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 Publishing, and Release
You can now buy the Kindle version of To Carry the Horn on Amazon, and the other retailers will clock in as soon as they approve the uploaded files. Got my first customer already! Thank you very much, whoever you are.
UPDATED – I'm live on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords, too. The proof of the trade paperback version arrived yesterday, so as soon as the Library of Congress gets its act together and sends me the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) data for the copyright page, that should become available in about two weeks.
Also got my first review, from a stranger, on Smashwords. 5 stars from a satisfied reader! Whoo-hoo!
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.
I'm slogging through the character names index and a Welsh pronunciation guide (very necessary — sorry to do it to you folks. One of my beta readers is complaining bitterly. I say, could be worse – could be a Russian novel.) This requires me to look up every name and make sure I provide some clue about how to say it. Welsh looks much harder than it is because of unusual spelling conventions. “Gruffydd” is Griffith, “Rhys” is Reece, “Vachan” became Vaughan, and so forth, but there are some genuine problems, too.
To begin with, the name of one of my main characters turns out to be the wrong gender. (No, I'm not telling you which one.) That's fixed now (that is, I fixed the name, not him.) Too bad, I liked that name.
Secondly, you can't just look up Welsh words in a dictionary. Perhaps you didn't know this… Celtic languages share a phenomenon known as “mutation” and are annoying enough to change the spelling accordingly. This means, when you pronounce a word differently because of the influence of its surrounding words or grammatical syntax, you spell it that way.
We're used to this in English for vowels in some of our older words, such as our class of strong verbs. We share with other Germanic languages couplets like “run/ran”, “fall/fell”, “know/knew”. Initial letters, on the other hand, rarely do this in English, so it doesn't seem so bad because we only have a few of them, and the initial letter isn't involved. It's different in Welsh.
Posted in Tales of Annwn
I'm having a gas powering through the finale of To Carry the Horn. Just spent this morning, um, disposing of one of the proximate villains.
As The Godfather puts it, “How's Paulie?” “Oh, Paulie… won't see him no more.”
Very satisfying (dusts off hands).
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