Cedar Sanderson's Blog, page 253

Bought and Paid For

My post is over at Mad Genius Club this morning. Click through and join the conversation about book reviews. Are they still relevant?

Review: The Black Goats

Last week I reviewed a fantasy full of sex that was, to say the least, less than a success. This week I will make up for it with a whole-hearted recommendation of Pam Uphoff’s Black Goats. Really, this whole series is excellent.

Oh, and in keeping with the theme of the week, here are the first lines of the book:

“Picking rocks was only fun for the first half-hour. Pity it was such a good way to practice magic.”

Pam blends fantasy and science fiction for fantastic fiction. Her world is well-developed both culturally and geographically, and peopled with characters who come to life. The Sheep Man, the old gods, and the goats; who are revealed to be cruel wizards trapped by a spell hundreds of years before. There’s plenty of sex in this book, and not all of it consensual. But Pam carries it off, developing a story where the conflict is between magic and mundanes who no longer remember that the tiny population of magic users dwells in the village of Ash.

The dark part of this fantasy comes with the escape of the Goats, who find power enough to break their magic chains and escape the Sheep Man, who is revealed to the the Tyrant King Nihility, possibly the most powerful wizard to ever exist in their world, even if he has spent 800 years as a shepherd with moronic-level intelligence. Desperate to rein the goats in, witches, wizards and their horses leave Ash to track down and kill the Black Goats.

The lighter side of the fantasy tale is the creation of the Wine of the Gods, a substance chock full of spells for healing, fertility, aphrodisiac, and things the gods don’t even remember throwing into the potent brew while they were being happily drunk on more normal wine. Unleashed on the world, the self-sustaining spell mixture will take over any other wine it is poured into – even a few drops. While it will heal pretty much anything, it also makes the partaker, well, let’s just say there are orgies herein. Again, she carries it off very well, expertly implying without showing gory details. This tale is more about the people, their world, and how the Goats and the Wine affect it, than it is about the sex.

Obviously, this is not a book for young adults. And it might not be for some adults, either. But I think you will enjoy her series… and if you haven’t started it yet, I recommend beginning with Outcasts and Gods, which is more science fiction than fantasy, and is a superb story of genetic engineering and consequences.

 

Opening Lines

potential…

I asked for first line suggestions on facebook yesterday after my post, and was overwhelmed with responses. I have a lot of friends who love to read. One of the things I had intended to do was to sort the recommendations by date, to see if opening lines have changed with writing styles over the decades. You know what I mean – the reason Dickens is a challenging read, but a modern novel is a breeze to read. The language and art of storytelling on paper has changed, and that isn’t stopping, with the shift into ereading. I didn’t do that for this post – I was taken aback by the results and although I may come back to it, I want to hear what you think. Some of the oldest lines are also the punchiest.

I also wanted to see how many people chose the same opening lines, so that way we could see what the most memorable lines were, at least in my cohort (I will say my friends lists are heavily biased toward well-read, intelligent, mature adults. That having been said, I’m sure I’m going to be teased now!) I am absolutely certain someone with more time on their hands than I have has already compiled a list more encompassing, but this was a fascinating exercise, and I really appreciate the help of the people who contributed.

So, here’s the list, not sorted by publication date, but by popularity. The first six quotes all received more than one nomination, with the top two receiving five or more votes each, and I think you will see why…

“On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window.” Larry Correia, “Monster Hunter International.” 

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, wet, slimy hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole with nothing to sit upon or to eat. It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.”

JRR Tolkein, The Hobbit

“The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.” -- Jim Butcher, _Blood Rites_

“Lot ninety-seven,” the auctioneer announced. “A boy.”

The boy was dizzy and half sick from the feel of ground underfoot. The slave ship had come more than forty light-years; it carried in its holds the stink of all slave ships, a reek of crowded unwashed bodies, of fear and vomit and ancient grief. Yet in it the boy had been someone, a recognized member of a group, entitled to his meal each day, entitled to fight for his right to eat it in peace. He had even had friends.

Now he was again nothing and nobody, again about to be sold.”

Robert A Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy 

“You see, I had this space suit.”

Robert A Heinlein, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

“The man who was not Terence O’Grady came quietly.”

Sharon Lee/Steve Miller’s “Agent of Change”

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher— the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.

Rudyard Kipling, Kim 

It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay 

“My name is Snuff. I’m a watchdog.”

Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome December

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“He’s a Mad Scientist and I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”

Robert A Heinlein, The Number of the Beast

“Were they truly intelligent? By themselves that is?”

Robert A Heinlein, The Puppet Masters

‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.’

HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu

“Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity.”

Brandon Sanderson, Elantris

“It was a dark and stormy night.” ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ by Madeleine L’Engle.

“I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosion… no Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercials… no Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes – no income tax.” - RAH – Glory Road

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“In the beginning, out of the mists of Time, hand in hand came the twin sisters of Art, Music and Verse. Man, in the exuberant infancy of the race, instinctively danced and as he danced he sang.” _The Musical Basis of Verse_ JP Dabney.

“All that spring, I was scared. Why Pa ever took a notion to stop on that old Chantry place I never did know. Maybe it was because he was just tired and wishful of stopping someplace . . . anyplace. There’d been a dead man on the steps by the door when we drove up. He’d been a long tome dead, and nobody around to bury him, and I was scared.” “Over on the dry side” by Louis L’Amour, 1975

“It was a dark and stormy night –”

“Oh, please, Great-Gran’pa,” a high-pitched voice broke in. “Not that old line!”

“Who’s telling this story, you or me?” the old man retorted. “You asked for this particular story, and I’ll tell it my way.”

Michael Caffrey, 

“I didn’t realise he was a werewolf at first.” MOON CALLED by Patricia Briggs.

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”

Frank Herbert, Dune

“Once upon a time, there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.”

Robert A Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“What do you mean, I can’t come?”

Heart of Venom, by Jennifer Estep (2013). 

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of….

Boys.

And it was the afternoon of Halloween.

And all the houses shut against a cool wind.

And the town full of cold sunlight.

But suddenly, the day was gone.

Night came out from under each tree and spread.”

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.”

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.

L Frank Baum, the Wizard of Oz

“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.” Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.” A Confederacy of Dunces, John K. Toole

“Call me Bandit” — John Ringo, The Last Centurion

“And then, after walking all day through a golden haze of humid warmth that gathered about him like fine wet fleece, Valentine came to a great ridge of outcropping white stone overlooking the city of Pidruid.”

Robert Silverberg, Lord Valentine’s Castle

“He was one hundred seventy days dying and not yet dead.”

Alfred Bester, The Stars my Destination 

The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling, when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on this tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut tree into the middle of the road. A violent yellow sunset was pouring through a rift in the clouds to westward, but straight ahead over the hills the sky was the color of dark slate. Every tree and blade of grass was dripping, and the road shone like a river.

C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Seducing the Reader: Part 1

it doesn’t take much to tantalize…

It seems obvious that in order to get a reader interested in your story, you must have a great line. Something that stands out, grabs their attention, but isn’t corny.  The idea here is to intrigue your reader and bring them into the story without making them lean away and smile politely until they can put the book down and effectively leave the room of your tale. Ideally, by the time you have their interest, they will take your book to bed with them and stay up half the night having fun.

Writing a striking first line without crafting something fit for Bulwer-Lytton is a challenge. And it’s not just the first line, it’s the first paragraph, page, and so on. Like the guy at the bar who never plans for a girl to actually respond to his first line, don’t be left floundering for story when you spent ages getting your hook perfect.

I started thinking about this when I grabbed the quote below as a metaphor example for class, and realized that a brilliant metaphor is a good way to start. Not by any means the only way, but it can be intriguing.

“Port Tinarana was like an old, decaying tart, her face lined with a myriad of streets and alleys, inexpertly caked with a crude makeup of overhanging buildings.” 

Dave Freer has a way with words like few other authors I have read, and part of the reason is that he seems to be a passionate reader himself. He knows what we want, and he delivers. The opening lines to The Forlorn evoke a place we wouldn’t want to live in, but from the safe distance lent by a page, we venture into those reeking alleys, and meet a character we are compelled by.

Personally, when I read I am looking for characters to fall in love with. This may be the reason I can’t stand stories where no-one has any redeeming qualities. There has to be something, for me. A touch of honor, a glimpse of hope, a soul that will not go quietly into the gray fog of nothingness. I adore characters that are curious, chivalrous, and loving… while being a rogue, and even grouchy. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden or Larry Correia’s Jake Sullivan are men I could read all day long.

Another thing that first line or paragraph can do is signal the tone, the genre, the feeling of the whole book. That guy (or girl, I do tend to be more attracted to men for some reason *shrugs*) sitting there talking to you gives those cues to what they are in haircut, clothing, eyes… all that has to be boiled down to just a few words.

“We came up the trail from Texas in the spring of ’74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad. We cleaned our guns and washed our necks and dusted our hats for town, riding fifteen strong to the hitching rails and standing fifteen strong to the bar.” 

You immediately know what to expect from this rugged outdoorsman, and Loius L’Amour always delivers. The opening lines to Kiowa Trail, even if you never saw the cover, promise an old west adventure.

I’m going to put some more first lines below, with the author and title in white – select to highlight and read. I’ve grabbed a handful of older books (hint) of different genres. Have fun, and remember to look at what makes them work (or not) and guess what genre they are.

“The starship came out of its envelope just long enough to unload the first rack of bombs. It flashed yellow, then it was gone – hypersonic and untouchable by anything not also in a star-drive envelope.”

David Drake, The Forlorn Hope

“There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.”

Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison

“The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.”

Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

“It was only a little after nine o’clock in the evening, but already the horde had gone rampaging away. Lemeul Siddons swept them out with jokes and gestures; he said Scat and Scram by turns, he threatened with pointed finger and clenched fist, he talked of the paper work he must do.”

MacKinley Kantor, Follow Me, Boys

“‘If you were a genuine Army colonel,’ Pilgrim said, ‘instead of one of the most bogus and unconvincing frauds I’ve ever seen, you’d rate three stars for this. Excellently done, my dear Fawcett, excellently done.”

Alistair Maclean, Circus

“She was up to her elbows in someone else’s blood when the call came in. She was used to being up to her elbows in her own blood, since she cultured it practically by the vat these days to incubate the virus in. But to have her hands inside a dying woman, trying like mad to keep the blood in, was new for Mirabeth Tofler. It was of course, this damn field work. In the lab she could maintain a proper detachment. Out here, you got attached to people, and then when they got shot, you did wholly unsanitary things like showing your fingers into a spurting artery and screaming for help while you were being splashed with the blood of a person who you had only known for a week.”

Yeah, Ok, this one is me. Opening lines I wrote for a workshop, when asked to write a ‘hook.’ 

Next week: what to do now that you have their attention, or; how not to stammer and blush uncontrollably.

Beautiful America: Slow Food

America has a global reputation for being the land of fast food. Sure, we all do it. Life is a whirl, and sometimes you just can’t spend the time to create something truly good. But I’ve made and eaten some memorable meals over the years, with my family and loved ones. I think those memories will linger longest, after the taste is forgotten, in the time taken to express what feeding your family is all about – love.

It was hard to pick photos for this. Living on a small farm I have canned, gardened, butchered, fished & hunted… and made lots of photos of food. So here are a few that just looked good!

I’ve baked all my life. When I am stressed, the absorbing process of cooking lets me relax, and it’s so rewarding to see the look on someone’s face as the enjoy the results.

The last raspberry of the season… some food never makes it in the house!

Wild blueberries: worth the time to pick and good in any way!

The ultimate in slow food – spending hours picking wild blueberries from the canoe, gently paddling and soaking up sun in between islands.

This little hen was fiercely determined that we should not eat her eggs!

Eggs of every hue… We did get green eggs from the Araucana hens, and I know a person who refused to eat them! LOL

Slow drips of sap, then hours of boiling, and finally, the quick pour over buttery pancakes…

The New Year’s Eve Feast, prepared over a campfire, and enjoyed in a snowy New Hampshire wood with the best of company.

Steaks on the campfire: New Year’s Eve Feast in the Woods

Wild chantarelles and home-raised pork fresh as it can be.

Finding Poetry

I’ll be honest with you. Most SF poetry sucks. At least, what I have read of it. I think part of the reason is that you can’t build a new world in a poem, without making it unwieldy. I could be wrong, it might just be me. But I did learn soemthing recently, and it’s led to creating poetry from SF novels, and I’m rather pleased with the results. Not my words, so they are in no way mine… I am not a poet.

Most of my posts for Amazing Stories are about writing, or indie publishing, or things to do with the business side of the industry. But today I wanted to do something a bit different. I’m in school, taking two literature classes this semester, and in the good class (yes, there is also a bad class) we learned about making ‘found poetry’ a process that I really enjoyed. I came home, looked at my shelves full of eclectic books, and said “hm… I wonder what I could do with some classic SF. So here you are. The words and phrases from each book were selected in order, I know some found poetry allows for rearrangement but it’s less of a challenge.

Poetry Books?

 

The Golden People

Fred Saberhagen

 

We’re at the top

He flickered away

one good hand

What do you think it means

to be human?

giant child, demanding attention

only animals

The aura of her mind

fine perfume.

 

The Witches of Karres

James H. Schmitz

 

Just plain fate

a helpless kid, anyway

two little sisters

Mass history

stood the three witches

silent voraciousness

The junior witches nodded

behave yourself every second

more or less like normal children.

 

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A. Heinlein

 

Fair dinkum thinkum

And woke up.

vips in huhu

solid, lovely structure

your air bottle, not mine.

we can throw rocks at Terra

interesting philosophy

fragile sack of protoplasm

we waited busily.

the prudent course.

Then he did die.

So now here is my challenge to you: create some found poetry of your own. I discovered that by doing this I made myself look very closely at the word choices used in these books. I read very quickly, and as a result, am much more likely to feel the characters, see the worlds, and be drawn on by the action, missing the language as it sublimates to my imagination. I don’t think that will ever change, but it is a good exercise for me to look more closely at the bones of a story from time to time.  Perhaps it will make me a better writer.

Pixie Snippet #8

The continuing adventures of a bounty-hunter pixie and his reluctant fairy princess. If you missed the first parts, look here for the links to them. Enjoy!

############

Bella hit a curve at a wild speed and I clutched tighter at her middle. With all the layers in the way, I couldn’t tell if I had waist, or something further up. Not that it mattered… I couldn’t appreciate it anyway. Damn my life. Up until this morning it had been all beer and skittles, or at least monster hunting with the occasional threat of death by dismemberment, and the rare evening by the fire with my pipe. Now I had a fairy princess to protect, and no way to do it. Until I got her safely back Underhill, into the thick of the conspiracies and politics of Fairy, shifting like quicksand. Dammit.

She shouted something over her shoulder I didn’t catch. I opened my eyes, releasing the Sight and re-engaging with the visible. My eyes teared up and I blinked rapidly to clear them. She was slowing down, and the reduced wind chill helped me get my eyes clear.

We were on the bank of the Tanana. She slowed almost to a stop and pointed. I understood that she was warning me it was about to get rough.

“Ok!” I shouted into her ear, and we tipped over the bank.

I leaned in the same direction she did. Same principle as balancing a motorcycle. The ice on the river was rougher than I had expected, and she slowed down as we crossed. I had a chance to look around.

The moon had fully risen, and it was almost bright as day now that we were out of the thick forest. It was a world of black and white, with shadings of grey. The river ice that had looked smooth from high up on the bridge earlier today was revealed to be as cracked and ridged as a crocodile’s skin. She slowed even further.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m listening. When the water flows under the ice, sometimes it leaves hollow places that just have a thin skin over them. If I hear cracking, we change course.”

“Wouldn’t going faster be better?” I wondered if she could hear the concern in my voice. I felt like someone had just dumped a bucket of that ice down my back.

She’d heard it. I could hear the laughter in her voice. “You mean like the idiots that try skimming over open water? We wouldn’t know how big the hole was, and on this surface we couldn’t go fast enough to make it, more than likely.”

We were almost all the way across. I could see the trail opening in the trees above us, and the bank was shallower on this side. I breathed out… and then gulped for air as the ice gave out under us.

We were in freefall for a fraction of a second, just long enough for her to squeak in terror and me to tighten my grip on her. Then the machine hit bottom with a crunch. We had dropped perhaps three feet. I let go of her and stood up. Yep, I could see out of the top, we weren’t down far. She had let go of the throttle and the engine was idling.

Bella looked up at me. “We’re stuck?”

The way the pocket was shaped, it looked like it. Sheer ice, layered and banded with sediment, it curved ahead of us. I looked around. It was very beautiful. Where the headlight was shining into the ice I could see faint blues and cloudy whites. It wasn’t a perfect circle, rather a sort of pointed oval shape. And there was no way to drive out of it.

“We’re still about five miles from town?”

She nodded at me. Wrapped in her warm layers, only her eyes showed, but I could see her worry. It was night, it was very cold, and we had no chance if we had to walk into town. I looked up toward the distant bridge. It was only a half mile at a guess, but our enemies were expecting us there, and no guarantee of a neutral passer-by.

“Shut it down.”

“What?”

“Turn it off. And get off, and stand over there.” I pointed at a spot well away from the machine.

She didn’t hesitate now, hopping off as she shut the engine down. I walked around the front of the snowmobile, kicking at the ice. It was really solid. The top edge curved in a little at neck height, where it hadn’t broken when we fell in.

“Ok, let’s get you up there.” I turned to her and waved her to come over.

“What are you doing?” she asked nervously, but obediently came to my side.

“I’m getting us out of here. Do you need a boost?”

“We cannot walk to town,” she told me flatly. Then Bella accepted my cupped hands and I gave her a gentle hoist. She scrambled up and stood looking down at me. I decided I had better start explaining. This was a good time to start teaching her, before the bad guys really caught up with us.

“You know why the Folke are different from humans, right?”

She peered down at me. I grabbed the front of the snowmobile and pulled upward. Heavy, but more awkward than anything, especially with a hot engine. I really didn’t want to burn myself, that smarts.

“We have special powers?” She sounded hesitant, like she didn’t quite believe it.

“We do. Magic, Bella,” her name tasted strange, rolling off my tongue. I would think about that later. “Magic that is linked to who and what we are.”

I heaved upward and got the machine up over my head, the skis on the edge of the hole. I ducked out from under it. She had backed off from the edge a little.

“Are you using magic now?” she sounded a little nervous now.

“A little. Pixies are also quite strong. I don’t have full access to my magic, I’m an earth being. All this ice is…” I tried to decide how best to describe how it felt. “Muffling my magic.”

I looked up. She was near the edge again. “Back way up, the machine’s coming up.”

She retreated to safety, and I got to the rear of the machine and breathed deeply. I reached out with my senses and could feel the resonance of the thin layers of sediment trapped in the ice. That was all I could access, the ice under my boots kept me from tapping into the earth fully. It was enough. I heaved upward, and the machine caught a little on the ice, breaking more of it as it left the hole and landed above me with a crunch.

“Heh.” I panted. “Not bad for an old man.” Bella hadn’t heard that, I realized, she was still way back from the edge. I grinned and looked at the ice layers. Using the sediment as toeholds, I got up and out faster than I’d hoisted her up.

Her eyes were very wide. I couldn’t see their color in the moonlight.

“Ready to get going again?”

She nodded and approached the machine slowly. “Lom…”

“Yeah?” I waited for her to mount before I climbed on behind her.

“What else can you do?”

“Lots. And yes, you have magic. I will teach you how to access it once we get somewhere and settled.” I answered her unspoken question and evaded having to explain too much about my abilities.

“And is mine… earth magic?”

“No, Fairies have air magic. Some of them also have an affinity for fire.”

She nodded, which I felt more than saw, and gunned the engine. We were off again. I hoped for a smooth ride into town. Now, I had other things to worry about. We couldn’t just swing by her place and pick up her travel documents. I didn’t even know if she had a passport. I wasn’t going to ask her about it now, though. We were back up to her favorite speed level: insane, and that was going to make talking impossible over the whine of the engine.

The trail broadened a bit here, and we were now riding on a trail that was beaten down by other snowmobiles, it no longer felt like water under us. She did something I didn’t think was possible and opened the throttle even further. I went back to my safe position behind her shoulder and pondered her reactions while I opened my sight again. This close to town, enemies were more likely.

Bella hadn’t said anything about being afraid, but her need for speed was telling me loud and clear she was worried, and feeling unsafe out here in the woods. I didn’t really blame her. This had to all be a shock, the Troll, my revelations, and now a pell-mell flight through a frigid winter night. I may have impressed her with my snowmobile toss, she was impressing me with her fortitude. All this would come at a cost, though. I was worn to the bone from my magic use earlier, and she was going to hit the end of her endurance eventually.

Properly grounded – literally, that is, bare feet to the earth – I could go on almost forever. I had come close to my limits once, and it had kept me alive through a Hunt that would have killed anyone, anything, else. But on the ice, with only a little sediment to draw from, I had drained my own reserves. I hadn’t told Bella that because she didn’t need to know. Not where my weaknesses were, only that I was a lot stronger than she would have been.

What it meant was that I was going to need to rest, soon, and refuel. Hopefully there would be food at the airport. We zipped past a house, making the sled dogs tied in their yard start barking uproariously. She didn’t even turn her head. I could see the dim glows of their life, seven of them, then we were turning. I kept my eyes closed. She knew where we going, and I needed to See more than watch the road. So far, only ordinary lives were visible.

She turned again, and I guessed that we were following a road now, from the feel, and the corners rather than curves. We must be getting close, there were more people around, although we were moving fast enough I was just registering and letting the glows pass, like the lights of oncoming traffic. When the really bright one showed up directly in front of us, like a lighthouse beacon, I opened my eyes quickly.

Breaking out of the Sight can be a little disorienting. For all the times I have had to do it in a hurry, it has never gotten any better. I opened my mouth to shout a warning at her, and then realized she was slowing. We were at the airport.

“Bella, wait,” I spoke into her ear, sure she would hear me now. She came to a stop, just outside a small building with the grandiose sign “Tok International Airport” over it.

”What is it?” She turned to look at me as I let go and slid off.

“There is…” I wasn’t sure how to explain it. The door opened and two men walked out. One was wearing brown coveralls, the other was in a parka and jeans. Both were heavily bearded, something I had come to expect of Alaskan males.

Try Some Content

I have a new post up at Mad Genius Club on marketing for writers, what to do, and what not to do.

Oh, and the steampunk hat, for Dorothy.

steampunk costume from back in May 2013

Cedar’s steampunk hat!

Review: Aeviternus Adventures

Teresa Perin sent me her book for review. I’m not sure whether the title is “The Elements” or “Aeviternus Adventures” since one is on the front cover and the other is on the spine. I first became aware of Teresa through the really cute blog she does about her goats. Having been raised with goats, I’m rather fond of the little monsters, although I also have horror stories about how baad they can be.

I hadn’t read any reviews of her book, so when it arrived I set it on the to-read pile, and it languished there. I’ve been too busy, as you know, to do a proper review for weeks, and also, this is a paper book, and I have been finding it easier to read ebooks on the fly. Last night, I finally got around to the book. It was… not what I had expected.

Look, if you are a grown-up fan of Wonderland, wish you could go through the lookingglass with Alice, or fly off to Oz with Dorothy, and you also want to have your fantasy worlds with lots of sex, then this is the book for you. I once read a fanfic about Dorothy and her travelling companions that this book reminded me a lot of. (No, I will not provide a link.)

Don’t be fooled by the opening, this is not a YA novel, or even New Adult. We leap into bed with the female protagonist and have pro-forma casual sex with the boyfriend who immediately after, still lying in bed, dumps her. Fortunately, Jilly isn’t silly enough to let this get her down for long, and by the time she gets home from college she is so over him.

In chapter two our heroine, accompanied by a dairy goat and a favorite cat, inexplicably falls through the darkness into a place where she can talk to the animals, something that bothers her not at all. Like Alice in Wonderland, she curiously sets out to explore. She journeys through this magic land (which is stuck in feudalism as so many fantasies are), encountering magical beings and having orgies with them. In return for the sex, she is granted powers, which is evidently why she continues to do this even after becoming romantically involved with a human.

The people in the book all want to take care of her, unless they want to enslave her. Those who want to take care of her, no matter their rank or status, bend over backward for this odd, very young woman in their midst. An example is here: “Jillian smiled and suggested, ‘you might want to rethink your policy on banning all magic.’

“The king shook his head in disbelief. ‘I’ll be. Who’d have thought magic could be so powerful and good?’”

At the end of the book, after Jillian has managed to return to Earth, because college is so much more important than her new-found lover and magic, she is called back into the land of Aeviternus. There she has more sex, adventures, finds out that she is the Chosen One, is almost raped to death, but because she is rescued, instead has more sex. Finally, Jillian arrives with her travelling companions to rebuild the Magical Commune, confident that together they can accomplish anything…

Sadly, I didn’t get into this book. It just wasn’t my cup of tea, but for those looking for some titillation and talking animals (did I mention the talking camel?) then this may be right up your alley. Yes, the dialogue is wooden, but that’s not why you would be reading this book, anyway.

Happy Halloween

I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Instead, I plan to write a novel, and (fingers crossed) about half of another one during Winter Break. The semester ends Dec 9, and I don’t start again until January 27. Six weeks… and I do plan a week to travel up to see my family in NH right around Christmas. So, Ok, five weeks.

How would that work? Well, if I plan to write a YA novel, weighing in between 65K -80K words, then I break that into a daily word goal of (let’s give me a day off every week) 5×6=30 days writing time, that’s… approximately 2500 words a day. That is well within my ability. I have the novel plotted out, and part of chapter one written, so the groundwork is there already. I know better than to plan to write during school. I can’t this semester, and my workload is only going to increase next semester. It will be worth it in the long run, but for now, I’m a driven woman.

I did write a short story today, a historical, giving a glimpse into a specific event for a class. I may put it on the blog later, but it’s not very long. Just enough to encapsulate Camp Lazear in the aftermath of the discovery of the true carrier of Yellow Fever.

 

And me in costume of the day… as the Mad Librarian.

Steampunk costume – the hat gets the most attention on campus!