Writers and Genres

In talking to a writer friend the other day, she mentioned my “genre.” That seemed a little odd at first because I rather pride myself on writing in lots of genres—Fantasy, Horror, Western, Science Fiction, etc. In our discussion, it seemed that she meant, primarily, fantasy, but only a portion of the stuff I’ve written would be classified as fantasy by fantasy readers.

After I thought about it, I began to divide my fiction writing into two ‘broad’ genres. These are 1) action-adventure and 2) weird. Weird includes stuff that carries elements of horror, noir, and the surreal. Since it was of interest to me, at least, I thought I’d post the breakdown here. In part, I’m wondering if the breakdown into these two broad areas might help sales a bit. I know some folks who read specifically, and only, in one genre. For some readers, if they are looking for “X” and happen to read “Y” by a writer, then they’ll avoid that writer in the future, even if most of what he or she writes is indeed “X.”

Anyway, here’s the breakdown for myself, as I see it:

Action-Adventure                        Weird

Swords of Talera                         In the Language of Scorpions

Wings Over Talera                      Midnight in Rosary (with erotica)

Witch of Talera                           Micro Weird

Under the Ember Star                  Harmland

Bitter Steel                                  Wanting the Mouth of a Lover

Cold in the Light

Killing Trail

Harvest of War

I was thinking of other writers I admire and how they might fit into one or both of these categories. I decided to place those writers in the same categories below. This is my opinion, of course. Any discussion is welcome.

Action-Adventure                              Weird

Edgar Rice Burroughs                         H. P. Lovecraft

Robert E. Howard                              Edgar Allan Poe

Louis L’Amour                                    Ray Bradbury

John D. MacDonald                            Clark Ashton Smith

Someone who combines the two throughout much of his body of work is Joe Lansdale, and maybe Dean Koontz.

What say you?

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When a Man Writes a Woman (Character)

For a long time I would not write a female character, other than as a love interest or as a secondary character. There were two primary reasons for this, which I’ll talk about below.

 1). I didn’t feel competent to do so. I knew women but certainly did not feel like I understood them. I realize today that I still don’t understand them. But then, I don’t really understand men either. I don’t understand humanity very well in general, I fear.  Humans are  complicated organisms. Most don’t even understand themselves.  But I realized somewhere in the 1990s that if I wrote about female characters, I might begin to understand them better. I’ve always learned through writing about things.

2). I was afraid I’d get it wrong and would be thrashed over it. I had seen men write female characters and be taken to task for creating a male-fantasy version of a female character. Many times I felt the criticisms were correct. But not always. Then I had an enlightening experience. I shared an idea about a female character with my writing group and the three women in the group were absolute adamant that a woman would not do what I was going to have my character do. I was rather depressed over that, so I asked a couple of other women, not writers but work colleagues, what they thought. They both said, absolutely, a woman might do that. In fact, that’s what “they” would do in that situation. Probably I should have already known it, but I had an epiphany: “not all women are alike.”   

By the way, these are the same reasons I haven’t written much about characters who aren’t ethnically white. I didn’t grow up African American, or Native American. Although I can generally envision some of the experiences such folks might have, I can’t literally “feel” the experiences the way they would. This makes me cautious in writing non-white characters because I don’t want to get it wrong. I want to treat all my characters with respect in the sense that I don’t want them to be cardboard cutouts or caricatures. But I particularly want to make sure to do this for women and non-white characters because they have too often been treated as stereotypes. At the same time, I don’t want to limit my characters either. I don’t want to avoid making an African American or a woman into a villain simply out of fear that some folks might disapprove.

Under the Ember Star was my first long work with a female lead. Ginn Hollis was not a consciously constructed character in the sense that I didn’t sit down to build a female character and then put her into the work fully formed. Instead, I tried to write her as naturally as I could, not so much writing a “woman,” as writing a human being who is also a woman. I think that’s probably the only way I can do it. In the reviews I’ve gotten for the book, most have said specifically that they liked the character of Ginn, so I feel pretty good about that. However, so far, I haven’t gotten any reviews from female readers. That makes me a bit curious about how women feel about Ginn. Well, maybe one day one of them will tell me.

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Ember-Star-Human-Knacker-Wildside/dp/1434444538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379002084&sr=8-1&keywords=under+the+ember+star

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SCORN #4

I didn't intend for it to be a whole week between "Scorn Posts" but school is in session and I have been swamped with work. I'm also trying to jump start an older nonfiction project that I have and that has taken a lot of what little spare time I've had. Anyway, here's the next entry in my Scorn series below.

4. From inches away we lock gazes. The mirror and I. The glass fogs with our breaths but at least that means we are alive. Then one of us begins to scribe letters in the mist. I do not know which of us it is. I read an R E S O L… I hope for a moment that the scribe has simply left off the “V E.” But perhaps I am reading the word backward. 

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SCORN #3

She is gowned in razors, and the blood on her hands is not her own. I have no weapons to match hers. So I study her cautiously, from far away. I conceal my scent with wormwood. I bind my belongings to my flesh so that no stray sound alerts her to my presence. It would not do to let the predator know that you are stalking it. Such a revelation would be prelude to a fatal nocturne.

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SCORN #2

I dream of a billion years from now, when the earth is more bone than dirt, when the weight of the myriad dead have slowed the world’s orbit to a standstill. Half the planet lies nighted and frozen. Half burns. I wander this wasteland, clothed only in ashes. The cold I hate. I cannot abide there; it is too much like people I have known.

It is not pleasant, either, to see the sun hanging crimson and hungry over the day lit half of this place. That orb is swollen with its own rot and licks its lips in anticipation of the feast to come when the earth spirals into its mouth. But at least then I will be able to rest. Only another billion years to wait. 

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SCORN #1

Behind the bright sky and sun, I see a tattered velvet darkness that no one else sees. It hangs like a shroud, with diamond dust glittering at its trailing edges. The darkness does not lie empty. Sometimes there are eyes. They are hollow as gun barrels, though down them I think I glimpse the shine of jacketed slugs that point at me. I wonder if one of those bullets has my true name scripted upon it. Perhaps they all do.

Things I Simply Don’t Understand

Point 1.  Ben Affleck is named as the next Batman and the internet goes into a tizzy.

Point 2.  Patton Oswald posts a blog saying don’t hate on Ben Affleck and many haters, go, “Wow you’re right. I won’t hate on him anymore.”

I don’t understand number one for many reasons. First and foremost, it’s an effing movie. More than that, it’s a “Batman” movie and we’ve had how many of these things already? Now I like Batman. I liked some of the movies better than others. I’ve expressed my opinions here and there. But do I lose any sleep or waste any energy wondering, Oh My God, who will they cast as Batman next? Will my world continue if they choose someone I don’t like? I suspect you know my answers to those questions.

Second, I don’t understand what Ben Affleck has done to deserve that hate. I haven’t watched a lot of movies with him in. I was never overly impressed with his acting talents. I didn’t like Daredevil. But he seemed middle of the pack to me. But suddenly he seems to have become identified as the world’s worst actor. What appears absolutely clear to me is that someone decided to hate on Ben Affleck. Someone else decided to join in. And soon we had a whole movement in which it is suddenly cool to hate him. Let me state it very clearly: Most of the people who supposedly “hate” Ben Affleck do so because they want to be one of the “cool” kids. There is no logic behind it, no rationality. It’s simply part of a need that people have to be “one of the group.”

Third, say you really really hated Daredevil, just as I really disliked the recent Judge Dredd. How is it that you so closely link Ben Affleck to that hate? I don’t find myself disliking Karl Urban because he played Dredd in a movie I didn’t like. Don’t you think that it was probably more the directors, editors and writers that were at fault for a poor movie than the acting itself?

I suppose my comment about the need to be one of the group sort of answers my point 2 at the top. Apparently some people read Patton Oswald’s blog and decided that it wasn’t cool to hate on Ben Affleck anymore. Well, another celebrity, who is thought by people to “be” cool, says not to. Is that really all it takes to change your mind? If I really didn’t like Ben Affleck, then Patton Oswald’s opinion would not matter a whit to me. How in the world can people change their minds just because a celebrity (or politician, or newscaster, or athlete, or popular singer) tells them they are wrong?

Here’s some other things that I think. 1). Most people never question why they feel the way they do? 2). Many people essentially have their emotions handed to them by outside sources. In other words, they don’t have any feeling one way or another about the Ben Affleck’s of the world until someone says, “Ben Affleck is horrible,” and it clicks in their head and becomes their feeling. 3). Many people will do just about anything to be “cool.” 4). Many people are far more influenced by ‘prominent’ people (who they don’t know from Adam) than they are by people who are less famous but might actually know something on the subject.

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Back to School

Today is officially my last of summer break. Faculty meetings start tomorrow, and registration begins Thursday. Classes start on Monday. That means less blogging and visiting blogs. At least for a while until I get a new routine established.

It was a fairly productive summer. I did finish a book, although I'd hoped to do a few short stories too and did not accomplish that. I did sell a few reprints, which is always nice. I also did not get as much reading as I would have liked done, and that is largely due to playing lots of Skyrim when I took breaks from the writing.

Unfortunately, next summer will not be as free. Given an analysis of my sales, I realized that I can't really afford to take entire summers off to write anymore. I'll be teaching at least half of next summer. Just too many costs and not enough going in to the coffers. I hope I can maintain at least half the summer free to focus on writing.

Off to visit blogs now on my last free day. Then I've got errands to run and some preparations to make.

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Bruce Boston's Dark Roads

Bruce Boston. Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems, 1971-2012.  Colusa, CA: Dark Renaissance Books. 2013.156 pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-937128-90-6. Illustrated by M. Wayne Miller.

Bruce Boston has been writing for many years but I only discovered him about fifteen years ago when I joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I was immediately struck by Boston’s ability to evoke images I’d never experience before, and by his immense vocabulary and a talent for wielding words with the delicacy of an épée. Since that time I’ve eagerly awaited every new poem he’s released. I’d have no idea of the count of individual poems that Boston has published, but there are more than forty collections of his work. He has certainly been productive.

Recently, Dark Renaissance Books released a selected collection of  many of Boston’s best “long” poems published between 1971 and 2012. I’m not sure exactly how they define long poems but all the ones here are at least two pages of material. Most are quite a bit more. Some are certainly epic in length as well as scope.

As a result of this being a “selected” collection, I’ve previously read many of these poems. I believe this actually increased my enjoyment of them. Boston’s poetry is so rich that I’ve often found myself rereading his work anyway. The first time through I’m swept up by the imagery, which is always perfect but seldom what you expect, and by the joy of the word play. The second time I read for meaning, and though I’m not always able to extract a coherent meaning, I’m always left with a sense of ‘resonance,’ a sense that truth lies within if I but had the breadth of experience to grasp it.

It’s hard to pick favorites from such a collection, where every page holds gems, but I have to call out two particular poems, the multiple award winning “Pavane for a Cyber-Princess,” and “She Was There for Him the Last Time.” Here’s a fragment from “Last Time.”

she was there for him the last time

in the bombed-out city

where the decimating trajectories

left their scars upon the earth

like sabers crossed and waiting

I highly recommend any and all of Boston’s work. You can pick Dark Roads up from the publisher: http://www.darkregions.com/books/dark-roads-by-bruce-boston

You should certainly check out Boston’s website, where you can access some of his work online:  

www.bruceboston.com

I’ll end with a quote from another poem in Dark Roads, “In the Short Seasons of a Long Year without You.”

This sheet of broken lines

I leave for you to find.

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Opinions Are Like *****: Everyone’s Got One

Lana and I watched the new Judge Dredd movie the other night. We both thought it was one of the god-awfulest pieces of crap we’d seen in ages. Normally I’m more tolerant of movie dreck than she is but in this case I was the first to state my opinion on it. It was the slow-mo, you see. At least at first. Slow-mo is over used but I don’t mind it under certain circumstances. Lana and I also watched “The Warriors” and there’s a scene where a guy gets thrown through the wooden door of a bathroom stall in slow-mo. I thought it worked well. We both like that movie quite a bit, although are under no impression that it is high art.

The problem with the slow-mo in Judge Dredd was that it went on and on and on. It was tied to the use of this drug that slowed down time for people, and also apparently made everything sparkly. I think the drug was pretty clearly modeled on heroin. I suppose the connection between the drug effects and the slow-mo made sense, but what we’re treated to is people smoking “slow-mo” pipes and then everything gets really…well, slow. There’s one scene where the bad woman is taking a bath while smoking, and we get a couple of minutes of her sweeping her hand through the water in slow-mo while her hand makes sparkly splashes. Later we get to see a person fall from a 200 or so story building in slow-mo. I can hardly overstate how boring that was. Slow-mo for 5 seconds of a guy getting thrown through a door is far different from 2 minutes of someone taking a bath or falling.

There were plenty of other things about Judge Dredd I didn’t care for. First, it was basically a Dirty Harry movie, which, for me, made everything 100 percent predictable. Second, the special effects were generally “meh,” and the sparkly stuff reminded me personally of Twilight. Third, they kill Judge Dredd at one point. Only…not. A bad guy shoots Dredd through a wall with an armor piercing round. We clearly see blood start to pour from Dredd’s chest on the right side under his armor. We see him slide to the ground. There’s a hole the size of a man’s fist in the wall where the bullet came through. But it turns out that it’s just a flesh wound through the lower right side of his body and he slaps some first aid stuff on it and then gets up to wipe out more bad guys. Sorry, you just can’t do that.

I was reminded of trying to watch one of the early SF TV serials once. They were running the episodes back to back so I knew I could catch them all. One episode ended with the intrepid hero tied up in a rocket sled rushing toward a cliff. The sled went over the cliff and exploded, indicating to everyone that the hero had to be dead. Except! In the sequel episode, we saw the same exact scene with the rocket sled rushing toward the cliff, except this time a previously invisible door opened in the side and the hero leaped to safety just before the sled went over the cliff. This was the equivalent of that.

And yet! When Lana went on Internet Movie Data Base she saw the movie was rated at 7 of 10 stars. And people I know and like and whose opinions I listen to have told me they liked it. How can this possibly be? How can my observations and opinions on a movie be so diametrically opposed to those of other intelligent people?

Sometimes it’s kind of depressing to be so at odds with the world. 

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Three Poems, and Other Things

Three of my poems are running today over at Beat to a Pulp. I hope you'll stop by and give them a read. These are some of my favorites among my own pieces. http://beattoapulp.com/pulp.htm


Also, of course, "A Whisper in Ashes" is still up at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/


Hope your Sunday is going wonderfully!

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New Sword and Sorcery Story Published

We interrupt the normal multiple-day lag between posts for breaking news of interest to...well, me. Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Issue 17, has just been published and contains a story by me called "A Whisper in Ashes." This is the first appearance of a heroic fantasy character named Krieg, who I hope to write much more about eventually. I had started two previous stories about a character with that name but they never quite gelled. This one finally did and I think I now have a handle on the character that may let me write more. The character is certainly in the tradition of sword and sorcery heroes like Conan and Karl Edward Wagner's Kane.

I hope you'll give the tale a read. It's free to readers after all. The direct link to the story is: http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=1418

The link to the magazine home is here: http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=1478

A couple of people have had the link to the magazine not work this morning. I had some trouble with it as well. Of course, it's probably due to the huge number of people trying to access my story. Don't you think? :)
The link has always come up if I waited a bit, though, so I hope it's a minor glitch.

Thanks.
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Out of Touch

I’m often amazed, but not unpleased, at how out of touch I am with modern popular culture. A lot of that is due to my age, of course, but I often seem very much unaware of things that other folks of my generation do know about. Let’s see.

A guy named James Gandolfini (I think that’s the spelling) died recently. I had no idea who he was. Even after I’d seen his photo I could only recognize him as being in a recent movie I saw with Brad Pitt about assassins. When I expressed my confusion, quite a few folks explained to me that he was on “The Sopranos.”  Ah, of course. The problem is that I’ve never seen an episode of that show.

Nor have I seen an episode of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Castle, Sons of Anarchy, or any of those Law and Order type CSI shows. I believe those are two different shows but I couldn’t tell which is which. I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, other than watching about ten minutes with Lana the other week. All I know about Fawlty Towers is that it’s British. I believe. Now, I might well like all of these shows; I’ve just never felt the urge to sit down and watch them.

I do know who Justin Beiber is because I see him being made fun of on facebook all the time. However, I couldn’t pick Lady Gaga out of a line up, unless she was wearing a meat dress perhaps. Nor would I recognize Honey Boo Boo. I believe she is a rather large child but that’s as much as I could tell you. I think there are three Kardashian sisters and they have dark hair. I wouldn’t recognize them. They may or may not be the daughters of Bruce Jenner. One of them was dating Reggie Bush for a while. I know because he played for the Saints at that time and I pay attention to football. I used to think Eva Longoria was a Kardashian until someone explained to me that she wasn’t.

There are a bunch of Jersey Shore/Big Brother type shows. At least I believe there are, although I’ve never seen an episode of any of them. I know there was a guy on Jersey Shore who called himself the Situation. I know because he was on a roast one night and was amazingly stupid in a non-funny way. Also on that show was a short, dark haired woman named Snooki. I only know because of the Jersey Shore episode of South Park, and because I heard a snippet of her one time admitting that she’d never read a book until she was in her twenties but she was going to write one now.

Not long ago I was told I’d mistaken Kanye West for Puff  Daddy. Only, his name isn’t Puff Daddy anymore but I’m not sure what it is now. It used to be Puff Daddy when he did a pretty bad remake of a Led Zeppelin song for the Godzilla 2000 movie. I only know the name Kanye West because of the South Park episode making fun of him. He apparently interrupted some famous female singer at one of the award shows. I don’t know who she was or what show it was on. The Grammeys maybe. By the way, how do you spell Grammeys?  I’ve never watched an episode. I still can’t tell Kanye from Puff something. I also confuse Fifty Cent with Mike Tyson. They’re both big guys ain’t they?

There are about half a dozen or more blonde actors who appear as the female leads in horror movies that I’ve watched. I can’t tell any of them apart or give you their names. Worse than that, I can’t name the directors of 98 percent of the movies I see. I know Spielberg, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, and George Romero, and that’s about it. Oh, and John Carpenter, because his name was on my favorite horror movie of all time, John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”  I believe he may have directed the first Terminator and Alien too, but I’m not sure. There’s also a del Toro guy, I think. He may or may not have directed Pacific Rim but he recently had a big blockbuster. I didn’t know until last night that the Actor’s Studio is a school for actors. I just thought it was a celebrity interview show.

I could go on and on but I think you get my point. How about you? Are you as out of touch as I am?

My next post will be about what I do know about popular culture. That might be a shorter post.

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If I had it do over

I was thinking of a story idea about a guy who gets a chance to live his life over, maintaining all the knowledge he accumulated during his first life. I put myself in the protagonist’s shoes to see how I felt about it myself. I think a lot of times people find this an attractive idea. I have myself at times. But when you really start to analyze it, as you would need to do if you were going to do a story about it, things don’t seem quite so simple. Every decision we make has multiple and complicated repercussions. There’s no way to change one thing without changing multiple others and one would risk losing the good things in order to get rid of the bad.  

I think, for example, of what I might do differently knowing the exact day my father would die and what I might have been able to do to prevent it. But I can’t even imagine the repercussions in my future had it not happened. I imagine relationships that I spent a lot of time and effort on that went nowhere, and what time and pain I might have saved myself by ending them earlier. But how would my memories and my personality be different if I had done so. Would I be a better man now? Or a worse one?

What about the motorcycle accidents I had! Changing my timing by a bare moment in any of those cases would have saved me a lot of pain. It would have saved me some of the permanent stuff I’m living with. Or would it? Had I not had any of those accidents, perhaps I would have had another that was far worse.

I think about my writing, about what might have happened had I produced the stuff I’ve produced earlier in my life, or what might be if I had decided to pursue a career in writing rather than making the choice that I did, which was to find a good career and job and write on the side. Would I be further along as a writer now? Would I have sold more? Would I be making a living at it?  The thing is, I almost certainly wouldn’t be making as good a living as I have with the choice I did make. Of course, there is no telling. I might have hit the market at just the right time and broken out. Or maybe there wasn’t a market for my work until I found it in later years.

I often wish for a reset button on life. Like you get with video games. You die in a video game and you just reload from the last save. But we don’t have those. And even if we did, would we reload after every “wrong” decision without knowing that, in fact, it was a right decision for what greater things came later. 

Ultimately, I know two things. My first marriage didn’t work our in the end but I have a wonderful son from it. I could not and would not give him up. Two, it was things going wrong in my life that led me to finding Lana. And I could not and would not give her up either.

Guess it’s a good thing we don’t get to live our life over. I wouldn’t want the fear of some pain to make me miss out on what I have now.

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Losing Time and the Giveaway Results

How does the time get away? It feels like I just posted the Star Trek post but that's already six days in the rear view mirror.

Patti Abbott won my giveaway for a copy of "Cut Short," by Leigh Russell. This is the first in her Geraldine Steel series. Patti, if you will send me your snail mail address to kainja at hotmail dot com, I'll get it in the mail to you pretty quickly.

Going into the dentist today to get my permanent crown put in to replace the temporary one. I sure hope that's the last dental stuff I need to do for a few years.

I finished my last read through of Wraith of Talera, then decided it wasn't the 'last' read through. I'm letting it sit a few days and will give it one more going over. I want it done and sent off so I can get into the next one, Gods of Talera. I've got a couple of short stories to do first, and an article on C. L. Moore.

The last couple of days I've been taking a needed break and just playing Skyrim and reading.

All right, enough. I promise a more substantial post in a couple of days.

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Influences: Star Trek?

It’s no secret that I’m a big Star Trek fan, particularly of the original series. I’ve seen every episode multiple times, every movie, and have read almost 60 Star Trek novels and 8 or so nonfiction books about the show.  I’ve watched all of The Next Generation episodes as well, although not as many of the other series. And yet, as far as I can tell, Star Trek has had virtually no influence on my writing.  Most recently, in Wraith of Talera, I have a chapter title that is a take-off on “The World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky.” That’s about the only influence I can think of, and it’s just a title.

In contrast, the eleven books of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs have been a major influence on all kinds of writing I’ve done, not just the Talera series. The works of Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore I’ve read can be numbered on the fingers of my two hands, but they also have been big influences.

I thought at one point that it was because I didn’t really write Science Fiction that the Star Trek influence never showed up in my work. But even when I turned my hand to SF with Under the Ember Star, it was Brackett and Moore type space adventure/space opera, not Star Trek. I have other SF ideas that I want to write at some point too, but none of them are Star Trekesque.

It’s not just the overall story setting of Star Trek either. I’ve never created any characters that smack of Spock, or Kirk, or Bones. I do have a character ‘arch an eyebrow’ on occasion and that might be influenced by Spock’s famous gesture of surprise.

I wonder why this is, and without much promise of an answer coming to me anytime soon. Any of you other writers out there, has there been something you’ve read or watched a lot of that hasn’t influenced your writing? If so, do you have any idea why not?

Speaking of showing one’s influences. If you’re a writer, you’ve got to read this poem by Ty Johnston. Sheer genius!

http://tyjohnston.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-write-alone-with-nobody-else.html

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A Resting WIP

I took a few days off to let Wraith of Talera rest and have been playing a lot of my video game Skyrim. It's such a wide open world and beckons one to explore. I think I've been playing too much, though, because I've started dreaming about it as of last night, and when I close my eyes I can see various kinds of screen images from the game. I think I'll take most of the day off Skyrim and get back to writing. In fact, ideas are occurring fast and furious but before I start anything new I'm going to give Wraith of Talera its final read through and send it on its merry way.

As I'm writing this, we have six baby coons in the back yard, with two different mommas. They come out early in the morning to graze around the yard for bird seed that has spilled out of the trays. Many birds flutter around in the trays and knock out seed. The doves scratch it out. When the coons first came they climbed up our poles and knocked the seed out themselves, and at one point completely dragged off one hanging feeder. We got Raccoon baffles and they didn't work. So we had to put two baffles back to back and that finally stopped them.

At any rate, the little ones are great fun to watch because they wrestle and play around all over the place. Sometimes 2, sometimes 3, sometimes all four of the one family. Lana is watching through binoculars and laughing uproariously at their antics. The young everywhere have energy. It's good to see someone does.
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When a Manuscript is "Done."

I guess I’ll tag this post under writing techniques because it might not be of interest to anyone else. It’s about what happens when a manuscript is “essentially” done.

For example, Wraith of Talera is finished except for one last reread. I’ll do that next week. Gonna let it sit a few days. I just finished some pretty much mechanical stuff on the manuscript this weekend and week. When a book is done I always do a “search” for particular words that I often overuse. In doing so this time I ended up taking out over 900 words that were basically useless out of almost 70,000. The words I search for in particular are, “that,” “my,” “though,” “still,” and “I.”  It’s first person. I also search for “And,” “But,” and “Yet” at the beginning of sentences, which I overdo at times. I also search for “said,” and “asked” and take out excess ones And I search for words that need to be used sparingly, such as “suddenly” and “finally.”

Although I believe this is a good thing for writers to do, there is a risk. Searching through a whole novel this way for a single word can give the impression that the word is far overused when in fact it isn’t if you consider it spread out over the entire book. For example, I use “my” a fair amount in the Talera books, but this is, in part, because they are first person books and I need to cut out some of the “I”s that can really overwhelm the reader otherwise.

Someone told me not to worry about “said” because it becomes invisible to the reader. I’ve always heard that and I think it is generally true for me. However, I’ve noticed it does not become “inaudible” to those who listen to audio books. Since the Taleran books have been produced in Audio, I also wanted to remove excess “saids” for that reason.

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Recent Goodreads during Jury Duty

Those of you who visit here regularly know I recently had jury duty. I spent most of four days sitting in a room, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy it, I took my kindle along and did get a lot of reading done. I thought today I’d run some capsule reviews of some of the items I finished or at least started during those days. I also reviewed all of these on Goodreads as well, if I could find them listed there at least. I got all but one of these from Amazon.

 

Commando: Operation Arrowhead, by Jack Badelaire:

I used to read a lot of historical fiction but have gotten away from it in recent years. When I read a book like Commando: Operation Arrowhead, by Jack Badelaire, I wonder why I slowed down in reading the genre. Commando takes place in World War II, certainly one of my favorite historical periods to read about, and probably my very favorite judging from the number of WWII books I have around the house, both fiction and nonfiction. The story is set after the Blitzkrieg has overrun France. A small British Commando team is sent in to make contact with local partisan groups and they have to deal with a brutal local Nazi commandant and his zealous troops. Although a fellow named Lynch is probably the main character, we get familiar with several major commando figures and these characters are a lot of fun. I can see lots of room for backstory to be expanded on these characters as the series continues. An afterword to the novel gives some historical backstory on the British Commando units of WWII. 

Badelaire’s work fits in nicely with the books I already have on my shelf, reminding me somewhat of the grittiness of Willi Heinrich’s WWII books, but with considerably more action. That action, which is quite graphic and which I like very much, reminds me a bit of some of the stuff we saw in the movie Inglourious Basterds, but told with the greater depth and background that a novel can achieve over a movie. Any movie reference will be somewhat misleading because this book should really be compared against other WWII adventure series, of which there used to be quite a few. I think it compares very well and really enjoyed it. I know there is a second in the series out, Operation Bedlam, and I imagine more are planned. The series is definitely off to a great start.

Hard Case II: The Lure of Hell, by Bernard Lee DeLeo

John Harding is back in new adventures with his band of merry “righteous” killers. They’re a group who take the safety of America seriously and aren’t afraid to get down in the dirt with those who would endanger her. In fact, they’ll get lower in the dirt. They often refer to themselves as psychopaths but in reality they are willing to do what it takes to protect the people and country they love. Among themselves and the decent folks around them, they know loyalty and love aplenty. 

Hard Case II, however, adds some new folks into the mix, Clint Dostiene, a somewhat reluctant agent of the “Company,” and Lynn Montoya, who enjoys killing, but only of serial killers and lowlifes. There’s the usual adrenalized action and the sometimes wry, sometimes dark humor that mark most of DeLeo’s work. I’m an action junkie so this is right down my line.

Outlaw, by Matthew Pizzolato

When I started with this book I was afraid it was going to be a bit cliche. The writing was good but the adventures befalling our hero seemed a bit pat. As the book continued, though, the twists started to happen and I really enjoyed the ending, which I did not suspect until very near the end.

The Toughest Mile, by William Meikle

This is a fantasy short story and is the first work I've read by this author. It won't be the last though. It begins with a pit fighter seeking his freedom, which is not anything new in the genre. But Meikle makes it his own and delivers a solid story with plenty of action, excitement, and some good emotional impact. The prose is also quite good, raising the level of the tale even further.

Boggy Creek: The Legend is True, by Eric S. Brown and Jennifer Minar-Jaynes

A fast, action horror read. It's about what you expect from knowing about the movie of Boggy Creek, but it delivers well. I enjoyed it.

NOTE: the following works were not available on Goodreads for me to review, but here’s what I would have said about them.

Madam Chang’s Red Dragon Saloon, by Angeline Hawkes (reviewed on Amazon)

This is an excellent tale, a long short story or a short novella. A young Chinese woman in the American West is born with a strange tattoo on her arm. Her family knows what it represents but keep that from her. Only after her family is brutally murdered and she is shown the horrors of the real world does she discover what the tattoo means. Blood and gore are the result, but there's a lot more to this tale, which could easily lead to some sequels. Highly recommended.

The Unexplained, by Christopher Fulbright (reviewed on Amazon)

This is a collection of short horror stories. It's very well written and creepy as hell. I've read other material by Fulbright and he can write. This is a fairly short collection so it's a quick read. There is still quite a lot of variety among the stories, though. Much enjoyed.

Polysyllabic, by Mark Durfee

This is the only one I didn’t get originally from Amazon. It is a collection of poetry by the fellow we know in the blogosphere as the Walking Man. If you’ve visited his blog you know the kind of hard hitting, intense, poetry he writes about life and politics. This is more of the same, made even more powerful by the accumulated imagery that you get off the pages. Searing is a good word to describe Mark’s work.

The Adventures of Black Jack Pepper, by M. L. Madison (reviewed on Amazon)

A charming children's book. Black Jack Pepper is a six-year-old girl who decides on that name herself. She and her younger brother and father have many cute and hilarious adventures. I bet many children would love to have it read to them. Now I'm going to have a doughnut.

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Swords of Talera Author Notes

Those of you who have read my short story collections know I always include a section “about the stories.” These are snippets that tell about when the idea came to me, how it was developed, and when it was published. Although I know many readers don’t give a hoot about such things, I’ve always enjoyed reading about stories in this way. My novels, however, don’t have this sort of thing so I thought I’d put some of this up on my blog. Perhaps I’ll have no readers for it, but what the hey, that’s why they call it a personal blog, I guess. Anyway, here’s a bit about the way Swords of Talera came about.

Swords of Talera was my second novel. The first was a western written when I was 17 and it will never see print. Because of events that happened around the time I finished that western, which I wrote about in Write With Fire, I decided writing was not in my future and just gave it up. I couldn’t stay away, though. Seven years after the western, I was in graduate school. Sometimes late at night when I’d finished my research work but couldn’t sleep I would type out sentences and paragraphs of fiction on the computer. By this time I’d read a lot of fantasy fiction, in particular a lot of ERB and REH. The John Carter stories of ERB particularly resonated with me. I’d been making up Sword and Planet type stories for my own amusement for years, and then just said, what the heck, why not write one of them down. I figured it would probably just be for myself, although the thought that it might get published was always in the back of my mind.

I didn’t start the writing immediately, though. First I spent quite a bit of time in the University of Arkansas library doing research. I already had the idea for the world of Talera, but I needed a character. I decided he would be a descendent of a Maclang, the characters from my western. I looked through a bunch of Irish and Scottish names and found the name Ruane. That didn’t sound quite perfect to me, though, so I modified it to Ruenn. I also did a lot of research on sailing vessels, on gas giant planets, and on all manner of creatures and plants that might be twisted around to form the basis of Talera’s biosphere. Only then did I sit down to write.

In fiction, ERB’s Barsoom books were certainly the biggest and earliest influence on Talera, but another major influence was the Dray Prescot books of Alan Burt Akers, who I didn’t know at the time was really a British author named Ken Bulmer. Still other influences included the Llarn books of Gardner Fox, and the early books in the Gor series by John Norman. Although I never liked the slavery aspects of the Gor books, that didn’t figure at all prominently in the first few books and Norman had a dramatic writing style that I did like.

“Swords,” which was originally entitled “Taleran Genesis,” is a linear book full of all the things I loved to read, and still would love if anyone was publishing them. It had alien characters, lots of action, sword fights and desperate rescues. I wrote “Swords” in about 4 months in 1984, although it wasn't submitted for years and was heavily polished in 1988 before I submitted it. Eventually I sent it to Tom and Ginger Johnson in Texas and it was serialized in their magazine. It was very well received by the readers and was voted best piece of original fiction for the year in which it ran. Below are the notes I kept during the initial process of writing the book:

Taleran Genesis? (Book One)  [begun June 15, 84] [1st draft fin [Christmas, 1984]

(Retitled, 6-7-85 Swords of Talera  [3rd draft fin, 6-11-85]

[4th draft started 5-29-88; finished 6-20-88]

Final draft start 7-12-88, fin 7-29-88;  printed 8-1-88:

final polish 9-29-88  Did a minor rewrite 6-30-96 and reformat

starting 3-3-02, doing a final rewrite to bring it up a notch

Went through it one more time in 2004, again trying to bring it up a notch.

The book was finally published as a paperback from Borgo press in summer 2007. It was mildly revised one last time before it was submitted for publication.

And there you have it. If you should have a hankering for such a book, it’s available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Wildside Press. It’s in print, ebook, and audiobook, along with the sequels, Wings Over Talera and Witch of Talera. There are clickable links to Amazon for the books along my right side border of the blog.

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Cooners

Lana and I have been throwing our food scraps into the back yard since we moved to our home outside Abita Springs. Why throw biodegradables in a landfill when they can at the least make mulch in your back yard, or perhaps feed local critters. Besides the birds, we soon began to attract possums, raccoons, and a fox at times. The raccoons have become our number one customers and for the past three years we’ve been seeing moms in the summer coming with babies in toe. This year, for the first time, we’ve got two mommas, one with two kits and the other with four.

Today, for the first time, we had both mommas and their families at the same time. We’re pretty sure the moms are from among the groups of babies from the last couple of years, which most likely makes them sisters. They are used to seeing each other in the yard and don’t fight among themselves, but I thought there might be fireworks today with the kits in tow. No problem, however. When the second set of kits came out of the woods, several members of the first set went tearing off to investigate and soon they were all playing together. It was fun to see.

Lana and I were both wondering why we find the little raccoons so adorable. Both kittens and puppies exhibit the characteristic big eyes and flat faces of human babies, thus making them resemble us a little bit more. Young raccoons look like miniature versions of the adults, without the flat faces. I think, though, it’s partly the playfulness and kind of goofiness of the young coons that Lana and I respond to. And they have so much energy. They never walk anywhere. They run, and in running they almost hop. They wrestle each other and explore every nook and cranny around them. In that way they’re more like human children.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a few pics of our cooners for your enjoyment.

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Sales Report, and Contest

I see authors doing this once in a while, reporting on sales for some of their independently published books. Usually the numbers look a lot better than what I see for mine. Gotta admit that bothers me some. But it’s good to do such evaluations and to read them from others. How do we know if anything is working if we don’t see some numbers.

Here’s the numbers on my noir collection “Harmland,” which I published on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble in April of 2012. It sold 14 copies right off the bat, then sold between 2 and 3 copies a month until August of 2012. At that point it flatlined and there’s not been a sale since. Total sales equaled 30 copies, with 6 of those coming from B & N and the rest from Amazon.

As for getting the word out, I posted on my blog and on facebook initially about the book. I’ve increased my posting on facebook in the last few months in hopes of reminding people of the collection. It hasn’t generated any action. I featured “Harmland” prominently in my first author newsletter, which I emailed out to several hundred folks at the end of October, 2012. I even came up with a “Harmland” chili recipe to include with the newsletter. Since I’ve had no sales since October the newsletter would seem, if anything, to have had the opposite effect to the one desired. I’m definitely gonna have to reconsider the effort involved in putting out a newsletter.

On Tuesday, June 15, I lowered the price of the collection from $2.99 to $1.99. This is for over 21,000 words of material. I announced the sale on facebook and sold 3 copies in the first few hours. None since then.

Today I’m posting about it here, of course. If you’re looking to pick up “Harmland” at its new $1.99 price, the link is here:

AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/Harmland-ebook/dp/B008CT92ZA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372340612&sr=8-1&keywords=harmland

I haven't yet changed the price at Barnes and Noble but that link is below: 

BARNES and; NOBLE: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harmland-charles-gramlich/1111664242?ean=2940014697026

As a further initiative to get folks to come read this blog, I’m holding a giveaway. If you comment on this blog, your name will be put into a hat for a drawing of a brand new, unopened copy of “Cut Short,” the first in the popular Geraldine Steel detective series by British author Leigh Russell. Back when this came out, I ended up buying two copies of the book and have had the extra copy sitting around for quite some time. I’m only going to be able to mail the copy to the US and Canada, though.

Hope your day is fun and productive!

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Progress on Wraith of Talera, and Other Things

Sunday night I wrote the ending line to Wraith of Talera. Felt good. The book is certainly not done. This is a completed draft but it will need at least one more complete going over from start to finish. After that will come the final editing checks. I'll check to make sure all Taleran terms are used consistently throughout. I'll search for certain words that tend to get overused and make sure I fix any problems up. That actually takes quite a while. Then I will set up the word processing file for the sequel, Gods of Talera, and will write the first scene, which is already in my head. I'll probably let Wraith sit for about a week, though, and work on other things before I start the revision.

I took yesterday off, visited with my niece and her family in the French Quarter. They are traveling through the area on a trip. Then I watched the movie Serenity, the move that closes off the Firefly TV series. Finally, I restarted my game of Rage since I beat it over the weekend and now I'm replaying to see if I can find stuff I missed the first time.

As for Serenity, I liked it very much. Both Lana and I teared up a bit at one particular place, and it's because we have developed genuine affection for these characters. Firefly was really well done and I'm sorry it lasted only one season. The movie was good but it didn't really tie everything up. I liked it somewhat better than Lana did. 

I'm still using google reader, by the way, although I have downloaded feedly. Google reader will disappear July 1 so I may have an adjustment period and miss some stuff for a few days. I suppose we'll see.

In sad news, I learned that Richard Matheson died yesterday. He was a writer I much enjoyed, especially his short stories, and he wrote some of the great Twilight Zone tales. It was sad to hear of his death.

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A Problem of Pastiche

Jury duty is over. Thankfully. I didn’t get called for a jury. In fact, I did nothing for three days but sit around on my butt and read. I love reading but even I was getting a little stir-crazy by the end. I’m free today, though, so time to catch up on a little blogging.

I read quite a few good pieces while sitting around and will review some of them here in time. I’ve reviewed most on Goodreads already. But I read one yesterday that was not so good. I’m going to talk about it a bit here because of the writing lessons it provides, but not give the name because I know who the author is, though it’s not someone I correspond with or anything. I also believe the author genuinely loves the Conan character and is enthusiastic, even if he didn’t get down on the page what he was probably hoping for.

Anyway, so here I am reading a Conan pastiche that I got free from Amazon for the kindle. It picks up where the original Arnold movie left off, which is OK. The first pages aren’t too bad. I’m starting to settle in, when the problems begin. First, Conan and his companion stumble upon the tale’s evildoers. They are cave dwellers mostly, degenerate, etc. That would be fine but they are described as “gnomes.”  I know that “gnomes” have undergone a lot of changes over time but I’m afraid I had a problem seeing them as anything more than garden gnomes from then on. Although the description of them was of something pretty nasty, it was a bit of a problem for me. I could have handled that.

Second, the anachronisms began, and this was quite a bit more of a problem. Conan is supposed to live in the Hyborian Age, far in the past before recorded history. Yet, the author used terms like “mania,” “electrified,” “bronco,” and, worst of all, “cop-out.”  At one point Conan yells “Happy Holidays” to his foes. Sarcastically, I think. These terms really destroyed any sense of realism for me in the tale. The writer is supposed to strive to become invisible behind the flow of the prose, but when you throw in phrases like “cop-out” in a story like this, you are putting the writer front and center.

Fiction is a very carefully crafted lie. As soon as you see through the veil, anything else that is remotely a problem starts to jump out at you. The whole “house of cards” rapidly comes tumbling down. If it hadn’t been for the anachronisms, I might not have noticed other issues with the prose so clearly, most notably the overuse of alliteration, particularly with “G’s,” and the weird use of terms. The author obviously had a pretty large vocabulary but frequently seemed to slightly misuse terms. One example I remember is the phrase “relentless tunnels.”  Endless tunnels maybe. But I couldn’t follow “relentless tunnels.”

Another issue for me was that the character was not anywhere close to the Robert E. Howard character. This Conan was a pure selfless hero, with none of the nuances that Howard brought to the character. In this way, the character didn’t even match the Arnold-portrayed Conan from the movies. This was not a particular problem with the writing. Had the character been called something else it might have worked just fine.

How about you? Do anachronisms bother you? Do you notice phrases like “relentless tunnels?” How do you feel about alliteration?

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Jury Duty and Father's Day

Josh came up for Father's Day and we had a good lunch at Outback with Lana, then came home and did little other than talk and play some of my video game, Rage. Josh showed me some of the drawings from his architecture classes. Great stuff. He's working hard and enjoying himself. It was good to see him.

In the evening, after he headed home, I even got 1000 words done on Wraith of Talera. I've been averaging about a 1000 a day over the last few weeks and that is very good for me. This is the longest stretch I've ever kept up that pace, and several days I've done over 1500. I'm over 62,000 words total now and should be writing the last two scenes this week. Then it will be time to go back over the whole thing and put on the final touches. I'll probably put it up for a few days to get some editorial distance.

Unfortunately, starting to day I've been called for Jury Duty so I don't know how much I'm going to get done this week, and whether I'll do any blogging. Typically here, Jury Duty is a five day commitment, unless you're chosen for a trial and then it might be longer.

So, if you don't see me around the blogs, this is why.

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The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard:  Del Rey. 2008.

This is a massive, 500+ pages compilation of pretty much every horror tale Robert E. Howard wrote. If you’re a fan of REH you’ll surely love it. If all you know is his fantasy, his Conan stories, then it will enlighten you on the man’s tremendous range. I actually started reading this a couple of years ago and chose to read it slowly and savor it, just a story here and there. Many of these stories I’d read before but they were all worth a reread.

I read one review of this collection that said it wasn’t “horror.” Well, not if your idea of horror has been defined by Stephen King. There are vampires, ghosts, and werewolves here, but the bulk of the stories either have Lovecraftian elements, or are of a type I might call southern campfire tales. By that, I mean the kind of tales rural southerners tell each other on dark nights when panthers are screaming in the woods and the fireflies flash like dead souls haunting the piney woods. Tell one of these around a campfire and no one will want to leave the light to go gather more firewood. The only thing worse would be to let the fire…die down.

Another thing about Howard’s stories is that, as a writer, REH found it basically impossible not to include a high level of physical action in his tales. Some people think that moves a piece away from horror. I don’t. Action and horror are a great mix. There’s plenty of it here.

Among my favorite pieces in this collection are “Dig Me No Grave,” “Old Garfield’s Heart,” “The Black Stone,” and “The Thing on the Roof.” I think the masterpiece of the collection is “Pigeons from Hell,” which creeped me out pretty badly.

This collection strove for completeness and that means not every piece in here is a masterpiece. There are also some fragments at the end that I wish Howard would have finished. Generally, though, I really liked this work and gave it five stars on Goodreads. I wish I'd written a bunch of these.

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Books in the House

Although I buy quite a few Kindle books on a weekly basis, it’s been a while since I put in a big order for print works. One thing of interest came in last week and a bunch more today. So here’s where I spent some money:

1. Warbirds of Mars, edited by Vaughn and Gilmour. This is a collection of connected short stories about the human resistance to conquerors from Mars.  I love the concept but haven’t started reading it yet.

2. This is Gonna Hurt, a book about music, photography and life by Nikki Sixx. I’ve already read this. Not a lot of new stuff if you’ve read his Heroin Diaries, but it certainly held my interest. He has apparently really gotten into photography and has sprinkled quite a few odd shots throughout . It also has quite a bit of his philosophy of life in it, things he’s learned from his experiences. I’m not much of a fan of such things; they generally appear pretty self-evident. I learned a little more about his childhood and his music, which is what I was most interested in. Most of the music stuff had to do with Sixx A.M rather than Motley, which is not particularly what I care about.

3. Proactive Contrition: A Meta-Memoir, by Wayne Allen Sallee. Wayne is an extraordinary short story writer. I’m not quite sure what to expect from this “meta-memoir,” though, but I know it’ll be surprising, entertaining, and will make me think.

4. The Saga of Dray Prescot: The Lohvian Cycle books 1 and 2, by Kenneth Bulmer.  This is a two volume set, each of which collects three of the Dray Prescot books that were not originally published in English during the original run of the series. They were published only in German. They have since been brought out in English in ebooks, which I bought already, but I wanted the print copies. Each volume has three books in it. I’ve read the first two from book one but still have four more complete novels to go. Looking forward to getting into these.  The cover below is for volume 1 but 2 is the same cover with II on it. Interestingly, the second volume includes a “compendium” much like I was thinking of adding to Wraith of Talera.

Speaking of Wraith of Talera, sitting on my desk right now is the contract from Borgo Press, as an imprint of Wildside Press, for the book.  I wrote a lot of rough draft and outlined the last few chapters yesterday so I expect to have the book finished and turned in by August. Since this one will be part of a duology, I am considering starting the next one immediately after Wraith is done. That one will be called Gods of Talera. 

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The Need for Cognition

A friend and colleague of mine at Xavier and I often get onto the topic of “need for cognition” in our discussions. What “need for cognition” means is that some people, and academics are often among them, have a chronic and near constant need to “think” about things.  He and I both have this quality, but neither of us believes that this need is present in everyone.  Many people, it seems, are rather happy to let their brains idle.  It’s not that these folks are stupid by any means; it’s just that they don’t exert themselves with thoughts when those thoughts are not directly related to the task at hand.  In quiet moments, their thoughts are also relatively quiet.  For me, it is often in the “quiet” moments that my thoughts race and twist the most.      

I’m reminded of a time in graduate school when a friend of mine and I were at a local drinking establishment partaking of more than a few alcoholic beverages.  My friend’s girlfriend came in, somewhat miffed that he had blown off plans with her to, instead, go drinking with me.  She asked, in a rather exasperated voice, why we felt the need to occasionally drink too much.  And both of us said at the same time, without any prior rehearsal or even discussion of the topic: “to stop our heads from thinking.”  What we meant, or at least what I meant, was that sometimes I wanted my thoughts to shut the hell up, and once I’d gotten enough alcohol in me those thoughts would obey. 

As an adult, I’ve found that playing a video game or chess has much the same effect as alcohol.  When I’m caught up in the game my thoughts are all focused.  They’re not wandering around yammering at me about this or that topic, and this can be a great relief after a day of cogitating.  I wonder whether writers in general are more likely to come from the folks who have a “need for cognition.”  Does part of the drive to write come from the very fact that writers’ thoughts are constantly yammering at them?  Or am I projecting my own mental state onto others.  What do you think?

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Of Ant and Humankind

A few days ago I noticed a dead snake on the dirt road around the corner from our house. I expected it to be gone the next day but it’s still there several days later. I noticed this morning that an entire ant hill has been built up around it. It made me think of human boom towns, when a vein of silver or gold was discovered, or when oil was found, and how a town might spring up almost overnight with everything dedicated to mining that vein or drilling for that oil.

I wonder what will happen to the ant town when the snake is gone. Human boom towns often died out when the ore was depleted. The people moved on to the next strike. I’ll have to keep an eye on the ants to see if the same thing happens.

It made me think of a fantasy story idea, of boom towns built up around the death site of a dragon perhaps. Ants and humans ain’t that different it would seem.

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To Appendix or not to Appendix

I’ve passed 47,000 words now on Wraith of Talera, the fourth Taleran book. This will mark the start of a new duology. By now, as is probably common with Sword and Planet kinds of series, I’ve built up a tremendous amount of information about the planet Talera. I keep what I call a “Taleran Encyclopedia,” which has details on characters, races, plants and animals, language, cities and countries, games, religions etc. I need it to keep everything straight.

At some point in many fantasy series, the author includes an appendix or two at the end of a volume providing at least some of this kind of information to the readers. It’s in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Alan Burt Akers did it for Kregen. There’s something like it for the Barsoom series by ERB. I personally like it when such things are included and was thinking about adding such an appendix to this fourth book. Here’s  an example of a potential entry, as it exists in my current “encyclopedia.”

Curse words and phrases:  There are many more:

    Dahh – Generally translated as Damn.

    Dihmus vishka – Possible translation is “god in heaven.”

    Krutt – Used as a curse because the habits of the insect are so disgusting to many.   

    Lart – Rodent (You Rat).  Generally considered a mild curse.

    Ruck (Ruckers) – Worthless ones.  

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Est Yaal shei = go to hell.

Ivid Yaal shei = What the hell?

Sae Yaal shei = Oh hell, or, by hell.

What do you think? Would you enjoy such a thing? Does it seem superfluous, or like an interesting element that increases the believability factor for the stories.

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