Book Release Party!

Today, I'll be stepping out of the spotlight (you didn't know we had a spotlight? Well, we do, and it takes three trained monkeys to keep it aimed at me) to feature an interview with author Elyse Salpeter. Enjoy!

Why look, an author with a book!

Last week, I sent Elyse a series of questions carefully constructed to make it appear as if I have a rudimentary command of English. She kindly obliged by answering each, and consenting to have her responses posted here in the Board-certified, gluten-free pages of my blog.

But first, here are a few links to Elyse, and her books!

Elyse's Amazon Author page (includes links to all of her books!)



So who is this writing madwoman? What is she all about?

I give you the Official(tm) Elyse Salpeter Author Interview!


QUESTION from FRANK: Your new book, Flying to the Fire, is the latest installment in a series featuring a deaf protagonist. What led you to feature a deaf child as the hero of the series?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I’ve been asked this a lot and I have to say, when I first wrote Book #1, FLYING TO THE LIGHT, I had no intention of making any sort of statement by introducing a deaf child as the main character. It’s just that when I was developing the story, this young boy popped into my mind and I said to myself “what if he can’t speak and no one has any idea about the amazing secret he holds?” I was more concerned about his age. How no one would take this child seriously at the age of six, so his secret would be safe for awhile. In book #2 I move him to the age of thirteen because I really wanted him to be the driver of the story.

I didn’t want this child’s deafness to be construed as a disability and it was simply a part of who he is. I have the family all using sign language to communicate with him and I treat him very typically. 


QUESTION from FRANK: You've established a unique cosmology for Flying to the Light and Flying to the Fire. Both books are set in the world we know, in the present, but your young protagonist knows something about the afterlife we don’t. Without giving away too many spoilers, how did you come up with the plot twist that’s central to the books?
ANSWER from ELYSE: No one really knows what happens to us when we die. We think we might have an idea. We believe in faith and religion and spirituality concepts, but none of us actually has the answer. Unless you’re a complete agnostic that believes you’re worm food at the end of the day, most of us think there “something,” though I’m hard pressed to say what it is. 

I love the idea that good souls have somewhere to go and bad souls have some place where they do penance, or are simply tortured for eternity for their heinous crimes on earth! When I came up with the idea for the FLYING series, I thought to myself “what if our souls don’t necessarily go where we think they do?” I also liked the idea that this wasn’t a plot scenario that I’ve seen anywhere in the field, and death and the afterlife have been covered a lot. I think readers will enjoy this twist on the age-old question of “what happens to us when we die?” 


QUESTION from FRANK: Let’s shift gears for a minute and talk about Elyse the author. Walk us through a typical day -- when do you write, how much do you try to write, and what’s the biggest obstacle you face trying to get all that done?

ANSWER from ELYSE: Ah, you see, when you said typical day and then discussed writing, that’s where my creative side gets skewed. You see, I never have set times to write. Between a full time job, married and with kids, I find my time to write to be a “plead, beg and steal” routine. A typical day is me turning on the computer in the morning and blasting out some social media promotions before I jump into the shower to get ready for work. Then, if I’ve dragged the laptop with me to work, I get two twenty minute sessions, on two different trains, to write. Sometimes I’m lucky and then can get some time in at lunch, and then also on the way home. 

Writing at night happens after the kids go to sleep, but by that time, I’m pretty much wiped out from my day. That said, when I’m deep into writing a new novel, I’ll negotiate with the family time for me to write and usually it involves me leaving the house in order to get the space and time I need. “Ideal” this is not. 


QUESTION from FRANK: The publishing industry. You’re a writer, so you’re a part of it. If you could change one thing about the business of writing itself, what would that be, and why?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I wish so many things. I wish there were more brick and mortar stores. I wish more publishing companies took on new writers. I wish it were easier to reach readers. I wish it were easier to get respected companies in the field to do reviews of self published work. I wish agents were more responsive and open to also taking on new writers. I wish it were easier to break into Hollywood. As you can see, I’m a big wisher. 


QUESTION from FRANK: What’s next for you? Got any new projects on the horizon you’d like to talk about? 

ANSWER from ELYSE: I do! I have a horror novel that I’m presently editing that I’m hoping to release for Halloween. It’s called THE MANNEQUINS and is about a film crew that disappears after breaking into a deserted mansion. After that I’ll start working on Book #3 in the FLYING series. The tentative title is called FLYING HOME. 


QUESTION from FRANK: Advice for aspiring authors -- it’s a Federal law that I ask this question in any blog interview. So, what’s worked for you, and what hasn’t, and what would you suggest new authors concentrate their efforts upon?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I would tell people to persevere. There are so many different levels of success. I know that now with five novels out I can be considered successful and I should be happy, but I’m not. I want to be able to do this full time and so I implore aspiring authors to keep writing, keep promoting and keep trying new things. With this ever changing social media and publishing landscape, who knows where the industry will be in ten years? Continue to keep writing and put out quality work and sales will come. I can’t tell you if you’ll be able to make a full time job out of it, but if you can reach a few people who enjoy your work, then you can certainly call yourself a success. 

Elyse is hosting a book launch for her new novel, Flying to the Fire. The official launch is August 30, but since you're a person of taste and no small wit, you can grab a copy right now by clicking your clicky little finger on this brightly-colored easy to use link. 



Thanks, Elyse, for joining us on the blog today!


Along Came a Spider



That's Millicent above, our resident Argiope aurantia (or, more commonly, the Black and Yellow Garden Spider). Millicent maintains a tidy two bedroom, two bath web above our box hedges, and is easily one of the best neighbors I've ever had (though not the first neighbor to subsist entirely on a diet of insects).

I'm careful to leave her web alone when I trim the hedges, because everyone deserves a place to live regardless of the number of their legs.

Reviews are Pouring In!

The most recent installment in the Markhat series was reviewed last week on Big Al's Books and Pals site.


I'm happy to report that The Five Faces garnered a 5 stars out of 5 rating, and the reviewer has nice things to say about not only this book but the series too:

Mr. Tuttle has a talent for developing his characters with dialog that I really appreciate. I love the banter and self-deprecating humor that he excels at. I also like the elements from our world that he weaves into his unique fantasy world of human characters along with wand-wavers, undead, trolls, banshees, soothsayers, and vampires.  I am not quite sure what to make of the slilth, but I like what he did with it at the end of the story. I am laughing right along with Stitches. I also have to laugh at the Brown River Bridge clown patrol, they add an interesting touch to Rannit’s unsavory population.

Which means I did exactly what I set out to do, this time.

You can read the entire review from the link below:

The Five Faces review on Big Al's Books and Pals

In other writing news, the new Mug and Meralda should go out for proofreading next week. Which puts the release of the book just a few weeks away!

Frank's Marketing Tips for Authors

If you read any online writing blogs or discussions, one of the first topics you'll encounter will be that of marketing your new book. There are mobs of new authors out there who appear to be convinced that the only thing standing between them and a stack of money high enough to climb and roll down is some uber-secret marketing plan.

Don't believe me? A cottage industry has sprung up overnight on Amazon alone, as hundreds of how-to books appear, each with titles like How to Make a Million Dollars Overnight Before You Even Finish That Pesky Novel or 100 Sure-Fire Tips and Tricks to Reach Best-Sellerdom and Quit Your Day Job and Show All Those Nobodies in the Crit Group That Grammar Doesn't Matter After All So Ha. 

I'd be a lot more impressed if these sure-fire can't-miss tell-all books weren't mostly written by people I've never heard of. I'd be even more impressed if many of them were longer than 15 pages, or contained fewer than half a dozen formatting and grammar errors on the first couple of pages. But hey, what's a fewe spellinging errorz between budding billionaires, right?

No marketing efforts can do more than temporarily boost sales of a bad book. And even good marketing plans can't propel goods books instantly into the sales stratosphere -- for every best-seller, I believe there are ten or a hundred equally good books languishing in the weeds, left behind out of caprice, not incompetence.

But of course there are actions and strategies any author can undertake to make the most of a fickle and ever-changing market. And since I'm a generous sort, I'll give my tricks and tips away for free (although donations are gladly accepted, after all, Millicent above needs a new central air unit).

Thus, I give you Frank's Marketing Tips and Tricks for Authors. Use them with care, lest ye summon down a furious plague of reviewers and movie producers!

Frank's Tips

1) Branding is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts. Not the kind of branding done to cattle in Westerns, though. Don't make that mistake no matter how many hits the YouTube video is likely to get.

2) Keep readers engaged with a series of high-profile crimes and arrests. Strive to have your booking photos featured on The Smoking Gun website at least once per quarter, and right before every new book release.

3) When using the Tweeter, maximize your content with lots of hashtags, abbreviations, and acronyms. HEY #AGHTY & CPHY @ASJESDF,#LOLOLOL SPDER/GHTY says what mere words can't.

4) Constant blatant self-promotion is ineffective and annoying, except when you do it. Automate Twits and book-face posts to remind readers to buy your new book every few minutes, or you'll be lost and forgotten by all.

5) Invite bloggers to blog on their blogs about your blog and then blog about their blog concerning your blog.

6) Google yourself. Pull the blinds down first, you pervert.

7) Always approach editors and agents from behind, while wearing cork-soled shoes, or they'll hear you coming and you'll struggle to force the chloroform-soaked rag over their mouth.

8) Book signings are a powerful way to reach and build an audience. Bookstore owners are busy people, so don't waste their time by asking permission before you set up a table and start signing. An attitude of quiet self-assurance and a pair of burly roadies named 'Big Mike' and 'Butcher-knife' are all you need to establish your presence.

9) Receiving a bad review is part of any author's life. But you're not any old author, so respond to a poor review with calm, professional mercenaries, who can be found for hire in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

There is a 10th tip, but it is so powerful and potentially dangerous I must wait and publish it in my own upcoming how-to book, which shall be entitled Writing For Big Bucks: How to Command Financial Mastery of the Publishing Industry With Only Two Small Ice Cubes, the Shinbones of a Hamster, and a 42-syllable Sanskrit Word Spoken Beneath a Total Eclipse, Part 1 (available in October for only $39.99).

Finally, the Inevitable Ice Bucket Challenge Video 

I leave you this week with a video.

I was challenged by my wife to undertake the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS research, and of course I agreed, because this is Mississippi in late August and a bucket of ice water poured over one's head is a thing devoutly to be wished for. 

There's another reason, too. My Mom died of ALS three years ago, and I believe I can say without reservation that I've never seen anything so cruel and so devastating as ALS. Every dollar raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge is a blow against the disease, and for me, that's a very good cause indeed.

Donations can be made via www.alsa.org.

Below is my video. Please note the appearance of the large fused ice-chunk, and the velocity at which it contacts my formidably sturdy skull. 

Words With Author Elyse Salpeter

Today, I'll be stepping out of the spotlight (you didn't know we had a spotlight? Well, we do, and it takes three trained monkeys to keep it aimed at me) to feature an interview with author Elyse Salpeter. Enjoy!

Why look, an author with a book!

Last week, I sent Elyse a series of questions carefully constructed to make it appear as if I have a rudimentary command of English. She kindly obliged by answering each, and consenting to have her responses posted here in the Board-certified, gluten-free pages of my blog.

But first, here are a few links to Elyse, and her books!

Elyse's Amazon Author page (includes links to all of her books!)



So who is this writing madwoman? What is she all about?

I give you the Official(tm) Elyse Salpeter Author Interview!


QUESTION from FRANK: Your new book, Flying to the Fire, is the latest installment in a series featuring a deaf protagonist. What led you to feature a deaf child as the hero of the series?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I’ve been asked this a lot and I have to say, when I first wrote Book #1, FLYING TO THE LIGHT, I had no intention of making any sort of statement by introducing a deaf child as the main character. It’s just that when I was developing the story, this young boy popped into my mind and I said to myself “what if he can’t speak and no one has any idea about the amazing secret he holds?” I was more concerned about his age. How no one would take this child seriously at the age of six, so his secret would be safe for awhile. In book #2 I move him to the age of thirteen because I really wanted him to be the driver of the story.

I didn’t want this child’s deafness to be construed as a disability and it was simply a part of who he is. I have the family all using sign language to communicate with him and I treat him very typically. 


QUESTION from FRANK: You've established a unique cosmology for Flying to the Light and Flying to the Fire. Both books are set in the world we know, in the present, but your young protagonist knows something about the afterlife we don’t. Without giving away too many spoilers, how did you come up with the plot twist that’s central to the books?
 
ANSWER from ELYSE: No one really knows what happens to us when we die. We think we might have an idea. We believe in faith and religion and spirituality concepts, but none of us actually has the answer. Unless you’re a complete agnostic that believes you’re worm food at the end of the day, most of us think there “something,” though I’m hard pressed to say what it is. 

I love the idea that good souls have somewhere to go and bad souls have some place where they do penance, or are simply tortured for eternity for their heinous crimes on earth! When I came up with the idea for the FLYING series, I thought to myself “what if our souls don’t necessarily go where we think they do?” I also liked the idea that this wasn’t a plot scenario that I’ve seen anywhere in the field, and death and the afterlife have been covered a lot. I think readers will enjoy this twist on the age-old question of “what happens to us when we die?” 


QUESTION from FRANK: Let’s shift gears for a minute and talk about Elyse the author. Walk us through a typical day -- when do you write, how much do you try to write, and what’s the biggest obstacle you face trying to get all that done?

ANSWER from ELYSE: Ah, you see, when you said typical day and then discussed writing, that’s where my creative side gets skewed. You see, I never have set times to write. Between a full time job, married and with kids, I find my time to write to be a “plead, beg and steal” routine. A typical day is me turning on the computer in the morning and blasting out some social media promotions before I jump into the shower to get ready for work. Then, if I’ve dragged the laptop with me to work, I get two twenty minute sessions, on two different trains, to write. Sometimes I’m lucky and then can get some time in at lunch, and then also on the way home. 

Writing at night happens after the kids go to sleep, but by that time, I’m pretty much wiped out from my day. That said, when I’m deep into writing a new novel, I’ll negotiate with the family time for me to write and usually it involves me leaving the house in order to get the space and time I need. “Ideal” this is not. 


QUESTION from FRANK: The publishing industry. You’re a writer, so you’re a part of it. If you could change one thing about the business of writing itself, what would that be, and why?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I wish so many things. I wish there were more brick and mortar stores. I wish more publishing companies took on new writers. I wish it were easier to reach readers. I wish it were easier to get respected companies in the field to do reviews of self published work. I wish agents were more responsive and open to also taking on new writers. I wish it were easier to break into Hollywood. As you can see, I’m a big wisher. 


QUESTION from FRANK: What’s next for you? Got any new projects on the horizon you’d like to talk about? 

ANSWER from ELYSE: I do! I have a horror novel that I’m presently editing that I’m hoping to release for Halloween. It’s called THE MANNEQUINS and is about a film crew that disappears after breaking into a deserted mansion. After that I’ll start working on Book #3 in the FLYING series. The tentative title is called FLYING HOME. 


QUESTION from FRANK: Advice for aspiring authors -- it’s a Federal law that I ask this question in any blog interview. So, what’s worked for you, and what hasn’t, and what would you suggest new authors concentrate their efforts upon?

ANSWER from ELYSE: I would tell people to persevere. There are so many different levels of success. I know that now with five novels out I can be considered successful and I should be happy, but I’m not. I want to be able to do this full time and so I implore aspiring authors to keep writing, keep promoting and keep trying new things. With this ever changing social media and publishing landscape, who knows where the industry will be in ten years? Continue to keep writing and put out quality work and sales will come. I can’t tell you if you’ll be able to make a full time job out of it, but if you can reach a few people who enjoy your work, then you can certainly call yourself a success. 

Elyse is hosting a book launch for her new novel, Flying to the Fire. The official launch is August 30, but since you're a person of taste and no small wit, you can grab a copy right now by clicking your clicky little finger on this brightly-colored easy to use link. 

Thanks, Elyse, for joining us on the blog today!


Writing News

Despite a trying week, I was able to finish the second draft of the new Mug and Meralda book, All the Turns of Light.

This new draft is now enjoying a stay with a Secret Beta Reader. Meanwhile, I do as all serious authors do after completing one book -- I've started another. 

It might be a new Markhat adventure. It might be a new Markhat adventure involving a long train ride. All these rumors might be true, although it must be pointed out that I could very well be lying about the whole thing, and have instead immersed myself in Cheetos and video games while I await the verdict on the second draft of Turns of Light. Frankly, I'm such a devious, deceitful fellow that I'm not even sure anymore. Why are my fingers stained yellow?

Other Writing News

There has been much ballyhoo and hullabaloo concerning the so-called Authors United Open Letter To Amazon, which you can read for yourself here. 

The crux of the matter is the ongoing dispute between publisher Hachette and bookseller Amazon over, um, whatever it is they can't agree upon. The right of Amazon to price ebooks as they wish or Hachette to fish inside the hundred-mile territorial waters limits of Norway or possibly over whether Han shot first.

Truth is, I don't know. Look, I have a full-time job, an elderly diabetic dog, and a closet-full of demons and skeletons of my own to deal with each and every bloody day. Bad author, I know, but Amazon and Hachette are going to do whatever it is they wind up doing regardless of my opinion on the matter. It's all I can manage most days to just keep putting words together; I don't have the time or the energy to spare on what amounts to a clash of the Titans over the hills and far away.

I do hear the crash and thud of battle, though, and that itself is disturbing enough. 

Publishing isn't an easy. It wasn't easy when I dived in back in the 1990s and it isn't easy now. But Frank, you say, aghast at my statement -- why, publishing is easier than ever, today! Anyone can upload their ebook, and instantly become an author!

My point exactly. I read somewhere that Amazon introduced more than 70,000 new ebook titles in the last two months alone. Seventy thousand. 

As a veteran of the publishing industry, I will leave you with this comment, which is of course open for debate.

It has never been easier to publish one's own book, and it has never been more difficult to place one's own book in front of the right audience.

Awash and bobbing amid an ever-widening sea of titles, each clamoring for rescue by a reader?

That's how it feels, much of the time. 

So whether Amazon is right or Hachette emerges victorious is secondary to someone treading water and hoping to stay afloat. 

And with that, gentle reader, I bid you good evening. 

How about a book to read?



Hot Blue Summer Sky


D 31095903 ©  | Dreamstime.com
Maybe it's the heat. Maybe I've got a case of the midsummer doldrums. All I want to do is lie down and have a good long nap. And by good long nap I mean I want to wake up no sooner that mid-October.

I've had it with summer. It's an inferno out there -- even the copperhead snakes are sticking to the shade and passing out cards that say CONSIDER YOURSELF BITTEN, THANKS instead of coiling up and striking, and I don't blame them one bit.

I believe Lou Ann agrees. We went for a walk earlier, and instead of running ahead and bouncing around and generally displaying boundless doggy exuberance, she headed right for the trail camera, waited quietly while I swapped data cards, and made a bee-line back to the house as soon as I locked the camera case shut. She's been in her chair, belly-up, under the study air conditioner ever since.

And still the sun blazes down. I can almost feel the heat of it, hear the merciless sizzle, just a couple of feet away on the other side of the study's A-frame roof. Part of me truly appreciates Lou Ann's sudden dedication to the air conditioner. I too want to curl up in a cool, dark place and hide from the sun's fiery glare.

I can't do that, of course, because there's too much work to be done. I'm down to the last five or ten pages of the new Mug and Meralda book, All the Turns of Light. That's the last place you want to stop when you're working on a book. There's a rhythm, a cadence, a delicate pace to be maintained near the end, and if I stop now, even for a day or two, I'll lose my sense of that pace. Getting it back would be difficult, if not impossible, so I'll let Lou Ann keep the chair and I'll sit here and tap away instead.

Turns of Light has taken nearly twice the time to complete than I estimated. But that's fine -- I'd rather blow my timeline and end up with a great book than stay on schedule and produce a mediocre one. If you're a fan of the first book (All the Paths of Shadow) I believe you'll love this one too.

Publishing News



My friend Maria Schneider, who is a talented author, animal lover, and licensed airship pilot, just released the sequel to Dragons of Wendal, which you should grab and read if you love fantasy and you haven't read it already. It's lots of fun, and it reminded me of the classic fantasy I grew up on. 

The new book is entitled Dragon Kin and you can get it from the Kobo bookstore or from Amazon by using the links below:



I loved the first book, The Dragons of Wendal, so I'm excited to snatch up the sequel!

Here's the sample blurb from Kobo, to give you an idea of what the book is about:

Drissa needs a place to hide, and she needed it yesterday. Wendal, with its rumors of inhospitable shifters, unknown terrain and wild magic, is not a territory many want to explore, making it the perfect place to disappear. Now, the last thing Drissa needs is to adopt more trouble, but what can she do when it hatches at her feet and then insists she drag it and a half-dead stranger to safety? But she’ll do whatever is necessary to survive, because her younger sister can’t wait forever to be rescued. Of course, Wendal and its inhabitants aren’t necessarily interested in her long-term plans or her survival.
Dragons of Wendal is book one in the series.

Okay, it's back to work for me. Take care, folks, and be wary of the heat!



In Case You Haven't Heard, Plus Amorous Frogs!

New Markhat is on the Way!

Just in case you haven't heard, Samhain Publishing accepted the new Markhat novel, and we have a tentative publication date of April 2015.

The book will be entitled The Darker Carnival, and if you think this one might be set in a carnival there's a really good chance you might be right. 

I've always wanted to include a traveling carnival in a Markhat book. Even a perfectly innocent carnival provides a rich and exotic setting for a book, but if the carnival is Evil(tm) -- well, that's just plain good fun.

I did a fair amount of research on turn of the century (i.e., the turning of the 19th and 20th centuries) carnival folk. They lived rough and tumble, hard-luck lives, especially the 'freaks,' but even so carny life was preferable to the alternatives in the early 1900s. Some amassed quite respectable fortunes, for the time, and enjoyed long and hopefully fulfilling lives. 

So in this new book, you'll meet, among others, the Man of Bones, Vallarta the Swamp Witch, Elisabet, Queen of the Elves, and the Living Dead Girl. Oh, and mastodons, because how else are you going to haul your Ferris wheel and carousel across the war-torn wastelands?

I believe I had more fun writing The Darker Carnival than I have any of the others, which is a good sign that you'll enjoy reading it too. 

I can't wait to see the cover. A carnival setting? This one ought to be really good!

But in the meantime, don't forget about the other eight Markhat titles, such as the one below!


Available from Samhain, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iTunes!

Here There Be, Um, Frogs and Snakes. Mostly Frogs.


©  | Dreamstime Stock Photos
Finally, a short bit of audio.

I live in north Mississippi. So do some of you -- but to many of my readers, Mississippi is a far-off land, a strange and exotic place peopled by barefoot hillbillies and over-run with beat-up Chevy pickups.

First, I would like gently point out that I own numerous pairs of shoes, which I wear on special occasions (formal tractor-pulls, court sentencings, the annual We Hope We Get The Lectricity Real Soon Now festival). Also, my truck is a Nissan, and I washed it once. 

We all live in unique settings. Whether you're in New York or Singapore or you're aboard the ISS looking down on us all, your moment is utterly unlike anyone else's. Communicating the differences of our experiences is part of what writing is all about.

I can't replicate for you the aromas of the dining room at Taylor Grocery. I can't describe to you, in more than the crudest terms, what you might see and hear and smell walking around Oxford's pre-Civil War town Square.

But I can record the sounds of night-time here in sleepy Yocona, which is what I've done and linked to below.

My summer nights are filled with a tireless orchestra of creeping, jumping, flying things. Crickets and toads. Frogs and katydids. Plesiosaurs and Sasquatch, probably, since anything could be back there in the dark.

It's only a 30-second clip. I promise it's not a screamer, because I find those things annoying (first rule of being funny: BE FUNNY. Screamers aren't funny and haven't been since 2007). 

Night in rural Mississippi. Enjoy, and mind the water moccasins!

Big News: The Darker Carnival has been accepted! Markhat lives!

An actual MRI of my current brain activity
Good news! The very latest Markhat book, The Darker Carnival, has been accepted, and will join the rest of the Markhat books under the Samhain banner in April of next year.

Which is something of a milestone for me and the series. This will be book 9 in the series, which means I've written nine more books than even I ever expected to write when I first sat down at a typewriter that sultry afternoon in the Late Cretaceous. 

I hope fans of the series will like this new book. I will say there are some big surprises in store, and things will never be quite the same for Markhat, Darla, Mama, and the rest. But that's life -- change is inevitable, whether we like it or not, and I'm hoping you'll like these changes. 

As soon as I finish the edits on the new Mug and Meralda, I'll dive right into book 10 of the Markhat adventures. I already have a good portion of it mapped out.

But for now, I shall revel in the sheer joyous sound of the words 'we want this one too!' 

If anyone wants me, I'll be over there, grinning like a fool.

Thanks, everyone!



Things That Go Bump, Mad Science Edition: The Parabolic in the Cemetery #1

Speak into the clear plastic dish...

Today, I have something genuinely spooky to offer you. 

As you can probably guess from the image above, I took my newly-constructed parabolic microphone rig to a local cemetery. Not just any cemetery, either, but to the very same place I've captured EVP phenomena before.

Before we get to the sounds themselves, though, a few words of explanation are in order. What you see above is the dish, of course, and the electronics. The black box on the bottom is the power supply and volume control for the mic itself. Poised atop that is a small general-purpose audio amp I use for signal tracing and low-level amplification (it has a gain of around 50, I think). Perched precariously above that is the Zoom H1 field mic itself, which is recording via its auxiliary cable input, and not its stereo microphones.

Oh, and that bit of fuzz, peeking over the top? That's a windscreen, which is placed over the electret mic at the focal point of the dish. 

I built the dish to use the 3000X super-amp, but I found that amp's output is well in excess of what the Zoom expects, wants, or can tolerate. So I'll need to add an attenuator circuit to the big-gain amp before I can use it with the dish. Bummer, but the little general-purpose amp performed quite well this trip.

My 20 minute recording session netted a couple of interesting audio samples. As usual, I don't claim to know the source of these sounds. I'm not claiming they are ghosts. I'm not claiming they aren't. All I'm saying is that I get odd sounds -- some voices, some not -- when I go to St. Peters Cemetery in Oxford, and I don't get these same strange noises in my backyard or other such mundane locales. Make of that what you will.

Let's start out with the most impressive of the sounds, which occurs around the 13 minute mark on the full session recording.  The image below shows what the dish was pointed at.


It's facing a hill. Just out of frame is a vase of flowers which has fallen from a marker.

I'll put the clip in context. Thirteen minutes in, and I've moved the dish around a few times. It's facing up a hill. I wander off, spot a vase of fallen flowers, and note aloud I'm going to right them. Shortly after that, you'll hear, quite clearly, the sound of a music box (or perhaps wind chimes).

It plays for several seconds. I did NOT hear even a hint of any such thing during the recording.

Could it be an actual wind chime, the sound of which was carried on the wind?

Maybe, I suppose. But the dish is very directional. It's aimed at a hill on purpose. And it's quite loud.

You be the judge:

Music Box Sound Sample Click Here



The next sound occurred just before the 18 minute mark in the full recording. I'm explaining that the devices I carry can't do anyone any harm, and that they might be able to record faint voices. Just after that, there is a noise of some sort that over-rides my next statement about their voices being detected in the background. The image above depicts what the dish was aimed at.

Is this a voice? I can't tell. I can only say I didn't hear it, and since it comes across as even louder than my own voice for an instant, that's weird.

Might Be Able Sound Click Here

Here's the sound isolated. It still doesn't make any sense to me.

Might Be Able Clip Isolated Click Here

Finally, and I almost didn't include this one, a very faint voice, captured at the 11 minute mark. I have no idea what it's saying. I was walking around, with the dish facing as in the last image above.

You may have to crank this one way up.

Unintelligible Voice Click Here


If you'd like to listen to the entire unedited session, click below. Be warned; there's a three and a half minute period right after I say I'm switching to the parabolic that things are just a buzz because I forgot to switch on the mic pre-amp. Duh. I noticed and switched it on at the 5 minute mark. I've got to get a cheap label-maker so I can at least denote the ON and OFF positions of my switches.

I hope you enjoyed the chimes and the other weird sounds.Sometime soon I'll have to have a talk with the Oxford Police Department and see if they have any objections to me setting up my gear after dark. Anybody want to slap on a proton pack and join me?

Random Catfish Sunsets



No. No I did not eat this handsome fellow, who surfaced to gobble down an easy meal of fish-food in the lake behind a friend's house. That is a Mississippi catfish, long may he live and prosper.

And here is a sunset, taken over the same lake:


If you squint just right, you can see Bigfoot waving from the trees, and of course Nessie is lurking below the surface. 

Writing News

My news this week is much the same as it was last week. Still finishing the re-write on the new Mug and Meralda (less than a hundred pages to go, yay!). The new Markhat is still out for consideration with Samhain. 

I know I've asked before, but since The Five Faces just came out and many of you might have only recently finished it, I'll go ahead and beg abjectly once more for reviews. Seriously, if you liked it (even if you hated it), if you've got a second to drop by Amazon and leave me a few stars and a handful of words I'd really appreciate both. We live and die by rankings, and rankings are related to ratings. It's a sad old world, but it's the only one I've got.  Thanks!



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!



Tula Cemetery EVP recording, October 1, 2017

 

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