M.R. Graham's Blog, page 23

The Medium: A Book of Lost Knowledge (Crosspost)

Crossposted from The Books of Lost Knowledge

Things are coming along. At this point, I can (conservatively), predict that the next Book of Lost Knowledge will be appearing in print 31 October 2013. I hate sticking to dates, though, and if it’s ready sooner, it will be out sooner.

It also has a title, a subseries title, a provisional cover (although I do sort of like the stark simplicity), and a Goodreads page.

So, without further ado, I present The Medium (Liminality: Book 1).

Lenny was good at teaching physics. He was good at fixing cars, making friends, keeping his head down, and not attracting attention. He was good at being a medium, helping spirits pass beyond the Veil – but as a vampire, he was always a bit of a joke.

All it takes is a drink in a hotel bar, a stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time, to run him afoul of Sebastian Duran, a lunatic who controls other people’s minds better than he can control his own. Torn away from everything he knows, trapped and starved and under constant mental assault, poor Lenny is forced to confront his own potential for monstrosity.

Wizards, cowboys, knights, and friends may not be enough to save his mind from destruction.

Consequently, the page formerly titled The Sparrow’s Fall has been renamed and updated with the blurb and provisional cover. It has also been relocated under the Liminality page, for ease of navigation.

Good grief, I’m getting excited!

A Prescription for Delirium by Noree Cosper – Book Tour Guest Post!

Today, I have the honor of hosting a blog tour stop for Noree Cosper , author of A Prescription for Delirium, book one of the Van Helsing Organization Series. When it comes to research and history, Noree is just a little bit mind-boggling, and she’s kindly agreed to share some observations on Vlad Tepes, the historical Dracula.

Bram Stoker partially based his Dracula off the historical figure of Vlad Tepes. Stoker combined possible references to the historical Dracula, Slavic folklore about vampirism, and the modern vampire. It’s no wonder, considering some of the monstrous acts Vlad Tepes committed. His name, after all, means Vlad the Impaler. So, who was he?

To us vampire fans, he is the ultimate fiend, the trendsetter. To the Romanian people, he is a folk hero who fought against the Turks and their oppression.  To other, he was a tyrant.

Vlad Tepes was born sometime in 1430 to Vlad Dracul of the Order of the Dragon, a Christian brotherhood dedicated to fighting the Turks. He was claimant to the throne of Wallachia, part of Romanian located south of the Transylvanian Alps. That’s right, though he was born in Transylvania, he actually was prince of another region. When he was just a child, his father entered a truce with the Turks and had Vlad and Radu, one of his other sons, remain with the sultan as part of the pact. This had a major impact on Vlad. While he took the time to learn the Turkish language and customs, his treatment caused a deep cynicism and Machiavellian outlook. It drove him to seek revenge from anyone who wronged him.

His first act of revenge was after his father and one of his brothers were killed with the help of the ruling families of Wallachia. After fight and regaining his throne, he arrested the nobles of Wallachia and impaled the older members outside of his castle. This was the first incident and why he was named Vlad the Impaler. He forced those who were still fit to build his new outpost overlooking the Anges River.

Tales about his cruelty spread, though his reign (off and on) was very short. Impaling wasn’t his only method. He also employed torture, mutilation, and burning alive. No one was safe, but a majority of his victims came from nobles and merchants of Transylvania and Wallachia. These atrocities were Vlad’s attempt to enforce his own moral code on his country. In his eyes, these were murderers, thieves, and those who preyed upon Wallachia. There is one tale where he invited the disabled, poor, and vagabonds to a great feast. He asked if they preferred this to not working and they said yes. So, he locked them in the building and burned it down. He said that Romania should not suffer those who didn’t do their part and now they were no longer poor or hungry.

Vlad continued to fight the Turks until his death at the hands of an assassin in December, 1476. For this, the Romanian people loved him. However, his actions sparked one of the most famous monsters of all time. I think we like to create creatures like vampires to hide the fact that humans can be the most monstrous of all.

She also risked life and limb to interview Marge Devereaux, a very angry demon hunter with some serious issues and some serious skills. More about Marge can be found in  A Prescription for Delirium.

Thank you for joining us today, Marge.

*Marge shrugs* Whatever. Gabby promised to pay me to be here. Let’s get this over with so I can get paid.

Where did you grow up?

In New Orleans, the Garden District.

What was your family life like?

On the surface, we were the perfect family. Rich, influential, respected. It was all a fucking lie of course. Before you open your mouth, I’m not getting deeper into it. You’re not my shrink. I don’t need to tell you anything.

In A Prescription for Delirium you like to use a lot of kicks. Can you tell us a little about your fighting style?

I know a little of other styles but I mostly focus on Taekwondo. It’s Korean martial art that emphasizes mostly on kicks and punches, pretty much why it’s called the way of the foot and the fist. I started learning it when I was thirteen and did some runs through some underground tournaments until I started hunting demons.

How long have you been hunting demons?

About two years.

How did you get started?

Well, I there’s this demon I need to find. At first I went to the psychic for help, but she was a useless fake. So, instead I found A Vodoun priestess who helped get me started.

Do you have any friends at all?

Why the fuck would I need friends? They’re just a liability, demon fodder, or they’ll to betray you later on. I have contacts that are useful a good distance away.

What is it that you think you offer to Gabby and the Van Helsings?

I’m willing to do what makes them sick to their stomach. I get answers.

Are you religious?

Nope.

Why not? You know demons exist.

Where is God in this world? Buddha? All is see is a shitty place full of pain and suffering.

Do you have any regrets?

That I exist. *crosses her arms* That I never got to deal with my father on my own terms.

A Prescription for Delirium is avalaible from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.

Ninety years ago, Gabriella di Luca promised to protect the family of her dying lover. She failed to keep that promise.  She was too far away to stop the devil that murdered the eldest Van Helsing son. Years later, Gabby learns the devil has resurfaced. She arrives in Hampton, TX, determined to stop the devil before it can lay a bloody hand on the remaining three brothers.

However, madness is spreading through Hampton. She suspects the devil is using this madness to test a drug which has a side effect of demonic possession.  Gabby rushes to end the source of the madness only to fall victim to it. For a woman cursed with eternal life, dying is no threat. However, Gabby must stop the devil’s plot or risk losing her most precious possession: her mind.

And the reading list was flattened. Help!

I was keeping a reading list for a while (which was subsequently transferred to Goodreads and has been expanding ever since), and it got longer at AggieCon. I grabbed myself copies of Exophobe (D. Kenton Mellott) and the first book in the Morrigan’s Brood series (Christopher and Heather Poinsett Dunbar), and I’ll be scooping up Henry Melton’s work as my pocketbook allows. It is good to find new authors.

Unfortunately, the Masters degree comes first, and it’s term paper season once again. I swear, I’m cranking out more theses than Martin Luther. This semester, it’s education as a function of colonialism, plus a fun statistics portfolio and the importance of history in teaching science. Good stuff, but extremely time-consuming, and as much as I’m looking forward to reading this stuff, it may well have to wait until summer vacation.

So, blog followers (Blollowers?), I am shamelessly plugging other people’s work. If I can’t read it, by golly, someone else should!

Exophobe (D. Kenton Mellott)

Mr Mellott described this one to me as a comedic sci-fi romance adventure, so I’m guessing it has something for pretty much everyone. I was also warned about corny puns, but we all know corny puns are the best kind. Pick it up here for Kindle. It doesn’t have many reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, but the reviews it does have are glowing. Give it more.

From Amazon: “Blogger and part-time computer nerd Enoch Maarduk wants to make a million bucks — who doesn’t?

On Friday night — after telling his disappointed friends he was staying home instead of going out partying because he was exhausted from a bad day at work — Enoch comes up with his Great Idea.

Beings that live in the electromagnetic spectrum and can be invoked by high-tech, computer-guided, pentacles. Enoch posts his gazillion dollar fiction idea to his blog, to amuse his friends.

And then is visited the next day by a polyester-jacketed, gun-toting, guy who demands to know where Enoch got his information. Then some hot kung-fu mama shows up and chases that dude out the door.

A hot kung-fu mama from PHANTASM (Preventing Horrors And Nightmares Through Active Spectrum Monitoring), an agency tasked with watching the EM spectrum to make sure no one summons any electromagnetic entities to Earth.

Oh, crap…”

Morrigan’s Brood (Christopher and Heather Poinsett Dunbar)

The Morrigan’s Brood series explores legends of blood-drinkers from across the world, bringing history and myth together in a way I haven’t seen before. As stated, I haven’t read it yet, but I did have the pleasure of hearing an excerpt read aloud by one of the authors, and can strongly recommend the rich, flowing prose. Plus, as an anthropologist, I can’t help but geek out about culturally liminal proto-vampires and their transcontinental exploits. Grab it here.

From Goodreads: “Evil reigns throughout much of the western world in the mid sixth century. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a group of blood-drinkers called the Lamia begin the search for a long, lost relic that will restore power to the Roman Empire. After traveling much of the known world, the Lamia discover the relic’s location: Ireland. The Lamia invasion forces win a foothold on the Island of Eire and hasten their search for this most important relic.Standing in their way is an outcast Roman general from many ages before, a Briton who would rather tell bawdy jokes than fight, and a young woman who has found her newly acquired lands under siege by a manipulative Lamia seeking vengeance against his oldest foe. They are not alone.The Lamia are not the only blood-drinking line on earth. A race called the Deargh Du, who draw their lineage from the Goddess Morrigan, will rise up and face the challenges of those who would tip the balance.Join the Journey, the first in a series of stories revolving around the Deargh Du through the ages.”

Star Time (Henry Melton)

Leave it to Texans to survive the apocalypse in style. Seriously, there’s not much more I can say about this. Texas needs more love in literature, especially in fantasy and sci-fi, and the fantastic Mr. Melton knows Texas well. Grab it here.

From Goodreads: “It all starts here…The plan always worked for the bloodthirsty Cerik, whose battle-bred claws and muscles made them the uncontested top predator on scores of planets-the radiation pulse from the supernova would turn civilization on the blue-white globe below into chaos within days, making for easy prey. In Texas, in a wooden cabin where she’d hidden from regular humans since birth, telepathic Sharon Dae knew nothing could prevent humanity from becoming another tasty slave race-she’d read it plainly from the thoughts in the sky. A scout ship had crashed in her woods, but these alien Hunters would vaporize thousands just to keep any human prey from the fragments. She sensed a stranger, Abe Whiting nearby, hunting for debris with his computers and gadgets. Painfully, she realized she would have to learn how to lie and betray to get the prize away from him, even if she couldn’t escape the jaws of the Cerik herself. How could she know that this techno wizard would soon brave the collapse of the world, cobbling together fried scraps and pieces in an impossible rescue attempt for her, a strange white-haired trickster of a girl who slipped through his life for only one afternoon?It all starts here, the first installment of a multi-volume, multi-thousand year tale of human destiny from the mind of Henry Melton.”

Go forth and read, my blollower minions!

The Great Con Post

I came, I saw, I AggieCon’quered.

It was my intention to do daily AggieCon posts, but I think I overestimated my stamina. I smiled, and I talked to people, and it was just more than I could take; I passed out pretty much as soon as the dealer’s room closed each night. I did get to meet up with some old friends, which was wonderful. I got to meet some pretty amazing folks, too, which was also wonderful. For example, Noree Cosper (author of A Prescription for Delirium), who joined in the book joy from the corner of my con table, and Christopher and Heather Poinsett Dunbar (authors of the Morrigan’s Brood Series) of Triscelle Publishing.

And we posed

 

I feel like I learned quite a bit.

For instance, I learned that I need a big stand-up poster-thing with which to attract attention. And maybe some strobe lights. I learned that I need book stands.

I also learned that George R. R. Martin likes my hats. I like his hats, too. Hats are good, just in general.

On the subject of learning things, I was reminded once again why I prefer paper to these crazy new electrical books. I had to send out the minions to acquire physical copies of Mr. Martin’s books, because it’s hard to get an autograph on a mobi file.

All in all, the weekend was a whirlwind. I didn’t have a chance to attend many panels, though there were lots I wanted to hear. I did meet fascinating people, take lots of pictures, and sell some books. I don’t want to step on any toes by posting photos, so if you’re the subject of any of the following and want it taken down, do shoot me an email. (You know, for those masses of cosplayers who don’t like to be photographed…)

Click to view slideshow.

The Road to AggieCon – Part 2

Day 2

We departed from San Antonio early and set out across the vast State of Texas, with College Station as our goal. We made pit stops as often as necessary, had barbecue (chopped brisket on a bun, with pickles an onions), kolaches (which are better when made by actual Czechs), and Cokes.

Everything went fairly smoothly until we hit Brenham, at which point our driver shrieked “ICE CREAM!” and veered across traffic and through a bluebonnet patch, narrowly avoiding the grille of an eighteen-wheeler, so as not to miss the exit for the Blue Bell Creamery. (In all honesty, I would have done exactly the same thing, had I been driving.) We didn’t really have time for the full tour, but we did peruse their country store and indulge in ice cream and photos in front of their vintage delivery truck. I had buttered pecan, the driver had mocha chocolate heart-attack something-or-other, and the Minion had chocolate mint. We departed with our sweet teeth satisfied.

Making like tourists, we also pulled off at a roadside bluebonnet patch to go sit amid the flowers and the fire ants for more photo opportunities.

Again, everything went fairly smoothly until we hit Washington, or thereabouts, and again veered across traffic (avoiding any bluebonnets or large trucks, this time) so as not to miss the exit for the Washington-on-the-Brazos state park. It’s a pretty awesome park. Washington-on-the-Brazos was the site where the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed on March 2, 1836. They’ve erected a couple of museums and a living history farm there, modeled after the home of Dr Anson Jones the last president of the Republic of Texas. We photographed all the things, walked all over everything, and admired the chickens and turkeys.

We arrived in College Station somewhat later than we had anticipated, having made the three-hour trip in about nine hours. After that, it was unloading and arranging, and finally an O’Bannon’s run with friends I hadn’t seen in two years. (I am myself an Aggie – the loudest and proudest member of the fightin’ Texas Aggie class of 2011. Whoop!)

The Road to AggieCon

Day 1

Today was the first leg of the drive to AggieCon – four and a half hours from the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio – because making the whole drive in one day might have caused irreparable damage to my spine.

The plan was to leave the Valley in the wee hours, but because this is my family, there was last-minute packing, organizing, reorganizing, and spazzing to be accomplished before we could set out. We set out, and within minutes, I realized that I had forgotten something. Back at the house, we all realized that we had forgotten things, and spent another fifteen minutes assembling all the forgotten things. The hour was not quite as wee when we departed for real.

The road started off murky and quickly escalated to rain. We drove in drizzle. There were also nilgai in the drizzle – about nine of them. They’re herd animals in Central and Northern India, their natural habitat, but the ones that were transplanted to Texas tend to keep to themselves, so it was very interesting to see so many of them. All the more because they’re impossible to find when you’re actually looking for one. We pulled off and took photographs through the rain, but none of them turned out very well. We also got some strange looks as we swerved into the turnaround lane, shot back south, turned around again, and shot off the side of the road to park in the grass and snap shots through an open window as the rain poured in.

Further north, there were bluebonnets, purple thistles, bachelor’s buttons, and primroses.

Four and a half hours closer, ladies and gentlemen. Until tomorrow!

The Sins of the Protagonist

Sketchy thing by MR Graham, competent writer and mediocre artist

I did something bad when I created Sandie, one of the main protagonists of The Siren. Something truly terrible.

I sat down and wrote.

I didn’t plan or plot or outline. Like The Hobbit, The Siren began with one sentence in my head that wouldn’t go away:

“There was a dead body on Sandie’s back porch, and it was trying to get in.”

I woke up one morning with that line in my head, scribbled it into my journal, and let it sit until writer’s block sent me scrounging for new inspiration.

It was a freewriting exercise. My sole intention was to get the juices flowing again so I could complete a different project – at that point, it was In the Shadow of the Mountains. So I started writing a story, and all I knew about it was that there was some sort of zombie thing and a person called Sandie. I didn’t know why the body was moving, who Sandie was, or even what genre this thing might fall under.

It worked out, though. Sleep seems to be when I’m most creative, and just like I had woken up with that opening line, I woke up a few weeks later with the story’s ending clear in my mind. I still didn’t know how I was going to get from Point A to Point B, but a music video (No, seriously, click that link and prepare to be flabbergasted.) and a very, very long car trip helped sort that out. By the end of the car trip, I knew what had to happen, I knew what was up with the dead body, and I had a grip on the central themes I wanted to incorporate.

I still didn’t know who Sandie was. By that time, though, Sandie was still my POV character, but the story was no longer about her dealing with zombies as it was about the relationship between her and the creature that inserted itself into her life.

So I did one of the worst things a writer can do. I plunged headfirst into a project without knowing a damned thing about one of the two most important players. She actually started out as an investigative reporter, rather than a marginally-interesting barista.

And it hasn’t mattered even a little bit.

I’ve seen all kinds of character interview sheets, hundreds or thousands of questions long, based on the assumption that a writer needs to know absolutely everything about the characters and the setting and the plot, and that’s a complete load of bull.

Fictional characters, like real people, are more than just a data set. Think about your best friend. You may not know how many people attended their sixth birthday party, and you don’t need to. You have a feel for them. That feel comes first; descriptors come later.

I had a feel for Sandie. I didn’t start out knowing much about her, but I felt like I knew her. I knew how she would react to finding a mobile corpse on her back porch, and so I took things backward and constructed a data set that would produce those reactions. I know people who get so hung up on characters’ backstories that they change their plots to suit – This character’s daddy issues wouldn’t let her do this thing I need her to do, so she’ll have to do something different. That can work, of course, but it can also result in deus ex absurdities being pulled out of thin air to get the plot back on track – or worse yet, a plot that meanders and backtracks and ultimately goes nowhere.

Work backward. Even in a character-driven story, the plot is what reveals the characters. If the plot goes somewhere the character doesn’t want to go, then the character isn’t really driving. Something needs a tweak.

The Fortress of Bookitude.

Today is a two-post day. Because you can’t build a book fort and not share.

Spreading the book love.

As good to me as Amazon has been, I’ve decided to let my books’ enrollment in their Select program expire. I won’t be able to offer them for free on Amazon any more, and they won’t appear in Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. However, they are now available to all of my Nookish and Koboid friends, as I’ve set up The Wailing and In the Shadow of the Mountains on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. (I like Smashwords. They offer all ebook formats, and they let me issue coupons! They also distribute my book to multiple retailers, like Diesel, Sony, and the iBookstore. I’ll add links to those as they become available.

So you can now find The Wailing here:

 

 

 

And In the Shadow of the Mountains here:

 

 

The updated purchase links can also be found on the books’ landing pages:

The Wailing

In the Shadow of the Mountains

Nerds of a Feather Spock Together.

I crack myself up.

Anyway.

I was confronted the other day with the inescapable fact that someone whom I take very seriously was unaware that I had any interest whatsoever in science fiction. That worries me a little, considering that the bulk of my works-in-progress falls to one degree or another under that genre. (My plan is to have The Siren out some time this year. I call it scifi-lite, and some people have asked me whether or not it might actually be urban fantasy, but they hadn’t read the ending yet.) But in going back over my blog posts and general internet presence, I realize that I really don’t talk about science fiction. 

That’s a problem, since – as indicated above – nerds of a feather must Spock together, and it’s hard for nerds of my feather to find me if I’m wearing my fantasy-camo.

So, allow me to present a short history of one of my obsessions:

I always had a kind of peripheral awareness of scifi, thanks to Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century and the Wishbone covers of The Time Machine and Journey to the Center of the Earth. I vaguely recall seeing Flight of the Navigator once in second grade or so. Zenon – Girl of the 21st Century briefly captured my imagination, but that didn’t last long. Other than The Norby Chronicles and Enchantress from the Stars, I don’t recall ever reading scifi before the sixth grade.

Sixth grade was the turning point.

Sixth grade was the year I changed towns, changed schools, and realized that I was a lot worse at making friends than I had thought. In Houston, there were enough similarly weird kids that I could be ignored as part of an untouchable nerd caste. In Huntsville, the weird kid attracts attention. It was the first time anyone had ever tried to convert me, and it was unnerving.

It only took me a week or two to fall in with Davis – who later became the best friend I’ve ever had. Davis was a kindred spirit. He was also a Trekkie. Ignorant of the multitude variations of Star Trek, I went home and watched countless episodes of Voyager so that we would have something to talk about. (I found out later that Next Generation was something entirely different.) Then I drew Borg-esque characters, aliens, and space-rebel types.

It was only after surviving the Voyager series finale that I realized what I had found. I had started out my literary career as a die-hard fantasy buff. I read The Lord of the Rings (reluctantly, I admit), and The Unicorns of Balinor (with considerably more enthusiasm) and Dealing with Dragons (which introduced me to sassy protagonists). I loved fantasy as a vision of what could be, in a different world. What I found in scifi was different. Scifi is what could be within the confines of our own universe. It can serve as both a warning and a hope. Like fantasy, it expresses truths through a vehicle of the fantastic, but for me, it hits so much closer to the core of our anxieties, especially in this era of rampaging progress. It explores problems that may well arise within the next decade or century or couple of centuries, presents us with options we may not be able to consider at the eleventh hour. Through scifi, we can project our future and cope with its difficulties before they pin us down.

I moved from Star Trek the television series to Star Trek the literature. (I subscribed to the fabricated rivalry between Star Trek and Star Wars until well into high school). There are a surprising number of Star Trek books. I owned more than fifty of them and barely scratched the surface. I picked up Ender’s Game and The Hyperion Cantos at a library’s too-beat-up-to-keep sale. They grabbed me. I stayed up way later than my parents would have liked, one night, and saw the Stargate movie on late-night cable. I wrote ten thousand words the next day. I can’t describe how thrilled I was to discover the television series. My great-grandmother gave me Easton Press copies of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Time Machine. I read them conspicuously, because I felt really hot when I was reading from gilt pages. I started picking up UFO conspiracy theory books to get ideas for my own stories. Then I discovered The X-Files and figured out that most of my ideas had already been done. (The file is still sitting on a floppy disc, somewhere.) I ate up Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Farscape. Mid-high school, I caught an episode of Doctor Who and spent the next twelve weekends or so catching up on forty years of British scifi wonder. I knitted myself a fifteen-foot scarf.

It was purple.

High school also got me into steampunk. I had always been into the Victorian aesthetic, especially as it connected to Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells, but it never occurred to me that there was a name attached to its speculative side.

College found me the outrageously awesome Overview of Science Fiction course, taught by this amazingly awesome person. She introduced me to Connie Willis and Neal Stephenson. This was also about the time that I found William Gibson.

It’s been a while since I last got into something new. Most recently, it’s been Warehouse 13.

And so, when I start pestering people to buy copies of The Siren, you’ll know where I’m coming from.

Nerds of my feather, join my flock.