The Knights of the Irregular Polygonal Table (#FridayFlash)

Any resemblance to Sabrina Zbasnik’s Rejected Story is purely, uh…

OK, let’s pull the pin and see what happens with this one. For other stories in this world, enter “strange lands” in the search box at the top of the page.

---

Image source: openclipart.org

Once upon a time, in the Strange Lands north of Aht-Lann-Tah, there was a tavern. Actually, the Strange Lands has plenty of taverns, as drinking oneself stupid was far easier than trying to understand one’s neighbors. But this tavern was situated at the foot of Aiken Butte, and was named for the landmark. As it was near the border of the Dominion and several other states great and small, knights of the nearby realms would gather there to drink, tell tales, work out minor differences between the kingdoms, drink, boast of their prowess, drink some more, and set dates for golf outings. And when they finished all that, they got down to some serious drinking.

The owner of the tavern had set aside a long table in the back for the knights. The corners were worn away by years of swords rubbing against them, so everyone called it the Round Table (Sir Pedant pointed out that it was actually a rough irregular polygon, with a general oval shape, but “the Knights of the Irregular Polygonal Table” just didn’t have the same ring). Besides, irregular is the norm in the Strange Lands.

But I digress. One fine day, knights from several realms were drinking and doing the other things that knights do when they’re not golfing or trying to knock each other off their horses. Into this peaceful debauch entered Sir Slice, so named for his golf swing rather than his swordplay.

“Ho! Ha!” the other knights shouted, pulling up a chair and making room. “What news?”

“Dire news, indeed,” said Sir Slice, slamming down his ale. “A dragon has captured another princess.”

“Not Stonebelly?” asked Sir Umber.

“Nay, good Dragonpooper,” Sir Slice grinned as the other knights laughed. “Just a regular dragon.”

“Dragonslayer, if you please,” Sir Umber growled. He had ridden out against a dragon one day, and the dragon laughed itself to death when Sir Umber soiled his armor. His now-former squire had let slip the truth, and nearly lost his head for it, for a secret once out can never be hidden again. “A dead dragon is a dead dragon, no matter how it is slain.”

Sir Slice waited for the laughter to die down. “Be it as it may. Who among us will go forth to rescue the unfortunate one?”

A long silence worked its way around the sort-of round table. “You haven’t heard?” said Sir Pedant. “It’s all about affirmative consent these days.”

Sir Slice scratched his oily head. “What does that mean? You sally forth, you slay the dragon, the princess is yours. That’s the way it’s always been done.”

“Not anymore,” said Sir Umber, glad to change the subject. “The princess must want to be rescued, and tell you she wants to be rescued. Those are the new rules of chivalry.”

“What? Of course she wants to be rescued!”

“She may want to rescue herself,” another knight said. “Or she may find the dragon’s company preferable.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Sir Slice asked incredulously. “Marry a peasant woman?”

“Nay, whatever you do, don’t go there!” Sir H’rangid shouted. “You haven’t seen Hell on Earth until you share a roof with a peasant woman whose elevated status goes to her head. Ask me how I know. I even have to leave my golf clubs at Sir Umber’s keep, and tell her I’m out on patrol when I go anywhere.”

“Again I ask, what are we supposed to do then?” Sir Slice cast a baleful eye around the table, as if he had learned an unpleasant truth about his comrades.

“‘Tain’t so bad,” said Sir Bubba. “Ya ain’t riskin’ yer life for someone who don’t appreciate it anyway, and ya got more time to play golf and drink beer with yer compadres.”

“Bah. I never thought I’d see the day when my fellow knights would refuse to aid a damsel in distress. It is up to me, then.” Sir Slice turned on his heel, stumbling a little, and left the tavern.

“Calm, my fellows,” said Sir Pedant. “Our friend must learn for himself.” He swallowed the last of his ale and waved his tankard at the serving-wench. “As we all did. Now, to the business at hand. What golf course shall we grace with our presence?”

I Write Escapism, and I’m Okay With It

Source: openclipart.org

From Wikipedia: “Escapist fiction is fiction which provides a psychological escape from thoughts of everyday life … The term is not used favorably.”

I don’t hear it as often as I used to, which may reflect the decline in reading overall—or maybe it’s because those who used it most have gone to the Great Library in the Sky. The description does seem to have a sneering quality to it, that implication of not reading the “right” kind of fiction—usually published in the 19^th century at the latest, because surely nobody born after 1820 has had anything worthwhile to say, right?

What brought this to mind was a recent The New Yorker article called The Percy Jackson Problem. A literary-minded mom writes about Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels, which her son incidentally loves to pieces. If you’re like me, and haven’t read them, they’re about an adolescent demigod, the son of Poseidon and a human mother. There’s this tension between “well, at least he’s reading,” and “but he’s not reading the claaaaaaaaaassics” oozing all through the article. Still, she at least implies that he knows more about Greek mythology at this point than she does. I’m intrigued, and will have to check them out myself now.

I remember those pre-junior high years as a near-dystopia, not that it got much better afterwards. Books were my escape from that life, and even back then I knew I wanted to write my own stories someday. I read a lot of different things, but none of them were “classics” nor titles that literary types of the day would have approved (with the possible exception of Rabbit Hill). One series I remember was The Boxcar Children, the stories of four orphaned kids who moved into an abandoned boxcar. I’ve forgotten the title of another story, but it was about a brother/sister duo who rowed out to an island on a lake and got stranded there. And of course The Hardy Boys, about two brothers who solve mysteries. (Ironic that, since I was such a timid child.) I suppose you could classify the first two as survivalist tales, but without the boxcar full of weaponry or tinfoil-hat politics.at, since I was such a timid child.) My White Pickups books, from that angle, are an adult version of those older stories—abandoned or stranded, people fight to survive and somehow beat the odds.

In junior high, the local librarian pointed me to the sci-fi section, and I was hooked. Who needs a boxcar in the woods when you have a fracking spaceship, am I right? Thus began a stretch of years when, like Cody in White Pickups, “the only books I ever picked up [had] a spaceship on the cover.” I’m not sure who it was that pointed me to Lord of the Rings in high school, but fantasy became an ever-increasing part of my reading mix. Who needs a spaceship? Just zap yourself to another world, and defeat that overwhelming evil with determination and heart!

I read a lot, and I needed stories that would take me Elsewhere for a while. Things did get better in college, but the habit was set. I got into Dungeons and Dragons, and that was addictive—acting out a story on the fly, where your own decisions and reactions affected how it ended. As you might imagine, that pulled me even farther into the fantasy realm. In our D&D group, we passed around our own book collections. I discovered The Sword of Shannara, Dragonriders of Pern, and the collaborative Thieves’ World anthologies came out around then. I spent the summer of 1980 in Biloxi MS and points south (i.e. the Gulf itself, working offshore helping cooks feed hungry drilling platform workers). I took a sheaf of scrap computer paper with me for my off-time, and wrote the first novel I actually finished, The War of the Seventh Trumpet. I never gave serious thought to finding a publisher, because even in the 1980s that kind of fantasy was already getting formulaic. (Not to mention it’s a typical first effort, pretty awful.) While I won’t ever publish that one without some extensive rewrites, it became background material for other Termag stories.

Thirty years later, here we are. I’ve published four Accidental Sorcerers stories, with the fifth (Lost in Nightwalk) coming out later this month and the sixth (Beyond the Sea of Storms) drafted. A sorcerer and his two love-struck apprentices travel Termag and have lots of adventures.

It’s escapist fiction, and I’m okay with that.

Sometimes—or all too often—you just need to get away from everyday circumstances. Fly that spaceship to Antares and fight the Vegans (aliens from Vega, that is… seems like they’re always hostile). Or follow Bailar, Sura, and Mik around Termag and see what kind of scrape they get embroiled in this time. Or stay out of those talking pickup trucks and try to make a better world for yourself, and the other four dozen people around you.

In the Victorian era, they had what they called “improving” literature. The “right” kind of books, written by the “right” kind of people. Maybe it was about building character, a phrase used only by people who aren’t doing the work (or reading those kind of books). Reading escapist fiction lets you try on a different person—that timid boy I was could become a survivalist, or even a hero, if only for a little while. Did I grow out of that timidity, or was I “improved” by escapism?

And now, I have another escape—I mean a new book—to get ready. Until then…

A Web of Vengeance (#FridayFlash)

Image source: openclipart.org

Wilson woke up.

Spiders. Everywhere. In his bedroom.

The bugs had invaded his house lately, perhaps looking for shelter from the coming winter. Wilson had declared all-out war. He’d used bug spray, shoes, the vacuum cleaner… and they just kept coming. He had two of those “set off and leave” kind of bug bombs, in case things got out of hand.

“Time to go nuclear, you bastards.” Wilson tried to sit up, but thick layers of spider silk bound him to the bed. He cursed and struggled, trying to wriggle out from under the covers, but he was stuck.

Suppressing a scream, Wilson watched as hundreds—thousands—of spiders dropped or climbed onto the bed.

A weight on his feet. The queen had arrived.

Writing Wibbles

I always feel like
somebody's watching me
(And I have no privacy)
—Rockwell

I had a couple of things to share this week—an interview with the creator of the #amwriting hashtag was at the top of the list—but something else reared its ugly adobe head, and vaulted to the top of the list.

Nate Hoffeider at The Digital Reader broke the story a little over a week ago. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) version 4 “[seems] to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.” Most EPUB-based eBook readers on the market use some version of ADE, although I’m not sure whether any are using ADE4 just yet. Older versions are less intrusive.

How intrusive is this? Let me quote Mr. Hoffeider here:

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text. …

Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers. …

And just to be clear, this includes not just ebooks I opened in DE4, but also ebooks I store in calibre and every Epub ebook I happen to have sitting on my hard disk.

(emphasis mine)

The Passive Guy, a lawyer who writes on self-publishing issues, has an excellent summary and links, both in the article and from readers in the comments.

Much of the outrage in the tech side of the community focuses on Adobe’s use of plain text. That is a little disturbing, yes—it means anyone who can put a packet sniffer anywhere along the path between you and Adobe can see all this data. But for me, it’s what the people owning the servers are doing that’s more important. Scraping your hard drive for eBooks makes ADE4 spyware, in my opinion.

When pressed for an explanation, Adobe finally said (in the typical corporate lawyer speak of any company caught with their hands in your pockets) that it’s part of their DRM, and they gave themselves permission to do it through their “privacy” policy.

Now I can already hear the Kindle haters shouting “Amazon does it, too!” Well, yes, Amazon does send some information back to the mothership, but there are (as I see it) three important differences:

1. Amazon is pretty up-front about what their Whispersync feature does, and it gives back by letting you sync your books across devices. Adobe gives you nothing (or maybe they use the info to target advertising at you, who knows?). You can also turn it off at any time.
2. Whispersync isn’t a DRM mechanism, at least primarily. It works just as well with non-DRM books sold through the Kindle store.
3. Amazon doesn’t presume to scrape your hard drive, looking for any MOBI or AZW files you might happen to have, just because they feel like it.

To Panic or not to Panic (probably not)

Since I handle all eBook formatting for Green Envy Press, and I work in EPUB format, I’m pretty sensitive to the idea of some corporation scraping my hard drive and looking over works in progress. Fortunately, I don’t use Adobe software in any part of my production toolchain.

But this is the problem: if people with access (legal or otherwise) to Adobe’s servers were to target a publisher’s typesetting department, they could get advance notice of upcoming titles or other intelligence. Or they could target individuals for blackmail purposes. I find it quite likely that Adobe’s legal department will use this info to shake down unfortunates who land in some kind of piracy profile (whether they’re actually pirating eBooks or not)—or sell the info to large publishers, so they can do the shaking down. I also expect Adobe to “share collected information with our third-party partners” (i.e. sell information about your reading habits to anyone who wants to spam you to death).

On the other hand, this affects only a small but growing number of individuals—those who have been suckered into installing ADE4 on their computers. I don’t know whether any eBook readers use ADE4, or will load that Trojan Horse in a near-future update. Obviously, people in the Kindle ecosystem are immune (beyond the Whispersync issues I mentioned earlier). Apple’s iBooks ecosystem is also Adobe-free, or so I’ve read. Earlier versions of ADE are not nearly as intrusive, so you’re safe in that case as well.

Fortunately, and I’ve said this before, eBook DRM is ridiculously easy to disable. Buy your eBooks from any authorized retailer, strip the DRM, and use Calibre or a third-party eReader to read on your computer. Or buy from those of us who make sure the “use DRM” selection is turned off when we publish.

And then, there’s the technical fix: block the IP addresses assigned to Adobe’s servers at your router. Whether you use DSL, cable, or fiber to get your Internet fix, your router has a fairly simple way to set this up. Look for something like “outgoing filters” and add the addresses shown in the image below. Here’s what I’ve added to my DSL router, just in case:

That won’t stop ADE4 from getting all chatty if you take your laptop outside the house, but it’s a start.

---

If you haven’t tried my eBooks—DRM-free, available for both Kindle and the rest of the world, and priced to move—why not check them out? The Crossover is free, and the rest are cheaper than a large latte. And unlike a latte, you can enjoy them again and again.

Little Swingers

Meet Amelia, in the swing next to Mason. She refers to him as “my boyfriend.”

Just a-swangin'

This is a church thing. They sit together in church sometimes, and usually at the Childrens’ Sermon (where the kids all come up front). I first found out when she had her arm around him as they sat listening. Her grandmother and I were cutting up about it later. “She’s a little old for him, ain’t she?” I asked in my best fake Southern accent. She’s six, and her birthday was during the summer, so she’s definitely older than him.

They don’t do much more than sit together, sometimes hold hands as they go downstairs. Mason doesn’t seem to be fazed much by it; it’s just part of church for him. For their grandparents, it’s just one of those amusing things kids do.

But apparently, she’s a bit of a troublemaker at school. Seems like Mason’s inherited his father’s (thankfully former) attraction for troublesome girlies. One more thing to grow out of. I hope.

The Boy and His House

The Boy closed on a house on September 15th. Over the weekend, we took a truckload (plus half a vanload) of stuff down to him. He and his bride had filled the back of her car on Thursday with a bunch of small things—plus Mason. They have a room set up for him, and I really wish I thought to get more pictures than I did.

But I got a picture of the front of their place:

Ready for Hallowe’en, I see…

Here at FAR Manor, I don’t have to put up spider webs. The spiders do it for me:

At least this one isn’t in the walkway

The Boy’s house is sitting on a little over 2 acres; he was showing us all the things he has planned (including a garden along one side). Amazing… he’s embraced this home-ownership thing big-time. The only downside is that it’s pretty close to his in-laws. Experience has taught me that such a location is hazardous to your mental health. But her dad paid cash for the place. The wife and I looked at each other at that news… I said, “I guess he married well.” If I got FAR Manor for free, I wouldn’t complain about it very much at all.

So October is here, and I’ve been taking the work laptop outside in the mornings when it hasn’t been raining. The mosquitos are a little plentiful, perhaps the result of a few buckets left out in the rain. I’ve dumped them out, though, so now maybe the spiders will do for the mosquitos.

OMG WTF Lobster?!

Despite the goofy picture, this is one of the toughest kind of posts to write about.

So it seems that Lobster, a former inmate at FAR Manor who was kicked out a couple times for various reasons, ended up moving to Louisiana. His bio-father lives out there, and is in prison for drugs, and you could say in this case that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He (Lobster) has never had good impulse control, and one time trashed the detached garage in a drunken rampage.

So anyway. Louisiana. He’s out there in Livingston Parish. He moved in with a woman 20 years older than him, another thing that was a kind of pattern for him. They probably did drugs, rock and roll, and the other thing.

I have no idea what happened for sure, because there isn’t any detail, but M.A.E. got word from a mutual friend and said meth was involved. Whatever it was, I’ll just excerpt from the news article:

A Livingston woman was found dead on her living room floor Saturday morning in what authorities are calling a homicide. … [Her] lower abdomen and throat had cut marks – from what is believed to be a knife or other sharp object, authorities said.

And he admitted to it.

And this guy was living at FAR Manor, on and off, for several years.

I think I officially have the weirdest life among white-collar types.

End of the Road (#FridayFlash)

Image source: openclipart.org

Vincent “Van” Hendricks stopped at the curb in front of the old mansion. “This is crazy,” he said, for the eighth time since he grabbed his leather bag and jumped in his Impala. The twenty years he spent chasing Jan Meppel demanded he go, though. You are invited to my lair, the letter had said. Bring your tools, and friends if you wish, but I pledge that you will come to no harm by my design. Hendricks had chosen to come alone, but told several trusted friends where he was going that night.

Shouldering his bag, his feet carried him to the door while his mind continued to sift through the reasons Meppel would invite him over. Some treachery, no doubt, but he was prepared.

He raised his hand to knock, but saw the note: Hendricks. The door is open. Please let yourself in and proceed to the parlor. Help yourself to the wine and canapés, and I will join you presently. He shrugged and followed directions. His bag held ways to test for poison, but the food and wine were safe. He poured himself a glass of wine, a vintage far more expensive than he ever bought for himself, and waited.

“Ah, Hendricks,” his enemy, this vampire, greeted him, carrying his own glass and seating himself. “I suppose you are curious why I invited you.”

“I’m sure you have a little surprise planned for me, Meppel.”

The vampire chuckled. “Indeed I do,” he replied. “I am here, you have come, and it is time for you to finish the hunt.”

Hendricks frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Then I’ll say it plainly. I want you to kill me tonight.”

Hendricks nearly choked on his wine. “What? Why?”

Meppel stood and began pacing the room. “If you include the days of my life, my pre-vampiric existence one might say, I am six hundred and fifty years old, and am bored beyond anything you can imagine. I seriously began to contemplate suicide—which for one in my condition, is a gruesome act indeed—about fifty years ago. Indeed, had you not come along, I would have likely done it before now. Evading you lifted the long boredom for a while, but now it has returned. I’d rather hoped you could have brought me down without my help, but it is not to be.”

“Kill you. Just like that. And you’re not worried about Hell?”

“Not at all. You see, I have no soul. Or rather, my soul went on to its reward with the death of my old self. I awoke into my new existence with my mind and memories, but my soul… gone. Amusing: the one part of me that was fitted for eternity departed when my second birth made me immortal. Such is the curse of the vampire.” Meppel drank and smiled. “I spent many years researching that problem, two centuries ago, and you are the first person to hear the answer I found.”

“That’s interesting,” said Hendricks, truly interested in spite of himself. “Evil without consequence?”

“Evil? You once likened me to a parasite, feeding off those like you. Does a dog call the tick evil? Nay, the tick does what it does to survive. What it is made to do. And I do the same. I may have fed on the unwilling. I may have killed those who deserved death. But never have I done what was done to me, and changed someone against his will.”

“What? What happened?”

Meppel drained his glass and set it on the table next to his chair. “I was in the employ of a merchant, in what you now call the Netherlands. This merchant owed favors to my father, and he persuaded the merchant to hire me on. I was not aware—nor, I believe, was my father aware—that my employer deeply resented my father. One night, he encouraged me to drink my fill of his wine, and I blacked out. When I awoke, it was to my second birth. He who had done this explained how my former employer had sold me, told me of my new existence, what I could do and not do, and so forth. He had a cadre of loyal staff, who also served as our food source. We fed them well, and they fed us in return.

“When whispers of our existence became too loud, we sailed to the Antilles. My master left me his worldly goods when he chose to end his own existence, and I moved on to the Americas. And now, I have reached the end of the road. You have what you need, I presume?”

Hendricks took a stake and mallet from his bag. “I do.”

“Where is your sword?”

“Sword?”

“To strike off my head after!” Meppel looked agitated. “You cannot tell me that you have hunted vampires and—bah. Use that one.” He pointed to an antique sword hanging on the wall. “The scabbard is around here somewhere. Take it with you when you go. You’ll need it when you go back and finish all the other kills you bungled. Will you need me to position the stake properly as well?”

“What? I—”

Meppel waved a ringed hand. “I am sure you know where to put the stake. To my chambers, now. Let us finish this.”

Vacation Slides Along

On Monday, we signed out a paddleboat and took a little tour around the lake:

Faster, Granddad!

There's a beach area on down a ways, that has a slide going right into the water, and Mason was all hot to do that. So next morning, away we went!

Splashdown!

There's also a raft, not something I see a lot of here in the South, although lots of lakes had them up north. On Monday, I steered the paddleboat up to the ladder so he could climb up for a few seconds, but yesterday he wanted to swim out there. Fortunately, the lake water was reasonably warm. His floaties did the job, and he got a pretty good idea of how things were when I was a kid in summer. (I hadn't swam out to a raft in decades, so it was fun for me too.) He did get to shivering after a while, so I got him up on the raft and sitting in the sun for a little bit until he warmed up.

OK, I'll skim across the water and make the turn...

As you can see, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. That was kind of a pity, but I guess with it being the week after Labor Day, all of the kids are back in school. I hope we can get over here on daytrips next summer; Mason already wants Daughter Dearest and me to chuck him off the raft. I told him he has to learn to swim without floaties first, so he has an incentive. He really wore himself out yesterday, and slept a long time, almost until 9.

Last night, we found a playground, and there was already a little girl his age there. Both of them were glad to have someone else to play with, so they let the parental units talk among themselves for a while. The downside of that is, Mason's now bummed when we go somewhere and there aren't any other kids around.

I'm not hurling, just spinning!

Too bad it's just him and me. DD is sick, and the wife is (as usual) tied up. I've got a little cold myself. But he's trying to get me to take him to the pool up at the clubhouse, so I need to leave this here. More vacation fun, you know!

The Last Lightkeeper (#FridayFlash)

The knock sounded urgent. Farl forced himself upright, knees popping. He shuffled to the door, trying to tame his unruly tufts of white hair.

“Are you a Lightkeeper?” the young man on the other side blurted, the second Farl opened the door. He looked concerned enough that Farl could forgive his skipping his manners.

“I am,” said Farl, pulling the door open the rest of the way. He stood aside and motioned the young man to enter. “And you are?”

“Bin,” he replied. A common enough name. “Glad I am, that I found you at last.” Bin made to put his hands on his belt, but one hand strayed close to the dagger he wore to one side. He waved his hands for a moment, perhaps trying to decide what to do with them, then ended up clasping them before him.

“And I am here,” said Farl. “But let us have tea as we talk. Putting an end to any problem is best begun with a cup of tea, I have found. Take a seat.” He busied himself with serving his guest. A pinch of leaves in each cup, and the water was already hot. Is this the one, come at last? he wondered as he worked. He would have his answer soon enough.

“So,” Farl prompted, setting a cup before his guest before seating himself. “Tell me why you have come.”

“I am an emissary from Linden Grove, the last free realm,” Bin replied, sipping at his tea. “We are beset by the Dark, that now rules over all realms but our own, and hard-pressed. I was charged to seek a Lightkeeper and beg for aid, that we may repel them, but all of those near to us are gone.”

“I am not surprised,” said Farl. “For I am the last. My fellows have succumbed, some to fear. Some to treason.” He looked directly at Bin. “Many to treachery.”

Bin quailed. “It is true then? You are the only Lightkeeper left to roam the world?”

“Aye.” Farl smiled. “But the last is not least, and I am not powerless. I have set plans into motion that will drive the Dark into the deep fastnesses from which it came. Only one thing is left to do, and then nothing the Dark can do shall avail them.”

“Then there is still time?” At Farl’s nod, Bin leaped across the table and drove his dagger into the old Lightkeeper’s chest. “Fool,” said Bin, jerking the dagger out, “you have given the world into our hands at last…”

Bin’s victorious boast trailed off, as he stared at Farl’s chest. Instead of blood, Light poured from the wound.

“That was the last thing,” said Farl. His voice held both pain and satisfaction, and he managed a smile. “I have faithfully kept the Light, and now I may at last release it into the world.”

“No.” Bin backed away, eyes riveted to the growing torrent of Light.

“You have given the world its salvation,” Farl insisted. “Be sure to tell your master that, when your shriveled soul flees to its dark bosom.” The Light poured out of Farl, stripping away Bin’s disguise, revealing the hideous minion of the Dark beneath. As Bin screamed in pain and terror, the Light dissolved the minion’s hide, bones, sinew. The bodies of both Farl and Bin crumbled to ash as the Light burst forth, free at last.

“Now,” said the Light, in Farl’s voice. “The world shall know both Light and Dark, in equal measure. Thus, the people will choose which path they follow. No thralls, content in their bondage. No slaves, begging for release. This day, they become their own masters, now and evermore.”


In the last free realm of Linden Grove, as the brave folk prepared to make their final stand, a soundless explosion of Light burst upon them from the east. It rolled forth, slow and relentless, pushing back the howling Dark and leaving the folk confused in their victory.

This was the First Dawn.

A Dark and Stormy Night

I thought I didn’t sleep well last night, but I apparently slept right through a pretty heavy thunderstorm. It was rumbling through the evening, so I must not have given it much thought. I do remember waking up at one point and hearing all the UPSes click. That may well have been when the power came back on, because when I went to poke the iMac this morning it was powered down. But that means I slept right through the constant nagging beeping of the UPSes, something I thought would not be possible.

So when I got to work this morning, there was debris all around the grounds. And this just past the driveway:

Then there was the email saying we lost power about 6:45 last night… must have been a really hairy storm down this way.

Here’s hoping your day is debris-free. Tomorrow’s Friday, and I’ve got it and the whole next week off! Stay tuned for a #FridayFlash queued up for tomorrow…

Writing Wibbles

I finally updated the progress bar(s) over the weekend. Beyond the Sea of Storms is the working title for the sixth Accidental Sorcerers story, and I have two months to finish the first draft to stay on schedule. I have a vague idea of what I want to do for the seventh book, but I haven’t started anything yet. Oh well, I have a week of vacation next week, too close to the inlaws to be completely relaxing, but I should have a couple days free to write.

Meanwhile, Lost in Nightwalk is off to the beta readers. I have two old and two new folks working on it, and I’m interested to see how it goes. I will soon have Marginalia and The Magic App Store sent off to interested parties. I envision them as the anchor stories in a Termag-based anthology.

Tag! I’m it!

I was tagged by +Philip Overby for the Not-so-Accidental Blog Tourist hop (huh huh, he said “accidental”). You know the drill by now: answer some questions, tag some new victims, will the circle be unbroken by and by…

1. What are you working on now?

There’s that little cluster of progress bars up and to the right, that lists my active projects and how far along I am. ;-) But seriously, the important thing right now is Beyond the Sea of Storms. I’ve also written a couple pieces that will end up in #FridayFlash this week and next. About dang time, it’s been two months since my last flash.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I don’t know of too many Fantasy books where the main characters are citizens of a matriarchy (one that isn’t a “yeah we got a queen but the guys run things anyway” variety). It’s lots of fun figuring out all the implications, and sharing them with readers. Culture shock! And the women (or girls) aren’t sitting around waiting for the guys to rescue them. A recent reviewer said “my daughter and I love reading these,” and that put a smile on my face.

3. Why do I write what I do?

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the stories that clamor for attention are the ones that get written. I wrote White Pickups and Pickups and Pestilence because they would not leave me alone (and kept growing) until I finally finished them. In the case of our Accidental Sorcerers, one thing tends to lead to another, and the stories just flow.

There are other things I want to write—some more stories in The Crossover line, some short stories, a new and completely different series—but the stories that sit back and wait their turn aren’t the ones getting any keyboard time.

4. How does my writing process work?

For certain values of “work,” I assume.

I have to grab odd moments to write—lunch time at work, and home after Mason goes to bed, are the two primary blocks of time I have. I don’t write linearly, and I use only the barest sketch of an outline. I keep most of the story line in my head, where I can play with it pretty much anywhere (often while commuting).

When I actually begin writing a story, I start with pivotal scenes, then figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point B to Point C. I’m one of those blasphemous “edit as you go” people, a habit begun I don’t know how long ago, and it works for me. Maybe when I get out the old typewriter to see what stories want letters to physically hit the paper, I’ll change my ways.

After I finish a draft, I let it sit for a month. Then I self-edit and send to beta readers. I apply the feedback, then off to the editor. Finally, format and launch!

OK… who’s next?

Well, +Angela Kulig is a little reluctant, but if y’all raise a clamor, she might be talked into it. Might as well add +Tony Noland and +Loni Flowers to the list too… and if you want to do it, jump right in!

A Farewell to EJ (aka @theAmazinGimp)

I haven’t blogged about it much, but +E.J Hobbs had been living at FAR Manor for quite a while, helping out where he could and mostly staying out of the way. (No girlfriend conflicts? No arrests? No drunken rampages? What was there to write about?)

But I digress. A friend of his from high school days lives down in Chamblee—once the father in law’s old stomping grounds, now he calls it “Chambodia” because of its large East Asian population—and has been trying to get EJ to move down there with him. There are several advantages… EJ’s home nurse skills have a wider pool in a more populous area, and there are plenty of McJobs to tide him over until he can get a better one. Plus there’s MARTA, a major advantage when you have neither car nor driver’s license.

He put it off for a while, hoping to build up some money so he could hold his end up, but in the end his friend decided he’d prop up EJ for a while. So on Saturday, the wife gave him some furniture, we loaded up the truck, and away we went. The Maps app made things look easy enough: I-285 to I-85 south (the freeway that Tina commuted on in White Pickups, you may recall), first exit, a couple of side roads, we’re there. We only missed one turn, and that we fixed by cutting through a QuikTrip parking lot to get back on track.

While EJ’s friend works Saturdays, he took the afternoon off to make sure we could move all his stuff inside. It took about 15 minutes to cart it all in. I asked for a decent Vietnamese restaurant, he pointed me to one on Buford Highway, and I treated myself to a really good lunch before heading back to FAR Manor. Meanwhile, the wife attacked the horrible carpet (seriously, who puts white carpet in a rural house? crazy people, that’s who) and made some marginal improvements.

Now, it’s just me, the wife, and Mason. I need to get that room upstairs converted to a library before she has a chance to object…

Achievement Unlocked: Daughter in Law!

Saturday was the big day, and nobody ran off at the last second (although one of the bridesmaids went missing for a while). I ’d have been happier with more of our side of the family there, but The Boy also had a couple friends show up and that made him pretty happy. The wife did a video, a sort of chronological thing of the two of them growing up, then some of them together at the end. It was really nice.

So anyway, here they are…

Dearly Beloved…

As you can see, this was an outdoor affair. In August. On Planet Georgia. Needless to say, we sweated like race horses. This is why I insisted on a winter wedding for us.

A lovely bunch

Daughter Dearest was one of the bridesmaids. She told us she was sure she was going to pass out, because her dress was a bit tight. But she underestimates herself. Not only is she a strong girl, she’s been trained to stand under hot lights (chorale concerts), so she held up without any trouble. She was really pleased with how well her hairdo held up; I guess they used epoxy on it or something.

It was the bride I was worried about. She was swaying for a little while, and I was trying to whisper “bend your knees, bend your knees.” She didn’t hear me, but stayed on her feet anyway. Turned out she put on a little weight (as skinny as she is, a little weight can be a lot of difference) since they got the wedding dress, and it was a little tight on her as well.

Me and the boys

The Boy asked me to be in the wedding, and to be the best man —that was a pleasant shock. I was there with Cousin Splat, Brand X, and the bride’s brother… and Mason. Mason was in a bit of a mood, as he’d spent a long time just before the wedding doing photography poses. He heard “just one more” a few times too many, and by the time of the actual ceremony, he was ready to quit. I ended up carrying and holding him, and he fussed (quietly) until I started indicating people in the crowd and asking him if they were zombies (Traffic Cone zombie, Buckethead zombie, etc.). That got a smile out of him, but after a while he went to sit with the wife. But he came back up and did the thing where the three of them poured different colored sand into a jar. The sand can’t be separated, and so neither can they, is the idea there. Touching, really.

Newlyweds! (sweaty newlyweds)

So, woohoo! We all survived, even if we smelled like a herd of dead water buffaloes by the end of the evening. We slugged down lots of water, and then we got to do some dancing and celebrating. The happy couple is off to Orlando for a few days, and now things can settle back to the normal abnormal that is life at FAR Manor.

Guest Post: Loni Flowers, “Witness to My Heart”

Since the writing brain just got back from vacation, about a week late, there isn’t much for me to wibble about this week. Fortunately, my friend Loni Flowers has a new romance novel out, and I invited her to talk about it! So take it away, Loni…

• • •

It’s my first time here at FAR Manor, and I must say, it’s an honor!

Larry was extremely nice and invited me to tell you a little about myself and my new book, Witness to My Heart, that just hit cyberspace yesterday. I tell ya, I’m so stinking excited about it, I can hardly stand to be around myself!!

This will be my third published novel, and I have to say that after a year and half of working on it, I’m actually excited to be finished and on to the next project. I’m still shocked I’ve managed to write three full length novels. I was never a reader growing up. I hated English class, too. If I could reverse the hands of time, I would have tried harder, actually gone to the library and picked out a “good” book, and picked a completely different career path. But since that isn’t possible, I’m thankful for a friend who convinced me to read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (before it was popular).

I know, I know.

You’re probably moaning and groaning about that decision, but say what you will… it opened my eyes and had me obsessed with books… any book, no matter what it is, if it has the ability to engage readers… awesome! From that series I moved on to Harry Potter and learned the true meaning of what “sick days” should be used for when you finally make it to the last book in the series! (Shhhhh don’t tell my boss!) As you can guess, the rest is history. Reading sparked a creative side in me I didn’t know I had and before I knew it, I was writing my first novel at the age of 30… while working a 40 hour professional job, managing 2 kids, 2 dogs and a husband. I still can’t believe I did it.

But enough about how I got started… and let’s get you to the details of Witness to My Heart! This book was a challenge for me. Though it’s a contemporary romance, I mixed elements of suspense and mystery into it. It is a different mood than my other books, but it was so fun to challenge myself.

Here, have a peek at the synopsis:

Keep a low profile. That's what Abigale Peterson was supposed to do, especially when the person she was being protected from was one of the world's worst crime lords. After seven years in the Witness Protection Program, she felt no safer now than she did when she was seventeen. Revenge was rarely forgotten when it came to a professional criminal like Zerilli.

Low profiles meant no social life and definitely no love life.

Paranoia and lies became daily habits, going against everything Abigale believed in, but they kept her safe. They kept everyone safe.

Until a house fire puts her out of that safety and into the arms of a stranger. Max Smith is sexy, smart, and has major attitude. He’s the only one who seems to get her. He calms her fears and comforts her from her nightmares. But he also sees right through her lies.

Before Abigale can stop, she’s in too deep; confiding too much and breaking the one rule she promised herself to uphold: Never fall in love.

If you’re intrigued, I have an exclusive link (not released to the public yet) that will let you read the first 3 chapters.

Now if you are truly intrigued, be sure to grab a copy today… and if you’re interested in winning a few things, I have a big giveaway going on over on my website, http://www.loniflowers.com/

Good luck, if you enter.

Thank for taking a moment out of your day to read a little about me and my latest obsession. And Larry, thank you so much for having me over!!

• • •

Aha, now I know why we get along so well: I was another one of those people who hated English classes (although the College English class I took as a senior definitely did not suck), and I avoided literature classes like the plague. I was an avid reader, though, but Fantasy and SF were not on the curriculum in those days. Ah well, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, right?

Maybe you want to go grab a copy of Lori’s new book, right? Here’s some links that might help with that:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Witness-my-Heart-Loni-Flowers-ebook/dp/B00MLN4IFW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1407873663&sr=8-3&keywords=loni+flowers

B&N (Nook): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/witness-to-my-heart-loni-flowers/1120108466?ean=2940150704220

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/461981

If you want to add it to Goodreads, here’s the book page: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22056608-witness-to-my-heart

And, you can link up with Lori on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy reading!

Harvest Time

On Planet Georgia, the harvest begins in earnest in August. The mother in law, who was the major garden person around here, departed a couple years ago. Still, the wife attempts to at least put some garden stuff in.

It didn’t help that we ended up with a huge amount of tomato plants this spring. One of the local banks does a customer appreciation day, in which they have a cookout with free hotdogs, and give out those six-pack trays of tomato plants. This year, they arrived close to the end of the day… next thing she knew, the bank people carried three entire flats (12 six-packs each, which meant there were 216 plants) over and dropped them in the back of the van. I took one of the flats to church, where several of the church ladies snapped them up, but the other ones were still there. I didn’t help matters; I wanted some Roma tomatoes to put on the dehydrator, so I bought a six-pack (this was before the “load 'em up” incident at the bank).

In addition, there were melons, a couple rows of corn, a handful of okra plants, and a few other things. It wasn’t as much garden as the mother in law planted, but it was more than enough.

This week, the piper paid us.

I came home from work to find the drainboard completely full of Romas. I got to work Thursday night, and roughly half of them were enough to fill the dehydrator. I tackled the rest today. Now, I have two quart freezer bags full of dehydrated tomatoes. The basil we bought is doing well, the oregano is sprawling all over the place, and I have enough tomatoes to make plenty of sauce.

Prepping for the dehydrator is easy enough. Drop them in boiling water for about 15 seconds, and the peel comes right off. This year, I got smart and added a pot of cold water for a quicker cool-down. Cut them in half, drop them on a dehydrator rack, repeat until the rack is full or until you’re out of tomatoes.

That was just the Romas. The wife dropped off a pretty good load of larger tomatoes, both ripe and green. I had made some noise about wanting to make green tomato salsa again, since the last batch I made didn’t last very long. So last night, I was off to the races… or rather, in the kitchen. Blanch, peel, chop up, add some other stuff like garlic, jalapeño, cilantro, onion, vinegar, a dab of sherry, and some “taco” seasoning. Then I dumped the whole mess in the crock pot to simmer overnight.

This morning, I grabbed four pint jars with lids, scooped salsa into them, and screwed the lids down. Despite the lids being used, they sealed. I’m still putting them in the fridge.

But gee, there’s still all these red tomatoes to deal with! I’ve always been curious about gazpacho, so I looked up a recipe. When I took +E.J Hobbs to work, I picked up the stuff we didn’t have around the manor, and came home and got to work on that.

This took a little longer than the 45 minutes the recipe page said, especially with regard to the “take the seeds out” part. I won’t be surprised if a handful of seeds managed to sneak past my diligence. Still, I’m looking forward to trying some of this, come tomorrow’s hot afternoon. If it’s any good, and EJ and I leave any, I’ll take some to work Monday.

The only downside is, I used less than a fourth of the ripe tomatoes to make the gazpacho. And the wife opined that there’s probably as many more tomatoes coming our way next week. She’s already made salsa (much milder than what I like to make), and she thinks she’s getting a rash from eating too many of them, so I need to figure out what to do with this bounty. I suppose I could give them away at work easily enough…

Oh, and lest I forget. You know I like big melons; I’m a guy. Get a load of this (it was a load, all right):

45 pounds. Can’t wait to get my hands on that!

Maintenance Monday

A vacation in Michigan is wonderful, but then there’s the return to the routine and outright misery that is FAR Manor. Nevertheless, I took an extra vacation day yesterday, partly to get a little rest before getting back to work and partly to take care of some things.

Vacation was altogether lovely. We stayed at the Ramada Plaza, at 28th St. and East Beltline, the heart of the retail district and a 10-minute drive from both Other Brother’s place and the place where Dad is now staying. The Plaza has a shallow pool with a high waterslide, and Mason loved the pool. He finally worked up the nerve later in the week to take the waterslide, first with Daughter Dearest and then with me, and then on Friday (our last night) he unlocked the “go it solo” achievement.

The day before we left for Michigan, my phone (iPhone 4) began acting up—powering down and restarting whenever I tried to do anything that involved the display (and that’s why I have no pix to share for now; DD will share soon). I assumed the phone needed to be restored, and worked through it that night with no luck. During the week, I figured out that I could use it for hours if I left it plugged in, which pointed to the battery. Fortunately, iFixit has parts and entire replacement kits (which include necessary tools), along with extensive instructions and videos, and the kit was $25 including shipping. Fighting the Ramada Plaza’s thoroughly crappy hotel wifi, the biggest downside to the place, I managed to place the order and the kit arrived on Monday.

But the mail runs around noon at FAR Manor, so I had the entire morning to change the oil in the Miata. This was something that needed doing a few weeks ago, so it got priority. Turned out I already had enough oil, and just needed a filter. (And an oil drain plug gasket, but we’ll get to that shortly.)

Changing oil is pretty straightforward: put the car up on ramps, loosen the filler cap on top of the motor, the drain plug underneath, and the filter on the side. The top and side can be done by hand, the bottom requires a 19mm wrench. You want a pan to catch the oil, a few rags to wipe up spills… and a new plug gasket. I’d neglected the last part, and ended up with the car spitting a cup of oil on the garage floor when I started it for the leak-check. Off to the parts store for a replacement, which required the van. Since the van needed new wiper blades, no problem. I lost another cup of oil when I loosened the plug, although that was expected. I kept a thumb over the drain hole and put the new gasket on with the other hand. Sloppy, but not difficult.

Then, I figured out what was needed to fix the windshield washers—a Y-connector had come apart and the fluid was going down the rain drain. Since the wife was going that way again anyway, I tagged along to get a replacement.


With the car dealt with, I finally got to the phone surgery. I have a floor lamp with a magnifier, and at my age it’s not an option for doing detailed things like this. To keep tiny screws from escaping to freedom, I did everything inside the shipping box. I was struck by the similarities between the battery swap and the oil change: three screws, a couple of specialty items (ramps vs. plastic pry tool), a little care when reassembling… and each took about the same amount of time. The differences were primarily those of scale and sloppiness.

The insides of an iPhone4,
with the new battery ready to install.

With repairs effected, and vacation over, things can get back to normal. Ouch.

Writing Wibbles

Lots of ground to cover this week, so I’ll get right on it…

• • •

First off, Angela Kulig’s mini-anthology Coffin Nails is free through Wednesday! Go get it.

• • •

Kindle Unlimited… I’m hearing a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over a new lending service. Seems like we get this every time Amazon tries something new, huh? (Tip: instead of spending $10/month, go down to your local library and get set up for borrowing eBooks. It’s free and the selection is wider.)

My take: The per-borrow payout has been a over $2 for months, now, slightly more than the royalty on a $3 eBook purchase. Amazon has offered a 30-day free trial, so I expect that August is going to push down that payout quite a bit (my guess: it will be around 50¢) despite Amazon increasing the fund by 66%. For some authors, the increased borrows will more than offset the depressed per-borrow payout. Others will hate it—perhaps enough to yank their books out of Select.

Amazon is walking a tightrope. At current payout levels, an average of four borrows per member per month (about one per week) will nearly wipe out the monthly subscription fee. But if the payout drops too far, authors will pull their most popular books, making the service much less attractive.

I’d recommend taking Green Day’s advice: wake me up when September ends. The free trials will peter out, Amazon will adjust the lending fund, and I expect that things will right themselves by November.

• • •

I’ve been tagged in the Meet my Main Character blog tour by my Twitter bud and co-op partner, Tony Noland!

Here are the rules:

The taggee must write a post answering the same seven questions about their MC (main character). Then the taggee becomes the tagger and chooses five other authors.

Since I have an ongoing series, this is both a WIP and a published work. It has not one MC, but three. I thought it would be more fun to let them answer the questions.

1. What is the name of your main character? Is he a fictional or a historical person?

Sura: What is this “he” about?

Mik: I think this world uses “he” as a generic pronoun, Sura.

Bailar: Mik is right. No offense was meant. Now, let me introduce us. I am Bailar the Blue, once Sorcerer of Exidy, although we haven’t seen home in over a year now. These are my apprentices: Sura sam Bailar, also my daughter, and Mik sim Mikhile, whom I named Mik Dragonrider. Sura and Mik are 14 and 15, respectively, as of our latest adventure. I suppose you would consider us fictional, although we feel quite real to ourselves.

2. When and where is the story set?

Bailar: We have roamed a great deal of Termag, the name of our world, so far. The three of us are citizens of the Stolevan Matriarchy, and we hope to return there some day. We’ve seen great cities, little upriver villages, and the ruins of ancient sites that will soon be resettled.

3. What should we know about him?

Sura: There’s that “him” again, but no matter. As an infant, I was abandoned on my father’s doorstep. It’s unheard of for Matriarchy women to abandon their daughters, but he raised me as his own. I learned of my true parentage in The Sorcerer’s Daughter. Without a mother, I’m legally the head of our household. Still, I defer to Father on certain matters.

Mik: I grew up in Lacota, one of those upriver villages the mentor mentioned. Two winters ago, I awakened an ice dragon when invaders from Westmarch were set to overrun my home. I had no training in sorcery, but the spell was in a child’s rhyme. It drove away the invaders, but I didn’t know I was supposed to dispell it afterwards. So it flew me to Exidy, and I became an apprentice.

Bailar: There is a fairly complete history of my life elsewhere. To that I would add, I have my hands full these days. Not only with all our adventures, but keeping the apprentices focused on their studies. Sura and Mik are good people, and excellent apprentices, but Nature tempts them. The skirmishes we’ve been in have given them a taste for mayhem as well, and that sometimes troubles me.

4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?

Sura: Patriarchies.

Mik: The mentor scrying when Sura and I are alone together.

Bailar: You need to whisper more softly, Mik.

Sura: That was second on my list.

Bailar: And that is why I scry. But my apprentices downplay our adventures. Each of the stories to date has a primary conflict, or perhaps a series of them. We have faced rogue mages, pirates on rivers and high seas, lovestruck suitors, and creatures thought extinct. We need not go looking for trouble, it finds us easily enough.

5. What is his personal goal?

Sura: His again. I give up. Let’s go, Mik. Father can finish this.

Bailar: Keeping the apprentices focused on earning their sashes, and keeping them safe. Although, sometimes, they end up rescuing me. Serving the Conclave, seeing new things. You know, I dreamed of adventure when I myself was an apprentice. As painful as it can be at times, I do enjoy this life.

6. Is there a working title for this novel and can we read more about it?

Bailar: Of course! First, I shall link to the first four stories already published.

Accidental Sorcerers
Water and Chaos
The Sorcerer's Daughter
Into the Icebound

The next story, Lost in Nightwalk, is about our harrowing experience in Koyr, which was supposed to be a safe haven. There will be excerpts soon enough, I believe.

7. When can we expect the book to be published?

Bailar: The first draft is complete, and the finished book should be available before the next solstice. Now, let me check on the apprentices before they get into too much mischief…

---

And… they’re gone. I guess I need to tag the next five victims. A lot of my Twitter friends are already tagged, so I’ll dip into the Google+ pool as well:

• +R.J. Blain 
• +Brooke Johnson 
• Craig WF Smith
• Scott Whitmore
• +Matthew Graybosch 

Writing Wibbles

If you haven’t seen the progress bars to the right of this text, check it out. Especially check out that top one, for Lost in Nightwalk. Yup, I wrapped it up Monday night! I wrote a little shell script, with some embedded awk, to generate that set of bars. It reads a text file and spits out the HTML, which I paste into the sidebar.

With that safely marinating for now, I finally get to breathe easy. There was an entire week that I didn’t touch it, but I got unstuck in time for the three-day weekend and made the most of it.

You know what that means, right? On to the next thing! Besides the stories listed in the sidebar, I have a couple others going. I’ll add them once I send Magic App Store and Marginalia to beta readers (at which point, I’ll remove them from the list). Speaking of which, I have two readers lined up for the former, and would like to get one or two more. I need three or four for the latter. Any volunteers? They’re short stores, 18K and 15K respectively, so they won’t take long.

Oh, and I’ve entered the Fantasy Cover Wars round for this month on Masquerade Crew. Follow the link and vote for Into the Icebound and one of the others, and remember to do it every day this month! As you might remember, The Sorcerer’s Daughter did very well in March—won by a commanding margin, in fact—so I’m hoping for a similar outcome this time.

If it’s reviews you’re looking for, it recently got 5 Smiling Frodos on Frodo’s Blog of Randomness!

I owe some people some book reviews, so I ’m off to write those. Until next time…

Taking a Dive

Daughter Dearest has been living in one of the rental trailers below the father-in-law’s place for the last couple months. I haven’t said much about it, because… well yeah, she left the nest, but it’s the same tree. She has a roommate, whom we’ll call Roomie. I can’t think of a more suitable blog-name that doesn’t insult what little intelligence she has (oops, I did it anyway). But I digress.

So, between her trailer and the family of Mr. Sunshine, BrandX, J, and Evil Lad NOT, is a third trailer. This one is rented out by Some Guy. Some Guy will usually help out around the farm if his part-time construction job doesn’t have him otherwise occupied. He grills a lot on his back deck, and invites BrandX and the girlies over to chow down and hang out.

Two weekends ago, he invited DD and Roomie to do a bar run. (I should point out, DD has a boyfriend, but Some Guy isn't him. He’s in Rome GA.) So Roomie was like “Sure!” and DD was “I’ll be the designated driver.” They took his truck and went to Dahlonega. (There’s a song about Dahlonega. My favorite line is It always smells like chicken $#¡+ on Highway 9 / But at least we can score cheap moonshine.)

Now I should mention, Some Guy is divorced and has a daughter, and of course his wife likes to play the custody games that some divorced people seem to revel in. So he was off to drown his sorrows, and Roomie just likes to drink and par-tay. They went to one place, and it was a little crowded with local college students, so they moved on to a different bar. There, Some Guy was talking with a young woman… and then her boyfriend showed up and got belligerent. DD got everyone out of there without a fight, and they left that place.

This is where it gets interesting. Some Guy was bummed out to begin with, and this didn’t help. DD was driving his truck, with Roomie in the middle and him in the shotgun position. Except that he said, “I’m tired of this,” and abandoned his position. By which I mean he jumped out of the truck that was moving at around 30mph.

DD stood on the brakes, and they jumped out. By this time, Some Guy was already on his feet, which says something about drunken luck. Still, he was banged up pretty seriously; he looked like an extra for a Walking Dead episode. DD took charge, started to call 911, but realized they were close enough to the hospital that she could drive him to the ER faster than an ambulance could get there. “Get in the truck,” she told Some Guy. (Meanwhile, Roomie was standing in the road in dark clothes, just gaping.)

“I don’t want to get blood in my truck,” he replied.

The tailgate was down, fortunately. Long-time blog readers know that DD can do a pretty good imitation of She-Hulk when things get dicey. She picked him up and threw him into the bed, told Roomie to watch to make sure he didn’t jump out again, then drove to the hospital. This was around 12:30am. DD called home to let us know what happened, because she wasn’t sure if he was even going to survive it. However, they let him out at 4am with a few instructions about changing the dressings.

The interesting thing was, back when the wife had the knee replacement just before Thanksgiving, they sent us four boxes of supplies —massive dressings, wide gauze rolls, tape—and she didn’t even need one box worth. We stacked them in the bathroom, and there they sat until we sent them down to him. After DD got through with him, he looked like an extra from The Mummy, one of the corpses that was only partly wrapped:

Don't jump out of a moving truck.
You might need more bandages than this.

So yeah, Some Guy is lucky to be alive and able to gimp around (he wrenched his ankle). He’s also lucky DD didn’t do him in herself, after that little stunt. :-P

Somebody’s very glad he’s still around:

Who would feed and brush me
if you're gone?

Remember, boys and girls, keep your bods inside the vehicle until it has come to a complete stop.

The Sentinel Tree (#FridayFlash)

This originally appeared on Google+ in one of +MJ Bush’s “tell me a story” prompts. I’m using a similar but different photo here to avoid copyright issues.

---

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons

Lis looked at the ancient tree, the sentinel of the gods, standing watch under the night sky. When her ancestors first came to this place, uncounted generations ago, it had stood on this hilltop. She shifted her burden, nestling in the crook of her arm, and began.

Climbing up to the hollow space one-handed was difficult, but not impossible. Lis teetered at the edge for a moment, then hopped down and crouched. The hollow was safe and inviting, and people often came here to meditate or leave offerings. Lis knelt and laid her infant son on the smooth floor. “O gods,” she whispered, tears streaming, “I am dispossessed of my home, through no sin of my own. Do with me what you will, for none are innocent, but do not allow this child to starve in a heartless world.”

As she stood, she heard a whisper: Take up your child.

“You reject him?” she sobbed. “You would have him starve?”

No, the whisper replied. Take him up, go south to the old road, then follow it west.

“But we'll starve before we go far!”

There are trees and vines whose fruit will sustain you. And streams of clean water. Follow the road, and you will find a welcome and a home.

Lis looked up the hollow at the sky. A star streaked across the Highway of the Gods, toward the west. Trust. Follow.

“I… I will.” Lis lifted her son and scrambled out. The way south was easy, all downhill. She could do this. More stars streaked to the west, perhaps preparing her new home.

Behind her, the tree returned to its long slumber.

Writing Wibbles

When I released the first three Accidental Sorcerers novellas, I had a good start on the next story in the series. That wasn’t the case for Into the Icebound—I only had about 3000 words down for the sequel (working title Lost in Nightwalk). After sending four of these stories into the eBook stores, I now have a pretty good idea how long it takes to get a first draft knocked into shape. If I want to keep my “roughly six months” schedule, I’ll need to have the first draft done by mid-July.

Scrivener is a great tool for this kind of thing. Select “Show Project Targets” in the Project menu, and you get a little window with the basic stuff you need:

Scrivener’s Project Targets

The “Options…” button lets you set the deadline date, and what days of the week you intend to write (I set it to take Sundays off). Clicking on the rightmost number under the top progress bar lets you set the target manuscript size. You can adjust it later if you need. I set a somewhat optimistic target of 40,000 words, as you can see, although I now think 32,000 is going to be closer to the actual word count.

It’s pretty simple, really. Tell it how big, how often, and how soon, and it gives you a daily word count target (the “Session Target”). It has moved around some, as I’d write over 1000 words some nights and not at all on others, but right now it’s pretty close to the 850 words/day target I started with… which means that, averaged out over the last month or so, I’ve stayed pretty much on target.

• • •

Salon Doubles Down

There’s a disturbing trend these days. Some organizations will say or print something that’s rather detached from reality, and people will call them on it. Instead of doing some research, or anything that might lead them to have to say, “dang, we really hosed our credibility running that tripe,” they dig in. In some circles, it’s called doubling down on the stupid.

Enter Salon. Andrew Leonard kicked off the month of June with your basic publishing industry press release stenography (because committing journalism is a misdemeanor or something), called Amazon’s scorched-earch campaign. He threw around inflammatory phrases like “monopoly power,” “heavy-handed tactics,” and (the worst insult of all) comparing Amazon to Walmart. Of course, he provided no evidence that Amazon has a monopoly on anything, nor that what they’re doing is disproportionate, nor that they’re sending thousands of publishing jobs to China.

So indies, from Hugh Howey and J.A. Konrath all the way down to me, called them on it, providing counter-arguments with evidence. In some alternate universe, a senior editor at Salon acquired clue, pulled the article, and ran a more balanced piece that used actual data and provided links. In this universe… Salon doubled down on the stupid. This time, it was Laura Miller and Amazon is not your friend: Why self-published authors should side with Hachette. (This disturbing lack of title caps seems to be a thing with Salon. But I suppose if you're not doing actual journalism, it doesn’t matter.)

In this article, the points are:

• The only people defending Amazon are indies.
• Many indies are angry with traditional publishers because the authors failed to get in (or are former midlisters who got screwed over and dumped).
• Self-published authors really, really, really hate traditional publishing (actual quote here).
• High prices for tradpub eBooks help indies by allowing us to compete on price.
• A publishing contract is a business deal.
• Most indie works are dreck, slush pile, etc.
• Tradpub books are higher quality, and so deserve a higher markup.
• Amazon might screw us over in some unspecified future.

OK, the fourth and fifth points are good ones. Stopped clocks, blind squirrels, etc. The rest is once again long on flamebait, short on evidence. Now I remember why I quit reading Salon around 2006.

C’mon, tradpub supporters. Is this the best you can do? Really? Regurgitate the same tropes from 2010 and pretend nothing has changed? If anything, traditional publishers have been squeezing their authors even harder since eBooks started booming. With almost zero production costs, eBooks give publishers more profit… and lower royalties to authors. Don’t take my word for it, Lagardère (Hachette’s parent company) put it on their slides in their shareholder presentation. Hugh Howey has them on his blog.

As far as tradpub books being higher quality goes, just saying “50 Shades of Grey” would be too easy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at a book published 50 years ago, and one published now, and see how production quality has deteriorated. Typesetters have been replaced with Microsoft Word. Copyediting isn’t nearly as rigorous as it once was, and your typical tradpub book has plenty of typos and errors to go around. One of the hardcover editions of Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas books had an entire line missing from the bottom of the first page! If they’d let that get by with Dean Koontz, what chance do midlisters have of getting a quality production run?

Finally, the notion that Amazon might stop giving indies decent terms—when the worst-case the detractors suggest might happen is still a better deal than authors get from traditional publishers—is laughable at best.

If publishers had some regard for authors and readers, beyond squeezing as much money as possible out of each, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.