It's a Plot!

I love characters. Not just my own, I love all the good characters I've read about or seen in the movies and even sometimes on TV (in between the explosions). And I'm not alone in this. Lots of my fellow story-holics in blogs, Goodreads.com, and elsewhere on the web, also insist that the character is the heart of a good story. When I started writing Unbinding the Stone a character was all I had, Tarkas, standing in a path with a stick in his hand. I don't know to this day where the name came from. I had the first sentence in my head, and one day I wrote it down. Then I stopped and said (well, thought, really), 'What do I do now?'

Because I had never written anything like this before, never taken classes, no writing groups or crit partners. I was writing a story because the story wanted to be written. So I had to figure something out, because one first line does not a story make. Tarkas paused in that damned forest path for a reason!* So I gave him a reason, a small one, and it justified him in pausing. But of course that wasn't enough.

I invented a plot. Step by step, one foot after another. Question leads to answer which leads to the next question. Where was he going that he needed to pause? If you've given the right answers, you've got lots of next questions to choose from. Not that the whole story is going to be a sries of answered questions, otherwise you've got a logic problem on your hands instead of a novel. The answers came when I needed them, too, never the expected reason, always something from left field. Tarkas appeared from the ether, and when I needed them so did a lot of other characters, doing other things for their own reasons, and my stories are about these characters and how their purposes mesh, or clash, or walk side-by-side. Some characters literally appeared when some other character turned around. None were invented.

This makes it hard to write. I can't tell you what my book is about because I don't know what my book is about. I think the first story I wrote where I knew what the story was about was my short story 'Off the Map'. This is because it was written for someone, Sandi von Pier, who had won a contest and my story, featuring a character based on her was the prize. I doubt it was what she expected. She gave me details about herself and I built a story based on them. So many ideas I stayed up for two hours plotting the story. Even the name, Off the Map. Plotting was fun. Plotting was...new. I wish I could do more of it.

On purpose, that is. I'm actually reading up on it, in a book called (ahem) 'Plot'. Original title, eh? I figure it may not be enough to tell me what I'm doing, but it may help me figure out what I've done.

*"Tarkas paused in the forest trail as he became aware of the sound of voices raised in Song."

White Christmas

No, not the movie, real life.
Although I did try to get the movie, yesterday at the library. Two copies, both overdue. Bastids.
So I got some other movies. The Get Smart movie, which I watched yesterday and very much enjoyed. Maxwell Smart was much more intelligent in this one, which made the screw-ups and other funny stuff much funnier. I kept expecting the usual slapstick and was pleasantly surprised to find none of it. The villain's villainy was made even more villainous by an early appreciation of his character. Betrayal! AAAgghh! Lots of cameos from the original series, too, and the gadgets. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry consulting. Just couldn't get any better. I also found a movie version of the Man from UNCLE that I'd never heard of. And I got a set of Wolfman movies to watch, including one I've never seen, She-Wolf of London.
Today the big show is outdoors, snow mounding up everywhere. I hope it'll last until Christmas, but I understand there's a rainstorm predicted for then so it may not. Hard to get rid of 2 feet of snow that easily, though. And it will be there for our birthday, in a couple of days. Yes, 'our' birthday. My wife and I have the same day. Makes it easy to remember.
Did a little bit of rushing about, yesterday, not as much as lots of other people were doing, but some. More strands of lights, a present or two, if I can figure out who to give them to. But I don't have to go out anymore so I can enjoy with a clean conscience.
We made two batches of cookies yesterday, too. I made oatmeal and my daughter made a batch of chocolate chip. We're stocked.

Christmas music and query letters

Odd combo, huh?

Well, it's stuff I'm doing today. A lot of driving around taking my various kids to various places, which of course means that I'm listening at least some times to Christmas music. I generally don't listen to the radio any other time. I'm usually not listening to the radio this time either, because basically most of the Christmas music on the radio is pretty poor. I get the impression that a lot of it was made so the artist in question would have some income at least part of the year, long after his fifteen minutes were over.

And how many remakes of classic Christmas songs do we need when thet've been pretty definitively covered already? Can anyone top Bing Crosby's version of White Christmas? Nat King Cole's Christmas Song, or Josh Grobin's version of O Holy Night? (Well, that last one there is challenged pretty well by Celine Dion, but I think his is better for being lower pitched.) I wish it were possible to permanently remove some songs from the list of remake-able items, and some movies, too, but then what would the entertainment industry do, produce something original? There's no love for originality in the world of business, however much the Universe in general may love it, and even depend upon it. Production means expense, expense requires justification, justification uses metrics, and metrics need a baseline. None of which is available for the truly original. Which argues, perhaps, for the absence of business in the world of originality.

Which brings us, somehow, to the subject of query letters. For some time now I've been reading blogs about them and trying to write one. I finally decided that both the blogs' complaints and my own were the same, that a new model of querying was needed. Being the brilliant, innovative writer that I am, I wrote one. It was a dialog, two of the characters from my latest manuscript discussing how best to present it as a query letter. What can I say, I like meta-literary. This allowed me to present the 'synopsis' of the novel in a non-synoptic way, which was important because my novels' -opses don't tend to syn- very well. If I ever wrote one that did I'd probably consider it defective and fix it. Anyway, I sent my little brainchild out into the cold harsh world of agentry to see what the reaction would be, and so far it doesn't look too terribly bad. One agent requested a partial, but passed. One agent treated it like a regular query and rejected it. Another also rejected it, based on certain items of content, but not the form. Only one has suggested that the form should be made regular, so the pros would know how to evaluate it. So it's only 4 responses so far, but three of the four are non-negative.

That's good, isn't it?

Watchmen

I finally got around to seeing this, when my son's girlfriend gave it to him for his birthday and he insisted on watching it with us. Both he and I enjoy these sorts of movies, but even my wife, who doesn't like these sorts of movies, got sucked in. I have read the graphic novel several times and found the movie to be a good translation, for the most part, although in one crucial aspect I was disappointed.

I have always understood the story to be about Nite Owl and Silk Specter 2, the two normal humans among the group of superheroes known as the Watchmen. Making them into kick-ass super-fighters, as demonstrated in the alley sequence as well as during the prison break, was perhaps a little too much, and I could have lived without the violence. The feeling the GN gave was people out of their depth, literal watch-men, trying to live their lives in a world filled with powers far more powerful and capable, even willing, of destroying everything. The main importance of the pair was that she was the one who convinced the godlike Dr. Manhattan of the value of life. It was something of an improvement that they weren't forced to adopt new identities after they broke Rorschach out of prison. Since no one knew their secret identities why would they have had to give them up?

Rorschach also was a human, but his uncompromising 'moral' stance, and preference for destruction over a world in which evil was allowed to go unpunished, put him on a different level. His role was quite well-played, and I've always preferred his character over all the others. I wonder why they had Rorschach kill the dog-owner with the cleaver rather than burn the house down around him, as he did in the GN. Budget, most likely. I'd also rather have had the space-squid, but that was part of a plot that would have taken far too much time to explain.

One scene I particularly missed was the final scene with Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan. The deliberate sinner looking for justification, if not absolution, from the closest thing to God he knows, and being denied even that. The scene they did show, leaving Ozymandias standing in the ruins of his palace, was evocative, but probably only to someone who'd read the book. Putting Dr. Manhattan's final words in the mouth of a different character in a different scene was no substitute. Especially since the movie also lacked the Black Ship, a metaphor that ran through the entire GN, describing Ozymandias' own self-ruination.

Over all, a good flick that I'd watch again.

Sometimes it doesn't have to make sense

That's a line from a movie I just watched, Grand Canyon. One of the great movies. It even mentions Thanksgiving in it, so there. It seemed appropriate to me to watch it tonight, I don't know why. My son wanted to watch his Babylon 5 DVDs, and I suggested we watch the last episode of season 5, which he told me was supposed to sum up the series but which we never saw. So he pulled it out and we watched the last two episodes, in which various characters go off and do their various things. I was never a big fan of the series, I always thought it was both too preachy and poorly acted, or written, or something. Every episode seemed like half the dialog was busy recapping the action of previous episodes, when it wasn't being monological and preachy.

But the last episode did somehow inspire me to watch Grand Canyon, a movie I always get more out of every time I watch it, even if it's only to figure out where I've seen that actor before. This time I see that the failure of Davis to learn from th opportunity life handed him is due to his excessive rationality. The whole point is that, I don't know, 'rationality is a subset.' Reason is a great way to get from here to there but not a great way to pick a there to go to. The greater part of life is faith, and trust. There was a philosopher who wrote years ago on the importance of trust, that we live every day, trusting that other people aren't going to do us harm. That we take so much on faith because we don't know barely anything, much less everything. Everybody needs faith, and everybody has faith. Not necessarily A Faith, mind you, and in fact I'm distrustful of Faiths with a capital F simply because I think they take the place of a more natural faith that a person can and should come up with on his own. I see no reason to take seriously a Faith that's so simplistic it can be turned without serious revision into a fantasy novel.

As a writer I know this very well. I create the stories but even I don't know what's going to happen next, a lot of the time. I can get my characters going down the forest path, but that's a pretty boring story and they have to get off the forest path PDQ, but how will that happen? I don't know, until I'm driving down the road or doing some shopping and an idea pops into my head. My stories are about faith, all stories are, or should be, but I know that they'll never be complete and they'll never be true. By writing them, I put some elements of my own faith into words and thereby change them. It is my hope that someone reading my stories will see that and perhaps have his own faith changed thereby.

But I'll never know, and they may not either.

A good event

I don't normally post about my book-selling events here but I really have to congratulate the people who run the Mount Sinai Middle School craft & gift fair. I did it for the first time yesterday and had a really great day. First off they had a great crew of volunteers who helped me unload my stuff (boxes of books are heavy) in the morning and then load it up again at the end. It's amazing what a drain that is, doing it by ourselves. Second is a young Girl Scout I'd met the night before, as she was selling cans of nuts and other snacks at a local supermarket. I mentioned at one point how I didn't see how chocolate and cashews worked together, and she immediately pointed out that they had cans of cashews without chocolate. That was exactly right, and I congratulated her for it. It turned out that she was a reader, and I pointed out that I would be at this event. Sure enough she came by, and picked up three books (The Secret of Bailey's Chase, Zamora's Ultimate Challenge, and Cynthia's Attic: The Missing Locket, if memory serves)! Third, of course, is that we sold a lot of books to a lot of people. One woman bought two sets of my own novels, my first sale of the day and a very good omen, I thought. While my own books were the best-selling titles, the best-selling category was the juvenile/YA group. Nice to see parents willing to put up money to get their kids reading early!

Then I got home and watched more Medium. It's kind of weird, but it seems like some of the episodes I've watched of season 4 so far have been easily recognizable variants on movie plots I've seen over the years. One episode reminded me of Fargo, another of The Whole Nine Yards. On the other hand, I was watching one extremely powerful episode, and got a story idea from it. I wonder if Mr. Caron, the producer of the show, would be interested in it?

Probably not.

Coincidence? I think NOT!

We just finished watching the the last three episodes of the third season of Medium, and let me tell you, the parallels with Tru Calling are scary. There are some spoilers here, so if you haven't seen either show don't read any further unless you don't plan to.

I really loved the show Tru Calling. I watched all the episodes and thought it was a really cool, provocative, insightful show with lots to say and an interesting way of saying it. And I liked Davis. It was one of the great tragedies of TV when they cancelled the show, especially when they did it in mid-season, without even a hope of future production to lend closure to the storylines. Many of the other shows that I've loved that also got cancelled at least were able to do that much. But Tru Calling ended with a bang, the villains apparently winning, no hope in sight. I even wanted to write a book to give it that closure, but I was told that TV tie-ins are contracted by publishers not authors, and the show had been off the air for a while already.

But Tru Calling had a great villain, played by Jason Priestly, with a larger purpose of preventing the rescues that the heroine performs, making sure that events play out the way they 'should'. And it had a good story at one point, about how a reporter had realized that all these bizarre rescues were happening, and this woman named Tru Davies was strangely involved in all of them. She gets involved, and ends up the latest victim in need of her help.

And what was the last story arc of Medium about? A reporter, who gets involved with Allison's current case and ends up as a victim in it. The villain? Played by Jason Priestly.

I know. Spooky, right?

Astronomicon part 2

OK - most important things first. I survived the trip home.

Don't laugh. After my last convention in July (I call them that even though I see none of the panels and almost never get out of the Dealers Room), I left at 4 Pm and got home at 2 AM, mostly because of construction on the I80 in PA. So this was a distinct improvement, although I will admit to a bit of scary moment when it looked like another delay in Pennsylvania.

I must say I liked the feel of Astronomicon. The people there were very friendly and really loved the subject. The problem was that there so few people there, which they also don't understand. There are several schools in the area, but the students don't come. Quite a few people in the Dealers Room were also Panelists, constantly going in and out. On Saturday we sold a grand total of 20 books, and that's not good. I've done events where that was OK, but not any with a hotel bill attached. Sunday we did the same, which is pretty common. Most convention-goers will shop around for the first few days, and then come back and buy stuff on the last day as they're walking out the door, so they don't have to lug all that stuff around. We also got quite respectable sales from Con staff and other dealers. I also handed out a bunch of my cards for my short stories, so hopefully I'll see some activity there. It's kind of hard to push a story that doesn't come in a paper form I can hand to the customer.

As usual we didn't sell just fantasy books. These events are for people who like to read, and so we often sell a reasonable percentage of non-fantasy books. Lots of mysteries, an adventure novel, even a western. No surprises there, we sell a couple of westerns at almost every Con. I think the effort made to distinguish SF from the Western back in the early days of SF was valiant, necessary, and doomed. They have too much in common.

So as business ventures go, it was a bit of a bust, as the sales didn't really justify the expense of going. They were very nice about it, only charging us for one table instead of the two we signed up for, and they even let us expand into a third spot since there was room and no one else was using it. As a vacation it was much better.

Astronomicon

Live from the Radissson Hotel in Rochester NY, its...Author Guy!

Please, please, hold your applause, just throw money.

So here I am at my first ever Astronomicon, trying as always to get my deserving books into the hands of deserving readers. We got snowed on, on the way up here. My wife was so jealous when I told her about it last night. Out on LI we don't get nearly as much snow as we'd like.

We got in at around 4 and immediately set up our tables. My daughter, Julia, got a chance for a shower last night, but did I? Nooo. And guess who comes by--last night--taking pictures of everybody for the archives. On the other hand he also recorded a brief interview with me that he said will be podcast sometime in December.

I'm torn between calling my books epic fables, or new mythology. I don't think 'fantasy novel' really groks the essence, man. I've been trying for 7 years now to figure out how to describe my books in a 30-second sound bite or a short paragraph, and I still can't do it.

I've got other interviews that I did a while back on the Destinies Radio show on WUSB, and the show archives are on CaptPhilOnline.com somewhere. I wonder if I can post them on my website? In chunks. The first interview was almost two hours long, since the follow-up DJ didn't get there in time. Fortunately I was able to speak coherently and extemporaneously for an additional hour, at midnight, until she finally got in. Howard had some good questions, so I had something to talk about.

Anyway, back to last night. It was steampunk night, and here I was without a single copy of Echelon's new steampunk novel, Thomas Riley. Lots of people in steampunk costumes too. As often happens at these sorts of events, we had a lot of browsers, and few buyers. Most con guests will browse the dealer's room several times before making selections, and then they don't actually buy them until the last day, so they don't have to carry around a lot of stuff. So I was able to spend a goodly amount of time with several people, talking extensively about my books in particular and Echelon books in general. Most seemed surprised that I could describe the stories so well, even though I read them a long time ago. Maybe that's the pronlem with both my reading and my writing, I don't just read, I work at it, so I read more slowly and lesss often but I know the book when I'm done. If I was able to just put words on paper I'd also get more words written but I don't know if they would be as good as the words I write now.

I got to shake hands with Robert Sawyer, the science-fiction author. Several of the other dealers are also panelists and such so I expect I'll meet a few more luminaries in the field before the weekend is out.

Time to see about breakfast.

this weekend in Author Guy land

Busy, wet, and windy.

We were set up to do an event is Islandia, on LI, yesterday, and the weather was just not inclined to cooperate. Last weekend was windy and cold. This weekend was windy and warm, with a few bouts of rain thrown in just for fun. I wasn't even planning to go, but my daughter (the one who does these events with me) asked why not, and the sun was out and the weather channel showed no clouds around. So we loaded up and raced on down to the event. Lots of vendors had chickened out, some even after they had gotten there and complained a lot while setting up. Even in the lot we weren't sure about it, but finally decided to take our chances. No sooner were we committed than it started to drizzle, and we had to get out the tarps I'd cut up after the disaster in Collingswood. The books spent the whole day under the plastic, which was good, since the rain wasn't constant but the wind was. My shelter blew up off the ground twice, and we spent the last two hours holding it down. My neightbor lost several glass ornaments when her christmas tree display crashed down. The event manager came around and told everyone that they would get their money refunded, and a while later came around and told everyone that the event was closing up 1.5 hours early. Even so we sold over 20 books, so all I can say is Tough It Out. The only thing quitting guarantees is that you'll achieve nothing.

Today I spent part of my morning counting books. Not only was the layout at the event pretty haphazard, but the packing up was even more so, and we didn't even do a final inventory until today.

I also checked out some agent blogs. Saw the usual advice about queries. It amazes me that people still need to be told some of the things I see in these blogs. My only problem in writing a query is the synopsis, but that's me and my story, not the simple format of a query letter. I did see that there seems to be an assumption on the part of agents that a story will have one protagonist and one plot/conflict. I started thinking maybe that's what my book needs, a stronger set of links between all the various parts and characters, so instead of multiple layers of plot, threads of plot woven into one, I could in fact have one plot. I doubt that it'll happen, but I don't think it'll hurt my story to try. In this case I was adding new text to my novel St. Martin's Moon. I'd always felt it was too short, but it took some time and distance to see where content could be added without being filler. The story really features three protagonists (which makes it tough to write a synopsis for, since there's no single plot, either) yet only one of them gets any great amount of screen time. The other two need to have some more presentation, which is what I did, partly. I'll probably be adding more, especially during edits, if it ever gets any. I also need to get more time in on my next novel, Tales of Uncle, as well as my contest entry for next year's Parsec contest.

Then today I watched two movies that I'd gotten from the Library. One was called the Librarian, the third movie in the series, called The Curse of the Judas Chalice. Humorous adventure about vampires and stuff. Much better than the second movie but not as good as the first, IMHO. I still think they should bring back Nicole Noone.

The second film was A History of Violence, a marvelous movie by David Cronenberg. A small-town store owner foils a robbery, and the notoriety brings him to the attention of some big-time mobsters who know him from his previous life, a life he claims was not his. What I loved about the film is that it was not about the crime or the mob or even whether it was his past or not. The movie is about the effect all of it has on his family, the members of which are led into the discovery and exploration of their own darker natures, which they hadn't even known existed before then.

Medium - Rare

I just discovered the TV show Medium, and I am so glad I did. I found the first two seasons on DVD at BJs for $10 apiece, which is ridiculously low. I picked them up, even though I knew nothing of the show. Must have been my own psychic powers at work (I use the Force to select my books, too), because this show is everything I like and very little that I don't.

This is a show about a woman, a wife and mother. She also happens to have psychic powers, and the stories are more about the effect these powers have on her life than the powers themselves. Just as my own books are about a man, who has to rebuild his life after the gods have selected him to the work that needs to be done, so this show is about a woman trying to live a life with a power that is often as much a curse as a blessing. This show could easily have turned into some 'psychic detective' type of thing but has thankfully managed to avoid that.

It's kind of annoying, really, since I'm trying to work on my stories and novels and instead I'm watch episodes of this show every night. It's the problem to have, I guess.

Any Storm in a Port

This time things are going to be different. It’s what I do, it’s the way I write. My only rule, and I’ve said it a thousand times, is “Never repeat yourself!”

Consider, for example, the story that was released last month by Echelon Shorts (‘Chasing His Own Tale’, read about it here) as compared with the story that is being released this month, which I call ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, mainly because, well, that’s the title. ‘Chasing His Own Tale’ began with a dark and stormy night. ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ starts with a…um…

Okay, different example: ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ began with a contest, held by a very nice little convention out in Pittsburgh called Confluence. Every year they have a contest for a story to be published in their convention guide, and the contest has a theme. The year I discovered it, the theme was ‘Hard Port’. Any interpretation of those words was a good one, but the story had to include them somewhere. As you can imagine, the story does not progress in a straightforward fashion. No book written by me does, but this story really fed into my tendency to take an idea and go off thattaway with it. Cybernetics. Seamanship. (You know, ‘port’ means left, ’starboard’ means right, that sort of thing.) (No, I don’t know where ’starboard’ comes from.) Wine. Which one should I choose?

In 3500 words I managed it five times. In five different ways. I should have a contest of my own, see if anybody can find them all.

I didn’t start out with the idea that it should be another comedy, either, although it isn’t one, quite. I don’t usually start out with any idea what a story should be or where it should go. I usually start with a character, somebody doing something, and the story spins out of what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it. Usually I’m lucky enough to figure out what that is before I get to the end. A short story lends itself to comedy, though, at least I’ve found it so. Or maybe that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Nah.

So if you’re in the mood for fiction that makes a couple of good, sharp left turns (ha! Get it?), you can find it right here.

New and improved

I finally got around to fixing up my website yesterday. It was originally created for me by a fellow student at SUNY Stony Brook, but I'm sure it had become something of an albatross by the time yesterday rolled around. It wasn't well-designed for what I ended up doing, which is write a bunch of truly excellent smaller stories. I had one novel and the site was intended to reflect that, naive rube that I was.

I had not yet caught on to the fact that authors have to be the main force in selling and promoting their own books, so the site wasn't especially active, and to a great extent it still isn't. If I want to add functionality I'd probably have to get a new hosting package and rebuild the whole thing. But I made a number of long-overdue changes, the most important of which is putting my novels, my short stories, and my anthologized stories on their own pages. Right now this is 6 items on three pages, but I have many more shorts coming, and maybe even a third novel. The manuscript for that is done, but I have no idea when it will come out.

I still have more to do, of course. In the near future the place will be changing some more, new pages and so on, plus updated content on the existing ones.

I have a question, though, and I'm hoping those of you in the world who read this will leave a cooment about it. I have changed the name of the site to "Left of Center", because I feel that phrase best describes the way I write. I have on many occasions been asked to write stories with certain guidelines and in every case, the looser the guidelines are, the further left of center my story becomes. As an example, I was asked to write a story about fire, for an anthology, and where almost everyone else created tales of house, building or forest fires and the people who had to deal with them, I created a vampire Christmas carol.

You see what I mean. I hope.

Anyway, I'm not an especially political person, but my wife is, and she felt that a title like Left of Center would be off-putting to those people who might come here expecting it to be a political site somehow. So my question is, how would you take this title? I admit I've already skewed the data by explaining it, but I would nonetheless like some feedback on the issue. I don't harp on the subject, and it only appears in the title bar. If this were a blog I could see it being a problem, but what about this case?

Thanks in advance for any comments you amy leave.

Six men, one room, and a door that goes WHAM! a lot

I was thinking about doing this as a character blog, and let Author Guy run the show, but AG’s a bit strange–

“Greetings! I am Author Guy, the primary character in the hilariously funny short story, ‘Chasing His Own Tale’, so primary that I don’t even have my own name. Now that’s primary. Besides, the story is in first person and I know who I am.”

–and I quickly thought better of the idea.

I thought about doing some kind of fake interview setup–

“‘Chasing His Own Tale’ is the story of how I wrote, or tried to write, a funny fantasy story, and is in fact based on my attempts to write a funny fantasy story. Very John Lennon-ish. Remember Nowhere Man? Anybody?”

–but couldn’t think of any questions to ask myself. Besides, it’s been done, and I don’t do things that have been done already. At least I try not to.

I even invented a new character, Blogger Guy, to write this blog for me, but the less said about him the better. So I guess it comes down to me.

***Insert Girding of Loins here.***

When my once-editor, She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, asked me to do a short story, and a ‘weird, silly, humorous’ one at that, I panicked. I had only ever written one novel (Unbinding the Stone, get your copy today), and had, I thought, no idea how to write short, or comedy.

Wrong on both counts.

The idea for ‘Chasing His Own Tale’ (which I will call CHOT because the real name is just too-damned-long) ambushed me in a parking lot about a week after I was asked to write it. After about another week of typing away at my computer, giggling madly, it was done. I had a job at the time that actually paid me to drive around thinking about stories all day, and occasionally do other stuff in between, like work. Since it’s a) a comedy, b) short, and b) written by me, it’s filled with classic fantasy tropes turned on their heads, in a ‘Monty Python meets Zero Mostel’ sort of way. It is, in short, a parody, a spoof, a farce, and probably other words from the English theater tradition that I don’t really understand.

Hopefully you’ve all picked up on the not-so-subtle hints that this all took place some time ago. I’ve written a second novel since then (A Warrior Made, get your copy he—okay, okay!), as well as several other short stories. The anthology CHOT was written for , Wyrd Wravings, went toes up years ago (just three copies left, and they’re all mine, ha, ha, ha!) and now my story is prepared for a new chance at fame and glory.

Please help it along by getting your copy here.

Murphy's Law

My car has been showing it's Check Engine light for a while now. First I went to the Toyota dealership for an oil change and they said they checked it and I needed a whole new catalytic converter, and those costa lot of money. I was at a family get-together with my brother, and his daughter's boyfriend works in a garage that happens to specialize in exhaust systems. So I took it there and they said it was just a sensor, much less expensive. About a week later I get another light, but this time it goes on and off, like it used to. It's been on for a few days and then I start getting a wierd problem I never had before: it stalls out constantly. Fortunately I'd gone to the place near my house to shop. If I'd gone to the place my wife wanted me to go to, I'd never have gotten home. It wasn't so bad provided there was a constant flow of gas, but the second you hit the brakes it died. The next day I take it to the garage, a different one which was fortunately down a large hill from me, so gravity did most of the work. I get it into the lot and it dies, so I let it coast into a spot...or two...sticking out a little bit. The garage guy gets to it a while later and takes 10 minutes to get it across the street (he said). He gets it up onto his lift and tries to turn it on again so he can do whatever computerized magic those guys do nowadays to check engines.

It starts. It runs. The check engine light is out again.

"Any appliance when demonstrated for the repairman will work perfectly."

Portsmouth

So last night I drove up to Portsmouth, a very nice little town in New Hampshire, where the company I work for, Bottomline Technologies, is located. I came up here to train one of my associates on the really incredibly convoluted processes needed to test and analyze defects (I'm a bug-hunter) for some of our clients. It's a nice trip, about 6 hours from my house on LI. I suppose I could take the ferry or a plane, but really I don't think they would save me any time at all in transit, and I do like the scenery.

I got in last night and I was starving, and the lady at the desk of the hotel suggested a couple of places. I decided to go to the Portland Gas Light Company restaurant. It was a very nice place, multiple restaurants in a single building. Downstairs wa s a brick-oven pizza room, but on LI we have trouble believing that they know how to make pizza anywhere else. Besides, I've had pizza, and I'm more interested in the things that I can't get anywhere on LI, so instead I tried their Shrimp and Mussel stew, although I made the mistake of ordering the chicken fingers as an appetizer. First of all, it was an appetizer for three people at least. Second, the stew was quite a lot of food in its own right and I left there feeling like I was about to explode (in a good way), because it's Shrimp and Mussel stew! You don't just stop when you're full, it's almost a crime not to finish it. The staff was also very attentive, although that may have been because I was the only patron in that section. ;) In all, when I start going back to places I've been before I'll definitely be going back to this place.

Labor Week day-end

Last week was the official opening of my publisher's new line of short stories, called Echelon Press Shorts. They have a whole bunch of us scheduled to blog for the entire month, except apparently on the weekends. (I suppose this is a bad weekend to hope for all that many people to be hanging around their computers waiting to read blogs.) Normally I just write these posts as I go, but for my entry last week I actually wrote a draft and polished the damn thing. It shows, doesn't it?

I was working from home Friday when I suddenly remembered that this was Labor Day weekend, and I thought to myself, "Self--" (I can call it Self on account of we went to school together) "--don't we have a book-selling event on Labor Day weekend?" And I sort of thought I might be right. This is one of the benefits of doing a number of these craft and gift fairs on a regular basis. This venue's been doing events on the Sunday before Labor Day (and Memorial Day) for a while now. So I called and verified and I was there for the event yesterday, selling whatever books people were interested in. It wasn't a great day, but given the economic climate it was pretty good. People have so much more interest in not buying things than they used to, but fortunately books occupy a nice middle ground between the stuff that's not worth the money, and the stuff that costs too much. But it seems like there are fewer events than there used to be.

I may be forced to figure out this whole 'marketing' thing after all. I'll get to it, right after I become an expert query letter writer.

So how was your week?

So yesterday was a good day for me, in that I was the spotlight author for the day at the Echelon Shorts blog, and it even looks like a few of you actually clicked through to the book page and hopefully ordered it. Yay!

I'm even looking at the stat's today and people are still checking it out. Yay!

I spent most of yesterday sneezing, and today I had to leave work early and come home and sleep since I was utterly exhausted. So thanks to all of you who read my blog and maybe even read my story.

My turn

I have the spotlight today, on the new blog for the Echelon Press Shorts line, at http://echelonpressshorts.wordpress.com . Kind'a strange how the names match up, there. Looks like a conspiracy to me.

They're even giving away free copies to the first five commenters, how weird is that?

What are you waiting for, this is Echelon, man!

First official sale!

Today my publisher's new line of short stories debuted, with Regan Black as the featured author for the day.
The first official sale was my own short story, 'Chasing His Own Tale'. So thank you to Someone, for checking out my book. I hope you like it (actually, I know you'll like it, but a touch of modesty seems to be called for in this instance). I will be the featured author tomorrow, so come and join me, and tell people what you thought of my work.

Please.