A Writer's Blog
Posted in Publishing, Release, The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
I'm happy to announce that To Carry the Horn is now available in paperback. See the link to order.
I'm still having difficulty with Google Play and may have to give up on that channel even if I finally get it working properly, because I understand that their propensity to discount ebooks arbitrarily may trigger the same behavior from Amazon to match the price, and I can't have a book seller making that decision for me; discounting needs to be my decision..
Posted in Just for Writers, and To Carry the Horn
I've been done with To Carry the Horn since the middle of September. Just waiting for one last bit of information — the Library of Congress CIP (Cataloguing in Publication) block of data for the copyright page — which should arrive in the next few days. After that, whoosh — up go the files for the ebooks and the trade paperback.
Just to give you a little flavor of what that's like…
1) Complete the manuscript (I use Scrivener). Output a version for Word. Use Word to do preliminary global changes. Call that “CleanWord”.
2) Use Word to make a marked up version destined for HTML. Use an HTML editor to make an absolutely clean version as a source for eBooks. Call that “CleanHTML”.
4) Use CleanHTML and Calibre to create the EPUB for Barnes & Noble and Kobo and the MOBI for Amazon. Load the EPUB file onto your ereader and proofread like mad. Three times. Make all the corrections to the Scrivener manuscript, the modified CleanWord, and the CleanHTML files. Note: i am spared doing my own upload to iTunes for Apple because one of the tools needed is a piece of software that only runs on a MAC. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.) I'll have to let Smashwords distribute to Apple.
CHAPTER 1
Prologue
I did it! He’s finally gone, dead, finished. A few snicks and snecks, and there he was on the ground, wasn’t he, throat twitching. And they just stood around, didn’t they, deluded like fools by the spell, that wonderful spell he gave me, he was right about it, all those hounds and nothing they could do.
The mighty prince. Ha. One less for you. I remember how he helped you hold him down before you cut him open…
Hush, hush, no, don’t think about that.
Posted in The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
Now that To Carry the Horn is almost done, it's time to check out the word cloud once more through the lens of Wordle. Looks like it's jam-packed with juicy goodness.
Posted in Plot, and To Carry the Horn
So here I've been reading lots of writers' blogs, listening to professional cautions and moans, trying to make sure I measure up appropriately to the expectations of my readers.
To heck with THAT. No one ever said what a blast it was doing the final quarter of a novel! That's what's getting me out of bed early every morning.
It's like watching your favorite long form TV show approach the end of its season and chewing on each week's episode, wondering how they will resolve the plot. That sense of time scale seems a closer match to writing than reading a book, which can be over in just a few hours.
Every day, as I commute, I get to chew on the plot so far and plan out the very next bits of it so I can write the scenes effectively the next day. And while I know roughly what will happen, details are constantly popping up (“oh, of course that's what he should do, that's how that gets tied in”) and it's always a surprise. The mind will provide, if you just plow the ground and sow it correctly (and make sure you're working on the right acreage).
Posted in Characters, Romance, The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
I'm at about the mid-way point of my current work in progress, and it's time for some romance. This first book in the series only covers about two weeks, very busy ones, so the most I want to do is have the characters meet each other and begin to form an attachment.
There's just one problem — she's an older woman. As in, he's 33 and she's somewhere upward of 1500 or so. Now, the issue isn't her looks. She's a timeless fae and seems to be about his age. It's not that our hero isn't attracted to her.
The problem is that he's rather intimidated. To begin with, she's a serious artist, one who has had centuries to work on her craft. He understands her work well enough to admire it. But what can she see in him? He's a smart well-educated guy, but she's a serious intellectual. Wouldn't she look at him as a child? Wouldn't all those years of experience make him transparent to her, the way we can look right through a 5-year old?
And yet… He's brave, stubborn, and kind. And he wants her. These are all qualities she admires, and she lets him know. All he can do is stiffen his spine and assume a confidence and equality in the relationship that he doesn't yet fully feel, hoping not to become Nick Bottom to her Titania.
What helps is his realization that this must happen all the time with the fae. With such long lives, they must frequently intermix much older and much younger in couples, and it doesn't mean to them what it means to mortal men
Posted in The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
I am approaching the halfway point on To Carry the Horn (a least, I sure hope so!) and thought I would take a moment to see what sort of word cloud the text so far would create.
Here's what happens when I dump 70,000 words into Wordle. Think you can guess the name of the hero?
Posted in Characters, Heroes, Plot, The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
To kick off this new blog, I've decided to share a few thoughts about heroic plots involving non-juvenile heroes.
The typical journey of the hero involves a young man who follows a call and leaves his childhood behind him, maturing through action and conflict into a suitable, perhaps even great, adult. The plot is typically done with him once his path to maturity is complete. It's a young man's tale.
In To Carry the Horn, my current work in progress, the basic plot concerns George Talbot Traherne who is drawn from his Virginia countryside life to an otherworld populated by characters from Welsh mythology. George is 33 years old when the action starts. He is already mature, comfortable with responsibility, his character formed. How then can he become a hero, in the traditional sense of the plot?
The answer is in the deficiencies of the modern adult world versus the idealized world of heroic tales. For a youth in a traditional story, part of the challenge of becoming a hero is finding something worth doing, recognizing and growing into his proper place in the world. George, however, lives in a world all too real and mundane, where many of the basic adult responsibilities of manhood are watered down or absent. He has grown into a proper place in that world, but that world is not serious enough to satisfy him. It's too similar to the protected life of childhood that the youth in a traditional tale seeks to escape.
Perhaps if he lived a life of direct action (military, police, etc.) he might feel differently, but he is just an ordinary, good, competent man feeling constrained by the exigencies of modern life.
The otherworld provides him with scope for action, to explode out of his stunted growth into true maturity. He finds something worth the doing and eagerly seizes the opportunity. He can now build a foundation for a life worth living.