Thrift Shop Parabolas and Cut-Rate Supermoons

Okay, you whispering ghosts, you low-talking specters, I've bloody well got you now.


Pictured above is my home-made parabolic microphone. 

What is a parabolic microphone, and why do I want one?

A parabolic mic uses a curved dish to collect and focus sound. A parabolic mic can pick up faint sounds long distances away, because the whole surface of the clear dish part focuses every bit of noise right onto the actual microphone, which is suspended in front of the dish at the precise spot where all the sounds come together.

Why do I want one?

Because ghosts are always muttering or whispering. Honestly, ghosts, spit out the ectoplasmic gum and enunciate! Most of the EVP (electronic voice phenomena) samples I've collected have been so faint and indistinct it's hard to tell what the words are. So I keep hearing things like "Flog the carrots, Matilda" or "My goats prefer Norwegian steering, forsooth." 

Enter the parabolic dish. Faint sounds are gathered and amplified. Distant whispers are rendered distinct. Casper's least utterances will finally be revealed as plain speech -- well, maybe.

Now, if you go out and start pricing commercial parabolic dish units, you'll quickly find they are divided into two groups. At the bottom, you have your $50 wonders, which I am sure break into small, sad plastic bits as soon as they are unboxed. Most of the 'dishes' are six or so inches in diameter. That's barely enough collecting area to even bother with.

The next level of parabolic mics starts at $500 or so and quickly ascends into the stratosphere, where even Bill Gates recoils from the price in terror. Just the parabolic dish part -- not the actual mic or the electronics, just the clear plastic dish bit -- runs close to 500 bucks. I get this. There's a lot of math involved, some precision engineering, and frankly outside of ESPN and movie makers the demand for dish mics is exceedingly small, being composed of myself and two dozen other amateur ghost hunters. 

Which is why I haven't had a dish before this. Seriously, do you know how much obscure fantasy authors (hi there) make? 

Well, I'm not buying $500 worth of anything unless I can drive it, eat it, or live beneath it.

This isn't my first attempt at making my own parabolic dish. We won't speak of the others, save to note they were all dismal failures. One burst into flames out of sheer shame. Another ran away and now pretends to be a derelict umbrella. 

But then one day, while crawling beneath the shelves in Home Depot with a dagger clenched between my teeth, I came across a clear plastic dish, 18 inches across, formed in a quite decent parabola. Instead of Tenga's $400 price tag, this one set me back eleven bucks and change.

Eleven bucks.

It's a squirrel shield, intended to cover a bird feeder. A humble squirrel shield. Some nameless, faceless hero out there cast it as a quite serviceable parabolic dish.


The rest of the components share equally humble origins. The tripod is a thrift-shop special I picked up for 5 bucks (thanks Holding Hands thrift shop!). The rest of the hardware is mostly plumbing scraps, with a metal mending plate and a piece of flexible steel serving as the actual mic mount.


The mic element itself is a simple electret single-element mic from Radio Shack. The black box that sits behind the dish contains the mic's power supply, volume control, and output jack. I'll post schematics and so forth next week. A single resistor, a capacitor, a 50K pot, a switch, a jack, and a 9V battery to run the thing -- that's it.

The output feeds my 3000X super-amp. The initial test in the backyard revealed some impressive pickup. When you hear bees buzzing about but can't see them because they're too far away, your dish is probably working.



I'll post some sound files too. One day soon, I'll take this unit with me on a cemetery run, and see if I catch any more voices!


Here's another 'super moon' pic. This one was taken on July 13, when the Moon was looking the other way. Not shown is the Arcturan scout saucer which exited the frame milliseconds before this image was taken. Darn camera-shy aliens. 

Writing Update

My new book is still on sale! If you haven't checked my Markhat series out, I invite you to do so. A good place to start, and it won't set you back a fortune, is with The Cadaver Client. 


The new book, The Five Faces, is the 8th entry in the series. Grab a copy today!


For the folks waiting on the new Meralda and Mug book, I must once again beg for your forbearance. The re-write of the first draft is continuing, as fast as I can. Which obviously isn't very fast, but I hope you'll agree quality is more important than speed in this instance.

I won't lie. The realization that the first version of All the Turns of Light was fatally flawed was a punch in my gut. I knew the only way to fix it was to essentially start over, and that flew right in the face of my profound and determined laziness. Whoah there, laddie, said my lazy side, which by the way covers 89 percent of my total surface area. It's bad enough I have to write these books in the first place -- now you're saying I have to start all over? I don't think so, Buttercup.

I was then instantly overwhelmed by a powerful desire to catch a marathon of 'Supernatural' on TNT, because my lazy side really knows which buttons to press.

Truth is, I nearly didn't rewrite the book at all. I was ready to chuck the whole Turns of Light series and start a new Markhat, and I would have, except for a couple of emails asking about the new Mug and Meralda.

I dived back in, and when the re-write is done an actual good book will be in the place of the original first draft. 

So a few more weeks of re-writes. Then the painful conversion to ebook format(s) and all the fun that will entail.

I have decided to self-publish this new entry in the Meralda and Mug series. If Samhain dealt with light fantasy, I'd sub there in a minute, but they don't. Too, I've already obtained a cover for the book -- yes, it's an original, by none other than Kanaxa -- and I feel comfortable with the ebook conversion process, if by comfortable one means 'will only wake up screaming at the prospect once or twice a week, tops.'

I plan to make the new Mug and Meralda available across a number of platforms -- Kindle, of course, and Nook, and Kobo, certainly. The price will be $2.99, which I think is A) fair, and B) the price-point most likely to result in the most sales. I hope that didn't sound greedy, which it was, but it's important to never appear to be greedy in public.

So that's it for this week! Time to get back to the re-write. Thanks for reading, and wish me luck!


Bonus Friday Rage Rant!

It took a few hours, but I have been reduced to a quivering, tooth-gnashing fiend, a fiend bent on violence, vengeance, and possibly also velocipedes.

The source of my furious derangement?

Poser 10, or, as I call it, THE DEVIL'S OWN SPEWING SPHINCTER OF SPASMODIC DESPAIR.

What is Poser 10, you ask, from what you hesitantly deem a safe distance?

Poser is a software package that, ostensibly, confers the power of artistic creation on hapless, ham-fisted fellows like myself. I can't draw a stick figure without getting sympathy cards or, in numerous instances, death threats. I've devalued museum paintings just by looking at them. Invertebrates lacking even rudimentary appendages have executed artworks many orders of magnitude better than mine simply by excreting slime on smooth surfaces.

In my case, art is something that happens to other people.

I wanted to see if I could change all that. So I bought Poser 10, because (I thought) if there is one bloody thing I can do, it's make a computer do what I want.

Hah. What a fool I was!

I installed the Poser 10 software. No issues. It worked the first time, which I can only assume is a cruel ploy to lull the unsuspecting into a false state of confidence. That trick certainly worked with me.

Now, Poser comes pre-loaded with all sorts of objects and figures. Basic human figures are among these, but even my brief exposure to the subject revealed that Poser figures are considered crude and unfinished. No, it's DAZ Studio figures you want, my lad!

Word is you can buy DAZ figures and simply install them in your Poser library. Why, the process is even automated! It's so simple a recently-stunned blowfish could do it!

Well, my recently-stunned blowfish just walked off the job, and I remain convinced that the whole wretched Poser / DAZ Studio relationship is nothing but a devilishly cruel prank.

It should be simple. The trick appears to be getting the DAZ files installed in the proper Poser directory. I understand file structures. They're not some esoteric mystery.

But regardless of what I do, how often I do it, or how many user guides I consult, the process always fails. Always.

I swear I hear faint laughter in the distance.

It's not always the same error, either. DSON errors? Sure. Python fails? Got 'em. Sometimes Poser just locks or crashes.

My machine is a monster. It has enough memory and CPU cores to run ten simultaneous copies of Poser. And land space shuttles. And fling Bitcoins in every direction as it does so.

But nothing I do works. Because via some odd violation of cause and effect, wherever I put the files is the worst possible place they could conceivably be. 

Here are the guidelines for installing DAZ files into Poser libraries:

"You must install your DAZ files into the proper Poser directory. Remember that last folder you tried? Not even close. The one you're looking at now? Hah! YOU ARE CRACKING US UP. Seriously, all your DAZ files should go into the Poser Runtime folder, except they must NEVER enter the Poser Runtime folder. They should go instead beside it, or under it, or maybe inside it before quickly being removed and written to 1.44 MB floppies which are then hidden under the couch. Go ahead, try anything, it's a slow night and we love the way your right eye twitches involuntarily when you get that DSON runtime error over and over and over..."

 Oh, and before you suggest Googling the errors, I've done that. Google returns the same tired half-dozen help links and then starts listing suicide prevention hotlines, because apparently it's been through this before.

I thought I had the DSON errors beaten, but now I'm seeing Python Object Call warnings. I could Google that, or strike myself in the face with a fan belt. I'm leaning toward fan belt, impact of, repeated. It will be just as effective as messing with Python.

It seems the Universe is trying to tell me dabbling in art is a waste of time. I wish the Universe had just sent a card.

If anyone from Poser or DAZ is reading this, for the love of all that is holy make at least a token effort to ensure your products can move between platforms without inducing insanity. Or warn buyers with a disclaimer, perhaps something along these lines:

"Thank you for purchasing Poser. We hope you will enjoy our software. We also hope you have easy access to a mental health care facility if you dare attempt to install DAZ Studio products for use on our program, because <snicker> we value you as a customer <snort> you do realize we can watch your face turn purple with impotent rage via your webcam, that never gets old, watch as we issue another Python runtime error, Google THAT, buttercup <giggle> oh man he's losing it WHAT A MAROON HAHAHAHAHA!"

I give up. I suppose my only option now is to go nuclear -- un-install everything, that is, and start all over. Possibly after sacrificing a flawless young goat.

Seriously, DAZ and Poser, if I can't figure this out, the problem isn't entirely mine.

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the corner, drooling and rocking.







Head Full of Fog


Foggy. That's how it was was when I took the picture above.

Foggy is also how I feel today. It's as if the fog in the photo didn't burn away in the morning sun, but retreated into the vast empty space between my ears instead.

Which means I should probably shut up and let my characters do the talking today. They are, after all, usually far more clever and amusing than I am anyway. 

Favorite Character Quotes


"Deception wears many masks. Take care to remove them all, should you undertake to see the face of truth."
-- Wistril the Wizard, from Wistril Compleat.

 "The stuff of legends is nothing but trouble to the persons unfortunate enough to make them. On the whole, I’d rather have been off fishing.”
-- Tim the Horsehead, from All the Paths of Shadow

 "You know you're having a bad day when vampires drop by to chat and you're pleased by the sudden distraction."
-- Markhat, from Hold the Dark

 "I don’t believe in ghosts. Except when I do."
-- Markhat, from The Five Faces

“If I were privy to the secrets of Creation, I’d kill your ass where you stand. But I know about the arcane seasons.” I put my gun down on the table and forced myself to sit. “So you’re the god of chance. Nice to meet you. Hope you die screaming real soon.”
-- Markhat, The Five Faces

“It’s not much of a universe these days. If it unravels, so be it. Let the gods amuse themselves with an eternity of vacuum.” Her eyes took back their old steel. “What sort of a surprise do you have in mind, Captain?”
-- Stitches, The Five Faces

Sneak Peek: The Darker Carnival

I'll close tonight with the first few pages of the new Markhat book, which is so new it's still under consideration with the publisher. But I don't think they'll mind if I post the opening here.

So, here it is, the world premiere, so to speak, of the latest Markhat adventure, The Darker Carnival!


THE DARKER CARNIVAL

My body lay sleeping, snug in my bed, but I walked the woods far away.

Once upon a time, I’d have called my walk a dream. Called it a dream and dismissed it with a laugh, if I acknowledged it at all. 

Once upon a time, I'd been a damned fool.

I’ve grown far too intimate with magic, though. First I told the huldra my name, let it sneak into my heart when I thought Darla dead, when rage drove me to throw away my soul for a whispered promise of vengeance. Then I’d walked with the huldra, cloaked in its dark sorceries, spilled blood while it rode me and took root.

I’ve dreamed with the Corpsemaster. Danced with things Hag Mary dredged up from some timeless deep. Stepped out of time itself, seeing this tired old world through a banshee's ageless eyes. I’ve brushed up against so many dark and deadly powers even the Corpsemaster and her kin can no longer see the truth of the stains the old magics have left.

So when I found myself striding through the night, with the mightiest and oldest of the forest oaks brushing my knees, I knew damned well it was no mere dream.

I was outside Rannit’s walls, well south of the city. The Brown River lay like a silver ribbon in the moonlight on my left. The low hills the Regent recently clear-cut to make ties for his new railroad shone bare and ravaged at my feet.

I walked, three hundred feet tall, now and then, but I did not walk alone.

The slilth ambled along at my side, its flexible clockwork legs coiling and curving in the moonlight, each leg a narrow shaft of quicksilver glinting in the night. It made no noise as it walked, not so much as a whisper, its legs slipping between bough and branch as deftly as a dancer’s, and as light.

The slilth has no face, no body, no head. It is merely a gaggle of legs which hold aloft a smooth, featureless ovoid lacking eyes, ears, or any visible orifices at all.

Stitches the sorceress claims the slilth to be an ancient construct of immense and irresistible power. 

It dipped its ovoid head at me, as if in silent recognition, and together we crossed the river, one step, two steps, three.

The barren hills lay below us, scraps of bare timber and freshly wounded earth all that remained of the ancient forests. 

The slilth paused, turning its eyeless face this way and that across the midnight sky. Then it diminished in stature, until its silver not-face barely peeked above the closest hill.

I followed suit, shrinking myself, fixing my eyes on the spot I judged the slilth to be watching. We waited together in silence.

An hour passed. The slilth, ever silent, raised a delicate silver tendril toward the east, and it was then I saw the first balloon.

The first, and the next, and the next, sailing in line as if tethered. They floated out of the night, soaring high, but dropping until I saw the lanterns that hung like yellow-gold jewels on the cables that held them together.

Five balloons, then ten, then another and another and another. Thirteen in all, each larger than the last, all lit by cautious lanterns.

I didn’t hear the mastodons until they came charging over the crest of the nearest hill. A line of the brutes three strong appeared, and the tread of their furry tree-trunk feet shook the ground beneath me.

The beasts wore enormous yokes, from which ropes rose up, vanishing into the night.

“So that’s how they do it,” I said, to my silent silver friend.  

The slilth made no acknowledgement. The mastodons thundered down the hill, shouldering aside the few bent saplings the lumberjacks had spared. 

A trumpet blew, and the furry beasts came to a halt. They stood swaying, tusks worrying the ground, snuffling and stomping and head-butting, but remaining more or less in place.

The stink of them washed over me, dream-state or not. I pushed it aside with a casual tug at the shadows that hid me.

The balloons bobbed into sight above us. Trumpets sounded in the sky, were answered by ones on the ground. Ropes fell. Men shouted. More horns blew.

The slilth dipped a silver tendril down and scribbled in the mud left by the lumber-jacks and their wagons. The pattern the slilth traced out was foreign, alien, a thing that wasn’t quite letters and wasn’t quite a drawing and wasn’t quite a warning, but something in the sweep and swoop of the lines it drew in the moonlight sent shivers up and down my fifty-foot spine.

The first two balloons touched down. Men leapt from the boat-shaped baskets, swarming about like ants, driving stakes and casting lines and making them fast.

A mastodon raised its trunk and trumpeted. Soon, its fellows joined it in a primal, ancient roar.

The slilth never made a sound. But the tone of its silence changed, in some subtle sense my slow poisoning by magic allowed me to discern.

The slilth’s not-words, had they been spoken, would have been something very much akin to ‘here we go again.’

I cussed.

The slilth’s scribblings flared, as if each furrow was filled with oil and set suddenly alight. Just as I was about to make out the meaning of the spiraling lines my fool body woke and my wandering spirit fell headlong into it as the slilth  absently waved goodbye.


Fireworks for the 4th!


Snapped this photo Friday evening, at Oxford's annual 4th of July fireworks show. The show gets better every year; not bad for a small town pryotechnics display.


I was using my FinePix SL1000 on the 'fireworks' setting. This was my first time out with that camera and that setting. Partway through the show, I managed to change a setting with my nose, and never quite managed to undo what I did (it was dark, I foolishly neglected to bring a penlight, and the fireworks show waits for no man). So of the 212 pictures I took, I got seven images I liked.


Before the city moved the fireworks show to the baseball stadium, they held it at Avent Park. The park is tiny, but there's a big grassy hill upon which the crowd would throw down blankets and lie back to watch the show.

The usual procedure, in those days, was for the fireworks to be set out in rows of tubes. Each tube was anchored to a wide plank. A fleet-footed fireman would run down the plank, lighting fuses as he went, and the various rockets would launch themselves skyward, to the delight of the by-then moderately pickled crowd of townsfolk.

I was there when, after the final firework was lit, the mounting plank fell over, aiming the entire row of powerful fireworks directly into the crowd reclining on the hillside.

Pandemonium ensued. Explosions rang out. Trails of fire criss-crossed the park, each terminating in a deafening blast and blinding shower of sparks and secondary explosions. People ran, stumbling, gasping, tripping over kids and coolers and each other in a blind panicked charge toward safety.

It was the most amazing, awe-inspiring fireworks show I ever attended.

There were no injuries. People laughed and gathered their stuff and because this was a far simpler time, there were no lawsuits, no public outcries. Just a lot of laughing, some scuffs and bruises, and the fireworks moved out of the park after that.



I missed a couple of good shots this year because a bevy of half a dozen imbeciles chose the middle of a fireworks show in which to parade around talking. Seriously, who goes to a bleeding fireworks show and then ambles around in front of my camera while the show is in progress? Where was it the lot of you pea-brained pachyderms just had to go, in a herd, at that precise and specific moment?

And who puts their backs to the fireworks?

Next time out, in addition to my small flashlight, I'm going to put a Super Soaker water cannon in my toolkit. I'm going to fill it with blue dye, and I'm going to paint those suckers the moment they amble, cavort, gambol, sashay, or otherwise promenade or creep in front of my tripod. Take that, ambulatory arse-heads.

Thanks. I feel better now.




Markhat News

As by now even remote tribes deep in the Amazonian jungles know, the new Markhat book is out. It's gotten a number of five-star reviews on Amazon so far, which is always great to see. 


The book is also available from Kobo. I've been looking at their e-readers and marketplace, and I'm  impressed. Amazon should be too -- those are some nice e-readers, and the Kobo store supports every format imaginable, not just a single Kobo format. In fact, Kobo offers all the Markhat books!

The new Markhat title, The Darker Carnival,  is still out for consideration. I will of course let you know the nanosecond word is received. Unless the word is 'no,' in which case I will remain silent and motionless in the fetal position until next Arbor Day. Such is the way of my people.

The deep re-write of the new Mug and Meralda book continues.

Ghost Machine

Pictured below is the  prototype for my new ghost-hunting gadget. I don't have a name for it yet, and I won't go into the specifics because A) that would probably be boring and B) it doesn't work yet. 


Please excuse the state of the work-bench. It The surface is clean, believe it or not, but it endures all manner of abuse, chemical, thermal, and mechanical. Oh, and the plain black box in the middle (more or less) of the photo?

That's an amplifier with a gain of 3000. It's so sensitive I can plug a magnetic probe into it, and hear music played over my phone with the speakers turned off and no headphones inserted -- the amp can easily pick up the tiny electrical signals being pumped into the headphone port, from a distance. It's just a single part of the new gadget, but I'm really proud of it anyway.

I'm hoping to snatch truly faint EVPs out of the air with this rig. Right now, I'm a long way from that, but those coils were just to test the oscillators anyway. The real ones will be much larger.

Hey DARPA -- feel like funding some really out-of-the-box stuff?

Last Words

Okay, all this writing isn't going to do itself. Take care people!

See you all next week.


Around Each Corner They Lurk

©  | Dreamstime Stock Photos
I teach a (free) writing class hosted by the local public library. It's a good way to meet and get to know other writers, and torpedo their careers by spreading lies and misinformation -- er, I mean, to give back to the community. Also, people bring snacks. Just kidding about the lies and misinformation

But not about the snacks. I do love a homemade cookie now and then, sooner or later, and indeed at all other times.

The class format is pretty simple. I invite everyone to read a sample of what they've written since the last class. If they're not comfortable reading it aloud, I read it for them. Then we all talk about what we perceived as the strengths and weaknesses of the sample.

I also try to inject a few bleak realities of the publishing industry from time to time. One of my students had fallen prey to a certain scam outfit we all know and loathe. He'd wrecked himself financially, had a garage full of printed books no bookstore would touch with a twelve-foot battle lance, and he was still convinced all he needed to do was buy a little more 'advertising' and he'd surely make the leap into the heady air of best-sellerdom.

I was as gentle as I could possibly be, but I explained why that leap would likely end in bankruptcy.

Never saw the person again -- in the class, or on the NYT Best Seller list.

Reality is tough to face. I'm certainly no fan of it. I remain deeply and wholly convinced that in any truly reasonable world, the Markhat series would pay all my bills, the Paths of Shadow movie would fund my world travels and my hobby of restoring antique aircraft, and I'd be forced to stop writing this because my agent called with good news about yet another seven-figure bidding war over a book I haven't even started yet.

Now that is a world controlled by rules of which I approve.

If anyone knows how to get there, please let me know. Until quantum jumping becomes commonplace, though, I'm stuck here with you folks, and we have to muddle along as best we can.



I had a book come out on the 17th. It's the 8th book in the series, so I'm not exactly new to the process. I will say the thrill never gets old -- there's nothing quite like finally seeing the fruit of all that bloody awful labor out there on the shelves at last.

Of course, anytime people see you thrilled, there are a small but vocal subset of them who decide your joy MUST BE SQUASHED in the most heartless and violent way possible lest, I suppose, happiness spreads unchecked.

Let me state up front that none of these people are in my writing class. No. They might be work-place trolls, or distant relatives, or strangers from across the world with access to email and possession of severe personality disorders.

I'm not quite sure why writers are the targets of so much unsolicited offhand ire. I don't see insurance salespeople met with smirks and asked "Why do you sell insurance? There's no money in that!" As far as I know, people don't accuse my dentist of having graduated medical school because he 'was friends with the Dean.'

But if you write, the trolls will mass, and they will find you, and they will speak.

So, writing class, here are the kinds of people writers should ignore, especially right after a book release. Because assault with battery and outright gleeful murder are still frowned upon, and video cameras are everywhere these days.

1) The Gimmee a Freebie. "Oh," they'll say. "Got a new book out? Give me a copy." I encountered a Gimmee the day of the new release, and while on previous occasions I apologized for not having a copy handy, this time I merely fixed them in a steely-eyed glare and said "You can buy it like everyone else." And you know what? It felt wonderful. Now look -- I do in fact give away a lot of my books. I do so freely, and with a joyful heart. But I give them to people who will appreciate the book. Not to someone who is merely engaging in low-level passive-aggressive bullying.

2) The Nobody Reads Nay-sayer. Their opening conversational gambit is "A book? Nobody reads anymore," delivered with a smirk. I heard this last week too. I bit back my response of "I'm sure you don't read, favoring instead the refined arts of nose-picking and theatrical flatulence, but you are hardly representative of primates, much less the average reader." I hate coming up with the perfect retort hours later, but I will confess I saw this person coming later the same day and sent the elevator up before they could catch it. No vengeance is too terrible for the harried author scorned.

3) The You-Must-Know-Somebody Industry Expert.  "Oh, you have a book out? Who do you know?" Who do I know? Well, I know Mr. Write Every Day, and his friend Miss Submit Your Work to the Appropriate Markets After Careful Research. And I'm well acquainted with the unpleasant couple Mr. and Mrs. Edit, Revise, and Revise Again. But hey, you're right, I said hello to a famous New York editor at the laundromat in 1997 and everything I've scribbled since then gets turned into a 9-book series, you've discovered my secret, woe is me, I am undone. I swear if I hear the 'who do you know' question this time around I'm going to scream the lines above right in their face until the SWAT team opens up with those pesky rubber bullets.

4) The 'It Must Be Nice to Have Time to Write' Troll. This creature is by far the most common of the killjoys. They always deliver their trademark phrase with just a hint of condescension, making it clear that they could effortlessly fill whole bookstores with their deathless prose if only they weren't so burdened with more worthy pursuits. The only reasoned and proper response to such creatures involves bear traps, lamp oil, and the furious wraith of Barbara Cartland, and the specifics are too terrible to describe here. Simply turn and walk away.

Of course most people, especially readers, are only too happy to offer support and well-wishes. The people above are the exceptions.

They do serve one noble purpose, however -- they get mentions in my blog.

As someone once said, it is unwise to anger the man who buys ink by the barrel. So to speak.

New Kobo Banner!

I know I have a regrettable tendency to harp on the Amazon versions of my books. Sure, Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, which may be the only creature that makes me look thin by comparison, but there are many other sellers of ebooks out there as well.

Chief among them is Kobo, and my good friend Maria Schneider made this fantastic banner for my books, which are availble through the Kobo ebook store in every format imaginable, and a few that aren't!



Thanks Maria! And by the way, you should be reading Maria's books too. Here's a handy-dandy link:




My favorites of hers are the Moon Shadow books. They're urban fantasy set out west, with real (wait for it) -- bite. If Roger Zelazny had set out to write urban fantasy, he'd have come up with something very much like Maria's Moon Shadows books. And that's high praise, because I love Zelazny's books in much the same way Gollum loved his Precious, right down to the lisp and the loincloth, but we won't go into that here.

That's it for this week! I'm still working on the revisions to the new Mug and Meralda. And please keep your fingers crossed for the new Markhat, The Darker Carnival, which is still under consideration at Samhain.

Stay safe, folks, and buy some new books!



Honey Moon


Above, the Moon! That's an image of the so-called 'honey moon' taken this past Friday the 13th. Full zoom, 50X, no tripod. Love this little Finepix camera.

Full disclosure, though -- that image is the best of the 43 images I shot that night. Many are indistinct blurs. But that's the beauty of a digital camera -- you can shoot hundreds of times, if you want, in search of that elusive perfect image.

Speaking of new book releases (I still haven't gotten to 'Elegant Segues' in the Big Book of Writing Secrets), you have noticed I have a new one out. It's called The Five Faces, and you can get it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Books, Itunes, Samhain, or other fine booksellers.

I loved the cover of this one so much I mounted a print of it in an oversized picture frame I made from leftover cabinet trim. The frame has waited years for a worthy picture, and now it hangs on the wall!


My new desk mascot, Mr. Dragon, approves.


Those weird blue patches on the ceiling aren't the result of a demented paint job. They are in fact lights, emitted from the case lighting of my PC, which periodically emits Cherenkov radiation. Small price to pay for having a really fast video card, though, and the extra fingers do come in handy when using chopsticks.


Other dragons lurk nearby. And no, I don't really have purple walls, because I'm not Prince. I messed with the colors in this image; the big dragon is actually purple, but I needed him to be green, and the wall was collateral damage.

You're using a lot of pictures tonight, aren't you, Frank?

Yes I am. Had a bout of vertigo last night and my brain is still running at half-capacity. Earlier I tried to plug the vacuum cleaner into an AV wall jack. Twice since starting this blog entry I've wandered downstairs to retrieve the coffee cup that sat inches from my right hand.

I should probably let dog Lou Ann finish the piece, even if all she did was chew on the keyboard.

The Five Faces has done pretty well since its release. The Amazon rankings are good, and holding steady. I'd like to extend a special thanks to everyone who left a review on Amazon -- reader reviews drive sales like nothing else. If you've had a chance to finish the book, please consider dropping a few stars on Amazon. With 30,000 other new titles clamoring for attention, Markhat and I need all the help we can get!

If you're new to the series, you're in luck -- Barnes and Noble dropped the price on The Mister Trophy to 99 cents this weekend, to give readers a chance to start the series on the cheap, just to see if they'll like it enough to continue. Amazon spotted the price drop and matched it, so you can get The Mister Trophy from either bookseller for less than a buck!

I leave you with an excerpt from a previous blog, one written when the room was not engaged in gyroscopic precession. It involves an email from my reluctant Muse Visavarevagsitaga, and it applies today just as much as it did a few years ago. Enjoy!

Date:  Sun, 3 Feb 2013 11:52:43 -0600 [12:52:43 PM EST]
From:  Visavarevagsitaga <Visavarevagsitaga@ancientwritingmuses.org>
To:  franktuttle@franktuttle.com
Subject:  HEY MORON

I see you're working on a new book. If one defines 'working' as pecking at the keyboard between screwing around on Facebook. But I'm feeling generous so we'll call it working. Idiot.

As your Muse, I've got a few things to say. Most of them involve being removed as your Muse, but that request was denied. Twice. So.

The book is a train wreck. A flaming, toxic spill, nuclear-waste-hauling five-alarm evacuate the surrounding counties smoke plume seen from space train wreck, and that's just the dedication, and it's all downhill from there. What were you thinking? What were you *drinking?* Can I interest you in another hobby? Origami? Animal husbandry? Spelunking? Anything that doesn't involve words?

The sad bit, the part that truly makes me want to lay waste to all of Mesopotamia and then weep abut it for a dozen centuries thereafter, is this may be the best thing you've ever written. Let that sink in, and then Google the many joys of spelunking.

Great. My third request for a transfer was just denied. Sigh. I miss the Bronze Age. So much less paperwork.

If you insist on pursuing this book to completion, the first thing you need to do is STOP BEING SO NICE TO YOUR CHARACTERS. Honest to Zeus, are you writing a murder mystery or hosting some demented fictional tea party? Here's a quick tip from an ancient Muse to you, bub -- for it to be a murder mystery SOMEONE NEEDS TO DIE.

So kill one of them off. Kill two of them off. Take my advice and kill them all off and try your hand at origami -- it's soothing and there's never a risk of dangling a participle...no?

Lackwit. Fine. Ignore my advice, what do I know, I'm only older than recorded human history and I once held the fate of millions at my whim. But hey, you read an article about Stephen King's writing habits, so obviously you're the expert.

Even if you refuse to kill off whatshisname, Muckrat the finder, or his wife Duller, consider smiting one of the minor characters. Zeus knows nobody will miss any of them. And if you can't bring yourself to kill them, at least maim them a little bit this time. You've got to thin the herd, pal, or by book ten you'll be drowning in supporting cast and forget I said that, we both know there will never be a book ten because you cant' stay off Twitter long enough, can you, monkey boy?   

I give up. Or rather I would give up if Central Assignments would let me. This email constitutes my official dispensation of my Muse duties for this Julian calendar month. To summarize:

1) Give up.
2) Seriously, give up. Woodworking! That's a good hobby for someone with your literary skills.
3) Give your characters nothing but grief. Grief, trouble, and constant turmoil, followed by epic disaster, and all before you type the words CHAPTER TWO.
4) Stop referring to me mentally as Visa-veggie. I can hear your thoughts, you ungrateful chimpanzee. 
5) Moron.

Sincerely,

Visavarevagsitaga (See #4 above)

PS Don't reply to this email. Or any of my emails. I'll delete your replies unread and if you think a rain of toads isn't impressive wait until it happens in your bedroom with high-velocity toads.

 Have a good week, everyone! Leave a review -- prove my Muse wrong!


Five Reasons for The Five Faces


Today is release day! The book is now on sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Samhain, everywhere!

THE TOP FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD BUY THE FIVE FACES:

5. It's less than five bucks. Seriously. I paid twice that to see Pacific Rim, and it was just Independence Day shot with stompy robots. I promise you that at no time during your reading of The Five Faces will you feel led to stand up and shout 'This is freaking STUPID' in a movie theater, partly because it's too dark to read in movie theaters but mainly because my editor won't allow stupid bits in our books. 

4) I used every letter of the alphabet. I'm not one of those lazy authors who can't be bothered to reach all the way up to the top row of keys. No, due to my strict workout regime and meticulous pre-writing stretch sessions, I am equally adept at hitting QWERTYUIOP as I am the other rows. I've even received high praise for my stylistic choices involving T and W, which were once described as 'Coffee is on aisle 9' and 'Sir, you can't park in the drive-thru.' So there's that.

3) My hero, Markhat, is real, and can see you through the pages.  Hard to believe, but it's true. Fans of the series describe brief meetings with Markhat himself, who sometimes appears as a sports team mascot or a bookstore advertising standee before dispensing nuggets of wisdom, encouragement, or household cleaning agents. "Markhat appeared in my kitchen, made himself a sandwich, and got me free HBO," reports one fan. "I turned around to thank him, and he was gone, leaving behind a tattered paperback copy of The Banshee's Walk and an outstanding balance at a rent-to-own place, which he still hasn't paid." 

2) My muse, the short-tempered and plain-spoken Visavarevagsitaga, is ready to quit and install a marmot in her place.  "Look," she said in her last email to me. "You're nice enough for a no-talent hack with delusions of grandeur and a skill-set better suited to a sled dog, but unless this book gets some numbers, kid, I'm putting you on the Small Mammal Circuit, nothing personal, I hear they like peanuts." 

1) Due to a complex series of unlikely events and activities which might not be what most Grand Juries would label 'legal,' the Russian Mob warned me that unless The Five Faces breaks the Amazon Top 500 within a week of release a series of even more complex and unlikely events will befall me, many of which involve farm implements and antique firearms. There's a lesson is this -- mainly, don't steal 45 million in Bitcoins from people named Vladimir -- but that aside, good sales numbers mean an author (me, for instance) can keep writing books in a series, and readers (you, let's say) can keep reading that series. Too, the way Vlad described the use of the anvil and the plow still gives me nightmares. So buy a book? Please?

'Nuff said. Here's are links!



Things That Go Bump 2014 Issue #2, and BOOK RELEASE!


Pictured above is the improved Tesla Radio featured in last week's entry. Note the pair of sadly unadorned black boxes on the right and left sides of the receiver chassis -- the box on the left houses a simple single-transistor pre-amp circuit, while the box on the right contains a basic LM386 amplifier chip with all the trimmings and a speaker large enough to easily be heard.

As you may recall, last week I hooked the receiver directly into my PC's sound card and recorded its output for later playback. That's all well and good, if one is willing to drag around a heavy tower PC, a monitor, a power supply, and of course a desk to put everything on. One will look awfully silly setting that up in a graveyard, so I built some amps.



The idea here is to put my portable microphone next to the LM386 speaker. That way I can conduct EVP sessions simply by speaking, and have the mic record both the Tesla radio's output and the sounds in the area.

That does mean walking around in cemeteries and haunted houses with some odd-looking machinery, but ghost hunting is itself a rather odd hobby.


With the solder-joints on the new amp still warm, I headed up to the big cemetery in Oxford yesterday. I've captured several EVP voices there before, and I was hoping the Tesla might catch a plaintive ghostly moan or two as well.


In case anyone is curious, below are the plans for my LM386 amp. The plans for the little pre-amp don't exist; it's just a single NPN transistor, a 9 volt battery, a couple of resistors and a capacitor or two. You can find that circuit all over the web. There's nothing special about any of this gear.


I use 1/8 inch mono cables and mono jacks to connect everything.

So, what mysterious and phantasmagorical sounds did I capture, armed with such fancy equipment?

Um. Well. That is to say, er, nothing. Okay, around ten minutes and 43 seconds in, there is what might be a very faint whisper. A whisper which says, after nearly 30 dB of amplification is added, I hate your horse. 

 But anything you have to amplify to that degree is almost certainly just noise, so I'm not even going to post the sample.

Look, we're just not in the mood today.
I will put up a link to the entire session, which runs a little over 15 minutes. I was planning to go longer, but both my Zoom mic and my camera batteries died at the very same moment, and I was starving, so Science was defeated by Supper and I headed for home.

Here's the entire session, including bird songs, hoarse radio preachers, and one exuberant drunk, who yelled HEY MELANIE from his window a number of times while the unfortunate Melanie walked briskly away.

St. Peter's Cemetery Full EVP Session Here


I'll head back again soon, this time with plenty of spare batteries and a bucket of BBQ ribs. In the interest of Science, of course. Science!

Tuesday Book Release!

As I may have mentioned here before some eleventy-seven zillion times, the new Markhat book The Five Faces goes on sale this Tuesday, June the 17th. 


Just look at that gorgeous cover, courtesy of artist KaNaXa. Note the fierce determination on Markhat's chiseled face! See the courage in the set of his manly jaw! 

He's sure, you see, that this book is the one that catapults the series to heights of fame never before experienced by yours truly. In fact, the image above depicts him striding resolutely toward the nearest bank, the better to deposit his sudden windfall and just possibly purchase a new pair of shoes. 

THE TOP FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD BUY THE FIVE FACES:

5. It's less than five bucks. Seriously. I paid twice that to see Pacific Rim, and it was just Independence Day shot with stompy robots. I promise you that at no time will you feel led to stand up and shout 'This is freaking STUPID' in a movie theater, partly because it's too dark to read in movie theaters but mainly because my editor won't allow stupid bits in our books. 

4) I used every letter of the alphabet. I'm not one of those lazy authors who can't be bothered to reach all the way up to the top row of keys. No, due to my strict workout regime and meticulous pre-writing stretch sessions, I am equally adept at hitting QWERTYUIOP as I am the other rows. I've even received high praise for my stylistic choices involving T and W, which were once described as 'Coffee is on aisle 9' and 'Sir, you can't park in the drive-thru.' So there's that.

3) My hero, Markhat, is real, and can see you through the pages.  Hard to believe, but it's true. Fans of the series describe brief meetings with Markhat himself, who sometimes appears as a sports team mascot or a bookstore advertising standee before dispensing nuggets of wisdom, encouragement, or household cleaning agents. "Markhat appeared in my kitchen, made himself a sandwich, and got me free HBO," reports one fan. "I turned around to thank him, and he was gone, leaving behind a tattered paperback copy of The Banshee's Walk and an outstanding balance at a rent-to-own place, which he still hasn't paid." 

2) My muse, the short-tempered and plain-spoken Visavarevagsitaga, is ready to quit and install a marmot in her place.  "Look," she said in her last email to me. "You're nice enough for a no-talent hack with delusions of grandeur and a skill-set better suited to a sled dog, but unless this book gets some numbers, kid, I'm putting you on the Small Mammal Circuit, nothing personal, I hear they like peanuts." 

1) Due to a complex series of unlikely events and activities which might not be what most Grand Juries would label 'legal,' the Russian Mob warned me that unless The Five Faces breaks the Amazon Top 500 within a week of release a series of even more complex and unlikely events will befall me, many of which involve farm implements and antique firearms. There's a lesson is this -- mainly, don't steal 45 million in Bitcoins from people named Vladimir -- but that aside, good sales numbers mean an author (me, for instance) can keep writing books in a series, and readers (you, let's say) can keep reading that series. Too, the way Vlad described the use of the anvil and the plow still gives me nightmares. So buy a book? Please?

'Nuff said. Here's the link again:



DO NOT CLICK This Link

Don't even think about clicking the link below, or sending it to your friends, or Tweeting it, of Book-facing it or whatever it is you crazy kids do out there on the Interwebz these days. Seriously, don't. Just close the browser. CLOSE IT NOW.




Mad Science: Tesla's Radio

They said I was mad! Mad, I tell you! But soon I shall show them all, bwahahahaha!
The weird looking contraption in the picture above? I built it, and it works, and you can listen to it a few paragraphs down. But first, some backstory!

There's a good chance you were taught that a man named Marconi invented the device we call the radio, and that his patent was issued in 1904, ushering in the age of the wireless and kicking off the gadget-happy 20th century in grand style.

It's a good story, but it's also a big fat lie. The truth is this -- Marconi's financial backers, Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, slipped the American Patent Office an undisclosed sum of cash, and the owners of the original radio patent found their patent revoked. I can only assume these unfortunate fellows were notified via mail, in a letter which stated 'Sorry, but wow that was a LOT of money.'

But if you dig a little deeper, you'll find that a Serbian genius named Nikola Tesla had the whole lot of radio experimenters beat, because he was sitting up late nights in his laboratory near Pike's Peak and freaking himself out with the radio he built before the rest of the gang ever gazed longingly at a chunk of germanium and wondered if they could drag voices from  it.

Rocking that 'stache like a boss.
Let's set the scene in Tesla's laboratory, which did indeed look like the set from the original Frankenstein movie. The place was littered with massive Tesla coils, some of which could throw sparks over a hundred feet. There were electric motors spinning and sparking, AC transformers humming, gears and pulleys turning away. If you think I'm exaggerating, consider this -- residents of the nearby town knew when Tesla was at work when sparks reached from the soles of their shoes down to the street every time they took a step. The blue glow that surrounded Tesla's tower was visible from town.

Nikola Tesla wasn't screwing around. He invented the electric motors still in use today. AC power? That's his. So are a dozen other commonplace bits of technical wizardry. The man would build machines in his head, watch them fail, make mental improvements until he'd worked the bugs out. Only then would be set about constructing the actual device. He was that good.

So, late one night in 1893, he fired up the radio set he casually conceived and listened, curious as to what he might hear.

What he heard astounded him. Frightened him, even. He became convinced that he was picking up some form of communication between entities unknown.

You can read his own recounting of his first exposure to radio in this 1901 article Tesla wrote for Collier's Magazine.

Talking With the Planets by Nikola Tesla

In the article, Tesla (correctly) decides radio is the best way to communicate over long distances. I doubt he foresaw radio's use as a way to sell laundry detergent, but nobody's perfect.

Of his first experiences with radio, Tesla says this:

"I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me."

 --Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901

 All of which begs the question -- what did Nikola Tesla hear, that night so long ago?

 He couldn't have heard commercial radio signals, because there weren't any. Distant lightning, sure, as a burst of static. The usual hissing of the cosmos, which extends all the way down to the AM band.

 But nothing I could think of would present itself as voices, or attempts at communication.

 Given the materials Tesla had on hand at the time, his radio set was almost certainly a chunk of germanium (or a similar crystalline mineral) and a crude arrangements of inductors, resistors, and capacitors.

 Luckily, all those things are easily obtained today. What Tesla was listening to was what we call, with a hint of nostalgia, a crystal radio set. It uses no power, save for the tiny amount collected by the antenna itself. At the heart of the radio set is a tiny hunk of germanium, which is found in the center of a thing called a 'germanium diode' which runs you a whopping 49 cents from most electronic suppliers.

 I built my Tesla radio based on the set found at the end of this link:

 Spooky Telsa Radio on Instructables

As you can see, his radio set is prettier than mine, but mine is a better card player, so there.

If you listen to the audio samples from the Instructables page, you'll find that lightning strikes sound just like thunder. Keep in mind the output of the Instructables set is being modified with audio processing software before you hear it -- reverb and other effects are being added to make it sound cool. Which is fine, but I prefer to record nothing but the raw audio.

Why?

Well, listen to the very brief audio sample below.

CTHULHU SPEAKS

Scary, right? Sounded like something out of Satan's own closet of nightmares, didn't it?

That was me, reciting 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' It took me six mouse clicks in Audacity to render the harmless nursery rhyme into something sinister.

Since Tesla didn't have access to my computer, I won't be adding sound effects to the recordings.

Building the Radio

If you have a mind to build your own crystal radio set, I'll include my own drawings and parts suppliers here. It's really not hard. Or you can buy pre-wired sets from various places around the web.

The Instructables site includes a complete parts list and schematic. I'm including mine because I made a few changes. Also, I didn't draw it out in schematic form, but depicted each component and where the leads should actually connect, in case anyone without electronics experience wants to give this a try.


I got a 1/8 inch mono plug to act as the output. I chose 1/8 inch because I have an old-school high-impedance earpiece with an 1/8 inch plug; I can use that listen to the radio, and a 1/8 inch mono cable to plug the radio into my PC's mic input so I can record the sounds. More about that later.

You can build your rig any way you want to, as long as the proper connections are made. Soldering is involved, but that's easy to learn and soldering irons are cheap. The only thing you need to be careful about is soldering the diode; they're fragile, and heat can quickly destroy them, so don't leave the iron on the leads too long.

I got D1, VC1, L1, R1, and C1 pictured above from the nice people at Scott's Electronic Parts. Below are the parts numbers from Scott's:

D1 - #1N34A-1
VC1 - #Var141-1
L1 - #FAC
C1 - #Cap.001uf-4
R1 - I had a 47K ohm resistor already. The Radio Shack part number is 271-1342
Earpiece - #CerEar-1
Mono plug for 1/8 inch mono cable: Radio Shack part number  274-251
The small amplifier shown in the photos is a Radio Shack part number 277-1008, cost $14.

I had a scrap of oak to use for the base. I got a five by six inch piece of 1/8 clear plexiglass to use as a component mounting board. Four bolts hold the whole thing together.



I wound my hilariously un-circular spiral antennas from 14 gauge copper wire. I would up attaching each spiral to a small sheet of clear plexi because the coils kept flopping around and shorting out. 

Why spiral antennas? Because Tesla's drawing and notes are littered with spirals. The man loved a spiral or two. That's a bit of homage to him, it was a shape I could easily create with six feet of copper wire, and since this project is as much about fun and art as it is about anything else, why not a spiral?

The antennas plug into banana jacks, easily gotten from Radio Shack, and the whole works cost around 30 bucks.



So, the radio was finished. I could hear sounds and voices in my earpiece. It was time to plug one end of the mono cable into the radio, and the other end into my PC's mic input. Which I did. I then fired up Audacity, selected the mic input, and hit record.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all. I was monitoring the input levels, and they were stuck at zero.

I plugged my earpiece in, and heard voices. 

What did that mean?

It meant the radio's output was far to weak to reach mic-level ranges, which start around 0.3 volts. I made a sad face, cranked the gain up within Audacity to ludicrous and stupid levels, and still got nothing.

I asked myself 'What would Tesla do?' and rummaged through my ghost-hunting gear until I found a small portable audio amplifier. I hooked it up to the radio, and it started mumbling in loud angry Spanish, so I knew I was onto something. The little amp has an auxiliary output, so I plugged that into my PC, and like magic, the voices began to speak.



Now, Frank, shut up and tell us how it sounds!

Listening to the Spooky Voices of the Planets

The little radio fired right up, filling my earpiece with a mixture of static, faint voices, and the ever-present 60-cycle hum of modern house wiring. 

By gently turning the knob on the variable capacitor, you can (sort of) tune in on different signals. Now, keep in mind this isn't a commercial radio set. It doesn't actually have what even the cheapest Wal-Mart radio would call a 'tuner section.' Stations come and go, fade in and fade out, pretty much at random. One minute you're getting the local NPR station, the next it's an agitated gentleman speaking in rapid-fire Spanish, and then that gives way to garbled music and what sounds very much like goats bleating.



And that's just during the day. At night, when the ionosphere bounces AM radio signals around like so many meth-crazed tennis balls, things do get weird.

But hey, you've read this long, here's a sample, torn right off the late-night airwaves!


Gotta love that whole Children of the Corn vibe the preacher was giving off. The late-night airwaves of today are a static-flooded wasteland of AM sermonizers, each stranger than the last. I heard one such worthy exhorting the many miraculous blessings of the Magic Hand, which was quick to bestow upon its owners good fortune, improved health, and a joyous love life, Mastercard and VISA gladly accepted for orders, quantities limited, get yours today!


All of which is amusing enough, but what about the sounds that caused a genius such as Nikola Tesla to determine, well before anyone else, that radio would one day be the link between Mars and Earth?

Well, in that regard, I must report my brief explorations have thus far returned nothing. Attempts to 'tune' between active stations are almost impossible -- there are a LOT more AM stations broadcasting than I thought. Too, the range of such stations can vary wildly. I routinely pick up brief transmissions from South America and Mexico, even on this little rig.


The 60-cycle hum is truly annoying. My next recording session will be held outdoors, far from the house, recorded on my ancient Dell netbook. I hope doing so will make any faint signals easier to detect.

So What Did Tesla Hear?

To put my conclusions in esoteric scientific terms, man, I have no idea.

Aside from static in one form or another, I can't image the radio environment of 1893 being very rich in anything but white noise and brief loud cracks of lightning. Was Tesla hearing the workings of his own machines? Was his radio set somehow creating weird sounds as part of a technical malfunction? Was Tesla just pulling our legs because articles about boring old static don't sell many stories to Collier's Magazine?

We may never know. I will keep playing with this radio, though, and if I manage to get Mars on the horn, you'll be the first to hear it!

Writing News

The big event, naturally, the new Markhat release! The new book THE FIVE FACES goes on sale June 17. 


I can tell more than a few people have already put in pre-orders, and for that I thank you!


The Perfect Face for Radio





I'm going to be on the radio this week, live from the KWAM 990 studios in Memphis, Tennessee, courtesy of The Steve Bradshaw Show! You can either listen at 8:00 AM on Tuesday June 3 by tuning to 990 on the AM dial, or you can fire up a web browser and click your way to the live show feed. Remember, that's Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM Central Standard Time.

We'll talk about a lot of things. I seem to recall that someone I know, possibly me, has a book coming out on June 17. We may also discuss Bigfoot, ghost hunting, parapsychology, and why I'm still wearing my pajamas in the studio. It should be a lot of fun.

Now, those of you who know me also know that my usual pre-noon vocabulary consists of the following phrases:
  • Huh?
  • Ugh.
  • Grr.
  • Look, officer, I'm sure my pants are around here somewhere.
But don't worry. I've constructed an unholy hybrid machine consisting of a twelve-cup Keurig coffee machine and a forced-dose IV system, which will keep hi-octane Columbian bean coursing through my veins all the way to Memphis early Tuesday morning. I should arrive at the studio alert, verbose, and, possibly, resembling the Tasmanian Devil from the old Looney Tunes cartoons.


I'm ready for my radio spot, Steve.
So if you're near Memphis at 8:00 AM Tuesday, tune in and mock my accent. If you're not anywhere near Memphis, pull down a sneaky browser tab set for here and listen in at work.

Meralda and Mug Update

The new Mug and Meralda book, All the Turns of Light, is still in the edit stage. I expected to finish that up last week. Alas, sometimes Life not only intrudes on my writing, but also assaults, attacks, and/or engages in vicious acts of bludgeonry. Yes, I know bludgeon is a real word and bludgeonry is something I just made up, but it fits and I'm hoping it catches on.

I will say this -- I've seen a mock-up of the cover that will shortly grace All the Turns of Light, and it's beautiful!

The Obligatory Book Pitch

As I may have mentioned some forty-seven times already, the new Markhat book goes on sale June 17. It's called The Five Faces, and below is the cover and a link.


I'm eager to see the reactions to this entry in the series. It's probably the grittiest, most unflinching book of them all -- poor Markhat really gets in deep, this time around. This book is set in Rannit, the whole gang is back, and I really hope you like it.

The next book in the series, The Darker Carnival, is still under consideration at Samhain. 

That's it for this week! Wish me luck and my radio appearance, and listen in if you can!


Water, water everywhere...


I don't think I've posted this map before. It's the hand-drawn map of the Realms I use as a reference when working on the Mug and Meralda books. For the last couple of weeks, I've been deep in edits on the new one, All the Turns of Light. I'm hoping to be done with that in a week or two!

The Realms are a very small part of Meralda's world. The Great Sea stretches twenty-five thousand miles in the shortest direction to the world's other land mass, a much larger continent that is home to the Hang. Which makes the world of the Realms several times larger than Earth. 

I did that intentionally. Why?

Ha. I won't tell. Not until around the end of Book 3, anyway.

This new book will have seen the most extensive re-writing I've ever done. But it's going to be a really good book, so it's well worth the effort!

Other Authors at Work


I took this photo inside novelist William Faulkner's home. He famously wrote out the entire outline for A Fable on his walls. He later won a Pulitzer for A Fable, and even wrote the outline on the walls a second time after Mrs. Faulkner had the walls repainted.

I post this image because I'm envious of Faulkner's talent. Let's conduct a thought experiment -- Frank Tuttle partakes of a respectable volume of good whiskey, outlines a book on his wall, and churns out a novel. Does Frank Tuttle win a Pulitzer, get a Historical Society marker erected in front of his house, and then go on to win a Nobel Prize for literature?

Not so much. Frank Tuttle sheepishly repaints the wall and nurses a hangover.

I'll always regret ignoring Step 1 on my Master Plan to be Rich and Famous. What was Step 1, you ask?

Step 1: Be born William Faulkner.

Man, you just can't skip steps.

Faulkner's desk and PC. Bet it runs XP.

Lou Ann Says Hello


Lou and I, on an expedition to replace the memory card in the trail camera earlier today. Taking pictures of Lou is challenging, because she rarely stands still. She has just emerged from a cooling dip in the pond, and is considering a return because she doesn't smell quite strongly enough of mud and algae. Mud composed of rotting vegetation and a thick scum of algae is, of course, Chanel No. 5 to dogs, and is to be applied liberally and often. She's at my side now, exuding an aroma only Swamp Thing could love.

Upcoming Markhat Release


A reminder -- the new Markhat book hits the shelves on June 17!

Here's the Amazon link:

The Five Faces

You can pre-order if you haven't already!

Here's an excerpt from THE FIVE FACES, in case you haven't read any Markhat books and would like a sample before diving in.


My new client’s name was Saffy, short for Saffron, and her big brother’s name was Ted, short for Ted. They were hesitant to offer up their surname, as most Orthodox Rannites are, so I didn’t push.

Saffy and Ted lived in an attic flat with their grandparents in the jumble of old alleys that run north of Camptown. Put the kids together and they’d still be outweighed by a sack of moth-wings, which is why I left them in my office and fetched Mama Hog.

Mama has her faults—and then some—but put a hungry child in her vicinity and she’s a one-woman charity kitchen. She took a single look at Saffy and Ted and vanished with a squawk, only to reappear moments later with a basket stuffed with biscuits and big thick slices of salted ham.

She left after delivering her feast, and by the time my new clients and I got down to business, I could smell Mama’s soup-pot boil as she brewed up something hot and savory.

Ted choked down the last bite of his fourth biscuit and wiped his chin on his sleeve.

“Mister, I’m much obliged for the biscuits, but I’m telling you straight—right now—we ain’t got a penny between us.”

Saffy nodded. She was on biscuit five, herself.

“I don’t know much about finders,” added Ted, “but I know nobody does nothin’ for free. So tell me this—why did you tell Saffy you would find Cornbread? We got no coin. And you ain’t havin’ nothing else, neither, if you get my point.”

I nodded. I liked the way the kid looked me in the eyes when he spoke. I liked the way he didn’t brag or threaten or bluster.

“I was a dog handler, during the War,” I said.

He returned my curt nod.

“So you know dogs.”

“Know them and like them. Cornbread—he help your sister get around?”

“I don’t need any damned help, mister,” said Saffy through a mouthful of biscuit.

Ted nodded silently. “Cornbread’s the smartest dog I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We raised him from a pup. He’s been with Saffy all his life, and she’s been with him all hers. We want him back, mister. But I can’t pay you. Not right now, anyways.”

I leaned back in my chair and pretended to ponder the matter. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ve got a house on Middling Lane. Summer’s coming. My wife likes a neat lawn, and I like a lazy afternoon and a cold beer. What do you say to this—I try to find Cornbread. You give me a summer of yard work as payment if I find him. If I don’t, you still work for me for two months.”

Ted eyed me with mild suspicion. “That’s it? No funny stuff?”

“That’s it. No funny stuff. Meals thrown in by Mama Hog. Deal?”

Saffy grabbed his elbow, whispered something in his ear.

“She wants to know if you’re any good,” he said, giving me that same flat, hard look. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about finders. So, are you? Any good?”

I opened my desk drawer and got out my writing pad and my good ink pen.

“I guess we’ll see. So tell me. What happened today at the Park?”

Saffy swallowed and coughed. “A man came up and asked me what kind of doggy I had. I heard him get on his knees, and I thought he meant to pet Cornbread, but the leash jerked and Cornbread barked and the man took him—”

I spoke before she could start crying again.

“The man. Did you know his voice?”

“No. He talked funny.”

“Funny how?”

She knotted her dirty brow in concentration.

“What keend of a doogie is that, lass?” she said, aping a deep baritone and a thick accent I couldn’t place. “What a wee leetle doogie he is!”

“He sounded like that?”

“Just like that.” She hesitated. “He smelled funny. Perfumy, like a fancy lady. And he had a big hat.”

I raised an eyebrow. Blind she might be, but she sensed my unspoken question somehow.

“His shadow was too big. I could feel it when he blocked out the sun. He had a big hat, mister.”

I scribbled on my pad. Fancy toilet water, wide-brimmed hat, strong accent.

“And you,” I said to Ted. “Where were you?”

He didn’t blink or look away. “I was watching the birds,” he said. As he spoke, he made a rapid reach and grab motion with his hands. “I lost sight of Saffy, just for a minute.”

Pickpocket, I added to my list. Mind your coin.

When I didn’t spill the beans to Saffy, Ted actually showed me a brief, narrow smile.

“So you never saw the man who took Cornbread?”

“No. I’d have gutted the bastard if I had.”

I didn’t doubt that for a moment. Life doesn’t breed any gentle children of leisure in Camptown.

Mama Hog pounded at my door. “Boy,” she shouted. “Let me in. Got some stew I needs to get rid of.”
I rose and let her in. Her basket was full of bowls and spoons and a pot with a lid and half a loaf of hard-crust bread.

“Reckon you young-uns got room for a bite of stew?”

They were face-down in the bowls and sopping up stew before Mama could hand out spoons.
Mama grinned, showing off her remaining front tooth.

“So, what are these here urchins hiring a finder for, pray tell?”

“Someone snatched their dog. Cut the leash and took him in the park.”

Mama’s grin vanished. “You’d best find them another dog,” she said. “I reckon them what took it has intentions of using it as a bait dog.”

Saffy swallowed hard and cleared her throat. I made frantic shushing motions at Mama.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “Her dog’s name is Cornbread. Saffy. Tell Mama here how the bad man talked.”

Saffy repeated the man’s words, complete with accent.

“Mama, that accent sound like anybody you know?”

She shook her shaggy head. “I reckon not. Though there’s all kinds of foreigners coming out of Prince these days. Some of them talks outlandish, I hears.”

Dogfighting is illegal in Rannit. And not much practiced. Too many War vets came home alive because a dog warned them Trolls were closing in. Anybody caught fighting dogs for sport tended to meet with the kind of displeasure that takes months to heal, if one survives it at all.

Maybe they didn’t think that way in Prince.

Mama leaned against my desk and watched my new clients eat.

“Reckon it must be nice, bein’ able to give away work for free,” she muttered. “‘Course, now that you got Gertriss bearing most of the load, you can afford to be all charitable, can’t ye?”

Mama’s great-niece Gertriss is now my junior partner. Since Mama brought Gertriss to Rannit to be trained up in the card-and-potion trade, Gertriss’s defection to the noble art of Finding has been a sore spot with Mama of late.

“I certainly can,” I replied with a big grin. “I’ve even got time to help you run your business, Mama. Set me up a table, and I’ll start reading the cards this afternoon. Can’t be much to it. The card with the skulls means death, right? And the one with the swords means conflict?”

By then I was talking to Mama’s back as she stomped out of my office muttering about ingrates and the poor upbringing of those who failed to respect their elders.

Ted looked up at me, stew leaving greasy trails in the soot on his chin. “You got a mouth on you, Mister.”

“So I’m told.” I noted his observation on my pad in a show of attention to detail. “Finish the stew. You two need to run along home and I need to start looking for Cornbread.” I pointed at the address I’d scribbled on my pad. “I can find you here?”

Ted nodded. “First door on the right, second story. Grandpa’s deaf. Grandma can hear but not speak. She’ll know your name.”

“Fine. Scoot.”

They drained their bowls. I fussed with my notes and pretended not to see the loaf of bread or both Mama’s spoons find their way into any shabby little pockets.

When they were gone, I put the empty bowls back in Mama’s basket and swept the few crumbs that had escaped off my desk.

I put the basket by Mama’s door when she refused to answer my knock. “Got a few hours before Curfew,” I said, loud enough for Mama to hear. “I’m heading down to the docks to ask around about newcomers from Prince. Darla will worry unless somebody sends a kid to my house with a note telling her I’ll be late, but that can’t be helped, since Mama isn’t home and I’m pressed for time. Woe is me, alas, and etcetera.”

With that, I hailed a passing cab and bade the driver to head for the docks.

He jokingly asked if I was looking for trouble, heading for the docks this late in the day, and I jokingly replied I was, and where better to look?

I tossed him a coin, and off we went, toward the setting sun.

END EXCERPT

So it all starts with a blind kid's missing dog, and winds up -- well. Let's just say things get complicated and dangerous for our hero, wise-cracking Markhat.

I mentioned editing earlier, and I have a lot left to do, so that's all for this week. Take care, folks!



Mad Science: Optical Shenanigans



The image above is an actual picture. It's not digitally manipulated, and it was taken on my worktable a few minutes ago.

The subject is a piece of jewelry from The Noble Collection. And no, I didn't fill a room with candles and jewels -- the picture was taken inside an infinity box, and there are a lot more pictures below.

What's an infinity box?

Some ghost hunters claim spirits can be 'captured' inside a box lined with mirrors. Such a thing is sometimes called a 'Devil's Toybox,' and while I don't believe ghosts, if they exist, can be trapped inside nine dollars' worth of Home Depot mirror tiles and twelve bucks worth of MDF, I did wonder -- what would happen if you built such a box, and put a camera inside it?

So off I went. Building a cube with each face measuring 12 and one-quarter inches took me about an hour. I thought myself a clever lad, because I remembered to account for the thickness of each mirror face. I did forget to account for the dimensions of the glue that holds each mirror in place, and had a few moments of high drama getting the glass panes to slide inside, but got lucky and didn't break anything.

Total cost; 37 dollars, when all was said and done.

I found that four small candles provided enough light to keep the camera's flash from activating. Focusing in the box is largely a matter of sheer blind luck. As soon as I close the lid, I can hear my poor little Fuji Finepix S1000fd start cussing in Japanese, because autofocusing in the optical equivalent of a circus funhouse isn't any fun. I used the S1000fd because it's the smallest camera I've got. My new one has an enormous snout of an optical zoom, but I may try it later too, just to see how its updated hardware deals with the reflective environment.

I'm putting the best of my images below. I hope you enjoy them!


Candles and a crystal ball (yes, I have a crystal ball, and it shows me episodes of The Walking Dead two weeks in advance, nyah nyah na nyah na).


You just can't find ceilings like this outside of Vegas...


Markhat's Mark IV vampire-built revolver. Loved the way the copper color was scattered.


Got this effect by skewing the camera on its little tripod. I've also gotten this effect before without a camera, with a quart of Old Overcoat malt whiskey, but I much prefer this method because my ears don't bleed afterward.


SpongeBob discovers LSD.


Who doesn't have a private horde of precious gems?


Look, Ma, no tripod!


Everybody needs a Treasure Room.


Bikini Bottom, Saturday night.


A herd of dinosaur.


Meralda's favorite latching wand.


Seven million candles.


So that's where I left all my rubies.


I like this one because it suggests a row of dragons, ready for battle. Or the Grand Opening of a new Subway sandwich shop, depending on your level of militarism.


Finally, gargoyles, because nothing keeps your treasure horde safer than an infinite number of highly-motivated gargoyles.

I'll be playing with the Infinity Box this week, trying different cameras and contents. If you've got a suggestion for a subject, let me know! Keep in mind it needs to be smaller than a foot across in every dimension.

No ghosts were trapped, harmed, or even mildly annoyed in the construction of this project.

In writing news, the new Mug and Meralda is still in edits, and the new Wistril is chugging along. The new Markhat is under consideration at Samhain, but I don't expect any word on it for six weeks or so. I will keep you all informed, though!

Okay, back to my edits. I hope you enjoyed the photographs. If anyone is interested in the actual plans I drew up before building this, let me know and I'll scan the paper and email it to you. It's not a difficult build.

Take care all!

Remember, The Five Faces goes on sale June the 17th, but you can pre-order now.





Undressing Meralda

One of the rare pleasures of writing is seeing your characters come to life on a book cover.

Markhat and I could be twins!
After all, you live with your heroes and heroines while you write about them. You hear their voice in every line of dialog, see their face each time you describe an expression. You conceive them, raise them, educate them, shape their personalities. You give them their talents and their flaws, their good and and their bad sides. You dress them, and wake them. You put them to bed. Sometimes, you even kill them.

But unless you remove random faces from magazines or use this new-fangled thing the kids call 'the interwebs' to cut and paste images, you never really see your protagonist, except in your mind's eye, until the book's cover proof arrives.

I'm speaking of Meralda, since I just finished editing the first draft of her new book. With any luck, one day in the not so distant future the book will be published, and the very first thing you'll see on this published book is a cover.

And on that cover, you will probably find Meralda depicted. She's earned top billing as the heroine, after all, and her presence on the cover is well-nigh mandatory.

Before I say anything else, let me say this -- don't panic. Because I will have nothing to do with making the cover. I know my limits, and such a task lies well beyond them.

That said, I wondered if I might find an image somewhere that captured Meralda's look sufficiently well to merit passing the image along to the cover artist one day. Armed with Google, and caught between tasks in a moment of boredom, I searched for images tagged 'fantasy woman.'

Google dutifully returned hundreds of images. Most were stunning, since fantasy art is a rich, well-established field. But very few of the images evoked my Meralda. Why?

Well, it seems that most fantasy realms are plagued by winds of sufficient velocity to make keeping oneself fully clothed nearly impossible. Undergarments tended to remain, although in various states of disarray.

Don't even THINK about it, quoth Meralda.
Look, I'm no prude. Seriously, I'm not. But upon seeing the images, Meralda, who was looking over my shoulder, raised her right eyebrow and announced in no uncertain terms that if she were to be clothed in a handkerchief and a bit of string she would be very, very unhappy, and would likely remain so for the next three hundred thousand words. 

 At a minimum.

 It's one thing when ordinary people say that. It's another when your protagonist -- the star of the show, so to speak -- says it.

Which led me to wonder: Why did Meralda feel so strongly about this?

I suppose the answer is obvious. I wrote her as a bookish, intense person. An introvert. She'd be perfectly happy spending the rest of her life behind the closed doors of the Laboratory, as long as coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches were delivered at regular intervals. Yes, she does have a gentleman friend in this book, but he understands all this, and is happy to accept her as she is.

I remember wondering, when the first book was published, if readers would be able to connect with such a withdrawn protagonist. Meralda sounds a bit dull, to be honest, if all I had to go on was the paragraph above.

But she's proven to be popular. And she's fun to write -- dragging her, kicking and screaming, out of the Laboratory and then out of Tirlin altogether in this new book was quite an experience.

I suppose the best thing one can do when writing a character is to let the character start writing themselves. So, Meralda, don't worry about being handed a micro-mini-skirt, a bustier, and thigh-high leather boots for the cover shoot. Not going to happen. I have nothing against such covers, but to thine own self be true, and all that.

Is there a timeline for the release of the new book? No, nothing specific yet, although I will say it will be this year, and it won't be too cold. Vague enough?

Things To Come

Since the new Markhat is off to the publisher and the new Mug and Meralda is in the capable hands of my fearless beta reader, it's time to start something new.

I'm determined to start and finish a new Wistril story. If you're unfamiliar with Wistril the White Chair wizard and his wise-cracking apprentice Kern, you can read their first three exploits in the anthology below.


The new Wistril, which will end up somewhere between a long novella and a full novel, will be entitled Wistril Ascendant. I haven't visited Wistril and Kern since 2007, and this seems like an excellent time to drop by Castle Kauph and see what the boys have been doing.

I'll be posting regular progress reports here, every Sunday, so stay tuned!



One Away, One on the Launch Pad

Fig. 1, the gun my Muse keeps pointed at my head.
I'll say this much for the year 2014 -- despite the usual (and a few unusual) external pressures, I've been able to get some writing done.

The new Markhat novel, The Darker Carnival, is in the hands of Samhain Publishing. I'll probably have a yes (yay!) or a no (no!) in about eight weeks. That's the first book I wrote this year.

The second book, All the Turns of Light, is now undergoing the brutal process of first-draft revision. So far, it's been a relatively painless process, but I'm only about ten percent into the book, so anything could happen.

All the Turns of Light is the second book I've written this year. It's only May. If I can maintain this 2000 word a day pace, I might manage another pair of books before 2014 closes.

I don't say this to brag. But if you're out there, like I was last year and all the years before that, thinking 'I'll never be one of those writers who can turn out ten pages a day,' please think again. You can do it.

Look. I'm inherently lazy. There are sea sponges with more vim, vigor, and get-up-and-go than me. I believe hard work is best performed by other people, preferably at a location so far away the sounds of their determined industry don't interfere with my napping. If work truly builds character, thanks, I've got enough character already and anyway it's time for Supernatural.

 So how did I defeat my powerful inner sloth, and actually get a respectable amount of work done?

I trumped my inner sloth with my inner OCD freak. Every morning, I make a list on a little card of the things I need to do that day. On that list is the entry 'Write 2K words.'

I cross things off the list as they get done. Now, my sloth would gleefully eat the list, or wander away from it to find a nice patch of cool shade, but my inner OCD guy cannot abide the sight of an incomplete item.

Yeah. It really was that simple.

I am using my own mental defects against myself. There's probably a clinical term for that, but if you know it don't tell me.

Motorcycle Update

My mighty Honda is back! Putting everything back together took several hours, but when I turned the key and hit the starter, she cranked. 



Honestly, I couldn't believe it. I was fully prepared to hear the engine sputter and fail. I wasn't even going to employ bad language at the realization I'd have to start all over. I nearly fell off the bike when she started, as though nothing had ever been wrong.

I got the book below, and followed the instructions, and avoided a trip to the shop. Books rule!


Final Words 

Like I said, the new Mug and Meralda is only about 10 percent done with the first editing pass, so I'd better get back to work. Have a good week people!

And don't forget -- the new Markhat The Five Faces goes on sale June 17! But you can pre-order now, wink wink nudge nudge...



Knee Deep in the Alligators of Editing

We hear you're editing, and we came to help.
As I mentioned last week, I'm making a deep editing pass through the new Markhat book, The Darker Carnival.

Writing a book is one thing. I've found that my best way to write is to just dive in and keep going, letting nothing (except snakes or large hail) slow me down. Can't remember what I named the doorman in Chapter 3, when we see him again briefly in Chapter 6? I type  **** and keep moving, knowing that I'll come back later and look up the name and fix that.

Which brings us to the edit phase, when all those **** entries have to be fleshed out and made whole.

That's the first and easiest part of editing, at least for me. I took care of all that in an hour. The next pass saw me searching for grammar mistakes, omitted words, or transposed letters. Those are quick fixes too, as long as you spot them. 

Now I'm reading through the corrected manuscript as I imagine a reader will, and my main mission is to spot passages that invite the reader to close the book. Those are the passages that must be re-written, and that can take a lot of work, depending on the nature of the text.

The author, upon confronting the horror that is Chapter Nine.
So far I've used the scalpel, but not the machete, and that's great news. Snipping a paragraph here and there requires the literary equivalent of a few stitches, and no more. But when that awful realization that an entire chapter or subplot just isn't working engulfs you, you know you've got a mountain of work to do just to get things back on track.

With any luck I'll get The Darker Carnival submitted this week. Then I'll return to the Meralda and Mug book and give it the very same series of re-reads.

Isn't the writing life glamorous?

Below, for no apparent reason, is a short sample of the new book.

Excerpt from The Darker Carnival:
(Not taken from the beginning of the book. Markhat is posing as a newspaper man to poke around Dark's Diverse Delights, a traveling carnival encamped outside Rannit).

I learned a lot about circus folk, that day.

First of all, they drink, and drink hard. Especially the side-show wonders. I met the Man of Bones when he stumbled out of his tent, went down on all fours at my feet, and vomited between my boots. I was amazed at the volume of liquid he expelled, given the emaciated state of his spindly frame.

The circus master kicked the Man of Bones unceremoniously in his gut. "And here we find the Man of Bones, who has terrified audiences from the Sea to the Wastes," said Thorkel, as he sent the scuttling wretch away with a kick to his backside. "A living skeleton, whose grinning skull will haunt your dreams forever."

I nodded and scribbled in my notebook. It didn't seem polite to point out that the Man of Bones was entirely covered in skin.

We met the Queen of the Elves next. She wore a moth-eaten flannel gown she hadn't bothered to fasten with a belt. A pair of mis-matched work boots adorned her dainty feet. She puffed on an enormous cigar between swigs of dark brown liquid gulped from a dirty jar.

"Say hello to Mr. Bustman," said Thorkel, to her.

"Go to Hell," she opined, before sprawling lengthwise on a bench. 

"Men have traveled the world to pay homage to the Queen of the Elves," said Thorkel. The Queen responded with a raised middle finger. "Her beauty and charm are unmatched in all the mortal world."

"She wears flannel as only an Elf could," I added. Thorkel's brow furrowed beneath his immaculate top-hat. 

"That is to say, her ethereal beauty blinds, so dazzling is she to gaze upon," I said, quickly. Thorkel rewarded me with a  jackal's quick grin.

I love the book so much I suspect someone with more talent than me is sneaking out here at night, erasing what I've written, and replacing it with tight, colorful prose. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I don't have that book. One day soon I should get a copy, because I do a lot of motorcycle maintenance lately.


My faithful Honda, after hibernating all winter, can't quite wake up even though spring has sprung. She tries to crank, but doesn't, which led to a choice -- either take her to the nearest bike repair shop (in Batesville, a forty-mile round trip) or take up my wrenches and attempt the repair myself.

The 83 dollar-per-hour shop rate made that decision for me. So I bought a book detailing the viscera of my model of bike and started taking her apart.

The carburetor, between the warp core and the shield emitter array.
The problem lies with the carburetor, which is a twisty metal thing composed of floats, urchin barometers, and hemorrhoids. It mixes fuel with air or air with better air or, possibly, does nothing at all except keep the gas tank and the air cleaner from banging together. I wouldn't really know. What I do know is that my carburetor didn't look like the ones featured in the book so I took it all apart and scrubbed the pieces with gasoline until they gleamed. 

Who knew gasoline has such potent cleaning properties? But it only works on metal things. My dress shirts didn't fare too well, and my black dress socks simply dissolved. I wish I hadn't been wearing them at the time, but I'm told toenails grow back.

Fig. 1, a carburetor. Or maybe that's a pasta maker. Frankly, we're not sure, but if the bike emits perfect angel hair pasta instead of exhaust we'll know why.
The book I bought is a Kindle book, and at first I was apprehensive about using it around oil, gas, and tools. But now that I've done it, I find that having good clear photos I can enlarge and clickable hyperlinks and a working TOC makes repairs much easier than trying to leaf through a dog-eared printed manual. 

I wasn't able to clean my idle jet (see how I toss around mechanical terms as though I've been doing this for years), so I ordered a new one. Total cost of repairs: $23. I haven't put the bike back together yet, but if she cranks I'll have spent about six hours repairing it and less than twenty-five dollars in parts. Not bad, as opposed to the $300 or $400 bucks a shop would have charged.



Obligatory Plea for Reviews

Hey, not to be a pest (okay, I'm being a pest, might as well own it), but if you've read any of my books and liked them but haven't had a chance to leave a review on Amazon, now would be a great time!

Brown River Queen could use a few more reviews.


The new Markhat book, The Five Faces, goes on sale in a few weeks, on June 17. 


Okay, the alligators are getting restless, so it's back to work for me. Take care all, and see you next week!

Bugs, Poems, and Waxings, Though Not In That Order.

Fig. 1: The author's new haircut. Does it make my thorax look fat?
First things first -- the new Mug and Meralda book, All the Turns of Light, is done. No more pronouncements of 'nearly done' or 'almost finished' or 'surely this week, it will wind up.' The first draft is in the can. The new book weighs in at eighty thousand words, which is a perfect length for a novel as long as most of those 80,000 words are the right words. But only time, a couple of editors, and readers can determine that.

Now that All the The Turns of Light is done, I've picked up the new Markhat book I finished a few months ago. I'll give The Darker Carnival another long hard look, and when it's ready to strike out on its own I'll send it on the good folks at Samhain Publishing, who will then decide whether A) it's a worthy addition to the series or B) Frank has finally jumped the shark and needs to take up knitting. 

I hope to have The Darker Carnival out in a couple of weeks. Then I'll give All the Turns of Light its turn under the harsh, unforgiving light of editorial scrutiny, and then it'll be shipped off to my beta readers, who will return their own judgment regarding sharks, jumping of, or going on to the next step.

Then, it will be time to start a new book -- either the next Markhat, or a new Wistril the Wizard, I haven't decided which yet. Those are my next two books. Just not sure of the order at the moment.

The image at the top of the page is a bug. I took it through my new microscope a few minutes ago, because who among us doesn't love magnified views of big bug heads? Oh? Really? That many?

Sorry. You'll be happy to know he's a nice bug, and that I put him under some bark after I made his portraits. 


I wasn't the least bit surprised to find him coated in pollen. Everything is coated in pollen around here. Most particularly my nostrils, but don't worry, I will not be posting any images of those.

Below is a thistle, which blew away before I completed half a dozen photos. Even the flying thistle-bits have pollen all over them.


Nature is, if I'm any judge, far too amused with pollen.

In Which I Wax Poetic

Someone asked me recently if I wrote poetry.

Nay, quoth I, for poetry is the language of the soul, filled with, er, what are those things called? Feels? You know, the source of tearful eyes and quivering lips -- emotions, yes, feelings, those sorts of things, and I don't have any, so there.

But it later occurred to me that I have in fact written the odd bit of doggerel, strictly in the service of a story. 

For instance, here are the opening lines from The Harper's Lament, sung by Jere the castaway harper at the opening of my short story The Harper at Sea.

I am a luckless vagabond,
bereft of land or country,
Unchained, unbound by love or law,
unhomed till death does take me.

Jere was a recurring character back in my early short-story days. I think my favorite story of his was The Truth About Arphon and The Apple Farmer's Daughter. Without giving too much away, Jere finds himself trapped in a shadow world, with only a numberless horde of ravenous ghosts for company. He remembers a tale told by the legendary harper Arphon, who claims he held a mob of ghosts at bay with wholesome, cheerful songs of summer and daylight. Naturally, Jere tries this approach, beginning with a merry dance tune, Vival's Dance. 

I wander fields, I wander woods,
I wander sky and sea,
I wander lone beneath the stars
Come wander, lass, with me.

The ghosts are not impressed. Neither do they appear amused by any of the other songs Jere plays. Despairing, and nearly frozen solid by the press of the ghosts and their frosty exhalations, Jere's magical harp moves its own strings, and Jere sings along, not realizing at first just what song it is he's beginning to sing...

The apple farmer's daughter
was all alone one day,
When Og the mighty hunter happened by the way...

As the song progresses, Jere sings along, horrified but unable to silence his harp. 

Mighty Og spied lovely daughter,
and his blood did right quick boil...

I'm not going to post the whole thing here, because Jere and I share a similar respect for decorum.

The daughter grinned and fanned her skirts, 
and mighty Og did shout....

At this point, Jere begins to suspect the legendary Arphon lied about a thing or two concerning his encounter with ghosts.

Mighty Og began to weep, and lovely daughter laughed,
I'll not be shamed, the hunter roared, one boot upon one foot...

As the last note of the infamous Apple Farmer's Daughter song dies, his harp selects even worse songs, including Queen Mavan Tames the Dragon, The Happy Donkey Song, and, worst of all, Lords Love Ladies. 

I won't tell you how the story ends. If you're curious, it's here in my The Far Corners anthology.



I believe there's a single nursery rhyme in All the Paths of Shadow, a rhyme that sticks in heroine Meralda's head as she winds her way up the Tower's long, dark stairs. It went like this:

The old, old wizard goes round and round the stair,
The old, old wizard goes sneaking everywhere,
The old, old wizard goes where you cannot see,
The old, old wizard is sneaking up on me!


The Markhat books also feature songs, now and then. Brown River Queen is set aboard a lavish gambling riverboat, and part of the floor show includes a black blues singer named Miss Rondalee. Miss Rondalee, like Mama Hog, commands a magic uniquely her own, in that Miss Rondalee's songs are touched with power. For instance, no two people will hear them quite the same way, because no two people need to hear the very same song. Here's an excerpt from Brown River Queen, in which Miss Rondalee's lyrics foreshadow things to come...

From Brown River Queen:

The music faded away, and the spotlight flared to life, and a tall black woman in a long white gown took the stage as the musicians tapped out a rhythm and began to play. 

The Queen lurched—just a bit, but enough to cause the remaining pair of formal dancers to stumble and lose their place. The lights even flickered.

And then it was over. The sounds of dice clattering and wheels spinning and gamblers shouting and cheering never faltered, not even for an instant.

“Did you see that?”

“I did.” I felt Darla’s heart beat faster. “Trouble?”

“Don’t know.” We kept dancing. The black lady introduced herself as Lady Rondalee of Bel Loit and dedicated her first song to ‘all the lovers out there.’

“Trouble,” she sang. “Trouble, bad trouble, been dogging me all my days...”

“Well that’s comforting,” whispered Darla. 

“Ain’t no comfort, ain’t no comfort, no comfort ever comin’ my ways...”

“I think she can hear you,” I said. 

“I hear you, I hear you sayin’, sayin’ I needs to be changin’ my ways...”

Darla stopped swaying. “You don’t think—”

“I don’t. Coincidence. We’re on edge, that’s all. It’s just a song.”

A waiter pushed his way through the crowd. His starched white shirt was stretched to near bursting by his muscular physique. A scar ran all the way down the right side of his face. Something under his black dinner jacket bulged, and I didn't think it was a salt shaker.

He bore down on us, mindful to keep his hands visible and open, palms toward me.

He stopped a few paces short of us, and waited until I gently disengaged from Darla and moved to stand in front of her.

He nodded, reached slowly in his jacket, and came out with a note. He held it up and I took it from him, and he vanished into the crowd—doubtlessly to employ those muscles in the precise pouring of any one of Rannit's finer wines.

I unfolded the note, just halfway, to make sure it didn't bear hex signs. Instead, I recognized Gertriss's tall plain hand, and I opened it all the way.

BOSS, it read. BY THE PORT STAIR. COME QUICK. IT’S BAD.

Darla gasped, reading over my shoulder.

“Don’t suppose I could convince you to wait here?” I said.

“Waste of time trying, dear.” 

And we were off, weaving through the dancers, plowing through the drunks and the gamblers and their noisy entourages.

I caught one more stanza of Lady Rondalee’s song, before the din drowned her out.

“One day soon, one day soon, trouble gonna be the death of me...”

“Not tonight, I hope,” I muttered. Darla didn't hear.

I put my shoulder to the mob and charged toward the stairs.

Brown River Queen, available now!

Is Miss Rondalee due to make a second appearance in the Markhat series?

Yes she is, because she's a powerful lady with a fascinating talent. I suspect Miss Rondalee and Mama Hog will be up to shenanigans, at the very least. Oh, and by the way -- Markhat's hometown of Rannit is based (loosely) on Memphis, Tennessee. Just south of Rannit, down the Brown River, lies Bel Loit, Miss Rondalee's home. Bel Loit is my version of New Orleans.

Final Words: Did Something Actually Go Bump?

I lack a clever segue for this segment of the post, so I'll just be blunt -- for the first time ever, I got absolutely spooked at a graveyard yesterday as I attempted to capture another EVP sample.

Eerie headstone pic of gentleman who is an ancestor of mine. Note epic 'stache.


Yesterday, I returned to Midway Cemetery, where I've actually collected a few good EVP recordings.

It was a bright, warm day. Hardly a cloud in the sky. Seventy-nine degrees. In short, the day couldn't have been less conducive to spookiness had it been accompanied by a brass band and a parade.

I've been to Midway Cemetery dozens of times. Half of the plots are occupied by relatives. I have no fear of the place, or its denizens.

But when I pulled up to the cemetery gates yesterday, for an instant I was sure a man was standing at the very back, at the edge of the trees.

Let me set the scene. Midway lies at the dead (ha) end of a gravel road traveled only by cemetery workers digging the once-a-decade grave, family members going to lay out flowers and pay their respects, and mildly-deranged ghost hunters intent of waving mics about in the hopes of recording a spectral word or two.

On the way there, I saw no tell-tell traces of recent traffic ahead of me. There is no parking lot. The road simply ends at the gate. No other vehicles were in sight.

But for a split second, I was sure I saw an upright figure, featureless and dark, standing at the very rear of the cemetery. I blinked, and it was gone.

Below is a picture noting the approximate location of the figure I probably didn't see:


Part of me was suddenly reminded of pressing appointments elsewhere, and moved to table the EVP session, citing an urgent need to watch re-runs of 'Stargate SG1' at a location many miles from the cemetery.

But I made of sterner stuff (mostly sausage, cakes, and steak) so I entered the cemetery and conducted my EVP session as planned.

I wish I could report I captured half a dozen ghostly voices imparting mystical wisdom, but the truth is that I got nothing. Not a faint whisper, not a muttered monosyllable, not s single anomalous exhalation.

I walked through the headstones and stood in the very spot I didn't see whatever it was that wasn't there. Again, no EVP hits.

I took about 60 photos while I was there. Two of them show what I'm pretty sure is blurring caused by wind-induced leaf motion. It is odd that only two photos were thus affected, and both of them were taken in the spot my dark figure (aka Mr. Trick of the Light) made his brief and undoubtedly imaginary appearance.

But here are the photos, for your amusement.


The blur effect is hard to see in reduced-sized images. It's plain when I inspect the full-sized pics on my big monitor. 

In the first image, start at the lower left corner of the pic and travel about a third of the way to the right. Then look up, about three-quarters of the way to the top. Subtle but weird blur. Wind? Yeah, probably.

In the second picture, just find the tallest grave marker (can't miss it, right side, little bell-shaped thing on top) and look left of the bell-shaped ornament. 

Like I said, probably wind. I spooked myself so naturally I'm seeing things that aren't really there.

Back to Work!

Okay, it's time to get editing. Have a good week people!





Mad Science, Creepy Crawly Edition!

Today, we journey not into the realm of the supernatural or the paranormal, but of the very small.

Earlier this week, I was helping my Dad look for some papers at his house when I came across a set of 60 prepared microscope slides I got as a kid. Because, yes, I was that big of a nerd, even back in 1973. The box of slides is pictured below.



The slide set appeared to be in good shape. My old microscope, though, was nowhere to be found.

Having the slides but no microscope presented something of an annoyance to me. True, I have neither seen nor thought about this set of microscope slides in 40 years, but now that I've found the slides, I feel the urgent and entirely unreasonable urge to view them, because how often do you get a chance to see a perfectly preserved specimen of Rhizobium Radicicola, or Mycrobacterium Ranae, whatever the heck they might be?

Now, at this point I really should have just started trying to find a decent old microscope on eBay, or even a modest new one from Edmunds or Amazon. But why do the reasonable thing when you can dive into your surplus parts pile and spend an hour or two building your own gadget?

Aha, quoth I. I will build my very own scanning electron microscope. It will be huge and imposing. Sparks will fly. Thunder will crash. The lights in four adjoining counties will dim, and I'll finally get to wear my snazzy new safety goggles and my 1930s-style side-buttoning lab coat.

But a quick check of the bank account revealed the lack of 80 million dollars in discretionary funds, so I was forced back into the realm of the merely optical, and with only such parts as I might already have lying around at my disposal. I did wear my side-buttoning lab coat when I finally did start construction, but without the sparks and the strong sudden smell of freshly-minted ozone it's just not the same.

But I did build a microscope, for about $14, and it actually works, and below is the proof!



That, ladies and gentlemen, is the rear leg of the common honey bee, photographed with the new microscope. The bee leg was part of the old Sears prepared slide set. Not too bad for 14 bucks!

Below is the rig itself:


Okay. I'm cheating a bit by using my iPhone as the primary optical device -- put the phone on the rig, placing the phone's lens carefully over the rig's primary lens. All that is contained in the top layer of cheap clear acrylic sheet, which is held up and steady by the bolts. The base is a scrap piece of oak, and I countersunk the bolt heads on the bottom so it would sit flat.

Below the top layer and the phone and the lens is the staging layer. See the wing nut in the photo above? There are two of them, and by spinning them you bring the staging layer up or down. And since you sit the specimen on the staging layer, it moves up or down until it is in focus.


Here it is with the phone removed. The lens is between the two bolts on the top. It is held in place by a steel washer.

There's nothing special about the lens. Okay, it is glass, and not plastic, because plastic lenses are worthless. Seriously. I spit on them. I cast aspersions on them. Bah! Plastic lenses are an abomination and I have no truck with them!

I got a dozen cheap glass lenses from American Science and Surplus for a couple of bucks years ago when I was messing with telescopes. I selected one at random, cleaned it, made sure the raised rounded side faced up, and glued it in place. Why select at random?

Because when you have that many buttons to fasten on your starched white lab coat, you don't have TIME for complex calculations of focal length and diopter! This is MAD SCIENCE! If you don't finish quickly the villagers will reach the castle gates, and we all know how that ends. Honestly, it's a wonder I ever a single monstrous body fully reanimated.

Yes, it's a quick and dirty rig that costs almost nothing, but the results are actually impressive. Below are a few photos I took right after completing the device.


Close-up of dandelion bloom (smaller than my thumb). Look at the stamen and the pistils, and all that lovely pollen. I didn't even notice the two ants aboard when I picked it. By the way, they were released into the wild when I was done.


Even more pollen.




Next up, a penny. Here's the whole penny:


And here's a close-up of Abe:


Salt crystals? You betcha!



Below is a burned-out tail light from my father's Toyota. Note the defective filament!



Below is a close-up of the author's skin. Note to self: Inquire about various lotions and healing balms soon.


Nah, that's not really my skin, that'ts tree bark. Here's me:


I took a fingertip image, and then I thought 'Hey idiot, do you REALLY want to post a hi-res magnified image of your fingerprint on the internet? Is that a good idea? Really?' so this is below the first knuckle.

Here's a common NPN transistor, which I'm sure you've all been dying to see magnified:


And below is rust on an iron band.


Ever wondered what dog food looks like magnified 100X? Well wonder no more...


Yeah, I wasn't exactly thrilled either.

For next week, if you can think of something you'd like to see magnified, email me (franktuttle at franktuttle dot com) or post your request in the comments below! If I can make it fit on the rig, I'll give it a shot.

Mama Hog Revealed?

I've made mention several times in this blog that Mama Hog, a recurring character in my Markhat series, is based on my grandmother on my father's side.

Her real name was Beatrice, but we called her Grammaw Bee. Not 'grandmother' or even 'grandmaw,' because I grew up in rural Mississippi, and thus she was Grammaw Bee.

Mama's Hog's speech patterns and even some of her appearance were inspired by Grammaw Bee. For a while now, I've tried to find a photo of my grandparents, and I finally located one.

It's a tiny 3 by 4 photo, and it's in terrible shape. I scanned it, enlarged it, and did all I could to enhance the focus and remove the worst of the scratches and pits. It's still not very good, but it's all I've got.


On the left is Grammaw Bee; on the right, my grandfather Henry and his ever-present cigar. Also note the presence of the commanding Tuttle nose, which I inherited. Small children often take refuge in its shade.

Picture the lady with her hair all wild. Remove her glasses. Hand her a stir-stick and a black iron pot, boiling in the yard, and that's Mama Hog.

She was a nice lady. She cooked for an army and knew all kinds of natural cures and neither of my grandparents ever knew an idle day, but they were happy, and I suppose that's all that really counts.

Mug and Meralda News - Is the new book done?

Well, is it?

By the time you read this, yes. I'm posting this early so I can settle into what will be the final writing session for the first draft of All the Turns of Light.

Length? A little over 80 thousand words. Do Mug and Meralda ever leave the Laboratory, this time around?

Oh yes. Whereas the first book in the series (All the Paths of Shadow, available from Amazon) was a sort of anti-quest novel in that Meralda never went more than a few blocks from home, this one takes the gang on a long journey across the Great Sea. There are airships and sea monsters and storms and magical menaces. I believe people will like this book even better than the first one!

By the way, there will be two more Mug and Meralda books after All the Paths of Shadow and All the Turns of Light. When all four books are put together on a shelf in the proper order, the titles will form a poem. And no, I'm not telling what the next two titles are.

So, on that note, I will take my leave, and get back to work. 

But I will leave you with a final image, which I discovered when I downloaded the pics from my iphone. It's not a good picture. It's out of focus and it's dark. But that really doesn't matter.

Below are our dogs Max and Fletcher. Fletcher on on the right. He's old and blind and diabetic, but he still takes care of Max. Some would say dogs are incapable of love; I heave asparagus at such people, and then mock them for their silliness, because dogs do indeed love.

Okay, off to finish the book, wish me luck!

Bonus Wednesday Blog: Tax Tips for Writers!

Certain eldritch signs portend various significant turnings of the year. Birds fly south. Or maybe north. Frankly I don't spend much time outdoors with a compass charting the movements of waterfowl.

But even a dedicated indoorsman such as myself can observe the anguished faces on the street, and hear the plaintive cries of agony borne on the night wind (and no, I don't know from which direction the bloody wind is blowing, let's leave that to the meteorologists, shall we?).

Even I can see the chalk outlines left by those poor unfortunates who at last cried 'No more, enough!' before shuffling off their mortal coils by way of extreme over-tanning or a full-on single-sitting read of Snooki's 'A Shore Thing.'

And even I know what these grim signs portend -- tax time.

That's right, gentle readers, if you are a citizen of the US, it's that time of year when Uncle Sam takes you fondly by your ankles and shakes you until every last cent you've seen in the last year falls out of your pockets, because let's face it, war ain't cheap.

Now, if you've made any money off your writing in the last year, I'm here to help. Because if there's anything the US government holds dear, it's the idea that every American is free to earn a profit by the sweat of his brow and the set of his jaw. Equally sacred to the American governing psyche is the ideal that they get a slice of that sweet free enterprise pie.

The first thing writers need to know about filing their writing income is this -- FILE IT. That story you sold to Ominous Bathroom Squeaks and Eldritch Attic Squeals Monthly for 15 bucks? That pair of flash-fiction entries you pawned off on Public Transit Funnies, a Bus Station Free Magazine for three bucks and a coupon for $2.00 off any foot-long club at Subway?

Maybe you're thinking 'Hey, why bother reporting that, nobody knows about those!'

How wrong you are, Grasshopper.

They know. Maybe it's the Carnivore communication surveillance system. Maybe the CIA has an Obscure Small Press Reporting Division. Maybe that mean-eyed old lady down the street is on the phone with the IRS every day, after she goes through your mail and steams open all the envelopes -- it doesn't matter how, but believe me, they know.

So, the first thing?

Report it.

Now if you've made any serious coin you've been sent a 1099-MISC from the publisher(s). You should keep up with these things. I used to put them in a folder and then lose the folder and then move to Mississippi and assume a new identity as Frank Tuttle when I realized I'd lost them all, but then I got married and she keeps important papers in a brilliant thing called a drawer. I'll bet you have some of these drawers  in your place too. Open them up and put stuff in them, it's an amazing time-saver compared to identity theft.

At the end of the year, you take all these 1099 forms, wipe the tears from your face, and enter them in the boxes according to the helpful prompts on the TurboTax software. When the crying diminishes to a bearable level, proceed.

Next, let's consider deductions. The word deductions comes from the Latin dede, which means 'not for,' and uction, which means 'you.' In tax parlance, deductions are money amounts which everyone but you can subtract from the taxes they owe.

For instance, I write on a PC. I built this PC myself, from components I purchased separately, for the sole purpose of writing.  Now, if I were anyone else, I could deduct the total cost of the machine from my taxes owed, since it's a business expense -- but since I am demonstrably me, this deduction does not apply, and, notes TurboTax, 'ha ha ha.'

See how that works? It truly simplifies filing.

Let's look at some other deductions which you, as a writer, cannot claim:
  •  Home Office Deductions. Oh, you have an office, in which you write? Well, let's have a look. It can't be attached to your house. It can't house a TV or other casual entertainment device. It can't possibly, under any circumstances, be even remotely suited for any purpose other than writing, and it can't be very good at that. So you have a detached office which contains nothing but a chair, a desk, and a PC running nothing but Word? But it has a roof?  'Ha ha ha,' intones TurboTax. 'Trying to pull a fast one, are you? DENIED.'
  • Office Expense Deductions.  You're a writer, and even the IRS grudgingly concedes that the act of writing might in some way involves putting down words on some medium, be it electronic or paper. Okay, this looks promising. You bought a printer to print out manuscripts. You pay for internet service because 1950 was 65 years ago. These seem to be legitimate deductions, so let's investigate further BUZZ HA HA HA NOT SO FAST, TAXPAYER! Those deductions are only valid in years  where acceptable total solar eclipses occur in northern Peru (see Schedule 117863-E, 'Solar Interruptions, South American Totality Table 167-75E, lines 46 through 78), and guess what pal, this ain't it.
  • Other Deductions. Mitt Romney has a 376 page embossed-leather-bound acid-free paper book with gold-gilt edges filled with 'Other Deductions.' Are you Mitt Romney? Didn't think so. Move along.
Sadly, that about covers it. You've toiled over every word, you've poured over ever sentence, you've labored long into that good night trying to illuminate a single tiny facet of the flawed jewel that is the human condition.

Or, in other words, you've earned slightly more than minimum wage. 

Bon appetite, my friends!

And for the love of all that is holy, don't miss the filing deadline. 

All the Turns of Light update!


That's Meralda, from All the Paths of Shadow. But Frank, you ask -- why does she look so smug?

Possibly because her new book, All the Turns of Light, is darned near finished. That's right -- I am this close (insert graphic here of fingertips almost coming together) to wrapping this book up.

Of course, that's only the first part of the book's journey -- but it is the most important part, because until the first draft gets written, there's no book.

So, on behalf of Mug and Meralda and the crew of the airship Intrepid, thanks for waiting so patiently, and rest assured the sequel to All the Turns of Light won't be so long in the making.

Things Going Bump in the Night

A news story caught my eye, about a very strange trail camera image captured near Jackson, Mississippi, in February of this year.


The deer is looking at -- what, exactly? Two light sources, suspended above the ground. And this wasn't the only image recorded that night. Here's a link to the full story -- http://m.wlox.com/#!/newsDetail/25156516.

What did the camera record? I have no idea. There really isn't enough detail to make anything out, at least as far as I can see. Could it be a night hunter wearing an illuminated cap? I suppose, but there's no way anyone is going to walk up on a deer that knows it's being stalked. 

More than one image of the lights was captured. I still have no idea what was captured.

We keep a trail cam active on our property, just in case Bigfoot ever decides to take a midnight stroll through Yocona. We have hundreds of images, none of which show anything overtly anomalous. Rest assured if we capture anything interesting I'll post the image!

Wolfie reminds you to lock your doors tight!
Okay, short entry this week, but I'm dying to get back to work. Take care all! See you next week -- until then, pleasant dreams!



Bonus Monday Blog: My Angry Body

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm nearing completion on the long-overdue sequel to All the Paths of Shadow.

Tonight, I had a genuine breakthrough. It was one of those rare moments when the story took hold and tore up my outline and Meralda stamped right off the page and bloody well told me what happens next.

I got it all down, too. Every word. I know where the story goes. I know why it goes there. It's good. Really good. I pushed sweet gentle Meralda too far, and she's had enough, and if she met Rick Grimes in a dark alley right now he'd be the one who turned and dived for cover.

Such moments are rare.

I hastily made four pages of careful notes. I saved that file, and then I turned back to the book file and plowed right in.

Achoo.

Bless you. I barely noticed the sneeze. My fingers hammered away, stabbing the keys of my long-suffering Saitek Eclipse II keyboard like fat, determined sausages.

Achoo.

Hah. I forged ahead, heedless of the growing pressure in my aquiline nostrils, or the tell-tale hints of burning and tearing in my bleary eyes.

ACHOO.

And then it began in earnest -- a full-blown, five-alarm, no-holds-barred Festival of Expelled Mucous which scared Hell out of my assembled Writing Dogs and necessitated an emergency cleaning of my monitors.

My eyes joined the fun, puffing up and streaming tears. I cried more than the front row at a Twilight screening. Tears ran down my cheeks and soaked my beard, and that's never happened before, although I will certainly use it in a book sometime, because having a beard soaked with salty tears is a unique visceral experience.

My nose, not to be outdone, redoubled its efforts. The Writing Dogs exited the study en masse, seeking shelter behind the toolshed and peeking out briefly to see if I'd exploded yet.

My sinuses are, I discovered, unbound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that neither matter nor energy is ever created or destroyed. Because I created matter, buckets of the stuff, and physicists don't believe me fine, just stand right there.

Then things got really bad.

I sprayed a considerable quantity of something called Flonase up my nose. Look, I'm a writer. But I'm not a famous one, so I still have a day job. I don't have many hours in the day to write. I don't have time for all this sneezy/coughy/teary body function jazz. And this nasal spray seemed confident it could help, or at least provide me with numerous amusing side effect options (may cause uncontrollable hypothermia. Some users report being transformed into werewolves. Occasional hyperdimensionality or time travel may result).

It helped, if by 'help' we mean 'take a bad situation and elevate it to truly epic tragic status.' The dogs have abandoned the toolshed and have placed ads on Craigslist which read FREE TO A GOOD HOME HURRY WE THINK HE WILL SOON BLOW UP.

I've used an entire roll of Bounty paper towels. No, you don't want any details.

My nose, my nasal passages, my traitorous running eyes have turned on me, in the hour of my greatest need.

How? If you took a blood sample from me, my blood type would register as ALLEGRA. I'm careful to avoid the outdoors. I haven't even seen the sun, or natural ground, since briefly emerging from my lair last November to inspect my otter-drawn sleigh.

This is killing me. I shall now concoct a devil's brew of powerful anti-allergens and hope it provides sufficient relief to continue with the book.

In the meantime, here is a repeat post from 5/30, in which I opine about all maters bodily and physical. Please wish me luck in recovering. I do NOT need this now!

WHERE IS MY ROBOT BODY?

REPOST from 5/30


Your body is either a wondrous living engine powered by a spark of the divine or a ludicrous assemblage of evolutionary short-cuts, depending on your point of view.

Having seen myself naked (police video enhancement techniques have shown a marked improvement in recent months), I know where I stand on the whole wondrous construction / meat-based Rube Goldberg contraption controversy.

An injury to my back last week left me thinking about the fleeting and fragile notion of health. Since the injury also left me in a crumpled heap on the floor, I had plenty of time to ponder my attitudes toward wellness in between bouts of cursing and attempts to raise myself by climbing a nearby window-frame.

So, with a renewed appreciation for the simple things I took for granted -- walking, standing, crouching to hide from store detectives, lifting liquor bottles or barrels filled with deep-fried hamburgers -- I'd like to offer a few thoughts on our bodies, and how to keep them healthy.

Your body is a biological machine, powered by food and air, which will give you many years of trouble-free use if you perform regular maintenance, especially routine oil changes. Wait. I got my body mixed up with my riding lawn mower. Let me start over.

Your body is a wildly inefficient hodge-podge of finicky, unreliable chemical processes and damage-prone tissue structures. Even with the best of luck, it's going to start failing faster than a Russian-built sports car after forty years, and probably well before that.

Let's take a look at the major structures and systems that make up the human body:

Might as well pick out a plot....
1) THE SKELETAL SYSTEM. Beneath your skin is an appalling volume of gooey wet stuff.  Hidden inside this gelatinous mass of goo are your bones. Each bone connects to another via muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cleverly-hidden wires. This complex arrangement of jointed bones and opposing muscles allows you to wave awkwardly at strangers who you thought waved to you, but were in fact waving at their friend behind you. Too, whereas the lowly ant can only lift a mass fifty times its own body weight, your skeletal system grants you the ability to beg for help opening a jar of mayonnaise. Maybe that stranger has a stronger grip than you do, from all that bloody waving.

The most common skeletal problem is that of having to endure a skeleton in the first place. Face it, used  skeletons wind up wired in humorous poses by bored medical students or spend decades popping out of doors in carnival spook-houses, and even then the things are prone to make a lot of clattering noises and require frequent repairs. Many commercial and medical establishments have switched to sturdy plastic skeletons these days, which is a move you should check into as well.

The human brain.
2) THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. Your nervous system conveys the brain's instructions to your muscles via a series of nerves. Given the poorly thought-out nature of most of your brain's instructions, this crude and error-prone delivery system is probably a blessing in disguise, since it gives you time to reconsider flipping off the burly, tattooed Neanderthal who just bumped you in a checkout line.

Humans share virtually all of their nervous system chemistry and neurobiology with the graceful soaring hawk and the surefooted mountain goat, but you'd never suspect that after watching the average person put on a drunken rendition of the 'Mashed Potato' dance at a karaoke bar. Honestly, half the population is likely to suffer minor injury just playing 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' and the other half couldn't walk across a foot-wide plank without falling if their lives depended on it.

Nerves are composed of neurons, glial cells, and quite a number of other microscopic structures which are wasting their time and effort on a species that still hasn't quite mastered the rhythmic finger-snap.

3) THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM. Your body requires proper nutrition to function at its best. A quick appraisal of your body's so-called 'best' clearly explains the shelves lined with Cheetos and the presence of a McDonalds drive-thru every sixty feet in the developed West.

You can spend forty years nibbling on nothing but free-ranch kelp and gluten-free naturally-occurring whole-grain tofu and still wind up diagnosed with the exact same terminal diseases as the 400-pound trucker who has eaten nothing but tobacco-soaked gas station burritos since 1987.

Still, you might improve your odds a tiny bit if you maintain a body that conforms to the following simple formula:

Height > Maximum girth.

Thus, if your waist measurement is six feet, remember to maintain a height of AT LEAST six feet. Seven would be better. Eight is just showing off.

Choose a height and stick with it. Your digestive system will seek to undermine your efforts at every turn, but  if you can ignore the aching constant hunger and nearly-irresistible urges to consume the entire Sarah Lee display in a single sitting, you can at least maintain a healthy weight. This ensures your last words can be smug ones.

A healthy heart is a bloated misshapen heart!
4) THE CARDIOPULMONARY SYSTEM. Your heart and lungs comprise your cardiopulmonary system. The heart pumps the blood, which passes through the lungs. In the lungs, the blood releases carbon dioxide, absorbs oxygen, and craves tobacco just like it's done day after tiresome day since Prince released his breakout '1999' album.

Much ado is made by physicians and the media concerning blood pressure and the importance of keeping one's blood pressure within certain clear limits.

Regardless of your age, general health, or activity level, doctors have determined that your blood pressure is well beyond both the upper and lower safe limits and you will soon expire unless you:
  • Switch to a healthy diet by removing all food from your diet.
  • Pester harried waiters with demands that your tablecloth and silverware be certified gluten-free.
  • Lecture everyone you know about the benefits of a Vegan lifestyle.
  • Reduce your body mass by no less than 67% between now and the next celebration of Earth Day.
  • Stop using bacon as both dental floss and chewing gum.
By taking care of your heart, you will ensure that Cyborg Dick Cheney has a steady supply of cardiac tissue for at least the next half-century.

Fig. 3, the anterior brachiostatic excretory array. Eww.
5) THE BRACHIOSTATIC - ARTERIOPEDIOTIC SYSTEM. All the squishy things not covered by topics 1 through 4 above. Feet, nose hair follicles, ear wax glands, etc. Basically, all the squirming bits of this and ropy parts of that which ancient Egyptian mummy-makers hurriedly sealed up in jars. Because, yuck.

If something goes wrong here -- and it will -- odds are you'll first learn of it in that brief moment between floating above your motionless body and being pulled into The Light. Early symptoms of a sudden demise from brachiostatic complications include itching, sneezing, feelings of calm or well-being, anxiety, hunger, thirst, any sensations of fullness, sounds or vocalizations from the mouth, blinking, yawning, skin, or regular bouts with sleep.

There is a way to keep your complex brachiostatic system in perfect function by consuming a half teaspoon of a certain Greek plant pollen per day, but this same pollen causes rapid, irreversible heart failure. Who says Nature doesn't have a sense of humor?

Really, the best you can do is keep those toenails trimmed so the morgue attendants won't snicker and post awful pics on Instagram.

HEALTH CONCERNS: AGING

From the moment you are born, your body begins to renew itself.

Sadly, your body is no better at this renewal business than it is at regenerating limbs or developing acute night vision. Now, if you cut a starfish in two pieces, each piece will heal and become a really pissed-off starfish, and no one will ever leave you alone with their pets or small children.

But cut off the tip of your pinky finger, and aside from profuse bleeding all that happens is a rapid realization that your Blue Cross insurance coverage is woefully inadequate.

Aging is merely a slow-motion fatal car crash into a rather solid stone wall. You are placed in the doomed car at birth, the doors are locked tight, and the steering wheel and brakes don't work. But take heart; each year, advances in medical science bring us closer to a truly lifelike embalming process.

We really, REALLY mean it this year.
HEALTH CONCERNS: DISEASE PREVENTION

Not a flu season passes without dire warnings from the CDC that the current strain of bird flu will wipe all of humanity from the tortured face of the soon-to-be-barren Earth. We are bombarded with media instructions to get flu shots, wear breath masks, and refrain from huffing the missing CDC canisters of experimental bird flu viruses.

This year will be no different, and the outcome will be the same. The worldwide death toll from the latest incurable superflu will be dwarfed by the sum total of all Nerf-related injury deaths suffered while riding atop a rhinoceros at noon on Arbor Day. If this is pointed out, CDC spokesmen will mutter under their breath and hint that next year the Great Unwashed are really gonna get trashed.

The only way to prevent disease is by avoiding childbirth, especially your own. Once you're here, disease is both inevitable and a vital component of our thriving Health Care and Mortuary industries.

You've got to really *feel* the burn.
HEALTH CONCERNS: EXERCISE

Use it or lose it, they say. They also say five times five is thirty-six and London is the capital of China, so listening to them is a complete waste of time.

Another complete waste of time is exercise. You can run, you can lift weights, you can practice Yoga every hour of every day for your entire life, but your body will still direct its energies toward devising ways to undermine your efforts. If you run, you will ruin your knees. If you lift weights, you will tear things with cryptic names such as the 'ACLU' or the 'Isles of Langerhams.'

You may forestall this inevitable decay by injecting steroids directly into your muscles, which will make you  stronger, faster, and easily capable of swinging that blood-soaked claw hammer for hours on end while a SWAT team peppers you with rubber bullets.

An alternative to this is low impact aerobic exercise, which consists of rapid-fire channel surfing while seated at an athletic and unyielding 46 degree angle. Additional motion may be added to the workout session by incorporating the chip-dip arm action, or by walking briskly to the refrigerator at regular intervals for another Coors Lite.

Marathons, triathlons, paragons, pentagons, and the Running of the Bulls are best left to the obsessive-compulsive, the rabidly insane, and the Spanish.

Grab your ankles, sailor.

HEALTH CONCERNS: YOUR DOCTOR - PATIENT RELATIONSHIP

Finding a competent, caring physician is an important step in maintaining wellness and a healthy lifestyle. However, you could achieve the same results by engaging in a quest for solid physical evidence of Bigfoot. In fact, that's altogether the better idea.

The modern physician left medical school only to find him or her self buried under a veritable mountain of debt. The only way to ever hope to pay it off is to run patients through their practices at speeds normally reserved for slaughterhouse cattle-chutes. Pharmaceutical reps help out by pushing thousands of pills and saving the poor beleaguered doctor the time of actually listening to his patients, who are by nature a whiny complaining lot anyway.

The modern doctor-patient relationship works like this -- you, the patient, are presented with a bill. You pay the bill. If the bleeding resumes return for another rapid-fire office visit, receive another bill, and this time, a blue pill.

Repeat until wellness or a body temperature equaling that of the ambient air is achieved.

It's just not that hard, people.

The spiders tell me to dance!
HEALTH CONCERNS: MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH

Many mental health care providers recommend quiet introspection and frequent self-examination as part of a health-conscious lifestyle. These health care providers recommend these practices because that BMW 328i with the 36 speaker Bose sound system and the heated leather seats isn't going to pay for itself, and the usual reaction to any interval of honest self-appraisal is panic followed by weekends in Vegas spent mainlining pure grain alcohol.

An important first step to achieving true mental health is learning to distinguish between the voices of friends and family, the voice of Grolog, Dark Lord of the Underworld, and the voice of Mark, who will be your server for this evening. Honestly, if you can refuse to loan your cousin Theo money, ignore Grolog's suggestions that you emulate the dietary practices of Hannibal Lecter, and convey to Mark your wishes for iced tea, the turkey club, and a side of spicy fries, then you're already in better shape than 75% of the other diners in Chili's.

Spiritual health is best achieved by waiting to become a disembodied spirit yourself, and if you keep ordering the spicy fries, you won't be waiting long, Mr. Unchecked Hypertension.

I intended to end this section on health and wellness with an audio recording of the noises my back now makes when I stand, but the FCC stepped in and I'll either have to skip that altogether or move to and post from Singapore, where the rules are more relaxed.

Tula Cemetery EVP recording, October 1, 2017

 

Cart (0)