Category Archives: Humor

January 28, 2013 · 11:53 pm

Forbidden Road

On friday, February 1, 2013 the kindle version of Forbidden Road, Book II in the Tower of Bones series will launch, followed closely by the print version. The print version may be delayed if there are any formatting issues, but it should be through the process by February 15th at the latest.

In print form these books are the size of good doorstops, but not quite as big as most of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.

Someone asked me how I could write a book a year, and that made me laugh. I suppose it LOOKS like that’s what I have done, but in actuality I began writing Tower of Bones in March of 2009. I have two manuscripts going at all times so they do seem to roll out at the rate of one per year, but I was actually two or more years in the writing process for each book before they went to publication.

Tower of Bones began its life as the walk-through for an old-school style RPG along the lines of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. My nephew Ryan and I thought would be fun to build something we could play and perhaps market as there is a large community of player who enjoy the old games. The game fell through but I liked the storyline and made it into a novel. But, by 2010 I realized it was never going to fly in the form I had originally created it.

In its first incarnation, Tower of Bones read in the “He is; he does; he goes” style of a Brady walk-through. Not real easy to get into as a reader! Present tense: The events of the plot are depicted as occurring now—at the current moment—in real-time. (e.g. “They drive happily. They have found their way and are now preparing to celebrate.”) In English this tense, known as the “historical present”, is more common in spontaneous conversational narratives than in written literature. A recent example of this is the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

You don’t even want to know the agony that I went through in changing the viewpoint of the entire 150,000 word ms from that awkward present tense point of view to the standard third person point of view. Not only that, I had begun Forbidden Road in the same style! Oh, my goodness–2010 was the year in which Grandma could frequently be heard exclaiming things like, “Sassafras! And Dirty Words!”

Alison DeLuca and my sister Sherrie DeGraw pored over that ms trying to help me clean it up, and finally by the end of 2011 it was done.

Now, three years after I began Forbidden Road it is in the grinder at Amazon, and the launch day approaches. It just looks like I am chugging them out one a year. I have already been working on Huw the Bard for 15 months, and Mountains of the Moon has been in the works for 18 months (and is still not finished.) Valley of Sorrows (book 3 in Tower of Bones series) has been in the works since November and NaNoWriMo

2010 was also the year I began The Last Good Knight as a NaNoWriMo project. I allowed myself to rush into publishing it when it was not ready. It is now readable, largely to the assistance of both Rachel Tsoumbakos and Carlie Cullen. I admit that my view of my own work is skewed by my growing as an author and gaining experience as an editor. It may be that I see my work in a worse light than the casual reader would, but in my opinion there were enough speed bumps in Billy’s Revenge 1 – TLGK to gag the dog.

One thing I have been working on is dealing with (if I may descend into technical terms) is Hinky Formatting Issues and VooDoo Readability. Anyone who has ever read an e-book knows what I am talking about, although they may not realize what has caused the strange appearance of random question marks where apostrophes should be. Strange formatting issues are also responsible for the way paragraphs will randomly lose their indentations, making a page look like a wall of words.

Unfortunately several wordprocessing programs are rife with hidden formatting, so if your ms began life in Open Office, you will need to strip all the formatting out of your work and reformat it, saving it as a .RTF. It gets even more complicated if you switched to using Word halfway through. As a rule, I strip all the formatting and completely reformat all my manuscripts before I upload them now, it saves time and curse words later. Rich Text Format files (signified by the extension .rtf) can also be argued to be safer than Word documents, (or .doc and .docx.) This is also, again, because .rtf uses text-based encoding. In simple terms, it’s pretty much impossible for Word to mess up .rtf files, because they are text-based: if there is a mistake while opening the file, the worst that will happen is that Word will open it as a text file, which will look like this:

\par A question that may often come to the mind of people who watch Mexican soap
operas is, \ldblquote Who the heck invented this ridiculous plot that consists
of the love af
fair between a rich guy and a poor girl who end up getting
married in the end despite all the adversity??\rdblquote This idea,
overexploited and completely clich\’e9

If there is a failure in .rtf you can at least read it. BUT the optimal goal is to have NO Formatting Failures so never rush to publish. If you are an indie you can simply move your launch date back until you have straightened out your issues. Use the option to review it in the handy reader KDP provides when you publish with them. B&N for Nook also has this option. Order proofs from your print-publisher and make sure your book looks the way you want it by going over every page of the proof copies line by line before you hear back from your friends that your book is a mess.

In the end I am responsible for what my work looks like so I have to do the footwork and make sure my formatting issues are all solved before the launch date. This requires both a calendar and the will to use it. Plan for a week of playing with your uploads to Kindle and CreateSpace before your projected launch date, and hopefully your work will go smoothly enough that you won’t need the extra time. Authors are notorious for leaving everything to the last-minute but I do suggest you don’t procrastinate in this endeavor. Random things go sideways and need to be redone. You’ll be much happier if you do the responsible thing and leave yourself plenty of wiggle-room during the crazy week leading up to your launch.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Dragons, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, Humor, knights, writing

Tagged as adventure, battles, dragons, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, writing

January 22, 2013 · 6:18 pm

David Eddings – Setting the Scene

In 1982 I picked up Pawn of Prophecy by the late David Eddings. This was an amazing, eye-opening book for me, as both a reader and an author. Eddings had the ability to convey a sense of place in a few well-chosen words. The book opens in the kitchen of a farmhouse with Garion’s memories of playing under the table in a kitchen as small child.

This is the first book in the 5 volume series, the Belgariad and chronicles the childhood of an orphaned boy, Garion, who is being raised by his Aunt Pol who works as the cook on a prosperous farm in a place called Sendaria. Garion has friends, and as time progresses he even has a wistful almost-romance with one of the girls there. But all is not as it appears, and Garion knows nothing of the reality of his family or the world he lives in.

He has other friends; Durnik the smith who is in love with Garion’s Aunt Pol, and a strange old traveling storyteller, Mr. Wolf whom his aunt seems to know well and whom she grudgingly tolerates despite his strange attire and love of ale.

What David Eddings does in the first chapters of this book is truly magical. He immediately drew me in and within two paragraphs I was immersed in this world–I could smell the smell scents of the kitchen and visualize the people who worked there so companionably in the generous employ of Farmer Faldor. I felt I knew them, and I felt I knew that farm.

I am not a boy, but Eddings put me inside a boy’s mind and I understood that boy on a personal level. Garion’s confusion and dismay as everything he takes for granted begins to crumble around him is real and I felt his anger, his hurt and confusion. I understood his need to stand on his own and I knew fear when he did.

Eddings managed to draw me into that world with an economy of prose. He gives the reader just enough detail to fire the imagination, and the reader’s own mind does the rest, unencumbered by too much of the author’s personal vision of the scene. He does this by describing what the boy remembers of the kitchen, and more emphasis is placed on the emotions evoked by scents and memories of conversations, supported by the merest framework of the scene. Edding’s world is filtered through the eyes of the people who live in it.

Garion’s earliest memories are of being a toddler–the sound of knives deftly dicing vegetable, his aunt keeping him corralled and happy under the table while she works, the sparkle of the gleaming pots and kettles high on the wall lulling him to nap.

“And sometimes in the late afternoon when he grew tired, he would lie in a corner and stare into one of the flickering fires that gleamed and reflected back from the hundred polished pots and knives and long-handled spoons that hung from pegs along the whitewashed walls and, all bemused, he would drift off to sleep in perfect peace and harmony with all the world around him.”

In that passage we see the entire kitchen, and we have a visual image of it. The child’s sense of contentment and safety that the kitchen represented is conveyed by the impressions of the kitchen instead of the image of it. The detail supports the story rather than impeding it.

Many times I see authors try to force an exact, detailed picture of their world on the reader, and it ruins the story for me. An author doesn’t have to beat me over the head with minute detail; that sort of thing bores me.

What reading the work of David Eddings has taught me is that economy of detail and simple lines often make a more powerful picture than a detailed drawing that looks like a search and find game. Some indie authors set a scene with so much detail it reads like an episode of Hoarders. I understand that, as I too wrestle with the tendency.

In the editing process I have had some of my most cherished passages detailing certain places or people thrown out with the simple phase “This is hokey”, and while it hurts to see those words in the comments, it is true and so it is time to throw out a beloved passage and opt for a lean description.

Sometime I opt for too lean a description and when the comment “What were they feeling? How did they show it?” appears in the right hand column I sometimes wonder why they can’t see it when it is as plain as day. But upon examination I realize that maybe a line or two more might help explain the emotion of a scene.

Still, it is important to remember that my reader has an idea of what true beauty is, and they may not think a girl with sun-yellow hair in perfect ringlets framing a heart-shaped face with fine, arching eyebrows over corn-flower-blue eyes peering through dark curling lashes is as beautiful as I may think she is. It may be better for me to refer to her as fair-haired and astonishingly pretty, and leave it at that.

If I could ask for any skill, it would be create a world with the precision and fine craftsmanship David Eddings brought to his work. To this end, I read the works of the great masters of fantasy hoping to absorb some of their techniques and wizardry. I also read the works of newly published indie authors hoping to find that one kernel of genius that will strike a chord in my soul and transport me to a world not of my own making.

The next installment in this series will be focusing on just that–indies of great talent whose works are as yet unknown but which have had an impact on me as a reader.

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Tagged as David Eddings, dragons, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, writing

January 19, 2013 · 8:53 pm

What I’ve learned from Piers Anthony

The book, A Spell for Chameleon, first published in 1977 was my introduction to Piers Anthony. I was immediately bewitched by his fantastical vision of a truly magical world, and I loved the fact that he placed it in Florida. His world of Xanth was a world where magic is as intrinsic to life as is oxygen, and that notion has intrigued me ever since. The concept of making magic a fundamental requirement for life is one that makes complete sense to me. Not only that, he did it with laugh-out-loud humor using puns and hokey jokes that were transformed into hilarious prose under his pen.

At the beginning of the novel Bink is facing exile from the magical land of Xanth and separation from his fiancée Sabrina for his lack of a magic talent. All human residents of Xanth possess some unique form of magic that ranges from incredibly powerful (such as the current King Aeolus’s ability to summon and control storms) to relatively useless (such as the ability to make a spot appear on a wall). In the hopes of discovering his talent Bink sets out to see the Good Magician Humfrey, a magician whose talent has to do with the gathering of information. Of course, things don’t go the way Bink hopes–it wouldn’t be a good story if they did!

Bink meets three women: Wynne who is pretty but stupid, Dee an average girl and also the sorceress Iris, whose power is the creation of illusions. Wynne and Dee are actually different aspects of the same woman, Chameleon, although Bink does not realize this at the time. Chameleon’s intelligence and beauty vary inversely according to the time of the month and she has been unable to find a man who is willing to be with her through all 3 phases. He also meets the Evil Magician Trent, and discovers that he actually likes him.

This book is one of the better books I had ever read, and I began a lifelong love affair with the works of Piers Anthony. Besides the witty prose and creative plots in this series, the COVERS of his books were AWESOME. I have been well-known as a person who will buy a book for the cover, and that is exactly how I stumbled onto this series. The Xanth series is one long running pun after another.

I bought A Spell for Chameleon for the same reason I purchase any book–I saw it on the rack in my local Albertson’s grocery store and fell in love with the cover.

I learned several things from Piers Anthony and his Xanth series, the first of which is that Great Covers Sell Books. I also saw that a true artist can take the most common, overused puns and turn them into the framework for a really fun adventure. I admit I did lose interest at about book ten, but even so, Piers Anthony still manages to have fun with it, and he still sells books. The Xanth series is incredibly popular, and deservedly so.

The series Anthony wrote that really captured my imagination, and which in my mind still reigns as his best works is the Apprentice Adept series, beginning with Split Infinity, Blue Adept and Juxtaposition.

This man has had one of the most prolific and highly regarded writing careers ever, with more than 150 published works to his credit. His sharp wit and amazing gift for world building are legendary, and he has won numerous awards for his work.

But what reading his incredible body of work and following his career has taught me is that even when things around you have gone to hell (as things are wont to do) the writer has the craft of writing fantasy to provide his mind with an escape from the TRUE weirdness of real life. Anyone who has read his official Wikipedia biography knows that Piers Anthony has had a long life with many personal challenges, through all of which I am sure writing was and is his refuge. This gives me hope and the impetus to just keep on doing what I can, trying to make silk purses from the sows’ ears of my work when I feel a bit discouraged.

Writing is a journey and you never know what lies around the corner.

If a writer is lucky, his works will eventually be beautifully covered and on sale in the racks at the local Albertson’s store, just waiting for a girl like me to pick it up for the art.

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Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, dragons, fantasy, humor, literature, Piers Anthony, writing, Xanth

January 18, 2013 · 2:03 am

Mucking out after the dragon

I thought I had The Last Good Knight all cleaned up. I was SURE I had it as straight as could be! Many eyes have looked at it, and still there are places that need attention! Fortunately, Carlie Cullen is applying her red pen to the hitches and halts in the flow, without changing the story or the structure since it has been published for so long. It’s a good story, probably my favorite but it has had a rough life.

This is the one tale that never had a real line-edit, and I was so new to this business that I thought the brief once-over my former publisher gave it was a true edit. They were new at the business too, and were learning a lot as they went along. It was a good edit, in that it cleaned up certain obvious things, but it was very quick and not a true, in-depth edit. I was not involved in the actual edit, as the changes that were made were not offered to me for my approval. Thus, getting that book re-edited so that it reads more easily is somewhat like mucking out after a dragon. Just about the the time I think it’s all done, there is another steaming pile of…goodness…look at the time, I should be cooking dinner.

Having worked with two editors since leaving the former publisher, I now see what was NOT done for The Last Good Knight the first time, and thank god, one of my editors, Carlie Cullen is giving it her attention. The biggest challenge is dealing with these things and moving on, instead of banging my head on my desk in frustration when she points out something I should have seen.

But that is why these sorts of edits are SO critical. We, as authors, only see what we THINK we wrote. This is something I can’t stress strongly enough–get an independent eye on your work. If you have a friend who has worked as a paralegal for her entire career, proof-reading lawyers briefs as Irene Luvaul did, even better! If you can’t find an editor you can afford, you can do this: Print your work out one chapter at a time, and sit down with the yellow high-lighter. take an envelope and go down the page one line at a time. You will catch a great deal that way!

I don’t feel nearly so badly about TLGK once I take a close look at my earlier works though – those tales who began their lives on the old Mac in the mid nineties. Once they were transferred to disc and then transferred again to PC they were put away and forgotten. Some have great storylines, and really fun characters, but I would have to completely rewrite them in order to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear they are right now. There must be an entire library of badly written prose on those old mac floppies.

There are many flaws in my earlier works, especially the ones going back to my days of pecking them out on the old IBM Selectric.They are rife with misspellings, poor grammar, clichés, head-hopping, and hokey dialogue. But underneath all the bad fluff I see the bones of the story I was so proud of having written in the first place, and I realize that there was spark there. This is why I say don’t be discouraged by your first initial draft of any work. All it needs is a lot more attention from you and the eye of an editor.

I was once a singer in a heavy metal band, and the opening lines of one of the songs I wrote went like this:

“It’s a cold and lonely morning, the sky dawns bland and white.

The emptiness inside my heart is as chilling as the night.”

It was cheerful little tune (NOT!) but with my ex-husband’s awesome guitar solos it was quite popular among our friends. We were very hip and very serious about the craft when we played. Of course I was 26 at the time, and quite sure I was the next female Ronnie James Dio. The band as a whole took ourselves far too seriously, and it soon got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore. It was a long time before I realized exactly why we fell apart the way we did, when we were having such a good time playing small gigs as a local band. We became too caught up with the art of the music, instead of getting on with it and we forgot why we were doing it in the first place.

I admit that I don’t need serious anymore. I don’t need to take my writing so seriously that it’s not fun.

With that said, I do need to turn out the best finished product I am able to do, and that means allowing someone I trust to look at it and say, “This just doesn’t read right. Maybe if you change this a little….” I am not married to my prose, although I am sure it is the finest prose in the world. Oh, look…more dragon poo.

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Tagged as Art, dragons, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, writing

January 14, 2013 · 7:03 pm

The Terry Pratchett School of Prose

One of the earliest influences on my sometimes smartassed style of writing was Sir Terry Pratchett, O.B.E.‘s watershed fantasy series, Discworld. Sir Terry takes J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and William Shakespeare, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, and mashes them up in this hilarious series of tales. There are 39 books in this trilogy! Talk about prolific!

Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A’Tuin. Oh my goodness – what opportunities for mayhem were locked in that kernel of a plot! The series begins with “The Colour of Magic.”

One of my favorite books in the series is “Mort.” It is the 4th book and is the first to give Death the main storyline.

As a teenager, Mort had a personality and temperament that made him rather unsuited to the family farming business. Mort’s father, named Lezek, felt that Mort thought too much, which prevented him from achieving anything practical. Thus, Lezek took him to a local hiring fair, hoping that Mort would land an apprenticeship with some tradesman; not only would this provide a job for his son, but it would also make his son’s propensity towards thinking someone else’s problem.

The conversation between Lezek and his brother Hamish as they discuss Mort’s future in the opening pages is hilarious and quite revealing in its simplicity. In this snippett, Lezek and Hamish are observing Mort as he attempts to frighten some birds away from the crop.

“He’s not stupid, mind” said Hamish. “Not what you’d call stupid.”

“There’s a brain there all right,”Lezek conceded. “Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see? I reckon it overheated his mind.”

At the job fair, Mort at first has no luck attracting the interest of an employer. Then, just before the stroke of midnight, a man concealed in a black cloak arrives on a white horse. He says he is looking for a young man to assist him in his work and selects Mort for the job. The man turns out to be Death, and Mort is given an apprenticeship in ushering souls into the next world (though his father thinks he’s been apprenticed to an undertaker).

I love the snarky way Pratchett takes clichés and runs with them. He grabs the boring, bland, overdone themes of western literature by the tail and swings them. When he sets them down they are SO much more fun to watch!

What I have learned from the Terry Pratchett school of prose is that dialog tells us as much about the speaker himself as it does about the words expressed. In the quoted passage above we see enough of the two men who are speaking to have some idea of who they are. Pratchett gives us the personality and demeanor of the character in those simple lines. We can see them, fully formed in our minds eye as they speak. .

That is the hand of the master, and it is what I someday hope to be able to bring to my own work. The important thing to remember is you must read the works of the masters, because if you have no idea of what good writing really is, you can’t write it. Read the best works in your genre and continue writing your own stories and never let the struggle of getting your work out there take away the joy of writing it. It’s not easy, going indie, but it is so rewarding!

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Tagged as adventure, Discworld, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, Terry Pratchett, writing

January 9, 2013 · 6:26 pm

Building the Beast

I have been suffering with a cold for the last week and so my writing output has dwindled to nearly nothing. I have gotten some work done, but not the amount I had hoped for.

I worked on a scene requested by my editor, Irene Luvaul, for Huw the Bard, one to liven up a dull stretch just a bit. I didn’t want to put Huw through the wringer again when he has already suffered so much, and he was so close to making his way to Billy’s Revenge, but she was right – a bit of tension would add to the interest.

So I alternately thought and slept on it for more than a week, trying to force my plague-ridden body peck out a few lines with merit to them.

I couldn’t think of anything.

But then a passing paragraph toward the end of Billy’s Revenge I – The Last Good Night (under revision again, cleaning up the manuscript, thank you Carlie Cullen for volunteering) gave me the idea for a strange creature with which I could freak out poor naive Huw. (Having the right editor in the first place solves SO many problems further down the road.)

Firesprites.

But this meant – you guessed it – Building the Beast. The only trouble was, I didn’t really know what one looked like – after all they were only mentioned in passing as being a nuisance.

Now, I only had three passing references in BR1 that talked about these creatures, but those few sentences told me quite a bit about them, actually.

So when I thought about it I realized I did have enough to build one. I just needed to assemble the parts.

1. They are either elemental creatures, or poisonous creatures, one or the other. I say this because they are called ‘FIREsprites’. Yet, logic tells me they can’t be made of fire, or there would be no forest. Therefore, they must be poisonous, and the poison must be an acid that burns like fire.

2. They must be small. Otherwise King Henri’s horse would not have stepped into a nest of them and thrown his rider.

3. Something about them makes people think of fire, and it must be something bad, because Lackland and the people of Waldeyn feel compelled to kill the entire nest when they find them, sort of like fire ants only bigger and badder. But they must be something that one lone woman (Lady Mags) could deal with, with only the aid of an amulet.

I always think it’s better when the folks who actually have to deal with them tell me what they look like, so here is what Matt St. Couer told Huw and I about firesprites.

Matt said, “Now we need to herd them to the center of the nest and get them bunched up in as tight a group as we can. Don’t touch them, whatever you do. The slime on their skin will burn you like the hottest fire, and there’s no stopping it from eating your flesh away. That’s why they’re called firesprites. The wounds keep putrefying, and amputation is the only remedy. Water helps but only if you get the water on the affected area right away, before the poison has done too much damage. I’m talking minutes here, and you have to really sluice the wounds to get the poison off. Sadly, they never seem to nest near water.”

Ulleen said, “They like to nest along roads because there’s not so much foliage and they get more sun there. The sun heats their nests and hatches their eggs.”

“They don’t look much like a sprite, do they,” Huw said, thinking they were interesting but not really fairy-like. “At least, not what I always thought a sprite should look like. They look more like naked chipmunks with hairless tails. But their skin is pretty, all shiny and coppery like that.”

“I think they were named that because when they’re looking for grubs and such all you see is a little flash of copper as they disappear into the brush,” Ulleen replied. “I’ve always wondered about that too.”

Now as far as actually building the beast goes, I have quite a lot of dragon parts lying around my office, and I can assemble a dragon in no time at all. I will even stick wings on it, if you like your dragons airborne. But dragon parts are far too large for this project, so I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Somewhere in here I have a box with everything one might need to assemble a demon.

I think this is the box.

Yes!

I’m partial to waterdemons. They’re quite fun to put into a fight-scene and some of their components will be perfect for the job. Clear, gelatinous skin is exactly what these little guys need, and I have a lot of it in this box. If I take some of that and turn it all coppery, it will actually be kind of pretty, in a hairless chipmunk sort of way. With the addition of a really strong acid to the gelatinous goo I think we’ll have a cute little firesprite!

I love arts and crafts time!

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Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, dragons, humor, literature, magic, writing

January 6, 2013 · 5:05 pm

Oh, the Agony

The Aspirin Shop © 2012 Connie J Jasperson All Rights Reserved

Yes, we now find ourselves in the deepest depths of January. The days are short and dark, and my desk is piled high with the visions and revisions of my current works-in-progress. I stare at the mountain of work that demands my attention and my mind is consumed with solving that eternal paradox, “Who gave me this damned cold? Which little germ-factory that I call a grandchild is the culprit?”

Alas, the responsible party is most likely sitting in his kindergarten class having a snack and discussing tactics for beating “Lego Star Wars” with his mates while Grandma suffers the agonies of the damned.

In the meantime, cold or no cold, I must somehow wind up the tale before me. My characters have already been through quite a lot, and they aren’t in tip-top condition. Still, they have a job to do and they are going to do it or die in the process.

At this juncture my characters are lurking high in the branches of fir trees outside the stone walls of a mountain keep, observing the small village surrounding the castle they need to enter. They need to decide how to enter the haunted castle, and they need to make a plan for getting to the rogue-mage and eliminating him. Once he is dead, the spells he’s layered over his guards will be broken and my team should be able to leave safely.

Once inside the keep, they will have to make their way through the halls, killing off the bespelled guards as they come to them until they have finally met the mage they have been sent to kill.

They’ve already fought a dragon and been caught in an avalanche. They’ve fought many other elemental creatures and each other.

Now here they are, poised on the edge of finishing this adventure and Grandma’s too stoned on NyQuil to concentrate long enough to get them to where they can kill the evil bad dude.

This could take a while.

It’s just so much wo-o-o-ork…..

Actually this game looks fun. I think I’ll just rest in the play-room for a moment….

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Tagged as adventure, Art, Brittain, fantasy, humor, knights, Legos, literature, Star Wars, writing

January 2, 2013 · 7:31 am

Which was that, anyway….

742px-L_Spada_Concierto_1615_Louvre As a mostly self-educated old lady, I’ve had to learn some real lessons, regarding the words ‘that’ and ‘which’. I finally managed to rid myself of the inadvertent overuse of the word ‘that’ in my writing, but in the process I find I have become a ‘which’, as opposed to a ‘witch’, which my children will tell you I have always been. Irene Luvaul, dear friend and editor on ‘Huw the Bard’ has spent many hours noting instances where I inappropriately used which instead of that.

Sigh.

I’ve spent 59 years using these two words improperly!

So, when DO we use the word that in an appropriate and defensible fashion? After all, too many that’s make the prose boring and forgettable. Some people say you must NEVER use it, but Irene says they are incorrect.

So does Grammar Girl, (Mignon Fogarty) on her awesome website for writers with questions. This website is an invaluable resource for folks like me, with some education, but no memory of what that education actually taught us.

There are instances where only that will suffice. When do we use the word that?

We use it when we have something called a ‘Restrictive Clause’. So now you want to know (as I did) what the heck THAT is!

Quote from Grammar Girl, “A restrictive clause is just part of a sentence that you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts some other part of the sentence.” She goes on to give a specific example of a restrictive clause: “Gems that sparkle often elicit forgiveness.” See? Not just ANY gems elicit forgiveness in this sentence, but only gems that sparkle. It is restricted to one kind of gem.

So, now we know about restrictive clauses, but what about nonrestrictive clauses? Again we turn to Grammar Girl and she says, “A nonrestrictive clause is something that can be left off without changing the meaning of the sentence. You can think of a nonrestrictive clause as simply additional information.” Again she gives the example, “Diamonds, which are expensive, often elicit forgiveness.” The word ‘which’ isn’t really necessary, as the meaning of the sentence would not be changed if you left it out. “Diamonds are expensive, but often elicit forgiveness.” Sometimes the sentence is better without the extraneous word.

I still make a mish-mash of things as they fall out of my head and into my book, but I take comfort in knowing I am not alone! Writing is a journey, and I learn something new every step of the way.

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Filed under Humor, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, humor, literature, writing

December 22, 2012 · 1:11 am

Alton Brown, the Futility of Stone Calendars, and Chocolate Chile Cookies

As Homer Simpson once said, “Mmmm… chocolate….”

I love to bake cookies, and I have found the tastiest cookie ever. I spent the end of the world baking cookies, just on the off-chance that the world would not end, and Christmas would arrive. If that were so, I would need to serve cookies and coffee to random guests as they might appear over the impending holidays, so better safe than sorry. The picture above left is for Chocolate Crackled Cookies, and is not only made with yummy chocolate, there is Roasted Saigon Cinnamon and Ancho Chile Powder in them. The odd sounding combination works perfectly!

Of course, Alton Brown tells us that when the Mayans and Aztecs were not killing time with chiseling long-range calendars, they were known to drink hot chocolate spiced with chilies. Of course, most Meso-Americans were quite busy with religious obligations and had very little time to pursue hobbies such a stamp collecting or assembling jigsaw puzzles, so calendar chiseling may have offered a diversion from the endless social rounds of war and ritual human sacrifice. Heck, even a simple ball game tended to end badly for the loser, so I’m sure a bit of hacking away at the old boulder with a hammer and chisel offered some relatively safe relaxation.

You know, I think the fact that the Mayan Calendar was chiseled into stone and ended on 12-21-2012 is a perfect reminder as to why we don’t use stone anymore for things like long-range calendars and day-planners. After all, stone is a finite medium! There is only so much stone available at a given point for a chiseler to chisel upon, so it stands to reason that at some point the calendar chiseler will run out of stone and the stone calendar will end.

Anyway, I find the Google Calendar to be much less trouble than a stone to fit into my purse, seeing as it is available on my phone, my laptop and my pc as well as the Android. Unfortunately, I am no longer allowed to plead ignorance in regard to appointments I’ve made and forgotten about. I get email reminders 2 days, 1 day and 2 hours in advance, along with pop-up reminders. The phone dings, and I (like Pavlov’s Dog) automatically reach to see what conditioned behaviors the digital-leash is encouraging me to exhibit now.

So now I that I have digressed and wasted copious quantities of time by baking, criticizing the Mayans time-keeping system and eating chocolate cookies, I will sit in my office and write a post (one day late) for my Best in Fantasy blog, this one examining the best book covers of 2012. There is some mighty fine artwork out there and indie books are just as beautifully covered as the books published by the ‘Big 6’ publishers.

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Filed under Adventure, Battles, Books, Humor, mythology, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as Alton Brown, Art, Chocolate Cookies, humor, literature, Mayan Calendar

December 18, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Charles Dickens was an Indie Author, Too

Few people are aware that one of the most famous and inspirational books in the English language was originally self-published, and didn’t do as well as the author intended. Charles Dickens began to write A Christmas Carol in September 1843, and completed the book in six weeks with the final pages written in the beginning of December. Unfortunately he was feuding with his publisher over the meager earnings on his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Because of that, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for the tale and chose a percentage of the profits in hopes of making more money. He then published the work at his own expense. It was as expensive then as it is now to publish quality print books and high production costs netted him only £230 (equal to £19,128 today) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £83,164 today) he’d hoped and needed, as his wife was once again pregnant. A year later, the profits were only £744 and Dickens was deeply disappointed.

Formatting was as tough in those days as it is now and Dickens was unhappy with the first edition of the tale. It contained drab, olive colored endpapers that Dickens felt was unacceptable. The publisher, Chapman and Hall, quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers but those clashed with the title page which was then redone. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages and was completed only two days before the release date of 19 December 1843.

I take comfort in knowing that the man who wrote the most powerful story of redemption in my personal library was an indie author too. Self-publishing is much easier nowadays, but nevertheless it too is fraught with costs and formatting difficulties. I have one last little formatting issue to solve in the Tower of Bones on page 361, and then I will be able to okay the final print version of it. Wonky formatting is the curse of my life!

This is the time of year when I watch every single version of A Christmas Carol that can be found. Alastair Sims, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo and now Jim Carey occupy the small screen and remind me of what is really important in life – love and family. Even Mickey Mouse has warmed the cockles of my heart in the role of Bob Cratchitt.

And now, I must go wrap presents by the flickering light of my television, as once again the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Mr. Scrooge to see what he should have seen all along – that Christmas Spirit is a year-round emotion, and has less to do with cash flow and Black Friday Shopping and more to do with charity of spirit.

If you are feeling charitable, I would recommend these fine charities:

The Salvation Army

The Union Gospel Mission

Clean Water for the World

There are so many worthy charities, and any gift you make to them will benefit millions of people. I live in the lap of luxury, and I know it. I have a good roof over my head, a reliable income and a healthy family. I am grateful for all these blessings, and if you are similarly blessed, I encourage you to make some donations to your local charities as a way of giving thanks!