*In kindness, or perhaps because he wants me to be done with Noah’s Boy already (and he’s not the only one breathing down my neck while I struggle with my writing-to-contract phobia) RES sent me a post on how the artist reflects society.  He’s promised me a companion piece already.  And, btw, I never knew he was a Times New Roman over Ariel biggot [live and learn.]

In a different note, today I have a free short story up up Amazon — it was up here for a week, but if you missed it, head on over.  Something Worse Hereafter should go free at noon Eastern, or in about two hours and change.  My goal is to keep a free story on Amazon between here and the end of the year, and see if that helps goose numbers.  We’ll see, right?*

In A Warped Mirror

By RES

 

It is said that the duty of the artist is to reflect Society.  Unlike many of the things often asserted, it probably is true, although probably not in the way most artists want to believe.

 

It is not that the artist should hold up a mirror to Society, it is that the artist, by the nature of creating art, does hold up that mirror.  In most instances it is a funhouse mirror, in rare cases it is a true mirror, but the artist cannot refrain from reflecting Society as the artist understands it.

 

No artist exists in the absence of Society; their values and how they see the world are shaped by Society.  Their conceptions of what is good and just versus evil and unjust are a response to the society in which they swim.  Even if an artist somehow supercedes Society, their art must remain of Society in order to be understood by that society.  Art is a conversation and the artist either converses with Society or talks to himself.

 

What, then, is the duty of the artist?  While many an artist thinks to hold up a true mirror, the mirror held is almost always warped because few artists have the depth of understanding necessary to offer a true reflection.  An artist has preferences and values (Tolerance versus Holding to Principles, Acceptance of Outsiders versus Group Cohesion and Identity, Times Roman versus Ariel) which warp the mirror raised because they form the basis of the artist’s understanding of Society, of Good & Evil, of Proper & Improper, of Couth & Uncouth.

 

Removing the timber from your own eye is extremely difficult, yet it is necessary to more accurately reflect the world.  One approach is to rigorously exert yourself to understand the world you are reflecting.  If you write a Historical, be true to the characters in their Time and Place.  Few Antebellum Southerners questioned their Peculiar Institution; few Yankees mill owners thought there was anything wrong with locking the workers into the mills during work hours.  Giving modern views and opinions to historical characters should be done with extreme care; avoid the temptation to wheedle readers’ sympathies by having a character reflect contemporary sensibilities.  In presenting the views of historical characters the antecedents of those views should be expressed, placing them in the context of an ongoing social debate.  One era’s enlightened view is another era’s Paleolithic thinking.

 

People are and have been shaped by the cultures in which they were raised, with those cultures’ envisionment of the Cosmic All imbibed at their mothers’ breasts.  Rare is the character able to reject the standards of measurement of their natal culture, and only extreme circumstances can bring them to do so.  It requires a powerful motivation for Huck Finn to reject the premise that Jim is somebody’s property, just as it required soul-searing experiences for him to even question that idea in the first place.  Had Twain not put Huck through a wringer those changed ideas would have failed to bring the reader along with him and dimmed the mirror’s reflection.

 

Characters should represent the zeitgeist of their era as accurately as possible, partly because the reader has chosen that genre in order to learn about that zeitgeist, partly to reflect both the society presented and the society to which that view is presented.  Part of the pleasure of reading a historical novel is to crawl inside a character perspective different from my own, both to experience that perspective in order to understand that era and to contemplate the differences between that era and my own.

 

It is important to provide readers various touchstones to properly orient in the historical era.  If reading a Western I need to know, the author needs to show me the basic premises of the culture.  I have to be told, for example, that $100 was a lot of money, was four months’ wages for a working ranch-hand.  I need to have explained the different concepts of Time and Distance governing people in that era, when fifty miles represented a hard day’s travel, when a month was the time for a letter to travel from sender to recipient.  Most importantly, I need to see how these factors affect the way people of that era think.

 

The goal is to provide enough information to allow readers to understand the nature of the culture they are viewing and to allow for the way our present perspectives distort the artist’s mirror.  It is vitally important for the artist to minimize projection of modern attitudes and values as a source of distortion; it is bad enough the readers bring their own values and expectations.  Because Society’s rules and standards are constantly shifting, Today’s blindspot is Tomorrow’s glaring fault.  Present characters and situations that are appropriate to their period.

 

Science Fiction and Fantasy present similar yet different challenges.  In them the author too easily succumbs to the urge to write lazily, to presume the attitudes which the author desires to promote.  Heinlein believed in “Free Love” and in later novels simply waved his hand, presenting characters who nobly and unselfishly enjoyed multiple partners.  At least in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress he provided a back story to make such attitudes a justified response to extreme conditions, and provided historical basis for the reader to accept the meme.

 

Darkship Thieves handles the issue of presenting a Libertarian society by displaying it through the eyes of an outsider, dumped into the society unwillingly and unexpectedly.  We are given enough background of the culture’s history to imagine we understand how they reached this social solution, and because the narrator is naive in regards to the culture she challenges and asks questions, allowing the social adjustment to be justified.  Because the reader is equally naïve, the identification with and sympathy with the narrator are enhanced.  Willingness to accept the character’s conclusions is greater because the author has “shown her work.”

 

Ayn Rand’s characters, on the other hand, are generally cardboard, acting according to authorial requirements for the philosophy she wants to present, speaking all too often in polemical oratory, too rarely as real people.  The mirror she holds up to Society is a warped one, purporting to present both how Society is (conniving and corrupt bureaucrats striving to control everything) and how she wishes it would see itself (entrepreneurs acting to improve the general weal by advancing their personal interests.)  Because her characters are not brought to life their experiences are less moving to the reader than they ought be.  Her mirror is dulled; we do not see our own reflections therein.  Even people who share Rand’s politics are distanced from the novel by the flatness of the characters.

 

For truly powerful and moving art, the artist must understand the world being reflected, must know the motivations and histories of all the major characters and many of the minor ones.  Every character should have a personal code, a set of lenses through which they view their world, and the reader needs to know each character well enough to understand that viewpoint even if (especially if) they don’t agree with that view.  Villains should not simply be given Black Hats — repellant personal traits and characteristics that the reader recognizes as signs the character is despicable — and White Hats.  Their motives should be complex enough to be credible rather than something as jejune as a lost childhood sled (unless the lost sled represents a stolen childhood.)

 

Heroes and heroines ought be motivated by moral principles perceptible to the reader, if only through many layers of character.  Sure, Li’l Abner’s Mammy could declare that “good is better than evil because it’s nicer” but that’s because she was a character in a comic strip dedicated to parodying mindless memes, the bad mirrors of the strip’s era.  When a character has to struggle to make a decision the reader needs to know why this is a struggle, what values are in conflict and what their roots are.  If the character makes a decision without any struggle, the reader should have seen why the character was decisive, why Value This so readily trumped Value That.

 

A culture is defined by its values, and those values define the culture.  Subcultures exist and define themselves by the values they emphasize and de-emphasize: group loyalty over fidelity to the standards of the larger culture, recognition or non-recognition of rights of those not belonging to the group.  A reader’s ability to perceive and recognize these distinctions affects the level of involvement in the tale.

 

While it is nearly impossible to perceive the world so thoroughly and clearly to present a true mirror, the artist should strive to polish the mirror to the best of their abilities and to make the warps in the mirror as honest as they can.  Admit preferences — Human Wave or Grey Goo — so that the reader can sense the warp in the glass; trust the reader to share that warp, if only for the length of your story.

Do you ever look in the mirror and wonder who you are?  Sometimes, heading out of my tiny powder room, after washing my hands, I catch a glimpse of my paternal grandmother in the mirror.

No, I’m not as old – nor do I look as old – as she was when I first met her, much less my first memories of her (which were of her being sixty three.)  And we’re not objectively that much alike.  Like most people, I went through life looking now more like one parent, now more like the other, depending on how I wear my hair and what weight I am.

But as I catch a brief, sidewise glimpse of my own face in the mirror, there’s that quirk in the lips, that expression in the eye, and my heart flip flops and I think “Grandma” before I check myself.

There is heredity, of course.  I stop short of believing our heredity programs us like little robots, that, beyond fate, we’re acting in some kabuki theater where every action was predetermined from the moment of birth and we only think we have free will.  Someone like me who kicked over the traces pretty hard, and whose initial elaborate “running away from home” as an exchange student hinged on seeing a particular poster at a particular time would have trouble believing that.  Besides, as I’ve explained before, even if it were true, I wouldn’t believe it.  To believe it would be to concede evil has won, that there is no choice and no such thing as an individual, and that we are like so many ants, following scent trails.

Besides, if that were true, the one nation that enshrined individual liberty would have done worst of all in prosperity and living conditions.

So unless it is proven at some point we really are living inside a computer simulation (!) I’ll continue believing that most of what we do is… well, not nurture so much (though that comes in) but self-will.

Which leaves me baffled by the things that aren’t, by those bits of actions/expressions/attitudes that seem to pass down the stream of DNA without our volition.

It is impossible, of course – Sarah says, channeling her inner Miss Marple – to live in a village and no know something about human nature.  And what I know about human nature is that to an extent “what is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.”

My family was known in the village for “A gift of words” – despite some stunning sports we threw out now and then, like my inarticulate grandfather, whose words were likely to come out backwards and sideways, as did my older uncle’s and as do my younger kid’s (though that might be developmental, as it’s going away now, being replaced with family-normal fluency) a disability that seems to always coincide with some form of engineering ability.

If they needed a spokesman for the village, someone to write a poem, some sort of wordsmithing, they came to us, even when the current representatives of the family were manual laborers or craftspeople.

How much of that was bred in the bone?  How much was the conversations around the dinner table where philosophical questions would be unpinned and you learned your vocabulary at three from listening to dad and granddad argue about the differences between various methods of governance?

One of the things that indicates heredity is the resurgence of the same characteristics in the descendants of a “sport.”  My inarticulate grandfather, whom his parents, in despair, had apprenticed as a cabinet maker, produced – among his grandchildren – as many lawyers, psychologists, doctors and engineers as his far more articulate brothers who were in those professions.  This despite the fact that as the much poorer branch we were more or less isolated from that side of the family.

In fact, going back as far back as one can, in my paternal line, one finds reasonably well educated people (even when general literacy in Portugal was minimal, all of us knew how to read, the women included) who predominantly show a flair for wordsmithing which might or might not be coupled with other abilities.  Professions range from crafts to law, though the family has a strong tendency to engineering and doctoring.

How much is bred in the bone?  It shows as bred in the bone, but is it?  How much is the talk around the dinner table?  And how much is picking mates who understand that talk?  My articulate father married an articulate and casually brilliant woman whose scant education was dwarfed by an interest in … everything.  (Though mom, like my younger son is very suspicious of fiction.)

Perhaps it is that I’m getting older which causes me to worry when I catch a glimpse of grandma in the mirror.  Not because I’m afraid I’m looking older.  I have no illusions about the fallibility of the flesh.  But because I wonder about gifts received and what I’ve done with them.  I wonder if I am living as I’m predisposed to or if I’m truly choosing.  I wonder about things like the Almeida tendency to pick the most bassawkward political theories to follow.  (With me being small l libertarian and my brother being a communist, though, it leaves  one in a puzzle.  Maybe we’re headed to an era with no political theory at all?)

Perhaps it is because I’m raising kids away from all the relatives who could have reasonably influenced their expressions, their beliefs, their ways of being in the world. And yet, my younger son is so close to my dad we might as well have cloned dad.  He even follows the same developmental milestones.

Then there’s Robert who is a patchwork of both families and who startles me suddenly with a look like my grandfather Alvarim’s, or by sitting like my grandmother Carolina.

Bits and patches, and …  Who are we?

If we go back far enough, we’re all cousins, probably several times over.  As Older Son is fond of reminding me, human population has gone through extreme bottle necks at least three times, and there might have been less than a hundred individuals.  So, we’re all cousins.

But you still see a continuity in a line, when you know the line.

And when you don’t?  I know adopted children who are more like their adopted parents than the parents’ natural kids.

I know that our pediatrician, when we talked about adopting and being afraid of getting a kid who’d be lost in our family, said “In your family?  Not a chance.  By the time they’re three, they’ll have the same vocabulary and fluency and they’ll test bright, anyway.”

Is it true?  I don’t know.  In the same way both kids often feel like total strangers, or like all too familiar, I suspect it would be the same.

Who are they?  Who are we?  What unknown/unremembered ancestor gave us that nose?  Where on Earth did those eyes gaze before?  That tendency to lead with the chin when arguing… where did it come from?  Was the last ancestor to do that some Phoenician merchant whose last remaining bit of DNA in the blood left me only that?

Thinking about this stuff brings about the same sort of vertigo that looking down on an endless abyss does.

And of course in the end the answer is always the same – you take your bits and pieces, patch them as best you can and carry on.  You mend what you can, you accept what you can’t (because even you aren’t endlessly changeable, no matter how much will power you have) and you carry on.

But sometimes you catch that glimpse and you can’t avoid thinking “Who am I really?  And what hidden depths have I failed to unlock?”

This report about what my readers have been up to is somewhat hampered by the fact that half of them seem to have wittlows which have prevented their finishing things.

The most creative excuse is from CF who was rescuing kittens and therefore can’t write.  (Um… don’t you rescue kittens too, Sarah?  Yeah, but I often also don’t write.)

So, I’ll start with the ones that have stuff, you know, actually up and for sale.  So:

STRYDER DANCEWOLFFE:

Karma’s Beach,  in the Family Influence series

STEVE POLING:

Finding time

(Sarah note – your title should be larger and your name must be larger on that cover, Steve.)

KAREN MYERS:

To Carry The Horn.

And, being an overachiever, Karen reports on her endeavor, also:

Just published my very first novel (actually, my very first work of fiction), the first book of a fantasy series. Landing page here: http://perkunaspress.com/wp/books/the-hounds-of-annwn/to-carry-the-horn/

Took five months, morning before work (I was on a mission). I’ve been ascending the very steep learning curve and, while I have a lot to learn, it has actual architecture and I’m content that it’s good as I can make it at this point in my experience. Did all the cover and formatting work myself (I’m a techie, but Smashwords just about killed me.) Hard-copy proof arrived last night — what a rush! — should go up in about 2 weeks.

What I’m crowing about is that the very instant the book goes live on Amazon this week some kind person buys it. But even better, the instant it’s up on Smashwords, someone not only buys it, but reads it immediately and writes a 5-star review which cites a meaningful aspect of the book. In other words, someone paid me money and when he read the book, he “got it” in some basic way. Whoo-hoo! Better than drugs!

I haven’t announced it yet to my initial prospects, waiting for the hard-copy (they’re by-and-large Luddites), and who knows how it may chug along at just a few sales until the next few books in the series come out. But I couldn’t be more pleased to be rewarded with an intelligent and satisfied reader right out of the gate.

(And don’t worry Karen, Smashwords annoys everyone — Sarah)

DEBORAH KINNARD:

The Faith Box Book One: Peaceweaver (TheFaith Box)

She also reports:  Peaceweaver, my 973 Wales book my agent said would never sell, came out last month from Desert Breeze. Working on its sequel and my first try at indie-work: Hello Again, a contemporary romance, will release as soon as I figure out this formatting thing.

D. JASON FLEMING:

For The Fragile Muses

MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER:

Ulterior Motive Lounge: UML, 80s Flicks, and Bunny Slippers

Sense of Wonder

The Mother Anthony

It ALSO comes with a report (for one the links above are kindle, but he has them in other formats as well:

My two self-pubbed stories are now on B&N and Smashwords as well as Amazon (where they’ve been all year).

“The Mother Anthony” tells of a teacher on a starship in peril, and the sacrifices she makes for the sake of her students. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mother-anthony-martin-shoemaker/1113474440?ean=2940015588194 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/244949

“Sense of Wonder” tells of a Lunar geologist and the price he pays to do science on the Moon. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sense-of-wonder-martin-shoemaker/1113474444?ean=2940015588262 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/244990

Kim Du Toit:

(In the interest of keeping Monsieur Du Toit from kicking the cat again, I’m adding links received via email which I was remiss in not posting — besides, if he kicks Greebo, he’ll withdraw a bloody stump.)

www.kimdutoit.com for the one-stop shopping experience; or, if you’d prefer the Amazon.com links:

Prime Target

Creative License

Vienna Days

Family Fortunes

Then there’s those that have stuff, but not for sale, yet:

TRAVIS CORCORAN:

1. I’m revising my first novel “The Powers of the Earth”. Without false modesty I’m a pretty decent NON-fiction writer (I’ve sold something like 7 out of 7 articles I’ve submitted to national magazines), but fiction is new to me, and there’s SUCH a juggling act with plot, characters, dialogue, fore-shadowing, and so much more.

I started work on this libertarian-rebels-on-the-moon-vs-socialist-Earth-government (yes, yes, I know Heinlein did it first. …and better. novel about two years ago (1 Jan 2011). Since then I’ve

* written the first draft (160,000 words)
* revised it to make the plot coherent (220,000 words, split into two novels)
* and am now 40% of the way through revising it again

I hope to finish this pass (draft 3) in another 50 days or so, take a two week break for the holidays, then work on draft 4 (the FINAL draft, I pray!) for the first 3 months of 2013. Then off to copyediting.

Details, in case anyone is interested:

http://morlockpublishing.com

CELIA HAYES:

The Tiny Publishing Bidness just signed two clients this week, and I’ll have to be working on their books over the next two months – so I went all-out this week on my own next book: working title “The Quivera Trail” . It’s about an Englishwoman who marries a Texas cattleman in 1876; think of it as Mrs. Gaskell meets Zane Grey. I’ve posted sample chapters, and put together a list here: http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/back-pages-and-sample-chapters/ I’m about three-quarters through. I think. Something may come up, plot-wise. Settled some of my Christmas schedule: three days at the Weinachtsmarkt in New Braunfels, and a Saturday at Christmas on the Square at Goliad, the first Saturday in December. And there was also a bit of the usual blogging, and an excursion into the Hill Country by back roads, which produced some marvelous photographs.
And yesterday, we went to the BMT graduation parade at Lackland, to support the son of a neighbor of ours, whom we had encouraged and helped to enlist in the Air Force.
Busy week, all told.

CYN BAGLEY:

I am posting a novel on my blog http://scrambledsage.blogspot.com called Perchance to Dream. Plus I you can find some of my shorts there. Come on by and tell me how I’m doing

Perchance to Dream is about three protagonists talking in their own voices. I don’t usually use first person.

KALI:

But please put in a word for the free serial Ilona Andrews is running at their website:
http://demo.ilona-andrews.com/category/clean-sweep/ It’s urban fantasy but with Andrews’ distinctive flavor, so even if you’re tired of UF or would never give it a try, well, give it a try

CYN BAGLEY:

Also you said friends – Shelly Arkon at her blog http://shellysnovicewritings.blogspot.com/2012/10/sir-poops-and-hair-ball-host-secondhand.html is doing a free drawing for her newly released book Secondhand Shoes. She has two dogs helping with the drawing and also does interviews of authors on her Nosh Tuesdays.

BOB STOCK:

I recently Kindleized (probably not a word, but should be) a friend’s amusing fantasy novel, Aluvir and the Circle of Twelve. Old-school gamers should get a nostalgic kick out of it. Sean Rhoades, the author, was active on the gaming scene and wrote for Cosmic Encounter and Earthdawn. I’m also pleased how the cover came out, as I have minimal artistic talent; just took some photos and used Microsoft Picture It to apply some filters:
Aluvir and the Circle of Twelve
Reading your recent comments and articles, I’m going to have to raise the price soon from $2,99 by a buck or two!

The synopsis is: “The formidable mercenary guild known as The Circle of Twelve had perfected a simple, lucrative business model: Orc Exterminators Incorporated. Their latest job clearing caverns of dungeon vermin was supposed to be routine. But soon they were caught up in a web of ancient intrigue involving dark elves, daimonic possession, and nothing less than the dragon apocalypse. Would anyone be left alive to pay their wages?”

I’ve also been working on improving the formatting, redoing the covers and adding NCX to some early Kindle books I put up, which were vanity projects to publish the posthumous poetic works of my grandfather, chief among them the Gospel of Demetrius, which in 400 verses purports to explain where God came from, where the Universe came from, where You came from, where your Brain came from, where your Soul came from, and why Atheists are definitely wrong. With a full description of Life after Death!
Gospel of Demetrius

So much content to format, so little time…

Cat’s Paw, by Robert A. Hoyt

Written when he was 13 but NOT a YA.  Not even though all that stands between the humanity and the end of the world is an alcoholic stray cat.  The Gods Must Be Crazy meets Aesop meets The Terminator.

ConSensual, second in Kate Paulk’s vampire at SF conventions series

Vampires, succubi, incubi, werewolves AND my entire family tuckerized in the bargain.  (Lies, all lies.)

Nocturnal Origins first in the Nocturnal Lives Series by Amanda S. Green

If you like it, try the second, Nocturnal Serenade, too.

Then there’s Lawyers of Mars by Pam Uphoff – which is insane.  No, seriously.  It makes Cat’s Paw seem sane.  Try it!

And if you don’t mind mysteries with gay main characters, give C. S. Laurel’s B. Quick a try.  It’s the first of a series.

Next week I shall try to have some of my stuff up for free, and maybe I can get one or two of Dan’s stories up as well.  I’m trying to get him to rewrite his space opera for NANOWRIMO.   I put up an excerpt here.  Maybe I can get help with the nagging?

Other than discussing theology (again — rolls eyes.  Like a dog with a favorite bone.) and making puns, I mean…

In a publishing sort of way?  Post in comments, and I’ll make it into a coherent post sometime tomorrow.

New stories?  Favorite stories?  Yours?  Your friends?  Something going free or discounted this week?  Teaching any workshops?  Let me know, I’ll post it.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Falling

Saying he’d use the power of a subject of fairyland was one thing – finding power to use was another.  Gabriel Penn, still Gabriel Penn, fighting against the encroachment of something alien and strange upon his mind, and knowing he was both himself and that strange thing and had always been, lay on his back at the center of the neck sack enclosing them all.

It seemed to him he was very alone despite his sister and brother, despite the princess and the centaur – was Caroline holding the centaur’s hand?  Damn the prophecy and damn its casual pulling of people into roles it had prescribed.  Seraphim would–  He cut the thought off.

If he gave in, if he succumbed to the prophecy’s demands, he would not have to worry about Seraphim’s wrath.  He would not have to worry about wounding Seraphim’s feelings, either.

It wasn’t just that he would not be going back to Earth – Gabriel’s memory played over his years in the Darkwater household with a fond nostalgia that might have surprised those who had always thought of him as oddly out of place, neither servant nor family member.  But it wasn’t only that that he’d been leaving behind.  Part of what made his time at Darkwater idyllic was that, away from his mother, away from fairyland, he’d been able to pretend that he was human: just human.

Even his time with Marlon had been the same or close enough: they’d been pretending they were humans together, and it had been a lovely game, down to cleaving to human moral rules or at least to the extent of hiding and pretending.

But neither of them was human, and Gabriel was something more than a mere half elf.  He’d tried to deceive himself for years that the prophecy was not really about him, that the cold, vast entity he felt, at the back of his own mind, the odd knowledge he had, the things he could sense were not – in any way – part of the fact that he’d been born to be king of elves.

He envied mere humans and their free will.  He envied elves and their lack thereof.  Created, as angels were said to be – though Gabriel had never met an angel and couldn’t attest to it of his own knowledge – without free will, elves were bound to their fate like slaves to a master.  They could rebel, but the rebellion either lasted very little, or it twisted the elf…  Like Gabriel’s uncle.

But Gabriel was neither human nor elf, walking between the worlds forever.  Which didn’t mean he hadn’t known what his elf fate was, or what he as meant to do…  He’d just thought his human half would help him escape it.  And for a while it had.  But prophecies were powerful things, especially in fairyland.  And there were more than one person – more than one entity – conspiring with the prophecy to bring him to the point and to make him obey.

And he’d run himself off his legs – he thought, going lax against the net, feeling the net dig into his back, and looking up at the nebulous dark where the net was hooked, probably to nothing more than a belief that something hooked it.

He glared at it, probing the fixings there.  If he caused the net to fall, could he manage to catch everyone else in here in his power and transport them somewhere, possibly Earth?

Could he do that and arrange his own death?  His mind flinched from self murder, but it was the only way to avoid his fate, and oh, he wanted to avoid his fate.

But then he thought of fairyland, and of the few glimpses he’d had of his uncle’s mind, in recent days, and also of the complications he senses extended all the way to Avalon and maybe to Earth, of the Others that Seraphim and himself had had to find, to rescue unfortunates from non-magic worlds.

Something very bad had been happening in fairyland, and if his uncle continued holding power, it would only get worse.  Gabriel had been taught, back on Earth, that fairyland was a parasite world, feeding off other worlds, like a leech upon a healthy being.  But his feeling, from the thing at the back of his head was something else.  Not something he could fully access or release without also releasing the… not human personality back there, but he knew that somehow a healthy fairyland was essential to the all the worlds.  As much as he would like to destroy the thing and make it burn, he couldn’t.  As much as his human half hated it, the slipperiness of it and its strange ways, he could no more destroy it than he could destroy his human family.

He narrowed his eyes, looking at the suspended net, overhead.  No.  He couldn’t kill himself or destroy fairyland.  Worse, he couldn’t balk the prophecy.  If he somehow managed to get out of here without letting the thing in the back of his head out, it would still get out sooner than later.  The prophecy would push him around and corner him, like a dog with a hare, until it had him just where it wanted him.

So, let the thing out, a little.  Use it a little.  Delay the evil moment as far as possible.

He said “Be ready, princess,” and was shocked at the odd harmonics in his voice, which seemed to echo with a weird force and bounce off non-existent walls.  “When I release you, find your way home with … my siblings and this misguided centaur.  Go home.  Go home as quickly as you can.”

She said something, but Gabriel couldn’t hear it.  He’d gone inside his own head, searching for the link to subjects of fairyland.

It wasn’t unexpected that he found doors barring to him – metaphorically.  The sacred groves rejected him, and the centaurs too, even though Akakios was his proof that the centaurs too were playing the prophecy and risking their lives and their prince to do it.

Magical fountains edged him off.  There were no words of course, but if there had been, it would have been the classical ones of “turn away, turn away, for you are not of fairyland.”

The dragons turned their head away from him, though he sensed they too were not quite refusing to take his side, but afraid of what the current sovereign might do to them.

And there hinged the dilemma.  He could not fight his uncle for the royal position and the royal power unless he got out of here.  But to get out of here, he needed the royal prerogative that would allow him to cut through the net and challenge his uncle.

It was a paradox, and he was more bound in it than in this net.  His hands clutched futilely at the threads of the net on either side.

He’d need someone who was of fairyland, but who had walked away, as Gabriel had.  Someone who would give him the power to do this.  He thought of his mother and shuddered.  His mother…  He’d never been sure if she loved him or not, or even if she felt anything at all.  She’d been thrown out of fairyland as a changeling at the age of five, and though she’d returned after, yet in her mind she remained a five year old child.  She could break things without malice or intent, just to know what was inside.

No, in this straight, his mother was the last person he could trust.

And the first person?  He tried to fight against the thought.  All he could remember was that poor animated corpse against the wall.  But Marlon had said that wasn’t intentional.  Which left…

Which left the ridiculous binding he’d tried to put on Gabriel when Gabriel had come back.  But Gabriel sensed, in a way he couldn’t quite think clearly about that this was because Marlon had a horrible fear of being left, of losing those he loved.  Perhaps not unwarranted.  He’d never had many people who loved him back, from what Gabriel had gathered about his truly horrible childhood.

And despite that fear, he’d removed the bind and let Gabriel go.

Gabriel was imprisoned but his mind and power were free.  He searched through the worlds, finding Marlon’s familiar mind-touch.  Seen through the mind only, he looked younger and less defensive than Gabriel was used to – younger than Gabriel in fact.

Gabriel had only a dim awareness of Marlon’s surroundings: A house, a threatening presence.  Heavens, was that a dragon?  Was Marlon, then, in fairyland?

He got the impression Marlon was … busy and in the middle of a knot of magic.  But his response to Gabriel’s mind touch was immediate.  “Gabriel!”  Marlon mind-spoke at him, recognition and gladness in his mental voice, and also the sort of total shocked surprise that made Gabriel feel a little like he’d been unjust.

“I—” he said.  He’d thought to demand and to order.  But that surprised took the rug out from under his feet.  He kept his mind and mental voice strictly human and his request was framed in human words, “I am in trouble, Marlon, and I need to borrow your power to survive this.”

“My… power?”  Gabriel had a feeling of… not reluctance, but almost fear.

Gabriel let him see the net, above, the people in with him.

“No chance of… waiting.  An hour, two?”  Again that not quite reluctance, but almost fear.

“Uh, as you know… time in fairyland.”

“Oh.  Yes.  And Himself would manipulate it.”

“Yes.”

He almost heard Marlon swallow.  For some reason the idea of ceding his power just now terrified Marlon, but on the heels of the swallow came an answer, “How do I do this?  How can I let you have my power.”

“You recognize me as your sovereign,” Gabriel said.  “You pronounce your power mine to use.”

“It is yours to use.”

“No, in elven.”

“Well, then,” Marlon said and spoke the words, ancestral and inborn, at the back of every elf’s brain, and he used Gabriel’s true name.

It was like holding lightening.  The shock of the influx of magic cut through Gabriel, as well as, suddenly, a clear view of Marlon’s mind, of where Marlon was.  Or what he was doing.

Oh, hell.  Not only had he just taken Marlon’s power away during a duel, but he’d also pulled away his protections from Seraphim and someone else.  It couldn’t be helped.

His power pull would throw people about, too.  That too couldn’t be helped.

What could be helped was using the power to do what it should, and to keep his human self sane as the elf-self, unleashed by Marlon’s fealty, sane and in control.

It seemed to Gabriel as if all that was him stood in the middle of a black and blue hurricane of howling magic pouring out from his own mind.  And the enemy was there, waiting.

He ripped the net with a wave of his hand and screamed at the others, as he tried to conjure stable ground for them to run on, “Run.  Run on home.  Run and leave me to my fate.”

I was born in a culture in which belief in fate is unquestionable.  From lullabies about star-crossed lovers who were fated to die (no, really) to lullabies about poor boys born to be big men, (or rich boys born to be brought low,) through no achievement or choice of their own, I had imbedded the idea of fate through the fingertips long before I set fingers to keyboard to write.

It is of course a concept that exists in every culture.  And you can understand why.  Or at least I can.  Even in the most meritocratic of societies – and no society is perfectly meritocratic, because you can’t make sure that everyone has the same connections/birth, etc, nor can you prevent the social animal humans are from taking that and myriad other sub-rational cues into account  — there are inexplicable failures and inexplicable successes.  You’re left scratching your head, while the deserving sink and the undeserving prosper.

And even in the most hidebound society, where if you’re born to the right people, and have the right connections, you should have a perfect life, fate intervenes.  You get an illness, an accident deforms you, you fall in unavailing love with JUST the wrong person… and your life is a wreck, if you’re alive at all.

Humans are designed, as part of our social animal nature, to have a “moral” component.  The moral component is not exactly what we, modern people, consider moral, but something older, less ethically complicated in which morality is doing what is considered right in that society: you appease the right god, you treat your enemies/friends the right way, and you’ll be rewarded and everything will be well.

You catch a wiff of that “morality” in the older legends of mankind (and to an extent it is still around – now feeding the college bubble.)

The only way to reconcile that with reality and to continue believing if you perform X correct action, you’ll get Y desired result is to believe in fate.  You could say it keeps us from going completely insane, lost in a world of chaos where nothing makes sense.

Because of that, it shows up in even the most “rational” societies.  You find it expressed “I guess it wasn’t meant to be” or “Perhaps the time wasn’t right.”  Or “My timing sucked” or…

So… It is everywhere, it is at the back of the human brain… but does fate exist?

We all know some people are luckier than others.  It is impossible, for instance, to picture Harry Potter doing half as well if it hadn’t been the early days of Amazon, when it suddenly started selling in the US before it was available here, and the publishers who had rejected it suddenly decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it star treatment.  And eh… not that my first three books were Harry Potter (for one, I got so far up Shakespeare that they’re difficult to read – a serious flaw, I must admit) but it took amazing bad luck to – after sixteen years of trying to sell a novel, and two years of waiting for the novel to be published – have it come out right after 9/11.  (It might have ended up the same, mind you, but… who knows?)  Or to have the first real novel with a real plot I wrote (Draw One In The Dark.  Okay, I’m not saying the other novels didn’t have a plot.  Some obviously do.  But I only UNDERSTOOD plot with DOITD.  It was the first time I felt on top of the form) end up through a series of mishaps, with the worst cover possible (the hard cover cover, not the mmp.  The hard cover is not only inappropriate for a light fantasy, it displays about the level of competency my son – then eleven – could have managed at that age.)

Was it fate?  Probably not.  Or maybe yes.  Or then again perhaps.

I believe in fate on odd Tuesdays and alternate Wednesdays.  I don’t believe in it in the dreadful idea that it controls all your thoughts, all your movements, all your outcomes.  I believe in it, more, as an extra weight or an added breeze at your back.

If you study, say, Heinlein’s life before the books finally hit big, you could easily believe he was the unluckiest man alive.  Pursuit after pursuit turned sour for him.  This isn’t even unusual in people who achieve big and stay on top of their game.

Which brings me to my observation – sometime ago – that the “darlings” of the publishing field, until (at least) the publishing industry got full control of it and could control their fates were often the most unfortunate in the long run.  You get a first book you ever wrote picked up and miraculously it hits (back before the game was SERIOUSLY rigged) and then … what?  If you don’t know how to keep it up, you will sink.   Your luck might still be fabulous, but unless you’re doing AT LEAST competent work, you won’t have a career.

Which I suppose is what Heinlein meant when he said luck was how the envious explained the work of genius.  It is, like most such bon mots overbroad and … somewhat wrong.  There are people who are suddenly and inexplicably lucky.  (Is Dan Brown a genius?  Perhaps in tapping into the exact vein that publishers and wealthy patrons wanted to promote.  I mean, I could see the same opportunity and had I had no moral scruples, I could have done it.  OTOH I’ve seen enough interviews with him, I think he rather believes his bizarre theory.  So… Not genius, and definite luck.)  But at the same time, those who continue being lucky (like Heinlein himself) owe less to luck and how it’s running than to their hard work and continuous, intelligent repositioning of their options.

Or, as my friend Kevin J. Anderson put it (And Dean Wesley Smith too, I think): the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Now, to the extent I believe in luck, I know my dad’s side of the family (mom’s side is difficult to gage, because people who continuously shoot themselves in the foot might or might not be born lame – who’d know?) has the sort of luck that, to quote Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Tom Bailey, Story of a Bad Boy, available from Gutenberg project, get it, you won’t regret it) “if they made hats, babies would be born without heads.”

And yet, I would bet you half of my writing colleagues think I’m way too lucky to live.  After all, I stayed employed and managed to make a living at a time when most people got one book and were out.

Genius?  Depends on what you consider genius.  It wasn’t intelligence.  But I try to keep my eye on what’s happening in the market, and I try to learn to improve my work – continuously, but then I started at a very low point – and I work.  I work harder than most people in my field.  (I remember being shocked at someone throwing a fit because her agent asked her for two proposals – at a time I was writing a proposal a month, and three or four novels a year.)  Not harder than all the people in my field.  I know people who work harder.  But given my handicaps of health, family, other obligations, I work as hard as I can.

I do it because I know my luck is naturally bad, and my fate probably tugs towards total failure at any given time.  And I can’t be having with that.

So does fate exist?  Who knows?  It seems like the sort of thing that chaos mechanics will somehow prove at some point… like they’ve proven that the mechanics of internet memes are the same as those of an Earthquake – unpredictable but more likely to hit in some places/at some times than others.

And if it exists and you’re fated to fail, does it matter?  Well, as I said, I view fate as a current pulling a certain way.  But currents can be overcome… with enough force.

Get yourself an outboard motor and go against the current of the river of fate.  Yes, you can.  And eventually fate gets tired.

Or to put it another way – you have to deal with your destiny.  Which is why I’m so fond of the Pratchett phrase that, supposedly means that: You’ve got to dree your weird.

You can spend your life raging at those who look like they’re blessed by fate, and letting envy eat you from the inside out.  Or you can shrug, assume your luck runs to bad.  And then make it so that nobody from outside can tell.

Dree your weird!

*Some very nice people have sent me guest posts, but since today is my double-blog day it didn’t feel right.  OTOH I’m so exhausted I’m not even going to try publishing work tonight.  I slept about 5 hours last night.  So, instead, I’m fobbing you off with the new opening of Noah’s Boy.*

Chapter One

 

The sun was setting in a splendor of red and gold over the Rocky Mountains, glistening like a fire over the remaining snow on the mountain tops when the young woman drove into Goldport in a brand new red pickup truck.

No one watching would have been particularly struck by her or by the pick up truck.

Nestled against the peaks of the Rockies, Goldport had once been a settlement of miners and frontiersmen and it was now a city of students and computer technicians, with a Victorian core forming the center of a town that was gentrifying and growing, acquiring a few spectacular glass-fronted highrises and a vibrant art and tourism scene.

In that environment, a college-age woman driving a four wheel vehicle was the most common of sights.  That she was Asian or partly Asian would startle no one since Golport was host to a vibrant Asian community.  And no one would have thought anything was particularly strange when she parked outside a low slung building atop of which a neon sign blinked the words Three Luck Dragon.

Someone might have thought it a little odd, though, when she entered the shiny red lacquered door  and a hand reached out to the window and turned the Open sign to Closed, right at the beginning of the dinner hour.

* * *

Beatrice Bao Ryu, better known to her friends as Bea Ryu, didn’t find it funny, when they closed the restaurant as she came in.  She found it distinctly unsettling.  But she managed a small smile, striking a pose of nonchalance as she said, “I don’t actually intend to shift and start a battle with Himself in here, you know?”  Her warm GeorRya accent drawled out onto what seemed for a moment to be the uncomprehending server – a skinny young man with Asian features.  But he bowed to her, looking scared.  “No,” he said.  His accent less obvious but no more Asian.  But he didn’t flip the sign to Open again.  Instead, he led her to a door next to the one marked “restrooms” and  knocked politely, then said something in rapid-fire Chinese.

Bea didn’t understand it.  Her maternal grandmother was Chinese, but her maternal grandfather was tall, blond and of Germanic ancestry.  As for Bea’s father, he was the great-grandson of Japanese immigrants to the United States.  Bea’s parents spoke English and their daughter had never learned either Chinese or Japanese till college, where she’d taken two years of Japanese – which meant she could catch the occasional word and say almost nothing.

A curt Chinese word answered from inside the mysterious door.  The server opened the door and remained bowed while Bea went in.

If she’d thought about it, and she’d never done so in so many words, she’d have expected the room into which she was ushered to be a sort of throne room, perhaps with some ancient gilded chair in the center.

That would have fit with what she’d read in the letters in her father’s desk drawer.

Whatever this criminal organization was, it dressed its leader in very pretty words: “Himself”, “Revered One.”  “Ancient One.”

Instead, the room she entered was small – only big enough to contain a desk-like table and two chairs, one on either side of it.  It might have been an interrogation cell, except that the person on the other side of the table had a Ryant metal bowl in front of him into which he was shelling peas.  With a pile of unshelled peas to the right of the bowl, and a pile of shells to the left, the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to his elbows, and his hands working busily at the homely task, the man could have been any of a hundred middle-aged Chinese employees at a hundred different Chinese restaurants.

Bea cleared her throat.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I think I’ve come to the wrong room.  You see, I was came to talk to The Ancient On—”

The man looked up and Bea took a step back and caught her breath, not scared exactly but startled, because the eyes were older than the middle-aged face.  They were older than any face.  Looking out of barely creased features, they appeared old as time and twice as deep, as though he’d existed through the uncounted ages of mankind and kept track of every slip, every error humans had made on the way to civilization.

“Oh,” Bea said.

The man said three brief words in Chinese and then his eyes widened, as though in shock.  He closed his eyes a moment.  “You don’t speak Chinese.”  It wasn’t a question.  He raised an eyebrow.  “Japanese, then?”

She cleared her throat.  “I–  No.  You see, I took a year in college, but—”

He shrugged, dismissing the matter.  “It’s of little importance,” he said.  “Our people have spoken many tongues, throughout the centuries.  What we speak doesn’t matter, except for comfort and a sense of heritage.”  His own English was almost unaccented, save for a faint hint of something British and very high bred.  “What I need from you requires no great linguistic competency.”

Bea swallowed hard.  She’d rehearsed this, all the long drive from Atlanta, and the nights in motel rooms, but somehow, suddenly it seemed very hard to say the words she’d planned.  It was the look of immense age in the man’s eyes, she thought.  But she swallowed again and said, her voice sounding strangely wavering in her own ears, “I don’t care what you require from me.  I came to tell you to leave my parents alone–  To leave dad’s business alone.”

The man looked up and frowned a little.  His hands resumed his work of shelling peas.  “Your parents,” he said at last.  “Finally saw the light and sent you over.  Now they have nothing more to fear from my people.”

She shook her head.  “My parents did not send me over.  Not that it matters.  I have no intention of doing whatever you want me to do.  And why you think—”

“Sit down,” the man said, gently.

Bea shook her head.  Those soft words had sounded like an order, but she had no intention of obeying.  In fact, despite all her best intentions and everything she’d intended to tell this creature about himself and his criminal organization, face to face with him, she found the best she could do was disobey.  Just – disobey and hold on to her rebellion with every fiber in her being, even as she felt him trying to bend her to his will.

He raised his eyebrows at her.  “Surely,” he said.  “Your parents have told you what you owe me.”

“No,” she said.  “Owe you?  I don’t even know who you are except someone who has been messing with dad’s business.”

“Truly?  Then you don’t know we’re an organization of dragon shape shifters?”

“Sure,” she said.  “I know that.  But the only reason I even knew you existed and that you wanted something with me was that I overheard mom and dad talking.  I found out you were the reason dad’s office got vandalized and about the calls to his clients.  The reason dad has had so much trouble keeping afloat as a veterinarian.  And that to make it stop you wanted me to come and…  And do something.  I wasn’t sure what.”

“I see.  Well, you came.  That’s what matters.”

“I came to tell you it must stop.”

The man looked up at her and smiled.  “Ah.  Spirit will serve you well, but do sit down.  I have a long explanation to make, and I despise having to look up to do it.”

She hesitated, but the truth was she wanted to know why anyone, even a criminal organization of shifters would require her presence urgently enough to interfere with her father’s business to get it.

She knew she was attractive.  She had a mirror.  She knew that the combination of her varied heritage had resulted in an oval face, large green eyes, and a pleasant combination of other features, all of which looked striking with her long, glossy black hair.  Since about the age of sixteen, she’d become used to looks of admiration from the male half of the species.

But the truth was too that she had no illusions about the full extent of her beauty.  She was pretty and striking, but not so out of the normal leagues in attractiveness that dreams of modeling had ever occurred to her.  The campus of the college where she studied art could count at least a hundred women more beautiful than her.

None of her other characteristics were any further out of the ordinary.  She was smart and talented, but was not going to set the world on fire with either her intellect or even with her art talent.  So why would this criminal organization want her that badly?

She knew it had something to do with her turning into a dragon, but it was just now and then.  Occasionally.  Truly, hardly ever, since she’d turned twenty and learned to control herself.

“So?” Bea asked.  “Why is it so important that I come here?  And why do you think I should obey you?  Or that I owe you anything?”

The man smiled.  It was a surprisingly engaging smile.  It seemed to her as he narrowed his eyes that a sense of amusement touched them too.  “I think,” he said, softly.  “That I’m about to shock you very much.  However, I trust you’ll let me explain my motives before dismissing them.”

She swallowed, wondering what he meant by that.

“Forget what I said about owing me.  That was…  You see, where I come from, it is assumed you owe your ancestors unusual respect, and I’m the ancestor of most of the dragon shifters alive today.”

“That is hardly likely,” she said.  “I know all my grandparents, and I—”

“I am not your grandfather.  Not even your great grandfather.  It’s much… older than that.  Thousands of years.   How many, I’m afraid I’ve lost track.

“But that’s imposs—”

“Please, Miss Ryu.”  He paused, his hands holding a pea pod over the bowl, looking at her.  Then he said, “Hear me out.”

It wasn’t a command – or it shouldn’t have been, spoken in that voice as soft as crackling flame.  But she stopped and listened.

His nail ripped the pea pod apart and his finger swept down the green envelope, trickling glistening little globes into the bowl.  “I have…  that is…  I don’t suppose your parents told you that I am your ancestor in—” He seemed to be counting in his head.  “Your mother’s mother’s side and your father’s mother’s side.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “My father is Japanese and you—”

“Oh.”  He dropped another spent pea pod on the growing pile and made a gesture, either dismissing that restaurant or the entire world.  “This is an identity of convenience,” he said.  “I told you my people predate most such things.  Dragons—Dragons belong to the whole world, even if our type is mostly of Asia.  There are other types—”

He resumed shelling peas, now very fast, as he spoke.  “It is the immutable rule of our people that the Great Sky Dragon must be a descendant of the previous Great Sky Dragon in the male line.  Unbroken male line.  And that he must be a Dragon shifter. We don’t know why but that’s how… that’s how it works.”  Peas tinkled into the metal bowl like falling rain.  A green smell filled the room.  “That was me, the many times grandson of the Great Sky Dragon, growing up on the banks of the Yalu River at a time when—”  He shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter, except to say that in my very long life, and sometimes I forget how many thousands of years it is, exactly, I’ve had wives, concubines and lovers, but—”  He looked up and smiled at her.  “There is no reason to blush.  In a life as long as mine, well, there will be friendship and love, and, occasionally, less honorable associations.  But what I meant to say is that of all my connections with human and shifter, many daughters were born.  My line is threaded through dragon kind, Ryus and Lungs and many other family names are honorably descended from me.  But in that time, only one son was ever born to me.”  He looked up again, and amusement pulled at the corner of his mouth.  “He was not born of a normal marriage.  It was more… a treaty and a ritual pairing.  Years ago, there was a … another dragon tribe.  Near the frozen… ah… I believe what is now called Scandinavia.  Their ruler was a woman, a female.  She was called the Queen of The West, as I was the King of the East.  We made a treaty, to keep our people from fighting each other, and..  There was a symbolic marriage.  Which resulted in a son, who was not a shifter.  I thought our blood didn’t work together, that we’d never have children who were shifters from that line, so I ignored it.

“Until someone stole the Pearl of Heaven and I found that while I could touch his mind, I could not control him as I could other dragon shifters.  And it wasn’t just because he had dragon-blood from the tribe of the west, for I could sense he had my blood too.  I had people trace back through his ancestry and found that he was descended from that long ago forgotten son.  And he is my only male descendant on the unbroken male line, the only one with a power close to my own.  The only one who can carry my burden.  The one who will carry my burden.”

A fleeting poor bastard crossed Bea’s mind, but she did her best to look attentive and blank.

“His name is Tom Ormson and he is…” The man she was now sure was The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “Very young.  I think in his early twenties.  He lives here in town and owns a diner, the George.”

“Yes?” Bea said.

“I’d like you to marry him.”

For a while, Bea was speechless.  She’d heard of arranged marriages, of course, particularly in Asia, but her parents were American and thoroughly modern, and they would no more think of contracting a marriage for her, than they would think of binding her feet. When she found her voice, she said, “And he’s agreed to this?”

“Oh, no.  He doesn’t even know about it.”  A frown pulled at the old dragon’s mouth.  “In fact, I think he has plans of marrying a panther shifter.  At least he’s living with her.  Completely unsuitable, of course.  Her people are not our people.”

“But you think he’ll agree?” Bea asked.

“I think he’ll tell me to go to hell,” the old dragon said, and looked up with a faint smile.  “And so will his girlfriend.  She’s feisty enough, and she has no fear of me.”

“But… you want me to marry him?  You said you can’t make him do what you wish, so…”

“No.  You’ll have to find how to make him do what I wish.”

Bea stood up.  Her legs were trembling.  She couldn’t let her father lose the business he’d worked for all his life, but neither could she agree to this.  The elderly man-dragon wanted her to seduce a total stranger one who was in a serious relationship.  No.  There were limits to what she was willing to do, even for her beloved father.  They’d get tired of trying to force his hand eventually.  They’d leave them alone.  Bea couldn’t sell herself for life for the sake of her father.  That was prostitution and slavery, combined.

Standing, she glared down at the Great Sky Dragon.  She could feel power rolling off him, though she could not have explained what type of power or how she felt it.

And anyway, though she didn’t have a boyfriend, she’d be damned if she was going to be thrown at this stranger and make him marry her even though he was living with someone else.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’ve got the wrong person.  I’m sure there’s someone else you can call on, who will be willing to do it.  I don’t want to trick a man who is in love with someone else into marrying me.  I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

There was a long silence.  “I’ll let myself out,” Bea said.

“Stay!”  It wasn’t so much an order as a sudden plea.  She’d turned to leave the room and now turned again.  The Great Sky Dragon was looking up at her, and his eyes held an expression she’d have thought impossible: raw, undiluted fear.

“Don’t you understand?” the Great Sky Dragon said, his voice low.  “Do you think this is something I’d want, throwing an untrained girl at a stubborn boy and hoping for the best?  Compared to me you’re nothing but babies.  I thought he could have his panther girl and be happy, and when it dissolved in a century or two, then I could guide him towards a marriage that will produce dragons.

“But there is a trial coming and I’m not sure I can–  If I’m not here, he’ll need to be married to one of our own, recognizably our own.  He doesn’t look like our kind.  My people will rebel at his orders.  And it will need to be known that he will have dragon children, to rule after him.  In the battle ahead, there might not be thousands of years to spawn.”

Bea didn’t realize she’d sat down, but her trembling legs were about to not let her stand up anymore.  “Why would he be giving orders?”

“My grandfather told me of the dragons-beyond-the-stars who could—who would one day attack the Earth.”  The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “I always thought it was a legend, nothing more.  But–  Lately I’ve had signs that it is not.  There is a great power out there, encircling, trying to remove me, trying to…”  He frowned.  “I think trying to attack my people.  I’ve lived very long, and death doesn’t scare me, but—”

“But?”

“But when I go all my power, and the destiny of my people will fall on the head of Tom Ormson, a stranger, raised outside our traditions.”  He held up a hand to keep her from interrupting.  “Oh, I know, you also have not been taught our traditions, but everyone knows your parents, both of them, are descended from my first-born daughter.  They will fall in line.  And you can help your husband through the trial to come by winning for him the respect of our people.”

Yesterday a commenter said something to the extent that while she loved to write but she didn’t know if anyone wanted to buy it.

This is, of course, where all of us start – pro, amateur, wanna be, and those who spend years writing novels and throwing them under the bed, never even telling their nearest and dearest that they’re writers.

In this way, I think (though correct me if I’m wrong ) writing is worse than music or art (though the reason my husband never pursued performance in music is that he freezes in front of an audience.  Or he used to.  Age cures a lot of that.) because it’s more interior and more part of who you are, in a way.

Don’t yell at me.  I do art too (at a very beginner level) and I know all about how it changes how you see things – most of art is teaching you to see.  Now I think about it, that’s also learning to write, only it’s learning to perceive the world in more ways than normal – but it’s still not the same thing.

If you’re the sort of person who will grow up to want to write, chances are you’ve been putting yourself to sleep, every night, with these little stories you told yourself.

If you’re like me, you were telling these stories to your little friends in elementary and possibly – with a stronger more “adult” edge to your teen friends.  Further, you were writing them in exercise books and passing each completed chapter back, so the class could read it.

Okay, you might not have been doing any of those things.  The fact that I was doing those things and they started so far back that I can’t remember how they started, probably helped make sure I wasn’t just putting books in the drawer for twenty years.  I knew some people liked my stuff.  I just didn’t know how many or if they would pay for it.

But I suspect more introverted people, or people who were introverted in a different way (I often used/use stories as a shield between me and the world) never showed these stories at all.  So when they started writing them…  They knew these were the stories they told themselves, the stories they liked to listen to, but not if anyone else would want to hear them, much less pay for them.  And unlike telling a story, you don’t get a reaction. Plus, in blogs or Amazon even, if you dare put it up, you’re always going to get the Obligatory Jerk Commenter TM.  It’s a fact of human nature that people are more likely to comment when they’re upset/irked than when they’re happy with what you did.  So you might have 100 devoted readers and never know it.  BUT the minute something goes up you’ll have the OJC.

Ric Locke was fond of saying that in this brave new world of publishing there are enough buyers with varied enough tastes that you can sell practically anything.  It doesn’t matter if your story is “bad” in the opinion of North American readers, it might catch the fancy of the French and take off like a rocket.  (The thing to understand is that there is no such thing as OBJECTIVELY bad.  There’s “objectively incomprehensible” – i.e. what I call “written in Martian” – and those don’t do too well.  But there’s very few of them.  Other than that what I consider horrible and would hate to be forced to read can and often does make money hand over fist.  To wit, Dan Brown.  And I’m sure some of my odder tastes would make a lot of you run screaming into the night [mostly because I like ingrown and involuted “literary” when I’m in a certain type of mood.])

So, given a large enough market Ric is bound to be right – and the emarket is very large indeed.  It sprawls all over the world and grows larger by the day, both in spread and in reach via cheaper and more ingenuous ereaders.

Because of that, if you’re sitting there, holding onto your “precious” and afraid no one will love it, chances are someone will love it.  As long as it’s not written in Martian.

Now, it might not take off right away, and if it does it might not make you millions, but a steady income every month.  Which is, of course, more than most of us ever got.

So if you put it out, don’t rush and take it back because “nobody loves it” – it takes time and opportunity for someone to find you.  And they’re more likely to do so the more you have out.  Dean Smith says you get a bump every thirty books (or shorts, or whatever) or so.

I know you’ve heard all this before, and I’m only repeating it as a sort of mea culpa.  I’ve told you guys this, over and over…

And I haven’t taken my own medicine.

Oh, sure, I have books out, though not many of them, mind.  “Books” in this case are short stories I’ve published before, and we all remember the charming moment when I was trying to figure out what to price them a few months ago and RES had to remind me they’re not sausage, you don’t sell them by the inch.

Which brings us to…  Which brings us to the fact that when I put them out, I thought in stupid terms.  Most of the stories I’m putting out have been published before.  I’ve been paid for them once.  (Often not much, as there was no pro market for space opera.)  It was, too, a time when people were putting up entire novels for 99c to 2.99.

So I thought… “Well, I’m a pro, 99c for a short is justified.”  And I put “shorts” up to about 7k up at 99c.  Stories above that went at 2.99, as did collections of five stories.

They did okay, though they didn’t make much money.  Hard to do at 33c a sale.  And it sort of made me slack off on putting them up, so months went by with nothing new, even though I have tons of shorts sitting in the drawer.

And I busied myself with the other writing.  Until recently the idea started filtering through the noise that the bottom of short stories was now 2.99.  You could sell a short at 99c as a loss leader, but if you wanted to be taken seriously, it was 2.99.

I also have bought a bunch of indie stuff lately, and realized that I was paying 3.99 and 4.99 for novellas of maybe 10k to 15k words.  And not grudging it.

I still thought you guys were all drinking your own ink and that no one would buy them at the new prices.

However, in a fit of daring, yesterday, I went over to Smashwords and changed all the prices, while at Office-ish.  I didn’t have the time/opportunity to do that for Amazon and Barnes and Noble until late at night, so those have only been up a few hours, particularly Amazon which takes almost 12 hours to process.

However, this morning, out of curiosity, I checked sales and… you could knock me down with a feather.

Look, take in account that Smashwords SITE – not the affiliates – is all you can see easily till you get the reports once a quarter.  It is also – for various reasons, including a sclerotic search engine – the worst selling of all the sites SW has access to.  Normally I sell – off the site — about 10 books a month, give or take.

Well, I sold 3 overnight, and of the more expensive ones.  And on Amazon I sold three copies of one of the short stories since it went up at a higher price, which was about an hour.  (And while my sales are usually larger there, that’s still very good.)

So… what have we learned from this?  It’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over again from more tangible things.  Like, we buy used furniture, I refinish it, we use it for a while, and when time comes to sell it, I’ll go with say double what I paid for it when it was a mess.  And we get no calls, or if we do people find all sorts of problems with it, and try to talk us down to what it was when we bought it, in bad shape.  BUT leave it to husband or son, who price it at five to ten times what we paid, and it will be gone within the day, and people just fork over the money and leave all happy.  Or look at the last house we sold.  We were getting extreme low-ball offers, and people found all sorts of things to bitch about.  For two years.  Then we raised the price 50k and it sold in three months at very close to asking, in one of the worst real estate markets we’d seen at the time (now it’s worse, but that’s something else.)

What does this mean?  I don’t know.  That we tend to undervalue that which is ours/we have.  That writers, in particular, are chronicle self doubters.  That most people are… er… more loose with their money than I am.  Or not, since I pay the inflated prices, too, provided it’s something I want to read and it gives me an hour of nice reading before bed.

It definitely tells me people value more that which they perceive as more expensive.

Of course, there is a ceiling to this, but where is it?  I hear people talking of a bottom of 4.99 for short stories and I go “That’s just crazy talk” – but given the price of an ice-cream cone or a coffee… well… maybe it isn’t.

For now, I’ll leave them at 2.99 to 4.99 with the really short “lighter than air” stories at 1.99.  But … well… we’ll see, right.

And for those of you who say “yeah, Sarah, but you have a name” – yes, but Sylvia Haute (my pen name for the juvenilia) doesn’t, and she too just sold a couple of shorts at Amazon.

I’ll keep you posted on how it does in a month or so, but for now it looks like a rousing success, and a lesson in not undervaluating yourself – in getting things out there and not being afraid to charge what the market will bear.

It shouldn’t be a hard lesson to learn, but it is, an one I must have beaten into my head very often, apparently.

 

 

It is not true that I’m cheap.  Given enough money to spend I could make beautiful music.  Now and then – when the prize is really high – I buy a lottery ticket for the joy of spending three days dreaming of all the things I’d spend the money on.

Actually the sad thing is that I’m not really interested in things, as such.  The more you have, the more you need to dust.  But I’d love to be able to hire people to do the stuff that eats up most of my day.  It’s not that I dislike doing it – I actually like cooking, I enjoy certain types of cleaning and sometimes I think ironing (particularly with the super dooper iron, which is recommended for start up ironing services.  So, you know I have a fall back) is my zen practice, and I’m fond of grocery shopping because I’m good at finding bargains and if I can drag one of the guys along it’s even more fun.  And then there’s all the things I enjoy which I don’t even have the time to try to do – garden, for instance.

The problem is that it’s very easy to spend the entire day picking up this, sifting that litter box, running to the store for a box of eggs… and not sit down to write at all.  There’s always any number of repairs around the house (Okay, stupid of me to live in a Victorian) which are waiting for my having two hours to do them.

And then there’s the other stuff.  I don’t know how many blog sites I’ve angered because I said I’d do an interview and then it went clear out of my mind.  And there’s books due.  And there’s mentoree’s stuff to read – since two of those are my kids, I get ambushed at the oddest times with “Mom, have you read?”  (Younger kid shows a disturbing tendency to write good historical stories about events that I had no clue he even knew about – I guess he’s been reading from my bookcases?)

And on top of this there’s publishing.

So, if I ever get rich, I want a cook, a house cleaning service, the clothes shall be sent to the laundry, and I’ll hire an assistant to keep my stuff in order.

But the problem with that is that the lottery guys keep picking the WRONG numbers.

So, I have to get real and deal with the fact that I am poor (house repairs, car repairs, two kids in college) and I have a lot of back log to publish, and other stuff I wish to write to publish.

Consider that most short stories sell for 99c so you’re getting 33 c per story, and that short stories don’t sell that well (not as well as novels.)  I will sell – on Amazon, I apparently sell more through Smashwords affiliates, but that’s not coming on line yet – about 10 of half the shorts a month.  Which means right now, for the sake of simplicity $30 for all 20 (I think I actually have 22) stories out.  About $3 for each story.

I routinely hear of people paying $100 to someone to get a cover, edit and put their short stories up.  At $3 a month that’s going to take a while to pay back.

Even for a novel, say you make $100 a month.  If you paid – and I’ve heard of this — $4000 to get it there and ready, you’re in the hole for… how much?

So below I’m going to outline the process I go through to put stuff up on the cheap.  My goal is to have shorts pay for themselves within 3 months.  Novels… I have to risk more.

If you’re not up to that, consider a micro-press which has mechanisms to do this.  A caveat is to make sure that your contract is for no more than two years.  Things are changing too fast for you to keep that property tied up longer.  The other caveat is that it’s a game of numbers.  Even a micro press (or a small.  Or a large one) can’t give you the publicity to make one book fly.  But two books, you’ll do better, three books even better, etc.

1-      If you’re not an old pro – by which I mean you haven’t published at least ten short stories and three novels, all of which sold either to publishers or sell well to the public – for the love of BOG have someone read your stuff before it goes out.

No, I don’t mean for copy-editing, that comes later.  I mean for sense, pacing and general cohesion.  I.e. to find out if it’s a story or a cabbage.  Even for me, and I’ve written over thirty novels, it’s all too easy to write a novel and concentrate only on the parts that interest you and no one else.  Say you really like shopping.  Your characters might very well shop more than anyone else has an interest in.  Or say you like eating… well, okay, most people like eating, but all the same the novel should not be a succession of breakfasts.  [What about dinners?—Ed.  Shut up – Sarah.]

You need to make sure the story is actually there.  How do you do that on the cheap?  Well, find six friends who read more or less what you write.  (This is important.  There’s stuff I can’t judge because it’s not what I read primarily, so I don’t know what readers of it like.  Say contemporary romance.)  Get them to read it.  If three of them don’t agree on a problem, then don’t change anything.  If they do, consider it.

Friends, mind, not your spouse, mother or cat – ie people who either won’t tell you the truth or who are so close to you that they won’t see the holes in your reasoning or your story telling.  [Your cats read? – Ed? Shut Up – Sarah]

2.  Have the dang thing copyedited.  On the cheap?  Sure.  Either find one of those annoying friends who live and breathe comma placement (everyone has one.  I have several) or trade with other indie writers.  “You proof mine, I proof yours.”  It can be done.

If you can have it copyedited twice, then go over it one more time.  You’d be amazed what you miss.

3. Covers.  You’d be amazed how much people spend on these.  $250 or $500 are counted as “cheap”.  This is insane for short stories.

If you have a program like photoshop (though older son does well with paint.net, but he’s a better artist than I am) or paintshop, you don’t need to pay someone for cover design.  Go and study covers for your genre at Amazon and your local supermarket, so you know what’s current.

Then… Then there are several sites.  This site has a bunch of free ones. (Be aware some of these are NOT properly vetted and pirated stuff falls in.)

I usually cruise by morguefile and if I don’t find what I want there, go to dreamstime.  If you set the search for art only (not photographs) and start at lowest price, it is possible to get art for under $2.  (Depending on what you write.  Sometimes the photos are fine, of course.)  For novels, I’ve been known to spend $7 on art for a cover.  Yeah, I know, last of the great spenders.

Things to remember: fonts are copyrighted.  If they come with a program you own, you’re fine, though.  Also, if there’s a recognizable person on the cover, make sure there’s a model release.  If there’s a recognizable commercial property (bar, restaurant, shop) make sure there’s a property release.

As with the novel, show it to someone before you put it out.  Second pair of eyes HELPS.

Oh, yeah, 3.a – for conversions I use sigil.  If I can figure it out, your kindergartner can.  So, try that.

And that’s it. Now go and have fun.

For those who don’t know and under “Membership hath privileges,” those who regularly comment here get to promote their own stuff … should be once a week, but it’s actually once when I remember it, because now the days just blur between novels.

I haven’t read my readers’ books and I make no warranty of their quality, I’m just passing along what they tell me.

So, here is what they posted in comments:

From Leah Cutter: 

I just put out a collection of short stories, “The Shredded Veil Mysteries.”

December 21st, 2012 hadn’t been the end of the world, but the Great Unraveling.

The veils between the Seen and Unseen worlds had shredded.

The living had suddenly learned they weren’t alone.

Andy had seen it all, done it all, as a detective working Vice when he’d be alive. Now, as a ghost, he works as a private investigator.

Come explore the mysteries of Heaven and Hell, of cameras with souls, and thieves with hearts.

Includes the short stories “Hell By Any Other Name,” “To Hell And Back,” “Hell For The Holidays,” “High Stakes Hell,” and “Postcards From Hell.”

It’s available all the usual places, but I’ll just include the Amazon link.

From Cedar Sanderson:

I have a novella on Amazon. A SF story of first contact, but not your usual encounter with aliens. How human is a genetic replica? How much emotion should a planetary scout allow themselves towards the unknown and unknowable? I love to read first contact stories, and drew elements from a favorite Art Noveau illustration as well.

From Pam Uphoff:

A collection of three novellas.
Free through Monday!
Then I’m going to bump the price up, as per Dean Wesley Smith’s advice.

From Gina Marie Wylie:

My book “Hannah Sawyer” is available now on Amazon in Kindle format, hard copy will follow next week. It is the third book in the Kinsella Universe. No, I can’t write a book every month, I have a backlog of stuff I’ve posted online. Hannah Sawyer is a diffident young woman who is caught up in a unimaginable war, a war that requires the best efforts of everyone if humanity has any chance at all of surviving. She learns bitter lessons about what bravery is, what duty is, and above all, who she is.

From Mike Weatherford:

I’m still working on my novel about the Mastodon party. I have posted the Prologue and a few other things to my website, Old Patriot’s Pen, for all to get a taste.

From Jonah Hewitt:

The Sequel to my first novel, Limbo’s Child, is coming out around Christmas (with any luck) but the first one is available on Kindle now! It’s getting great reviews. There’s a sample chapter of the next book in the current one.

From Alistair Young:

t’s not quitean indie work in the publication sense yet, but I’m currently writing one-a-day or thereabouts nanofics set in my SF universe, the Associated Worlds. Some story, lots of metafiction and vignette-type work. And while I’m currently posting them to my blog:

http://eldraeverse.com/category/writing/fic-a-day-writing/

…I do plan to collect them, the rest of this year’s. and some longer pieces into an actual e-book (and possible physical book) sometime around the start of next year. If that would qualify, I would surely appreciate a pointer!

From Stephanie Osborn:

Chromosphere Press just released my SF short story, “The More Things Change.” It’s available on Kindle and Nook.

November 6, Travis Taylor and I will have a nonfiction book coming out from Baen titled, “A New American Space Plan.”

November 15, Book 4 of my Displaced Detective series, “The Case of the Cosmological Killer: Endings and Beginnings” will be released.

Both the latter 2 works will be in print and ebook.

From Bill Swears:

My apocalyptic science fiction/urban fantasy/ horror story with hope, Zook Country, will be published by Twilight Times Books in trade paperback on December 15th. It’s already available as an e-book here and can be liked here: https://www.facebook.com/ZookCountry.

From Mackey Chandler:

“Down to Earth” the sequel to “April” will be free to download for Amazon Kindle all day Monday the 8th. April is a young resident of an orbital habitat who eagerly got involved in a rebellion and war of independence. “Down to Earth” continues her adventures after the war trying to keep what they have won. The third book in the series, “The Middle of Nowhere” will be ready later this year.

My site is: http://mackeychandler.com/

From Nas Hedron:

My SF novel “Luck and Death at the Edge of the World” and my novelette “The Virgin Birth of Sharks” both came out this year (May and July). All my books are available through my Amazon author page(http://tinyurl.com/NasOnAmazon) and through Kobo and WHSmith through the links on my home page (www.NassauHedron.com). Both books have an extensive “Facts in the Fiction” section after the story itself that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the factual background to elements in the fiction. Finally, both books also have brand new companion web pages where prospective readers can find samples from the book and existing readers can find bonus content (http://luckanddeath.wordpress.com/ and http://virginsharks.wordpress.com/). Great blog by the way! Nas Hedron.

From Cyn Bagley:

My last collection of short stories is called Ghostly Glimmers II.
Amazon kindle
Smashwords

I am putting my novel Perchance to Dream on my blogspot http://scrambledsage.blogspot.com – it is a character-driven supernatural horror story about two women and one man affected by a church run by demons.

Once I have finished Perchance to Dream, I will do an edit and then put it up in 2013 on Amazon and Smashwords. I am working on Hilda’s Inn for Retired Heroes. This one is a fantasy epic. Plus I will be putting together the second novel on EJ Hunter’s world.

In the background, I am writing another paranormal romance (my way–not harlequin’s way) between a woman and a motorcycle mechanic werewolf. Plus the hubby and I went to Goldfield for some material for a book I started writing and quit writing a decade ago. It’s a desert story about two different generations of Nevadans. It will end up having supernatural components.

So that is what I am doing– I hope I have enough time to finish it all. I have more in the works.

From Sandra Ulbrich Almazan:

I have a SF novella called “Lyon’s Legacy,” which is about a scientist’s attempts to sabotage the cloning of her ancestor, a TwenCen rock star. It’s available on Amazon B&N and Smashwords. You can find links to the paper and audio versions on my Amazon page

From Sabrina Chase:

The print versions of all three books of my SF Trilogy are now available on Amazon and directly through CreateSpace — The Long Way Home (book 1)  , Raven’s Children (book2) and Queen of Chaos (book 3)

From Kiti Lappi:

Five short stories on Amazon Kindle  Night Work, After the Night Descends, Dealing With Elves,  Raven’s Night, The Task

have used a couple of the free promo days, will use the rest but right now I’m undecided as to when. Three are vampire stories, one urban fantasy and one a more traditional one.

And maybe I should add this since some of you might find some use for it, at least anybody who might be looking either for something to use for cheap/free fantasy style cover pictures, or as references for drawing or painting: I’ve spend the last two days trying to figure out how to use the WordPress free blog option. I’m not going to start actual blogging, too lazy, but that seemed to be the easiest way for me to put up some pictures somewhere. So, mostly photographs for now, some I have played with a bit with the rather crappy editing programs I have. Most of them are of friends of mine running around the nearby castle ruins dressed in a cloak and/or tunic and waving a sword or a staff (I do have a couple of friends who are crazy enough that they actually seemed to enjoy doing that even if there were other sightseers there both times – just one person in every picture, both women, by the way, I went with one friend in the spring and with another last week ). I mainly plan to use them, myself, as reference photos, but since I didn’t have anything ready when I finally got the nerve to put up those shorts I ended up using a few for (temporary, hopefully) covers.

If you find anything you like feel free to use it.

One reason I wanted those pictures originally was that I couldn’t find that many good photos of how a full cloak acts in a wind. So, the cloak used is a full circle one, and both days were somewhat windy. But even if the original purpose was fulfilled I liked those photo sessions well enough that I will probably do this a few more times, whenever my models have the time.

Uh, how do you make links here? The address where you find the photos is kitilappi.com. There isn’t much now, but I will be putting up a lot in the next weeks and months.

And yes, I do have permission for this from the models.

From Edward Willet:

This week I republished myself two previously published humorous science fiction short stories. “Strange Harvest” originally appeared in Western People (supplement to an agricultural newspaper!), was reprinted in OnSpec, and had national airing on CBC as part of a series hosted by Nalo Hopkinson. It’s about a small-town reporter who’s trying to figure out where the rash of exploding tomatoes and incendiary radishes is coming from. “Waterlilies,” originally published in Space and Time, is a nanotech apocalypse comedy satirizing modern art…if you like that sort of thing. They’re on Kindle  and Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/242744, https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/242743). My YA dystopian novel The Chosen and my YA ghost story The Haunted Horn have now also made it to Smashwords.from Kindle Select. The Chosen is at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144418 and The Haunted Horn at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/242736).

From Jeffro:

I am an amateur writer that mostly focuses on vintage games. My best work that has gotten the least exposure is probably the interviews I’ve done. I have thought about doing these on some other topics– first hand accounts of men that have served in Afghanistan for instance– but the right opportunity has yet to turn up. (If I meet someone that has a story that needs to be told… I try to do what I can to get it out and edit it down into something accessible and readable.)

Here are my interviews:

Ramona Richards, professional writer: http://jeffro.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/exclusive-ramona-richards-interview/

George Dew, game designer: http://jeffro.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/exclusive-interview-with-george-dew-of-dark-city-games/

Ken Schultz, witness of a significant moment in game design history: http://jeffro.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/an-insiders-view-of-metagaming-and-the-fantasy-trip/

From Eugene Woodbury:

The Gentleman and the Rake is an unconventional look at two landmark works of English literature. First, a lighthearted take on the critical events in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Then Mr. B, the redeemed rake of Samuel Richardson’s scandalous Pamela, is summoned to court to tell his version of the story. http://eugenewoodbury.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-gentleman-and-rake.html

And coming later this month, Fox & Wolf, a contemporary fantasy about a werewolf and a kitsune (Japanese werefox).

From D. Jason Fleming:

Sometimes the course of your life is set out clearly. Sometimes it’s altered by the music you chance to hear in the dead of night when you can’t sleep. And other times, it’s even less predictible than that.

What wouldn’t you do, “For the fragile Muses…“?

(It’s a short story I dashed off because I had to. Currently the only thing I’ve got out, but that’s going to change in the next month or two.)

FROM CHARLES E QUINN:

Dance Shadow Dance and other stories

(If not available it’s in the middle of getting its cover changed.  Try again another day.  This was one of the early covers for the publisher, and we didn’t QUITE have the hang of it.)