Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 39

Death’s Lady audiobook covers

So, way back when I was doing the Tuyo World Companion (it was just a year ago, but it seems like a long time , okay?), I complained with considerable vehemence about not being able to get a frame around the cover. I’d come up with one that more or less did the job, but it wasn’t that great. Then, in the nick of time, commenter Mona Z contacted me and said, basically, “You know what, as it happens, I’m an expert with Canva and good at this stuff and here are six versions of that cover with different frames.” I picked this one:

And then Mona very kindly did a version for the paperback edition too.

Well, that is not the sort of thing I’m likely to forget. So, when I decided to do audiobooks for the Death’s Lady books, I thought I would take a stab at doing covers myself because, I mean, it’s not THAT expensive to ask the cover artist to create audiobook covers, but it’s also not free, plus I thought it would just be a kind of neat thing to try.

Things you really need to know about making book covers:

The images and elements at Canva are supposed to be fine for commercial use, but this is not always true! I know experienced self-publishing authors who avoid Canva like the plague. The people who are most likely to get in trouble — I mean actually have their KDP accounts permanently terminated — tend to be throwing a lot of low-content “books” on Amazon using images that a thousand other people have already used when doing the same thing. That’s not especially relevant to me. Nevertheless, I am nervous about using templates or images from Canva. On the other hand, Canva is a great tool for building a book cover (among other uses) because you can move images around and layer elements on top of images or on top of other elements.

You know where else you can get images besides the ones sitting on Canva? Of course, you can buy them on Shutterstock or whatever, but also, a lot of giant museums have made a huge number of artwork images free to use.

Museums that make lots of artwork public domain

When I say public domain, I really mean it. You can download the images, modify them in any way you want, use them for commercial purposes, anything. They are really and truly available. The link above goes to an article that explains some of the history behind this. The big shift occurred in 2017, because before that museums did not permit anything like this and now a large number of museums do. So a vast number of artworks are now in the public domain, with their images available for use, as defined by Creative Commons Zero. The language is as follows:

The public can reliably and without fear of later claims of infringement build upon, modify, incorporate in other works, reuse and redistribute as freely as possible in any form whatsoever and for any purposes, including without limitation commercial purposes. 

Moreover:

In the United States, reproduction photographs of paintings and two-dimensional art are not protected by copyright. If the art is in the public domain, then a photograph of the art can be used freely.

And the links above explain how this came about.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the many museums that now offers enormous collections of online images of public domain artwork, downloadable and useable for anything you want. They have this tag on every Open Access image: As part of the Met’s Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.

This is where I thought I might be able to get images that would be unusual — that is, not something offered on Canva and used a lot of times by whoever else, but also definitely available for commercial use. So I went to the Met website and typed “starry night” or something equally generic into the search bar and got this on the very first page of results:

This is Shozokuenoki Tree at Oji: Fox–fires on New Years Eve by Utagawa Hiroshige. In case you are interested, Wikipedia says:

Utagawa Hiroshige, born Andō Tokutarō (1797 – 1858), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.

Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The subjects of his work were atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868). The popular series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai was a strong influence on Hiroshige’s choice of subject, though Hiroshige’s approach was more poetic and ambient than Hokusai’s bolder, more formal prints. Subtle use of color was essential in Hiroshige’s prints, often printed with multiple impressions in the same area and with extensive use of bokashi (color gradation), both of which were rather labor-intensive techniques.

The thing about this artist, I mean when it comes to whether it’s practical to use a detail of his artwork as the background image of a book cover, is that he created roughly a gazillion prints and therefore it’s no trouble to get details from four different prints, and they will all look unified because the artworks were all created by the same artist. I started with the one above and made a cover for The Year’s Midnight, and this cover might as well have had a blinking neon arrow pointing to it saying Nonexpert Author Made This. The same for the other three audiobook covers in the series.

So I sent those to Mona and asked, basically, “Should I throw these away and ask the original cover artist to do audio versions, or can these be salvaged?” Happily, Mona likes Japanese woodblock prints and was glad to help, and she gave me many iterations of excellent advice, eventually leading to this:

Various things to know: You are not allowed to put any kind of border around the edge; and you are not allowed to put any text on the bottom right quarter of the cover. ACX, Amazon’s audio platform, shows you a square with the lower right corner blocked off to show you where text can’t go. (No, I didn’t realize that until I loaded a potential cover and looked at it at ACX.) That’s why all the text here is at the top; that looked better than putting the author’s name on the bottom, but offset to the left.

But what you can see is how easy it is to set an image on a Canva template and move the image around, then set it in place, then move it around again, then cut the edges off, then move it around some more, until you wind up with a detail of a painting. You can then set elements on top of your image, such as swords, shadows and flocks of birds, and you can gray those out and shift them “up” and “down” through the layers of images. Then you can put whatever text you want on the top, in a lot of possible colors.

So, unless I change my mind, the audio covers for this series will be based on these woodblock prints, not on the original cover art. And no, that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to keep buying cover art; it just means that I thought this was an interesting option to explore. I learned quite a bit, and I enjoyed the process.

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Update: Not a lot to say, let’s have some pictures

It’s not like nothing is going on. A lot is going on. It’s just mostly stuff you already know about.

A) The MARAG audiobook is available, yay!

B) The audiobooks for RIHASI and the Death’s Lady series are underway. I must say, I get a lot more weeding done when I have audiobook chapters to review.

C) I have a sale scheduled to coincide with RIHASI’s release, I scheduled it months ago, I nearly forgot about it, last week I remembered about it and had a lot of hasty last-minute fiddling to handle, and also I need to send out a newsletter mentioning this sale REALLY SOON. I’m almost finished with the next installment of the DL story that will go in that newsletter. I’ll probably, almost certainly, send the newsletter July 3.

D) SILVER CIRCLE is moving ahead, though rather slowly, relatively speaking. But it’s moving, so it’s fine.

E) It’s summer, ugh, heat. No taking dogs to the park when the low at dawn is 80 degrees F and the humidity is dialed up to SAUNA. I take the dogs for walks around six am because it’s relatively tolerable at that point. They are welcome to zip out into the yard whenever they like. I have not yet had to call anyone inside for fear they would play tag until they got heatstroke, but I do keep it in mind, especially at dusk, when Joy, Haydee, Morgan, and sometimes Naamah are likely to be chasing each other and wrestling. The boys have more sense, or at least they have more coat and dislike the heat more. Plus they are older. Ish is ten and a half now, remarkable how time passes, and Conner is seven.

Magnolia ‘Ann’ reblooms all summer

Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’ is a stunning variety, massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, preferable to both the wide-type species and especially preferable to white-flowering ‘Venus.’ It’s a magnolia relative that is mostly finished flowering now, but not quite.

Even the cats get tired of the heat and join me on the couch.

Joy is stunningly beautiful as well as just cute as a button

Joy will be four months old in a few days. That’s remarkable. She’s basically housetrained. I’ve been teaching her ordinary Rally stuff, sit / down / left finish. Very simple things. Maybe I’ll put a title on her, but basically this kind of training is just useful to teach her that communication is a thing and she should pay attention to me. Maybe I’ll show her (locally) in conformation shows as well. I really like her a lot. I mean as a show puppy. Nice structure, pretty head, confident attitude. She would be an easy puppy to show. She’s easy in every way, not least because she can play with the others to burn off extra energy.

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MARAG: Audiobook now available

Just letting you all know that the MARAG audiobook went live last night.

Yay! Very easy production, solid quality, I’m happy with this audiobook and I hope listeners enjoy it too.

The audiobook of RIHASI is underway; I should get to listen to the second chapter today.

The audiobook of THE YEAR’S MIDNIGHT is also underway; I expect I’ll get to listen to the first chapter of that one this weekend.

Lots of audiobook stuff in progress!

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Verb Tense in First Person

A post at Kill Zone Blog focuses on a topic I’ve mentioned pretty often (it seems to me) — .

They kicked me out. I wasn’t supposed to come back after Christmas vacation, on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all. They gave me frequent warning to start applying myself—especially around midterms, when my parents came up for a conference with old Thurmer—but I didn’t do it. So I got the ax. They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey. It has a very good academic rating, Pencey. It really does.

Did you see how the author switched from past tense to present so the character can move from telling the events of the story to offering a personal opinion? It’s as if the character wants to share a little detail with the reader, so he turns directly to the audience and hands out some extra information. This ability to offer side comments in the character’s voice seems to me to be unique in first person, and it shows an aspect of the character that may not work if the author stays with past tense.

The passage is from The Catcher in the Rye, and what I want to point out here is that (a) Yes, the narrator is offering an opinion, but also (b) the statements that are in present tense are the ones that are about a feature of the world right this minute in story-present, while the statements that are in past tense are story. Well, backstory, but that’s story in this particular book.

I don’t think of this as the protagonist offering a personal comment to the reader. I think of this as the author making it clear that something is true right this second in story-present; it’s not just something that might have been true in the past. That’s what I think is crucial here. Everything is in the protagonist’s voice. Everything is filtered through the protagonist’s perspective. Nothing is really an aside to the reader.

If there really were an aside directed to the reader, it would look like this:

They kicked me out. I wasn’t supposed to come back after Christmas vacation, on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all. They gave me frequent warning to start applying myself—especially around midterms, when my parents came up for a conference with old Thurmer—but I didn’t do it. So I got the ax. They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey. I’m telling you, it has a very good academic rating, Pencey. It really does.

If the author really wants to break the fourth wall, then the fourth wall gets broken, o Best Beloved, and you can’t miss it. I don’t think Holden Caulfield is addressing the reader exactly. I think you don’t need to address the reader in order to provide opinions and comments in first person.

Regardless, this is why I’m on record as saying, multiple times, that verb tenses are objectively harder to manage in first person than third. Which is not a reason to avoid first! But it’s something to be aware of. The linked post adds,

When I was working on my first-person novels, I didn’t realize I was using exactly this technique, but someone with editing experience reviewed some of my work and told me the tense had to agree all the way through each scene…

And this is dangerous advice if the author thinks it’s true. It would be true in other kinds of stories or in English Comp essays, but in first person stories it is emphatically not true, and when the author gets this wrong — or worse, “corrects” verb tenses because of bad advice — that’s disastrous.

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Poetry Thursday

I intended to post a poem I particularly love, but I happened to trip over this new-to-me poem, so let me share this one with you instead. I’ll also ask: which of the thirteen is your favorite?

***

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   

It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   

V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

VI

Icicles filled the long window   

With barbaric glass.   

The shadow of the blackbird   

Crossed it, to and fro.   

The mood   

Traced in the shadow   

An indecipherable cause.   

VII

O thin men of Haddam,   

Why do you imagine golden birds?   

Do you not see how the blackbird   

Walks around the feet   

Of the women about you?   

VIII

I know noble accents   

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   

But I know, too,   

That the blackbird is involved   

In what I know.   

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   

X

At the sight of blackbirds   

Flying in a green light,   

Even the bawds of euphony   

Would cry out sharply.   

XI

He rode over Connecticut   

In a glass coach.   

Once, a fear pierced him,   

In that he mistook   

The shadow of his equipage   

For blackbirds.   

XII

The river is moving.   

The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.   

It was snowing   

And it was going to snow.   

The blackbird sat   

In the cedar-limbs.

***

I honestly don’t know which of these I might pick out as my personal favorite. There are a lot of wonderful lines here. It was evening all afternoon! A lot of wonderful stanzas too. (I) is hard to beat, actually. (II) might be the most surprising. It’s hard to choose a favorite! Maybe … maybe (V). Or maybe not! I’d have to throw a dart at this poem because I don’t think I can really pick one out.

I can’t believe I never saw this poem before! If you’ve never seen it before either, here it is. If you were already familiar with it, I hope you enjoyed recalling it today.

Image from Pixabay

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“What makes a good story?”

Here’s a surprisingly concise answer to the above question, on Twitter:

Students at NYU asked the creators of South Park the million-dollar question: “What makes a good story?”

They gave one of the best explanations of story I’ve heard: “If we can take the beats of your outline, and the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats… you got something pretty boring.

What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is the words ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’”

For something so concise, that seems pretty accurate, doesn’t it? Though I expect some “and then” moments will appear in the narrative as well. Let’s try it:

Gandalf appears right before Bilbo’s birthday party.

And then Gandalf forces Bilbo to leave the ring for Frodo.

And then Gandalf warns Frodo about the ring and sends him to Rivendell.

Frodo intends to go to Rivendell alone,

but Sam was eavesdropping and gets coopted in the quest. They set off,

but then threatening black riders appear.

Therefore, frightened, he accepts Strider’s help.

But, seduced by the ring, when he faces threats, he tends to put it on, so the black riders keep getting closer.

And then he is wounded by the cursed sword. All seems lost!

But then, in the nick of time, an elf snatches him from the black riders and carries him to safety.

And so on. What do you think? I think probably most events in the plot can easily be connected by “and then,” “but then,” and “therefore.”

Obviously any kind of reversal or anything unexpected will be hooked into the plot by “but,” and anything the protagonist does because of those unexpected events will be hooked into the story by “therefore.” But there’s definitely room for the plot to simply continue from time to time, and then those continuations will be hooked in by “and then.”

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Heists

At Crime Reads: Planning a Heist with Your Spouse

Not quite what it sounds like, unfortunately! It sounds exciting! But no, this post is about co-writing a heist novel with your spouse.

In the pages of our first heist together, we competed with each other to introduce new twists, upsetting the other’s carefully constructed plans. We found it to be a unique piece of our cowriting—one we’d never discovered in our previous novels—with two authors, we were able to build more reversals, some that even caught each other by surprise. …

This is Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka, who have previously written romances. This heist story is, oh, it’s a YA heist novel! I didn’t see that coming. It’s called Heiress Takes All.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia Owens isn’t thrilled that her dad’s getting remarried…again. She’s especially not thrilled that he cheated on her mom, kicked them out of their Rhode Island home, and cut Olivia out of her rightful inheritance.

But this former heiress has a plan for revenge. While hundreds of guests gather on the grounds of the gorgeous estate where she grew up, everyone will be thinking romance—not robbery. She’ll play the part of dutiful daughter, but in reality she’ll be redistributing millions from her father’s online accounts. She only needs the handwritten pass code he keeps in the estate’s safe.

Wow, she sounds vindictive. Even vicious. This description did not do nearly enough to persuade me the dad deserves to have millions stolen by a brat daughter who’s mad he’s getting remarried. That’s what this sounds like to me. Granted, the reviews do a better job persuading me she’s got more reason than teenage pique to steal a huge amount of money from her dad. How about putting that in the description, not leaving it for a reviewer to communicate to potential readers? Here’s how this story starts.

I really shouldn’t have worn heels to my very first heist.

They cost me only seconds on the stairs, possibly less. Seconds might be critical, though, in moments like this. I reach the bottom steps, then the dark wood of the basement corridors, where I pause to pull off my pumps.

Ugh. More lost moments.

The instant they’re in my hand, straps hung on my rubbed-raw fingers, I run.

Footsteps pound behind me. Not the ominous rhythm of two feet or even the hectic syncopation of four. This is a crowd.

The long passageways I’ve ducked into mock me with their formality, their elegance. The white baseboards give way to pink paint; deep, dark hardwood floors where the balls of my bare feet thump with every step, crown molding which … I only know what crown molding is because Dad would not stop pointing out to guests that the crown molding dated back to the 1800s.

I mean, it’s not bad, but I’m not that interested either. I know the authors have to set the scene, but this seems like the protagonist is paying an awful lot of attention and spending a lot of time thinking about the decor, considering she’s running away from a crowd of people. Also, I don’t know why her fingers have been rubbed raw, which makes me wonder whether the act of pulling off her shoes cause actual physical trauma to her fingers. That seems unlikely. But what other activity could have led to this kind of injury? I’m paging ahead through the sample and I still can’t tell. The authors are leaving us completely in the dark about what this girl just did that has resulted in her running away down dark basement corridors (dark, but the baseboards are white and the paint is pink? How dark can they be?). I guess the description is supposed to suffice as orientation for the reader, but I would actually like more orientation right here in the story.

Well, never mind, moving on. This definitely makes me think of a recent-ish Book Riot post: Get Ready to Read 10 of the Best Thrilling YA Heist Novels

I didn’t actually look at the post, just thought — when I saw the title — oh, heists, I like heists, I should look at that sometime. Well, this is certainly the time. What thrilling YA heist novels are we talking about? I wonder if Heiress Takes All is on the list. Also, I’m once again pausing to say to myself, “YA Heist Novels” is a whole category? Who knew?

Oh, look at this, the Book Riot post appears to have been sponsored by the publisher of Heiress Takes All, which is Little, Brown. I didn’t realize Book Riot had sponsors. I’m guessing that Little, Brown thinks this is a good time to get people thinking there is a category of YA Heist Novels.

Anyway, this post begins: If you’re down for thrills and screams, in these next novels, you’ll find heists that take you to highs and lows you won’t expect, intriguing plot lines, untrustworthy characters, and endings that you think about even days after finishing the book. If you’re a fan of adventures, secrets, and complex challenges, you’ll want to read these thrilling YA heist novels right away.

Ah hah, didn’t see this coming, very strong SFF flavor to this Heist list. What do you suppose the list ends with? You might have guessed it, even though I didn’t:

Good choice, Book Riot! I’m liking the whole list better now — I mean, if The Thief is on this list, then the list was put together by someone whose taste aligns with mine to at least some extent. Though I like most of the sequels better than this one. Personally, I think it’s hard to beat The King of Attolia, though I know a lot of people put The Queen of Attolia at the top and I can see that. They’re neck and neck for me. “Nahuseresh, if there is one thing a woman understands, it is the nature of gifts. They are bribes when threats will not avail.” Priceless moment!

Hey, you know what else might count as a heist novel??? I thought of this because any post at all at Book Riot always makes me think of this. But you could actually view Watership Down as a heist novel! Not the whole thing, but getting into General Woundwort’s warren and out again, that’s an actual heist!

Of the others, this one looks promising: A Tempest of Tea

On the streets of White Roaring, Arthie Casimir is a criminal mastermind and collector of secrets. Her prestigious tearoom transforms into an illegal bloodhouse by night, catering to the vampires feared by society. But when her establishment is threatened, Arthie is forced to strike an unlikely deal with an alluring adversary to save it―she can’t do the job alone.

Calling on some of the city’s most skilled outcasts, Arthie hatches a plan to infiltrate the sinister, glittering vampire society known as the Athereum. …

Criminal mastermind, vampires, tea … good cover too. From the top reviews, I gather this first book might end on a cliffhanger.

Anybody got a good heist novel to recommend? SFF or otherwise, doesn’t matter. I’ve got one, from a long time ago:

The story in The Great Train Robbery is based on a real heist, which gives it something difficult to capture in fiction, though I don’t think it’s all that closely based on the real crime. Crichton included a lot of description of the history and the historical setting. I really enjoyed it.

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Update: Calmer week, smoother progress

Still a lot going on, but the week just past nevertheless seemed less cluttered. Let me see, what was going on?

All right —

1) I listened to and approved the first chapter of the RIHASI audiobook. This narrator is distinguishing characters more by vocal style than by changing her voice. I think it’s working quite well (that’s why I made her an offer in the first place). I’m looking forward to listening to chapter two!

2) The technical difficulties for the audiobook of MARAG got ironed out, so that’s now in review at ACX. Whew. Another week or so, probably. They’re usually pretty fast.

3) Finally wrote the first all-new chapter for SILVER CIRCLE. Then I smoothed out the next, already complete, chapter, so that the stuff going on at different locations all braids together.

I have now clarified for this story how cellphones and laptops work. That is, I knew for sure that if government agencies could track everyone via their cellphones, that could be a problem. I was ignoring that problem, but it was becoming more urgent to sort that out. So, I asked on Facebook, “So, how can you hide your phone from cops and the FBI and whoever?” There was more to it on Facebook, but that was the idea, and it was really funny to me because last week people I know from work and wherever were saying, “Wow, for a minute I really wondered if you’d become a survivalist or something! Then I saw the #AmWriting tag and that made a lot more sense!”

Anyway, that was highly helpful, I got some great information, and now I know how everyone is handling this, given that they have very good reasons for not wanting cops or the FBI or anyone to track them. So I went through and smoothed out phone use all the way through the story, which was crucial for being able to braid the flow of action together.

I’m mostly through the next new chapter now as well. Or at least, that chapter is started, which pretty much counts as nearly through it. Beats me what the chapter number is. I’ve lost track. There are going to be about fifty chapters total. I think I have about ten to go. I haven’t been writing them in order, which makes it a little hard to remember.

4) I think the audiobooks for the DL series will be underway sometime this week. I could have gotten the original cover artist to do audiobook covers, but I got distracted by playing with Canva and wound up asking Commenter Mona for advice about that because she is into graphic design and cover design.

Mona was super helpful. Therefore, last week I went from “This will never work, I need to scrap this and just ask the original cover artist to do audiobook covers,” to “By gum, I think I can actually do this.”

The covers are quite different from the ebook and paper book covers, of course, but I don’t care — lots of books have very different covers for different editions, after all.

I’ll do a post about this cover process later — it was fun to do!

MAIN FOCUS THIS WEEK: Making progress on SILVER CIRCLE, of course! I hope to be much closer to the end of the story by the end of June.

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Fathers in SFF

I was hoping I’d remember to do a Father’s Day post, and sure enough, I did, so here we are! But I’m not going to try to do a top ten list because honestly, I’m not completely sure that in all of SFF, there are ten fathers worth putting on a Top Ten list of great fathers. That’s why there’s so much repetition when you look at lists of SFF fathers — it’s all Arthur Weasley all the time, and honestly, he’s a pretty minor character, it seems to me. Granted, it’s been a good long time since I read the series, but still.

When I think of a list like this, I want a father who is:

–More than a minor character.

–Competent, because I can’t stand ineffectual characters and I particularly dislike ineffectual parents who ought to step up, but don’t or can’t or are just oblivious.

–An actual good father, not just an important character. Someone who acts as a father during the events in the story.

I’m going to stick to a Top Five list because that is actually doable.

1) Sam Vimes

I know a lot of the Discworld series get picked out as favorites, and actually I’ve never read the Granny Weatherwax ones — I should do that — but my favorite series in this world are the Vimes books, excluding the first one. The character arc in the first book is Sam pulling himself out of the gutter, and fine, whatever, but I prefer to skip that part and begin when he’s already the competent, take-charge, dedicated cop we all know and love from the other books. Also, he’s a great father. That Where’s My Cow? scene at the end of Thud! is marvelous. All the scenes with Where’s My Cow are marvelous.

2) Aral Vorkosigan

Aral is probably going to appear on every SFF Father’s Day list. There’s a reason for that. I think he only marginally counts as an important character once the focus shifts to Miles. BUT, Aral is an enormous presence in Miles’ life even when he doesn’t have a lot of time on the page.

3) I don’t want to pick just the obvious fathers, so how about Isaac Grant in Obsidio. In this YA SF trilogy, young protagonists get center stage, but I really liked Isaac, so I’m stretching a point. He’s competent, determined, and steps in as a dad not just for his own daughter, but for other young characters who have lost their own fathers. I particularly appreciate that Isaac is competent as a father, not just in other aspects of life.

I think all three books in this trilogy are excellent and great fun — which is not to say precisely plausible — but the wildly implausible plots are part of the fun. Here’s my post on the first book.

4) Derk in The Dark Lord of Derkholm. Derk has seven children, you may recall — Shona and Blade, who are human, and Kit, Callette, Don, Lydda, and Elda, who are all griffins. What a splendid, fun story this is. It’s not my absolute top favorite DWJ title, but it’s up there. And Derk is a committed, caring father, though I grant creating the griffin children is a little unusual.

5) Sinowa inGara. The reason I’m picking him for this list rather than Daniel is because Daniel is Jenna’s father, but Sinowa steps into the father role for practically every boy and young man he encounters. His central conception of himself is as a father, plus when he sees other men failing their responsibilities as fathers, he steps in there as well.

Anybody spring to mind for any of you? Who else belongs on this list?

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Reminders —

Just a handful of reminders in this post:

A) I’ll be pulling RIHASI at my Patrion about June 24. If you would like to download the epub there, now is a good time. Here’s the link.

B) Obviously if you haven’t preordered RIHASI yet and you would like to, this is a good time; here’s the link.

C) I’ve started a new Death’s Lady story, set during the lead up to midwinter and then going through midwinter. This is the first midwinter after the events of the series, so this is the first time Daniel and/or Jenna might possibly ask Tenai to open the way for them back to our world. This story is from the point of view of Taranah, the king’s aunt. The first installment of this story will appear in my newsletter, which you can sign up for here. I’m scheduling this newsletter to go out next Monday.

D) When the story is complete, I’ll drop it onto my Patreon. I have no idea when that will happen because I really have no idea how long this story might go. All these newsletter stories are appearing at my Patreon as they’re completed.

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