James Erich's Blog, page 9

I’ve submitted a new YA fantasy novel!

After working on the stupid thing for over a year now, I’ve finally finished and submitted my YA fantasy novel, Dreams of Fire and Gods: Awakening (formerly known as The Guardians Awaken).  It was one of those novels that just kept getting more complex as I wrote it, so even after I told my publisher that it was ready to go, once I finished up a couple little things…it took four more weeks.

Don’t ever do this.  I’m lucky that my publisher is understanding.

The biggest stumbling block was that this is part one of a trilogy.  When I mentioned that little tidbit, my publisher said, “Okay.  Go ahead and submit it.  But I want to see a summary of all three novels, so I know where you intend to go with it.”

This turned out to be fantastic advice.  Once I sat down and actually started writing up the summaries, I realized I didn’t really have more than a general idea where the stories were going.  I had some ideas for scenes and I knew the general story arc, but there were enormous gaps.  That’s one reason it took so long to prepare for submission.  (The other reason was that my friend, Claire, pointed out a number of points in the finished first novel that needed to be addressed, prompting another rewrite.)

But now I have a fairly concrete idea about how the next two novels will go and I’ve submitted the manuscript, at last!

Here’s the teaser for it that I put in my cover letter:

A thousand years ago, the kingdom was nearly destroyed, as two factions of gods — the Stronni and the Taaweh — warred for the land and the frightened humans who lived there.  Then suddenly the Taaweh vanished and the Stronni declared victory.

Now, as the likelihood of a war between the Emperor and his regent, Vek Worlen, approaches, the Vek’s son, Sael, finds himself allied with Koreh, a homeless vagabond, as he flees the capital city and makes his way across a hostile wilderness to his father’s keep.

But Koreh has dreams — dreams of the ancient Taaweh — and he knows that the looming war between the Emperor and the Vek will be nothing, compared to the war that is about to begin.  Because the Taaweh are returning and the war between the gods may destroy the kingdom and all who dwell there.

Skyr

Vanilla Skyr

Skyr is a popular yogurt-like substance made in Iceland that has been part of the Icelandic diet since it was settled around 870 C.E.  I’ve written about it in several stories, including Seiðman, but until this week I’d never actually tasted it.

I tried and failed to acquire some from a local market, which claimed to carry it (but lied), but finally my friend Claire picked some up in Maine and brought it over for me.  Now at last, I know what it actually tastes like!

I have to say, I was a little disappointed.  Not because it tasted bad.  It tasted fine.  But I was hoping for something unusual and what I got was something that tastes exactly like Greek yogurt to me.  If you can’t find skyr locally, go to the supermarket and pick up some plain Greek yogurt (which is easy to find, these days) and you’ll pretty much know what skyr tastes like.  It’s thicker and creamier than American yogurt.

On the plus side, my descriptions of it weren’t wrong.  We don’t know for certain whether it was exactly the same in the Viking Age as it is in Iceland today, but it probably wasn’t radically different.  They make it with skim milk today, and it would have been made with whole milk in the past, of course.  Icelanders often mixed it with porridge to make something called hræringur (“stirred”) or ate it with cream and sugar on it.  I gather that they still do, but now they add fruit to it, just like we do with our yogurt.

Also, it’s good to know that there is something in the Viking Age I would have been able to eat without wanting to hurl.  The Viking Age Icelandic diet consisted of delicious items such as whale meat fermented in whale urine, beef fermented in whey until it practically disintegrated, and lichen.  Mmm….

Second Wave Of Edits On “Seiðman” Done!

I turned in the second wave of editing on my YA novel, Seiðman, this Monday.  I’m not sure if there will be another round of edits or not, but I would love it, if there is, because every time I go through the manuscript I find more to correct.

This time it was the description of the night sky on Midsummer night in Iceland:  it doesn’t actually get dark, because the sun is only just dipping below the horizon for about two hours.  So you don’t see stars, really.  It’s more of a grayish twilight.  I didn’t know this when I wrote the early drafts of the novel, since I have yet to travel to Iceland.  Fortunately, somebody who lives there corrected me on that.  I could have sworn I’d corrected it in the novel before submitting it to Harmony Ink, but…apparently not.

I know I’ll get a final galley proof to go over, before it goes “to press,” but it’s a litle late to do much editing at that point — it’s mostly to check for typos and missing words.  (One of the most common mistakes that end up in published books is dropped words.  Our brain fills them in, so we can read the same sentence twenty times and not notice a missing “the”.)

I haven’t yet seen any drafts of the cover.  I did approve a final draft of the cover blurb, though.

In the meantime, I’ve finished up a final draft of a YA fantasy novel called The Guardians Awaken that i’ll be submitting to Harmony Ink this weekend.  The only thing that remains is for me to come up with a summary of Book Three in the trilogy — The Guardians Awaken is Book One.  I’ve already come up with a summary of the second book.  But my publisher told me she really wanted to have the summaries done before I submitted Book One, so she has an idea where I’m going with it.

The First Gay Marriage Proposal On A US Marine Base

This past Tuesday (April 24th), Navy veteran Cory Huston proposed to his partner, Marine Avarice Guerrero, in the first gay marriage proposal to ever take place on a US military base! Well, possibly others have occurred under more private circumstances, but this one had reporters photographing it.

After a few minutes of emotional holding and kissing, Huston went anxiously down on one knee; looked up at Guerrero, who was dressed from head to toe in military fatigues; and produced an engagement ring and the time-honored phrase, “Will you marry me?”

Huston’s mild tremble, a result of hours and days of anticipation about this day, was quickly quieted by the one word every hopeful fiancé wants to hear: “Yes.”

“I was blown away,” Guerrero said, staring at the shining ring on his finger shortly after the proposal. “I was shocked that after all we’d been through, he would honestly want to spend the rest of his life with someone like me.”