, when I build things, I spend a lot of time making scale drawings and building it in my head to make sure all the pieces will fit before I make any cuts.I measure and mark all my lumber carefully, and check everything twice before the first sawdust flies. On this piece, I just went nuts with a jigsaw. No measurements, no straightedges, no squares. I just laughed maniacally and cut.

Surprisingly, the pieces fit together. You can't see them in these photos, but I even made my own square-head nails.

Total construction time: less than three hours, including the stand. Cost: zero dollars.

I'm not done with it yet. The wood needs some aging. And a bit if subtle finishing, to get the look I'm after.

What does one do with a life-sized but anatomically inaccurate rendition of a human skull, you ask?

Wearing it to work is out. Ditto for trips to Kroger or the bookstore.

So I'll probably put this up on eBay in a week or two as 'folk art.' If it doesn't sell there, my truck needs a dash ornament, and just by adding a stiff spring I can have the world's largest folk art skull bobblehead!

If nothing else, it served to let me build something, no matter how ridiculous, which I need to do from time to time.

Maybe now I can get back to writing!

Markhat News!

And so a great hush fell over the land. Everywhere, creatures fell silent and still. Squirrels halted in mid-scamper. Wolves paused in their howling. Woodchucks stopped doing whatever it is that woodchucks do.

For there it was. The email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series, in the inbox that held the email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series (repetition emphasizes content).

The woodchucks grew restless, eager to resume their tireless efforts at establishing a stable fusion reaction (they're a lot smarter than they look, people). The wolves gave me the stink eye, fearful that Sarah Palin might be sighting in on them from a Stealth helicopter. The squirrels complained bitterly, because re-establishing a sustained scamper isn't nearly as easy as it looks.

So I opened the email, and . . .

. . . and . . .

BROWN RIVER QUEEN, the new Markhat novel, has been accepted!


Yes, that's right, the 7th Markhat title will be making its way to a bookstore near you soon.  This is another full-blown novel, not a novella or a collection of short stories. The old gang is back, with a new face or two as well.

At the moment, it looks like we're heading for a March 2013 release date. I will of course keep you posted here.

Thanks for all the support! Now let's all go hug an Ogre in celebration!

Belfast: Both Barrels

According to the latest news out of the sewage-encrusted wasteland that is Northern Ireland, the Belfast City Council put dog Lennox down after holding him hostage for two years of sham court hearings and clumsy lies.

Here's a quote from the official TheLennoxCampaign page --

Official Statement From Lennox's Family:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your messages of support. We are sorry to say at the present time Belfast city council seem to be intent on killing our boy. Despite previous assurances otherwise, we have been denied the opportunity to say goodbye. We have also been told that we cannot collect his body and bring Len home. We have been informed however that we will receive "some" ashes in the mail.


Keep in mind that poor Lennox was a service dog to a special needs little girl. Keep in mind the Belfast City Council (spelled 'Baby-stomping Nazi bastards') dragged this whole wretched mess out for two years, while they kept Lennox in a despicable little wire cage surrounded by his own feces (and yes, there are photos).


In the end, the Belfast City Council wouldn't even let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


I suppose the Belfast City Council's offhand promise to mail 'some' of Lennox's ashes to his grieving family counts as rare fine charity in merry old Belfast. I imagine each member of the Belfast City Council (I want to make sure Google remembers what the Council is destined to be most famous for, thus the repetition of the words Belfast City Council) was teary-eyed and filled with pride when they magnanimously offered to mail the innocent dog's remains to the grieving little girl.


I suspect they'll send the envelope postage due.


Send it postage due, and then levy charges against the Barnes family for 'storing illegal dog-breed ashes' or something equally inane.  This is, after all, the Belfast City Council we're talking about. 


Because that's the kind of cruel, sadistic, unfeeling, vindictive, unreasoning, cold-hearted, psychopathic, puppy-murdering, bloodthirsty, evil-minded, rotten, despicable, worthless, cowardly, vicious execrable foul vile depraved repugnant malodorous inhumane barbarous stinking hateful reprobate maleficent bags of crap that make up the Belfast City Council.

I'm not even doing them justice in the paragraph above. They snatched some kid's dog after showing up at the wrong address, they decided Lennox was a pit bull when his Belfast-issued license and a DNA test clearly showed he was a perfectly legal 7 year old bulldog/lab mix, and then they kept the poor dog in a cage until they murdered him, two years later, with an offhand note saying 'Nope, no goodbyes, we'll mail you some ashes, are we good now?'


How do you even convey the depth of such blatantly cruel behavior?


I suspect that Lennox either died in his deplorable confinement or was put down months ago. I suspect the Belfast City Council was afraid to reveal this, after the media firestorm surrounding Lennox became apparent to even their dim, ratlike little minds.


Internationally-renowned dog trainer Victoria Stilwell recently traveled to Belfast with an offer to take Lennox away to the US at no expense whatsoever to the Belfast City Council.


The Belfast City Council refused to even speak with Victoria Stilwell. Consider that for a moment -- fat-headed career politicians refused to cavort in front of cameras. With a celebrity. Does anyone else find that strange?


I suspect they refused for two reasons -- first, not one of the Belfast City Council members is capable of completing a sentence without lapsing into a violent alcoholic rage. And second, because they knew Lennox was already gone. Lennox's ill-treatment was apparent in the few photographs leaked from his pathetic quarters. I believe Lennox died through abuse and/or neglect, and that's why the Belfast City Council refused to meet with Miss Stilwell or let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


They'd already killed the dog.


Which makes them liars as well as heartless villains.


It's too late to help Lennox. Unless the legacy of his horrific mistreatment at the hands of the Belfast City Council, the ignoramus judges, and the truly incompetent 'dog experts' that made up the whole wretched tale causes some change in the dark heart of Belfast, Lennox will have died (badly) for nothing.


So, by all means, put Belfast at the top of your holiday destination list! Belfast, famous for its exports of boils and goiters, where the authorities are so friendly they'll quite possibly mail you the remains of your pets a couple of years after they murder them. 


Belfast, city of delights, if by delights you mean bloodthirsty dog wardens and a City Council bent on casual slaughter of all dogs, whether they are a prohibited breed or not. 


Belfast, where pride trumps reason, where compassion is something that happens elsewhere, where they'll mail you the ashes of the one you loved.


Belfast City Council, you people are rotten to the core.

Dragons, Books, and Something New!

Life is change. Or change is life. Or is it time is money?  Stitches in time save goats?

I can never keep all that eldritch wisdom straight.

Regardless of my lackluster grasp of homilies, I'm going to do two new things in today's blog.

First, I'm going to talk about someone else's book for a change. Hey, stop all that clapping and cheering, I can hear you, you know.

Next, I'm going to introduce a segment I call 'Out on the Patio.' This will be an audio segment, recorded out on my patio, in which I blabber on about whatever inane subject strikes my fancy. There will be a link below.

Why am I doing this?

Mainly because I wanted to give you guys a change of pace. You come here week after week and read my rants and raves, and if I keep doing the same old same old I'll wind up boring you.  That's the main reason.

Also, I went to great lengths to purchase this nifty chrome-plated Blue Snowball professional microphone, and aside from a few ill-fated sessions of singing along with musical legend Billy Idol the Snowball hasn't gotten any use. My plan was to start a podcast. I still plan to do that, but I have to first get over this stage fright, and the 'Out on the Patio' segments seem like a good way to do this.

Finally, you'll all get the chance to marvel at my thick Mississippi accent. Mock away. But I'd really appreciate it if, when you're done laughing, you'd zap me an email and let me know how the sound quality was.  Too soft? Too loud? Muffled? Distorted? Made your dogs bark and your ears bleed?

Let me know!

First, let's talk about a book I just finished, Dragons of Wendal by Maria Schneider.

Before starting Maria's book, I plowed through several zombie novels and a couple of 'extreme' horror anthologies. To say I was aghast at the poor quality of these books would be a vast understatement. Formatting problems? All over the place. Grammar errors? Right, left, and rife. Bad storytelling? Oh yeah.

Dragons of Wendal was, if you'll forgive the analogy, a breath of fresh air. Spot-on perfect formatting. Impeccable grammar. Engaging characters, skillfully drawn, in a story that was by turns funny, frightening, and even (gasp) romantic.

Zoe, the heroine, is smart and plucky and accomplished. Her world is filled with magic and peril, but it is not just another Standard High Fantasy knock-off complete with red-faced blustery innkeeps and wise old whiskery mages. I loved Zoe's world. It lived and breathed, and visiting it was great fun.

I don't do spoilers, so I'd better shut up. Look, if you like my stuff, or Pratchett, or classic high fantasy with a modern twist, grab Dragons of Wendal. It's only $2.99 at Amazon for the Kindle; there's also a paperback version there for just a few bucks more.

And now for my audio debut!

Out on the Patio

You guys are my guinea pigs -- er, valued pre-release focus group. Let me know what you think by emailing me franktuttle@franktuttle.com!

Thanks. And stay cool out there!

Even Legumes Get the Blues

Maybe it's the heat.

And it's heat we have, in spades. The outside temperature Friday reached four hundred and eleventy hundred billion degrees, in the shade, beneath a bag of ice, wearing a suit made of ice cream.

And that was before things really heated up in the afternoon.

Even the snakes aren't biting. Instead, they squint and promise to hide under your pillow sometime in November. Even the omnipresent Jehovah's Witnesses have curtailed their soul-saving operations, figuring, I suppose, that this weather is so close to Hell as to make them functionally indistinguishable.

Whatever the reason, I just can't get my aging aftermarket brain in gear lately. I sit down to write. My brain stares at the screen for a moment and then wanders away, leaving my fingers to tap out sentences such as "The gyro hast regretted a frigid assemblage of melodious corn, forsooth."

That's not exactly going to wow the editors at Cool Well Press.

So what, you and I both ask, is your problem, Frank?

Heck if I know. I'm eating. I'm sleeping. I'm getting plenty of exercise, if by 'plenty' you mean 'as little as humanly possible,' and if by exercise you mean 'not exercise.' But that's fine, because I HATE exercise. I'm not even keen on being corporeal. It was fun for the first fifteen or twenty years, but you get arthritis and let's see you wax rhapsodic about it.

Maybe it's the slow book sales this summer. I see a sales rank dip down below 200,000 on Amazon, and suddenly just vegging out in front of the TV while 'America's Got Talent' proves America has little if any talent seems like a perfectly valid use of my rapidly dwindling supply of time.

Too, we must not discount prevailing public opinion, which may be summed up as 'Frank is inherently lazy.' There is considerable evidence to bolster this assertion. In fact, if the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot was half as pervasive, we'd all be waving to him as we met him on the street, three or four times each day.

I've tried positive affirmations, but I can't help but snicker at the things even while I repeat them to myself. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING! SEE THE FUTURE YOU WANT AND IT WILL BE THE FUTURE YOU EXPERIENCE!

Really? I want to be a 1999 Chevy Camaro.

I don't see any tires. I have lungs and not a small-block V6.

Bah. So much for that.

I know the only way out of the doldrums is through them. I have to keep typing, even if sentences such as "Gimlet races only brace the luckless vapors of solitude" are the only ones I produce.

I'm just tired. Maybe the weather will break. Maybe I'll find my center. Maybe the peach tree out back will start sprouting money.

The corpulent echoes of upright men sashay past, flags at half-mast, hats bespoke, ornery knees clicking...

Fifty Shades of Mug

I am writing in the wrong genre.

The buzz these days is all about the book Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm told Fifty Shades sells eleven billion copies per second on Amazon alone, and total sales of the book by all markets combined exceed the number of sentient beings in the populated universe by a factor so large mathematicians have been known to explode just trying to describe it.

This is in direct contrast to my own titles, which sell at a rate we will charitably describe as 'slightly slower.'

I took to a mountaintop recently to ponder, among other things, the reasons and causes for this inequitable disparity in sales. Okay, it wasn't a mountaintop, but sitting on that extra couch cushion does give me a commanding view of the foyer.There I sat, in a position of deep thought, through two entire episodes of Lizard Lick Towing.


And then it came to me.

My books feature very little of the content that made the author of Fifty Shades so rich they are now picking out a new sun because our current one is simply 'too yellow.'

Look through all my books. Spankings? Nope. Salacious romps in luxurious Wall Street offices? Um, no.

Even Markhat, who is a wise-cracking world-weary private eye, never gets any naughtier than a kiss now and then. Or, if he does, there's no way he's going to talk about it.

So maybe I need to move with the times. Maybe Markhat's next adventure should be entitled Steamy Rannit Nights, or Naughty Mama Hog. I have to stick with the three-word title motif -- you had noticed that, right? Well, it's a thing. All Markhat titles have three words. If there's a reason for that, it escapes me.

Of course, I'll also need to rename the new Mug and Meralda book. It was going to be called All the Turns of Light, but now I'm trying to decide between Pants in the Wind or Mug's Curious Encounter With a Rather Un-inhibited Philodendron Named Honey LaLove. 


Why not jump straight aboard the gravy train, though, and go with Fifty Shades of Mug?

I might even release a new version of All the Paths of Shadow - -see below!

And here's a Markhat title, renewed for the adult market!

Yes, the sky's the limit now!

Or you could just buy one of my plain old un-sexy books, linked below:

Frank's Amazon titles!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to research dirigibles...

That's Belfast! (A Save Lennox Post)

First, a bit of background.

Two years ago, in Belfast, a big black dog named Lennox was seized for the crime of being big and black.

Lennox never bit anyone. Never chased anyone. Never had a complaint spoken against him. He had a proper license. He had a good home. The Dog Wardens (that's apparently what Belfastians call the otherwise unemployable and the feeble-minded) were only at Lennox's home because they went to the wrong address. But because the Belfast Dog Wardens deemed him big and black, they also decided, using all six of their brain cells, that Lennox was a Pit Bull, a breed prohibited in Belfast.

What followed was a travesty. Photographs surfaced showing poor Lennox cowering in a tiny cage, surrounded by piles of his own feces. The official response by the Belfast City Council to these photos was a shrug and a puzzled 'Wait, what's wrong with fecal matter at one's feet?'

Two years passed. Various judges heard the claims of good behavior and non-Pit-Bullness. One of the Dog Wardens even perjured herself by claiming she was terrified of Lennox, despite a number of photos which showed the woman sitting calmly with Lennox, petting Lennox, even letting Lennox give her big sloppy dog-kisses.

A series of increasingly-corpulent Belfastian judges listened to all the evidence and wobbled their ponderous chins like Jabba the Hut sucking down a fifty-gallon drum of jello before blurting 'Off with his head!'

They even brought in a so-called 'dog expert,' who, after a brief interval of pointing at crows and insisting they were Welsh Corgies, claimed Lennox was not a Pit Bull, but was a settee, and could be dangerous, maybe, I see a lamp, what's a Pit Bull anyway?

You can read my previous comments on the matter here.

Today, though, marked the end for poor Lennox. The final judge, who I will not grace with even a name because I don't believe in adding Google points to bottom-feeding slime-worms, decreed that Lennox be put down at once.

His family won't even be allowed to say goodbye.

That's Belfast.

You've got your grossly incompetent, profoundly moronic Dog Wardens, who equate big and black with deadly slavering killing machine. You've got your City Council, who spend two years refusing against all evidence that the Wardens might have made a mistake. And you've got the absolute worst judges this side of the Fifth Galactic Arm, because they heard the evidence but clearly didn't understand enough of the big words to see what an idiotic case the Wardens and the Council brought against poor Lennox.

That's Belfast. Stupidity powered by arrogance compounded by incompetence.

Two years, they kept this poor friendly dog in a tiny metal cage. Two years, they put his family through Hell.

That's Belfast.

By now, I imagine poor Lennox is gone. And I imagine that the Belfast City Council and the Dog Wardens and the pudding-headed judges are all relieved that the whole business is history.

Except it isn't. You backwater, inbred Belfastian buffoons are about to learn, the hard way, what sort of impact negative press on the Web has on blighted little slums such as the one you call home.  There are those of us out here, well beyond the heaps of garbage that line your borders, who won't let people forget who and what you are.

So by all means, let's talk about Belfast. Let's talk about their tiny little cages, their ignorant and cruel civil servants, and the nasty air of casual cruelty that hangs over the whole wretched place like some persistent, noxious fog.

Because that's Belfast.

Rest easy, Lennox. None of this was your fault. No.

That too belongs to Belfast.


PS--
Please copy and paste this blog, or at least the URL, to the Lord Mayor of Belfast, email addy below:

lordmayorsoffice@belfastcity.gov.uk

Please be advised that the customary title for the Lord Mayor of Belfast is 'Peaches.' Or 'Twitface,' if you're feeling nobby.

Something Custard This Way Comes

One bit of writing advice I always give is this -- once you've submitted a piece, forget about it and start something new.

This advice doesn't play particularly well when I offer it to the checker at the grocery store, but other writers see the value in it. There is nothing to be gained from obsessive worry over a title that is now on an editor's desk. You can't hurry the process. You can't affect the outcome. All you can do is chew your fingernails down to your elbows and waste a lot of time.

So I started my new book the very day I sent out the old one.

But today, some eleven days after the submission, I find myself doing the very thing I so often warn others against. No, not licking outboard motors, but obsessing over a submission.

Now, eleven days in this business is nothing. Eleven weeks isn't even considered a long wait. I once waited eleven months for a yes or a no on a short story (it wound up being a yes). So getting impatient after eleven days is somewhat akin to starting your car in Dallas, driving a block, and wondering if you're in Alaska yet.

Thus, in order to purge the evils spirits of doubt and dismay which bedevil me, below are the most likely fates my manuscript has already suffered:

1) My submission is being passed from editor to editor as each bursts into great raucous gales of laughter and screams of 'Is he SERIOUS?'

2) The publishing house has decided to pass on the book, and they're taking out a full-page public rejection space in the New York Times just to make absolutely sure I get the point.

3) They ran out of synonyms for NO.

4) They've hired the entire clown cast of Ringling Brothers Circus to pile into a tiny car and drive to my house and throw 919 pies in my face, each accompanied by a cheerful shouted "We regret that your submission does not suit our current needs" followed by a nose honk, a squirt of lapel-flower seltzer,  and another thrown pie.

5) See #4 above, but with musical accompaniment by the Blue Man Group.

These are the things that fill a writer's unkempt head. I'll dream of clown cars, I swear I will.

It's All Good Fun Until 20 or 30 Kinfolk Get Gut Shot

Like 17 million of my closest friends, I've been watching the History Channel's 'Hatfields & McCoys' mini-series.

The first episode, which opens during the American Civil War, raised the bar on casual, almost recreational murder. The second episode teetered on the verge of self-parody, as pretty much everyone turned on everyone in a hog-fueled free-for-all of unkempt facial hair and petty yet brutal violence.

I'm not sure what's in store for us tonight. I can only assume that some point an entire basket of warm and fuzzy puppies will be brutalized to the accompaniment of period-authentic fiddle music.

I'm not slamming the script or the production values. I'm not slamming the production values because they're unimpeachable. The actors all look like they've spent the last five years doing heavy manual labor in the same clothes they're wearing. The beards are lush and properly grizzled, even those on the women, the chickens, the trees, everything. The weapons and use thereof are correctly portrayed. I'm pretty sure I even smelled pig manure in a couple of scenes.

The script can't really be attacked because the producers did their research, and as far as I know their portrayal of all parties involved is accurate.

What's my problem, then?

The Hatfields and the McCoys all have one thing in common -- they're awful, awful people. All of them. Men and women, boys and girls, spoons and forks. There's not a hero in the bunch. Even the old granny women are lurking in their rockers, Bowie knives at the ready, just dying to draw some Hatfield or McCoy blood.

I did get a chuckle when I realized every barn-dance scene resulted in at least one disgusting, pointless murder. Not because I find disgusting pointless murder humorous, but I've always been suspicious of barn dances because putting that many hillbillies and that much high-octane corn whiskey in the same vicinity simply cannot end well.  Which makes 'Hatfields & McCoys' the natural antithesis of 'Hee-Haw.'

Will I watch the final episode tonight? Probably, because A) I have weak impulse control and B) if the whole thing culminates in a Tarantino-esque orgy of death and blood at a barn dance I'll have joke fodder for weeks.

Yes. I'll watch it and I'll shave immediately afterward and I'll go to bed stone cold sober, and if a barn dance breaks out anywhere near me I'll wrap myself in the Internet and turn up the volume on some Industrial Darkwave to drown out the sound of fiddles and musket fire.

Things to Do in Denver When Your Novel Has Been Submitted

Markhat fans, rejoice, for the new book is off to the good people at Samhain Publishing.

Which means I (and you, yes, both of you) get to wait for the verdict. Will Brown River Queen be accepted, and soon take its place as Book 7 of the Markhat series? Or will Brown River Queen be judged lacking, and consigned to the 'Thanks-but-no-thanks' pile?

In fact, did the email with the book attachments ever get there at all? Sure, I sent the email. That is, I think I did. But what if the attachments have already been corrupted? What if my outgoing email server ate the whole thing? What if I just think I sent it, when in reality there's an editor out there who just received a Word file containing nothing but the letters E, I, and M?

I kid, of course. And no, I did NOT just check my Sent Mail folder. I am far more evolved than that, and in any case, you can't see me.

So, while I await word on Markhat's new adventure, I'm already underway with the sequel to All the Paths of Shadow.  And with any luck I'll get my podcast up and running soon too.

Of course, that's along with replacing the clutch in my motorcycle and putting new brake pads on Karen's Suzuki and keeping the jungle from overtaking the house and fighting crime in the dead of night. Although frankly I may have to cut back on the crime-fighting bit -- I'm spending a fortune on capes and pain relievers, and I keep falling asleep at the wheel of the Tutmobile.

It's a never-ending whirlwind of excitement, is the writer's life.

I'd like to thank my brave and heroic beta reader Kellie Bagne, who has the eyes of an eagle and spectacular grasp of grammar. She found eight pages of typos and problem areas in the rough draft. I found one, mainly because the hood of my crime-fighting costume keeps falling down over my eyes.

So wish me luck! I'll keep you all posted as quickly as word comes in. Also wish me luck with the new book!

Thanks!

Breaking the Law

One of the rare delights of being a fantasy author is taking a good hard look at the immutable laws of physics and, after careful and studied consideration, thumbing one's nose at them.

With the exception of the Wistril stories, I'm not one to have a wizard wave a staff and lay waste to whole landscapes. No, I prefer for my magic to make some sort of sense -- after all, the kinetic energy required to lay the aforementioned waste had to come from somewhere, right? If not, well, there goes Conflict, right out the window, because if my wizard can flatten armies with a wave and a word, what problems does he really have?

I tried to base the magic in All the Paths of Shadow on a feature of our world with which I am familiar. Electricity. Electrical current. The 'holdstones' Meralda uses are magical batteries. In her universe, magic flows like electricity, using many of the same conductors, in fact. That's why she's always winding copper wires around things.

And it's also why she can't mutter a few mystical words and send enemies flying. Yes, she can build marvelous devices, but they have limits. She has to be smarter than the bad guys.

Since I just finished the new Markhat book, and I'm letting a talented and fearless Beta reader have a look, I've dived right into my next book, which will be the sequel to All the Paths of Shadow.


Entitled All The Turns of Light, this new book will chronicle the further adventures of Meralda and Mug, as they take to the skies in a truly massive airship I am now designing.

I'll post drawings when I draw some I'm not ashamed of.  But that's not what I'm here to crow about.

Here's the deal. I need my airship, the HMS Intrepid, to be capable of a non-stop one-way voyage of some twenty-five thousand miles.

As you might imagine, that presents a few engineering problems, even if the story takes place in a world where magic works.

Now, airships aren't anything new to Meralda's world. I mention them frequently in the first book. It's even stated they've been flying passengers and cargo about for fifty years. They use 'lifting gas' which is obviously hydrogen, and they move using 'fans,' which are obviously propellers. I didn't go much deeper than that because we never boarded one in All the Paths of Shadow.


But the airships were always on my mind. I established that Meralda was familiar with steam engines. Heck,  she invented the electric motor on her world, along with electric lights. So we have access to steam engines and electricity. Still, what drove the airships, I wondered?

The Realms don't have petroleum. I considered and rejected alcohol based combustion engines as too inefficient. Steam engines are also out -- heating that much water to those pressures requires lots and lots of onboard fuel, and when your choices are wood or coal, you're in trouble.

I was leaning toward electric motors running on straight-up batteries when a better idea popped into my head.

And here it is!

The Intrepid's fans are powered by steam engines. But instead of boilers and heaps of coal, they're using what we would call quantum entanglement, which works like this:

Cast a hollow steel block with very thick walls, an inlet, and a steam escape valve. Call it Boiler A.

Using magic, pair this with an second block, which is identical in design and dimensions. We'll call this Boiler B.

The magical pairing is an expensive and meticulous undertaking, and it's why the Steam Guild is so wealthy.

Now, the fun part. Fill Engine B with water and heat it, burning coal or wood or the angry emails I'll get from environmentalists about burning coal. In our universe, Boiler B would boil, while boiler A sat there and looked confused.

But in Meralda's world of magic, if you build a fire under Boiler B, it's Boiler A that actually heats up.


So yes, something must be burned to generate the heat. And yes, there are losses involved in the transference from B to A.

But the airship Intrepid can take to the skies without having to haul a few hundred tons of coal around. And I feel like this 'works,' because I'm only cheating a little bit.

It's entirely possible that only a hardcore geek could get excited about applying the Law of Similarity to a fictional airship engine. But I'm a geek and proud, baby!

So be on the lookout for a new Markhat novel and a new Meralda and Mug! And by the way, if you haven't read All the Paths of Shadow yet, it's only $3.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Okay, back to work for me!

The Zen of Editing

If you've been wondering what Frank is doing these days and you guessed 'a brief stay in the Lafayette County Detention Facility,' well, you'd be wrong.

I've been editing. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I finished the first draft of the new Markhat novel, BROWN RIVER QUEEN.

Sure, there was wild celebration. About eight minutes of it. Because finishing a first draft gets writing the first draft out of the way, true, but it also ushers in the next phase of the process, which is the edit and re-write stage. Or, as I call it, the 'Flaying off my own skin with a rusty butter knife' stage.

First drafts are, for me anyway, limping, misshapen things. Let's say I forget the name of a street I mentioned 34 pages ago. I don't stop and go back and look -- I just type ****, which is my code for 'Go back and look this up, doofus.'

Same for the names of minor characters. The wine steward from Chapter 4? ****.  The date, if I've lost track of it? ****.

All those **** entries have to be cleaned up. Spell-check has to run.  I do my own searches on the words I habitually screw up -- discrete and discreet, I'm looking at you two. I also run searches on the characters I tend to transpose.

Then comes the re-read. Here I'm looking for repetition. Bad alliteration. Dialog tags that repeat or don't fit or are missing altogether. Plot holes. Subplots I may have started and then dropped. Notes I wrote to myself and stuck in the manuscript and forgot about. The last thing you want to do is leave an editor scratching her head over entries such as 'Make RT kr.ull w/o 9 of the thing.' You don't want to bring undue attention to the fact that you're making this stuff up as you go.

So yeah. It gets messy.

All this before I ever consider sending the manuscript out. In fact, I like to do all this more than once, because it's so easy to miss things. I know what I meant to write, and my traitorous lazy brain sees those words, and not the ones my fingers actually typed.

This time around, though, I've added a new practice to my usual round or re-reads and edits. For the frist time, I'm having my PC read the whole book, from start to end, aloud to me, while I turn away from the screen and jot down notes by hand on a notepad.

Word 2010 has a built-in speech function. I wish I had Word 2010. Word 2010 runs about one hundred and twenty bucks. Instead, I have Word 2007, which is 2010's mute sire. So I found a free text-to-speech program on CNET called Hal Text-to-Speech Reader, and I'm using that.

I pull up the actual Word file and copy an entire chapter. Then I paste that into Hal and grab my notepad. It's slow, even after setting the read rate to just below AUCTIONEER INSANE, but wow is it effective.

I've already read through the whole thing twice, and was feeling pretty good about the state of the manuscript-- until Hal started reading to me, in her robotic flat voice. Mistakes that sailed right past my eyes leaped out screaming in my ears.

Here are a few examples, taken straight my my notepad:

twenty of more (should have been twenty or more)
isn't hat right (should have been isn't that right)
is a good as (should have been is as good as)
to and from (should have been to and fro)

Those are hard to catch, when they're hiding in several hundred pages of text. But my ears caught them with no trouble at all.

I am weary of the robotic voice and the complete lack of inflection, though. And the often hilarious pronunciation of words and names I made up myself.

But it's still a good system.

The edits on BROWN RIVER QUEEN are going quickly, all things considered.

In other news, if you wanted to grab a copy of my YA fantasy book ALL THE PATHS OF SHADOW but  also wanted to wait for the price to fall, you're in luck! You can get the e-book from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble or the publisher for only $3.99, which is six bucks off the former price.

Here are some links, so click away!

All the Paths of Shadow at Amazon for your Kindle

All the Paths of Shadow at Barnes & Noble for your Nook

All the Paths of Shadow at Cool Well Press in any format

Chalk Up Another One

It is done.

I speak of the new Markhat book, BROWN RIVER QUEEN. I just added the words THE END to the first draft.

Another novel. Seventy-odd thousand of what I believe to be the right words. Written at a time of my life when frankly I'm surprised I was able to write at all.

I love this book. Maybe I've hit my stride at last. Maybe I've gotten to know the characters and Markhat's world so well I'm finally able to show it with clarity to you, the reader.

Maybe I just got lucky.

Whatever the case, I love this book. It's got thrills and chills and surprises. Long-time Markhat fans, who've been along for the whole ride, are going to learn some new things, and understand some familiar faces a lot better.

Now keep in mind I've haven't sold BROWN RIVER QUEEN yet. In this business, there are no sure things. But a part of me is absolutely certain this new book will be accepted, because yeah, it's that good.

I spent yesterday re-reading big chunks of it, getting ready to write the epic dust-up at the end. I'll be honest with you -- more than once, I read a portion, and was honestly amazed that those words came from my rather addled and dysfunctional brain. Seriously, folks, it's a mess in here. Did I really write that?

Now the real work begins. A first draft is just the beginning. There will  be re-readings. There will be re-writes. A couple of people out there are going to be heartily sick of BROWN RIVER QUEEN before anything hits an editor's desk.

And, assuming the book sells, then will come more of the same. Re-reads. Re-writes. Line edits. Did I have the sun rise on page 134 and again on page 136, even though only six hours had passed? Was Markhat wearing a black hat on 98, and a grey one on 101? Did I spell grey gray or grey? Did I use stair or stairs consistently throughout?

But I'll do all that work, and I'll do it gladly, because that is the only way to put out a book worth its price.

I may never get rich at this game.

BROWN RIVER QUEEN may never sell a million copies. May never be made into a big-budget movie.

But by gum, it will be a good book. And people will read it, and say to themselves at the end "That was a darned good book."

And that's the highest praise I can conceive.

The End.