Michael J. Sullivan's Blog, page 79

The Bubble Gum Thief

Jeff Miller is an author.
I can't begin to tell you how that one sentence pleases me. I'm certain it pleases Jeff even more.
Jeff and I met as members of a small writers group in Clarendon, Virginia. The group gathered at a Barnes and Noble each week—second floor near the windows, sandwiched between History and Current Events. I always liked that. Something inspiring about entering the doors and seeing Fitzgerald, Whitman, and Shelley painted on the wall near the coffee shop, peering down. Ghosts of literature past blessing us with stern looks and the heady aroma of dark roast, the stinky petrol of writers. This was as close as our cross-section of Americana would get to a bohemian coffee shop where writers paid their bills with poems.
We had a librarian, a teacher, a lawyer—more than one I think, but that's to be expected just outside DC. Some of us were originally from the Midwest, the South, the east or west coasts, one even from Germany. We were young and old, male and female, newlyweded and long ago divorced. A few had kids, others hoped to, and some spoke of grandchildren. We had scholars, soldiers, mothers and daughters. All with tales so different, but one thing in common—we all wanted to be authors.
We'd gather in folding chairs set in a democratic circle and discussed, with great seriousness, the offerings each of us sacrificed to the group. Jokes were made to break the tension. There was always tension. No aspiring author sat in that circle with any less apprehension than an accused murderer before a bench. On trial our fragile, self-inflated dream; in every chair, a wicked child with a hat pin.
For years we gathered. Read numerous tales of knights, zombies, vampires, trolls, civil war romances, and space operas. Some were good. Others needed work. None were ever bad. In a place where everyone took a turn looking down the barrel, pulling the trigger was uncomfortable at best. The idea the same as the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. We were a class coming of age together, discovering how to accept criticism, build characters, and to just say no to misplaced modifiers. And we all wanted to be something. A children's novelist, a science fiction writer, the next Hemingway, King, or Tolkien.
Jeff wanted to write thrillers. He liked books that drew a reader in from the first sentence and kept them reading with excitement, intrigue, and mystery. That's the wheelhouse of a thriller. I always thought the same ideal could be applied to any genre—any fiction—and kick out a good result. In many ways Riyria is a fantasy set to a thriller tempo.
Not long after The Crown Conspiracy was first published, Jeff caught the golden ring landing a fantastic agent. His book was on the road to Big Six publishing. He only had to cut almost a third of the book. After he had, they asked him to put most of it back. The process was grueling, but who could argue with Glenda the Good Witch on the yellow brick road to see the wizard.
Then tragedy. As his agent was on the verge of submitting to publishers…she died.
As you can imagine this was devastating on multiple levels, and I could see a change in Jeff. The smile was gone. Not only had he lost his big shot, a person he worked with, who he was just getting to know, had unexpectedly died. Jeff picked himself up and went back to querying agents, back to knocking on doors and getting rejections—back to the beginning. Having read his book I was still positive he was going to make it, Jeff—not so much.
You need to understand that Jeff Miller—while not a pessimist—is a highly cautious optimist. Recently married with two young children and a demanding day job, he dreamed of being an author, but it was a vision he kept up on an unreachable shelf. He could look, but never expected to touch it. Didn't matter that he'd spent years learning the craft, then applying his skill to writing and re-writing a wonderful character-based police procedural thriller; such fortunes were the rewards other people got—not him. Everyone thinks that. I tried to tell him so, to tell him his book was good. I could see it on his face, in that self-conscious smile—he didn't really believe me. I didn't believe it when people told me either.
Jeff left the writer's group and moved to the Midwest a few months ago, which is disappointing as I can't see the smile on his face today. I imagine it is one of those wide, teeth-showing grins that will be with him for a long while. People will probably give him puzzled looks. It's just not normal for people to appear that happy.
I'm not with him. I can't see it, but I don't have to. I've been there. I walked on that same air. And I swear I heard a bell ring, saw a falling star, or stumbled past a four leaf clover, because you see The Bubble Gum Thief, a thriller by Jeff Miller, was published today. 
Special Agent Dagny Gray is smart, athletic, and fearless. She’s also fragile, depressed, and anorexic. If she doesn’t get healthy soon, the FBI will drop her—and she’ll never have a chance to end the crime spree of the so-called “bubble gum thief.” 

It all started with the theft of a pack of gum, and the ominous note he left behind: THIS IS MY FIRST CRIME. MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER. Every two weeks, he delivers on this pledge, committing a bigger crime, and promising that the next will be even worse. When petty theft gives way to bloody murder, the stakes become clear. He may have begun with the smallest crime possible, but he’s building toward the biggest crime imaginable. 

There’s a method to the gum thief’s madness, and Special Agent Dagny Gray knows she can figure it out…if the Bureau will let her. But will it be in time to prevent the cataclysmic finale of his escalating spree?

This holiday season help make a newborn author's dream come true. Go read the sample on Amazon. If you like it, buy it and read it. Then leave a review on Amazon. For paperback go here. To visit Jeff Blog go here.
This is Jeff 's first novel, I hope it will be a huge success…I'm hoping his next ones will be bigger.
Congratulations, Jeff. And just for the record…I told you so. 

Terraria Physics

I wrote a short story recently for the Unfettered anthology, entitled The Jester. In doing the final polishing the following happened that illustrates how strange life can be for a writer of fiction who is also a gamer.
"There's a problem with your story," my wife Robin said walking slowly into my office, head down with a concerned look.
I stopped typing a blog post I wasn't all that interested in. I've been hard pressed to come up with anything worth writing about. I prefer to either publish essays that are informative or at least entertaining, and I've not thought of anything in a long while. "There's nothing wrong with the story."
"Yes there is."
"No there's not. You've read it, I've read it. We've had the writer's group go over it—there's nothing wrong."
"It's physics," Robin said in an ominous tone as she flopped down on the bed. The dog followed her in and jumped up beside her.  
Instantly I knew what she was talking about. "The water and the shaft?"
"Yes." Again she sounded morbid as if the test results had come back malignant. "It won't work."
"Yes it will," I said. "Trust me, I thought of that. The thing you don't know is that the source is a mountain lake high above the exit. The reader won't know that either because Royce and Hadrian can't know. But I don't think anyone reading the story will think about it to that degree."
Robin gave me an, are you kidding, look.
If you've not been published, you've not known the joys of detailed scrutiny. I'm not talking about harsh critics complaining about typos or cardboard characters, I'm talking about superfans who believe so deeply in the books that they need to know the fate of everything and are very disturbed if there's inconsistencies, or an error of any sort. In my upcoming novel The Crown Tower, some beta reviewers wanted to know the fate of the barge. This is equivalent to feeling it's important to know what happened to the boats that were left at the bottom of the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride. Then there are those who question how Hadrian draws that long spadone off his back, or how in Percepliquis did Hall build a ship on the beach when the tide so quickly erases it? One fellow mentioned that the baker's table in Nyphron Rising wouldn't jar when Constance slammed her hand on it—because baker's tables are very solid.
It's not that I don't have answers for these sorts of questions, most of the time I do—the rest of the time I'll make one up—but I'm always amazed that people ponder my work to this degree. Robin knows this, hence the look.
"But it won't. Think of a diving bell. Water won't fill a bell—air gets trapped underneath. The water won't flow up a shaft like that."
"Sure it will. Think of siphoning gas. As long as the end of the tube is lower than the gas tank, gas will flow up hill. The water will fill until it reaches the same level as the source."
"I don't think it will." Robin had a very convinced expression—so did the dog. The dog always takes her side.
It was at this point that Robin fixed me with a serious stare and said. "I've done it in Terraria."
For those of you who don't know. Terraria is a computer game—sort of a 2D Minecraft—where you dig to find minerals to craft armor and weapons. You can build homes, and fortresses as well as fight monsters. Sometimes, while digging you encounter water or lava.
"So have I." I countered. "That's how I drain shafts."
"But I made my ocean home that way. I built a room and then just pumped the water out. The room never refilled."
"You must have been pumping air in the room to replace the water like divers clear goggles underwater by blowing out of their noses."
"But I wasn't pumping air in," she insisted. "I was only pumping water out. And the room never refilled."
The dog had that condescending look that suggested she was right. Personally I think Tobi takes her side for political reasons.
"Has it occurred to you that Terraria might not be real?"
Robin looked at me as if I'd just suggested Santa Claus was a myth (Santa Claus is also in Terraria.)
"Think of it this way." I stood up and used my hands to illustrate the complexity of my theory, wishing secretly that I had a hotline to Bill Nye. "If I put a glass upside-down in a sink filled with water, it will trap air, just like your diving bell. But if I poke a hole in the top, the air will rush out and the glass will fill with water."
"I don't think so."
At first I thought she was going to be clever and say I couldn’t poke a hole in glass—I actually didn't have an answer to that one. Instead she surprised me.
"It doesn't happen that way in Terraria." She was sticking to computer game physics.
My story integrity was on the line. As absurd as it was, we went downstairs to the kitchen and I began to fill the sink with water. I suggested I demonstrate with the colander, but she wasn't going to go for that. We found a plastic cup. It was actually the old container for chocolate covered almonds we bought at the supermarket. Only a few left so they were eaten in the name of science.
Upside-down and submerged the cup remained filled with air.
"Feel the resistance?" I asked.
Robin nodded. "Now cut a hole in the top while I hold it in the water."
I took a knife from the block and saw the next day's headline: AUTHOR SLICES LATE WIFE'S WRISTS, CLAIMS IT WAS FOR SHORT STORY.
I poked a tiny hole and watched her.
Robin hesitated for about a minute staring in the sink, a little smirk rising on her lips. "Okay, maybe your right."
She let go of the cup and started to walk out of the kitchen then stopped, turned and said as a parting shot, "But it works in Terraria."
I returned to the keyboard and realized I no longer had a blog post problem.

Just When You Thought The Voting Was Over

 
“But not being noble born, you aren’t allowed to enter a tournament.”
Since at least some part of Theft of Swords, Rise of Empire, and Heir of Novron were all previously released prior to the Orbit editions, none have been eligible for any awards. (Although, last year Emerald Storm may have been the only non-traditional book on this very same list, which was just amazing.) 
This year the individually released second half of Heir of Novron, Percepliquis, does qualify and miraculously made the Goodreads Choice Awards list. Nice placement I thought, but it seems to look very out of place among all those other, more confident, more professional and eye-catching covers. You can barely read the title, and who could possibly hope to pronounce it? 
And yet...wow.  
Thanks Goodreads  

Comic Con 2012

So they didn't hold the New York Comic Con at the above building...but how cool would that have been? Granted all those people could never have fit, but then it really couldn't have been much more crowded. I took this photo while walking through the streets of New York. Thought it ought to be the home of something like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or something, but then I had such thoughts on my mind given that I was in town for a book signing and panel at Comic Con.
Saturday night I met with, Raymond Rose, a fan of my books, and his wonderful wife. The two came to the city from western Pennsylvania, only to realize they'd misplaced their con tickets. After trying and failing to get in, they were understandably disappointed. Raymond, who I've connected with on Goodreads a few times, contacted me with this unhappy tale and asked to have dinner. I doubt a quiet dinner in Little Italy with Robin and I was much of a consolation prize for coming all that way, paying for and failing to get into Comic Con, but I hoped it helped.  
The next day, thinking I had plenty of time to get there, my wife and I had a leisurely breakfast at a little diner on the other side of Manhatten where we were staying. Turns out I was wrong and we had to jump in a cab and race across town. Sitting in the back seat of a New York cab when the driver knows the passenger is in a huge hurry, is like sitting on a couch watching someone else play Grand Theft Auto. 


We made the trip then had to fight the crowds waiting in droves on the sidewalks to get in. Racing for the secret author's entrance--the blue entrance as it was known--we jumped in got our badges and scrambled to find the Orbit booth. I arrived one minute late for the signing and felt a bit like a rock star walking out on stage before a waiting crowd. 


There actually was a line. 


This was unexpected. It's not like I'm Neil Gaiman and have thousands of fans, but we did go though all fifty books Orbit had on hand in under twenty minutes. There was never a moment when I wasn't signing, shaking hands, or talking to a reader, (sometimes all three) and the folks from Orbit were doing a great job of moving the line along. 


I was torn between wishing those getting the books were fans who had already read them, and hoping they were all new readers, so I could expand my plans for world literary domination.



Turned out to be a mix. And I was surprised. I almost never meet those who have already read my books, so this was a real treat. 


Afterwards Robin and I were on a panel about publishing. A lot of aspiring writers in the crowd, who I think were pleased with the discussion, which centered mostly on how to get published, or how to self-publish, and what to do after that. I think my role was just to make the unpublished authors  feel better. When I told them my story, they all looked a little happier in that, holy-crap-I-hope-I-have-better-luck-than-he-did, way. 


This closed out the con and we filed out along with the hordes working our way back to the hotel, taking the train back home the next day. I have to admit there's something pleasant about being able to visit New York in the fall, and for one weekend, pretend I'm a famous author and have others pretend with me. It's enough to make me feel like I'm a character in a Nora Ephron movie.
Thanks for coming. We should hang out again sometime.

Riyrias

A fan by the name of New Hitomi recently posted this on Flickr, then tweeted me and apparently held their breath to see my reaction. I loved it, but more importantly this finally settles the long debated topic of who should play Royce and Hadrian in the movie version.


By the way, that's exactly how I pictured that scene from The Crown Conspiracy, right down to the sign on Albert's back and the one shoe coming off.

Thanks so much for sharing this with me New. I can't wait for the next installment.

Unfettered

Cover Art by Todd Lockwood


One of the downsides to being an author is a lack of corporate aided health insurance. For those of us not making millions (you’d be surprised how many that is) medical problems can be devastating even if a full recovery is made.
Shawn Speakman is an author, webmaster, and recent cancer survivor, who after beating Hodgkin’s lymphoma, has more than $200,000 in medical bills. Shawn, however, also has friends. Famous friends. Terry Brooks for example who wrote a short story for him and suggested he ask a few of his other pals to pitch in some words and make an anthology.
So Shawn put out the word.
Did I mention Shawn has some interesting friends?
In 2013, Shawn will be publishing Unfettered, a fantasy anthology featuring stories by:

Terry BrooksPatrick RothfussNaomi NovikBrandon SandersonRA SalvatoreTad WilliamsJacqueline CareyDaniel AbrahamPeter V. BrettRobert VS RedickPeter OrullianTodd LockwoodCarrie VaughnBlake CharltonKevin HearneMark LawrenceDavid Anthony DurhamJennifer BosworthLev GrossmanMichael J. SullivanEldon ThompsonShawn Speakman
The book is entitled Unfetteredbased on the idea that the authors were given no restrictions. We could do anything we liked. Sanderson is including a Wheel of Time piece and I’ve heard Rothfuss has submitted a poem. Lawrence is including a Jorg story, and I’m sending along an original Royce and Hadrian adventure entitled, The Jester.
The Jestertakes place in the Riyria Chroniclesera, around year four, and finds the two already in deep trouble after having taken another strange job. This time Riyria teams up with a pig farmer and the widowed wife of a candle baron who have an ancient treasure map, but not much sense.
While the book will not be out for a few months, it is up for pre-order. Unfettered will be published as a trade hardcover as well as a leather-bound, signed and numbered edition limited to 500 copies and autographed by all contributors.  Shawn also has his own book, The Dark Thorn available through Grim Oak Press, which he hopes will further help offset his medical expenses.
I hope you’ll help us help Shawn, and maybe in the process find a new favorite author or two.
For more information on Unfettered

You Know How It Ends…Now See How It Began

“I once heard a rumor about thieves who stole treasure from the Crown Tower of Ervanon and replaced it the very next night,” Emily explained.

“Why would anyone do such a thing?” Alenda asked.

The viscount chuckled softly. “I’m sure that’s merely a legend. No sensible thief would behave in such a way.”

I wrote that back in the fall of 2004, almost exactly eight years ago near the start of the novel The Crown Conspiracy. I was living in Raleigh, North Carolina back then, and I never had any thought of publishing stories about the two thieves I’d just started writing about. At that time this passage was just color, a way of adding depth and setting up the following explanation of how thieves worked in the world of Elan. Still, even when I wrote it, I knew Albert Winslow was lying. He was well aware that Royce and Hadrian had done that job. I just never devoted any time to discovering exactly what had happened.

Until now.

Since June 6th I’ve had a survey running on my blog asking readers their opinion on what they would like to read about if I did more books from the universe of Elan. I made no promises. I didn’t want to keep writing if only a few people cared. My plan was one of wait and see how the world received the Riyria books. Well, the series has only been out for eight months, so it’s still a little early, but I think the boys have made a pretty good impression—good enough to take a serious look at bringing them back for more adventures.

Overwhelming requests indicated you wanted the origin story—the birth of Riyria. You wanted to see how Royce and Hadrian first met and the first job they did together. Well, today I am officially announcing—you’re getting your wish.

The Crown Tower—the next full-length Royce and Hadrian novel—and the first of The Riyria Chronicles, is scheduled for release by Orbit in August 2013 in trade paperback, electronic book, and audio formats. 

You’re probably wondering what The Riyria Chronicles are. Right now it’s not much more than an idea I have. The Riyria Chronicles, as I envision them, are stories that fill in the history of the twelve years of Royce and Hadrian’s life as Riyria. They will be generally standalone novels that I imagine will center on significant events in their career together, told mostly in order, and I was thinking one book for everyone of one their twelve years. That’s not to say I will write twelve books.  This isn’t that kind of series. It’s not an ongoing tale or interconnected in the sense that Revelations was, or Song of Ice and Fire is. It really can’t be since if you’ve read The Riyria Revelations, you already know how everything turns out. So this won’t be a single story told in parts, but rather much more episodic like The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes or maybe the Dresden Files—only with medieval thieves instead of nineteenth century detectives or modern day wizards.

Chronicles will likely hit on topics hinted at in The Riyria Revelations that readers have asked about like the original Drumindor job, the disaster that was Blythe Castle, the Crown Tower heist as well as others never previously touched on. While I have several additional projects under production, The Riyria Chronicles allows me a framework to put out a new Royce and Hadrian story every so often, just for the fun of it without hampering me from stretching my authorial limits by discovering new characters and worlds to explore. 

You may be wondering why I didn’t just do a sequel.

If you read Revelations, you know how the story ends. Some have actually called it perfect, and I worked hard ensuring those dominos fell exactly right. I like the place that everyone was left in, and am perfectly content to have them get a rest after all the trials and tribulations I’ve put them through. That’s not to say I won’t consider something in the same world, generations in the future, but Royce and Hadrian wouldn’t star in such a story. Chronicles is a way I can provide more of what most of my readers have told me they want—more time with two guys who should never have been friends, risking their lives for each other.

So what’s The Crown Tower about? Here’s the teaser:

 Two men who hate each other. One impossible mission. A legend in the making.
A warrior with nothing to fight for is paired with a thieving assassin with nothing to lose. Together they must steal a treasure that no one can reach. The Crown Tower is the impregnable remains of the grandest fortress ever built and home to the realm’s most valuable possessions. But it isn’t gold or jewels the old wizard is after, and this prize can only be obtained by the combined talents of two remarkable men. Now if Arcadias can just keep Hadrian and Royce from killing each other, they just might succeed.
(Note: Cover not final)


For me the challenge, and fun of this book, was in recognizing that when they first met, Royce and Hadrian wouldn’t have liked each other much. So could I construct a tale that would realistically portray those first tenuous steps toward such a legendary friendship? I think I have, and I’m very excited to share it with you.

So at last, I can finally make official a project I’ve been keeping under wraps for some time. Technically the deal I made with Orbit is for two Royce and Hadrian novels…and I’ll be back in the not too distant future to tell you more about the second book in The Riyria Chronicles, but that’s a topic for another day. Today is all about The Crown Tower, and the fact that the boys are coming back. I hope you’ll give them a warm welcome when they arrive next August.

Scoring Points

 
Fall is a busy time—back to school and all that. For me autumn has always been the season when my books came out and I started new projects. This year I’m way behind.
I’m in the middle of one novel that I never intended to write that is going great but keeping me from starting a trilogy that I told myself I would begin last week. At present, however, I can’t do either because I’m working on edits for two other novels I wrote last year and writing a short story already overdue for an anthology.
My wife has suggested that I just write 24/7, but I actually do need sleep.
This blog falls into the something’s-gotta-give category. Still I have to relate something that recently occurred…
When it comes to reading, my son is worse than my daughter ever was. He hates reading, always has. At sixteen, he’d only read what he was forced to at school. At seventeen I managed to get him into the Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, and he read the whole series. Score one for me and Rick.
I never even tried to get him to read my books.
For his birthday recently, we got him a Nexus 7 in the hopes of using gadgetry to spur reading. I told him he could buy any books he wanted using my account and I’d pay for them.  This was all wishful thinking on my part. I knew he’d use the new device to play games, or for email.
But then something surprising happened.
A few years ago I drove my son and friends to a movie and learned one of the boys—one of my sons friends—had read my books and loved them. He was giddy to meet me, he was also clearly ostracized by the others for his geekish behavior. As my son has gotten older his circle of friends has begun to include girls. Young women have started visiting the house along with his old boy’s network. And then it happened. While on our summer vacation I noticed my son was spending a lot of time on his new Nexus 7. I asked what he was doing with it, and he replied… “Reading.”
I was shocked.
“What are you reading.”
“Theft of Swords.”
I was confused to the point of almost mentioning what a coincidence that was given I wrote a book by the same title. Then I realized—he was reading my book. Like a perfectly built card-house I backed away slowly so as not to disturb anything.
Not long after he came to my wife to ask if he could get the second book on the Nexus 7. I found this funny as all get out, since our house is packed with copies of my books in every form and language imaginable. You can’t walk into any room and not find ten or twenty on shelves, in boxes, or on tables. But he wanted it on his new device, so sure, why not—anything to get him to read. And he was reading mybooks!
So I had to admit I was proud that my writing had managed to penetrate that resistance to reading that my son had so carefully constructed. After so long, the series that I created to help interest my daughter in a love of words, but came too late to help her, had done the trick with my even more stubborn son. It only took six years, over 200,000 sales, releases in 14 different languages, and a Nexus 7 to get him to read them, but I wasn’t going to complain. I had achieved the impossible. I had gotten my son to like books.
Then I discovered the real reason.
Okay maybe it isn’t the real reason, maybe I’m wrong, this is only speculation after all. Still I found it suspicious when I recently discovered the two new inductees into the old boy friend’s network, the young ladies, were also fans of my books. When, as a teenager, a friend likes your dad’s novels, he’s a geek. When a girl likes them…that’s a whole different argument.
I’m still marking this as a point for Royce and Hadrian.

Vacationing Under Yellow Umbrellas

On Beech Mountain over looking a mist shrouded Echo Lake

Apparently vacations, in the modern sense, come from the idea of students “vacating” schools during the summer months, although the rich have taken holidays since the middle ages. Around the start of the 19th century, a good deal of America’s population was driven by the Puritan work ethic. Simple concept: work good—play bad. So idling away summer days at a lake or island resort wasn’t popular. Vacations were also impossible for most of the working class who at that time were mostly farmers. The work of farming, as it turns out, is done mostly in summer, and not many had a mind to take vacations in winter. So it was the rich—who coincidently were idle most of the time anyway—that went on vacations, but not for fun. Apparently “fun” was also considered bad. I imagine smiling was evil too—remember we’re talking about the “good” old days here.
Instead people of means went on vacations for their health. This was a time of wide spread tuberculosis and a belief in the curing properties of air and natural spring waters, made Saratoga Springs one of the first vacation resorts. A lot of early vacation destinations had the word “spring” in the name for this reason.
The poor, got into the act, but rather than vacationing for health, it was religion that drove them. Going on a religious retreat was safe as the temptations of idleness like drinking, smoking, dancing, swimming, and most importantly, sexual temptations, were restricted. By the later part of the 19th century the railroad had the idea of building hotels at the end of their lines and promoting vacations. The super rich of the Gilded Age had their own train cars that would take them to great camps like those in the Adirondacks and Acadia.
The Vanderbilts, Durants, Astors, Rockafellers, and Carnegies went on holiday, but these people didn’t take a weekend off for a whirlwind tour of Disney World, Epcot, and Universal Studios. They left the city and lived on the lakes in the woods for the entire summer. They brought libraries of books and read extensively. They brought paints and easels creating art like we take photos. They went on week-long canoe trips—not as their vacation, but as one small aspect to their vacation. They wrote poetry, learned how to play instruments, created butterfly collections.
As mentioned one of those locations haunted by the ultra-rich was Acadia, Maine—Bar Harbor to be exact. They built palatial cottages along the Atlantic’s picturesque rocky coast. Then in 1947 a fire wiped it all out. 200,000 acres, 851 permanent home and 397 seasonal cottages were destroyed in what was called “the year Maine burned.” The rich didn’t rebuild…well not the Gilded Age rich at least. 
Bar Harbor Inn  Still when my wife and I first stumbled on Acadia National Park nearly thirty years ago it appeared to be mighty well off to us. At the time Robin and I were in our early twenties and on a whirlwind tour of New England in a Capri hatchback. Too poor to stay in hotels, we camped in our tiny dome tent at KOAs along the road and ate campfire cooked sausages wrapped in bread and butter for breakfast. We wandered the shops and streets of Bar Harbor marveling at the beautiful inns and high priced shops and fantasized about one day staying at the legendary Bar Harbor Inn right there at the park on the waterfront. We’d imagined sipping mint juleps under the yellow umbrellas and watching the Margaret Todd—the only four-masted schooner in Frenchmen’s Bay—set out on her sunset sail from the end of the dock. It was a nice dream that I knew would never happen. That’s what dreams were back then, impossible desires. But I didn’t care because my best wish had already come true. I’d married Robin the year before.
We had a great time on that trip climbing the mountains of Acadia, even the infamous Precipice Trail that sorely tested Robin’s fear of heights as it’s a 1000 foot non-technical cliff climb with narrow ledges and iron rung ladders up the face of Mount Champlain. Not long after Robin and I moved to Vermont. We visited Acadia several times, but never scaled the Precipice again and never managed to stay in Bar Harbor. 
Climbing Precipice Trail 27 years ago
For the last seven years we haven’t taken vacations. Just too busy, I suppose. The Puritans would be proud. Then last year, as you may recall, I went out to Death Valley on a research trip for a novel, which turned into an unexpected week long Californian adventure with my wife and son due to earthquakes, hurricanes and forest fires. It turned out to be a lot of fun, so this year we thought we’d try again. My son never saw Acadia, so we decided to introduce him to the adventure grounds of our youth. Hobbits adventuring once more into the Misty Mountains, only this time we could afford more than a campsite.
So last week, Robin, my son, and I flew to Bangor, drove down to Acadia, and achieved that thirty-year-old dream of staying at the Bar Harbor Inn. We sat on the veranda under the bright yellow umbrellas and sipped rum punch like characters in The Great Gatsby.  We took the sunset cruise on the Margaret Todd, where my son helped hoist the main sail, and we returned to the Precipice. 
My son James climbing precipice 2012
  I wasn’t certain if I could climb that mountain trail again, but my eighteen year old son was determined, and I wouldn’t let him go alone. Robin was also determined to retrace her steps. I honestly didn’t think either of us would make it, and before we even reached the cliff face Robin waved us on. I figured she planned to just wait, but she only wanted to go slower and didn't want to make us wait. My son and I reached the top and heading back down found Robin more than three-quarters up. Terrified of the height, but even more stubborn, she pressed on not looking down until she stood at the top. We went biking through the park in the rain, had pop-overs at Jordan House, took a carriage ride and had other adventures, but seeing Robin reach the top of the precipice once more and those drinks under the yellow umbrellas were the highlight for me.  

And while some people find a unique shell or pretty stone that they pick up off a beach or trail as a souvenir, I found an idea for part of a story. Just the sort of thing I’d been looking for. That’s the problem with authors and vacations—leaving the smart phone and laptop at home won’t stop us from working. I suppose it might have made the Puritans happy to know that, but then again, happiness was also probably frowned upon.

Bull Spec and Flyleaf

This past weekend I was back in my old stomping grounds, North Carolina. Robin and I had lived there for twelve years and it was interesting to be back again, trying to remember things that were only vague recollections.  We started out on Saturday night by meeting with local writers at a dinner hosted by The next day we were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at Flyleaf Bookstore with fellow Orbit author, T.C. MaCarthy (who was also at Mark’s house the night before) for a dual reading/discussion. This all came about due to the efforts of Sam Montgomery-Blinn, creator of Bull Spec Magazine in conjunction with Flyleaf Books. Together they have been scheduling events with such writers as Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erickson, Michael Chabon, and Brent Weeks.
I met T.C. at Balticon a few months earlier, so it was great seeing him again, and wonderful to met Sam who did such a fantastic job of organizing, presenting, and keeping everyone off their diets.
I did something I rarely do—I read from my books. I don’t think I read well aloud, and have avoided it for the most part. That said, if you’d like to hear me read from the start of Avempartha and witness some of the presentation, the folks at Stuck in Traffic , videotaped the thing and posted it to their site.

The reason I’m making this post however is to thank a young woman who lives in Baltimore who—along with her entire family—came all the way down to Chapel Hill just to see me. (That’s like a five hour drive depending on traffic.) She is a young writer who recently published her first work. This is the sort of thing that makes public appearances worth doing. Thanks so much for coming, Lindsey.