K.M. Alexander's Blog, page 30

Eight Years

Today is I Make Stories’ eighth year.

I don’t typically mark anniversaries around here (I usually take time to reminisce every two. hundred. posts.) but I felt that today it’s essential to pause and thank each and every one of you for reading and supporting me and this blog over the last eight years, seven hundred eighty-four posts, three books, and six manuscripts. What a ride.

Your support means more than words can express. I couldn’t do this without you. Thanks for following, sharing, and commenting over the years. Thanks for the emails and messages of encouragement. Thanks for buying my books. Thanks for leaving reviews. Thanks for telling your friends. Thanks for all that and so much more.

I’m sure there will be further adventures ahead of us, and I’m glad you’re here with me.

 

Popple: A Free 18th Century Cartography Brush Set for Fantasy Maps

Throughout history, we can find examples of cartography used as aspirational propaganda. After all, land can be easily claimed on the map where it might be more challenging to hold in person. Countries can seem more significant with slight projection adjustments, and colonies can appear more populated and robust. 1746’s A Map of the British Empire in America by Henry Popple is the perfect example of this—laying out the intent of the British Empire and her colonies in the New World, rather than the realities of the time.

I love this map. It’s a deviation from standard styles of the 18th century that I haven’t seen before. It manages to capture the wildness of a new frontier (to European eyes at least) in ways that cartography of the old continent hadn’t done before. The map itself was huge—nearly eight feet square when assembled, and the level of detail wasn’t something I could just ignore. It’d be perfect for fantasy maps.

With that in mind, I am releasing Popple an enormous brush set with all of these beautiful details ready to be used in your fictional cartography. I think you’ll dig it.

[image error]

Variety is what sold me. Each mountain and forest is one-of-a-kind, giving each area its own unique look. Plus it has wetlands! Swamps! Interestingly enough swamplands seem to be a rarity among historical maps—despite their near-ubiquitous presence in fantasy maps. (Guess we “blame” Tolkien for that?) One thing of note, it was challenging to determine what constitutes a town, or a city, or a farm. Since there was no key or legend, I made my best guesses based on my research. That said, you can use any of these signs however you like, my system is more to keep the brushes organized so you can find what you’re looking for when browsing.

Within Popple, you’ll discover over 400 brushes, including:

20 Individual Habitations
10 Double Habitations
30 Grouped Habitations
20 Small Towns
3 Large Towns
10 Small Cities
30 Medium Cities
15 Large Cities
10 Huge Cities
20 Missions
20 Forts
5 Border Forts (the sort you’d find along rivers)
10 Tents
6 Random Habitations
30 Scrub Lands
30 “Round” Forests
30 “Tall” Forests
30 Swamps
40 Hills
40 Mountains
30 Mountain Ranges

The button below links to a ZIP file that contains a Photoshop brush set (it’ll work in GIMP as well) as well as a set of transparent PNGs in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support Adobe brush files. I’ve separated them by type, Settlements, Flora, Small Landforms, and Large Landforms. They’re black, and they’ll look broken if viewed in Chrome, but trust me, they’re all there.

DOWNLOAD POPPLE

As with all of my previous brush sets, Popple is free for any use. I distribute it with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which means you can freely use it in commercial work and distribute adaptations. While attribution is technically a part of the license, I personally don’t give a damn. All I did was convert these into a modern brush format, Henry Popple and his crew did all the real work—so if you need to give someone credit, give it to them.

Enjoy Popple! Feel free to show me what you created by sending me an email or finding me on Twitter. I love seeing how these brushes get used, and I’d be happy to share your work with my readers.

Meet Digit

Digit is a humanoid-ish robot designed by Oregon’s Agility Robotics. You might recall seeing it in a video from Ford a few weeks ago where they introduced their plan to disrupt home deliveries. In the video below, you can see the little fella doing no disrupting of anything at all, in fact, it’s just taking a stroll in its hometown. Not creepy at all. No.

(If you’re actually creeped out, fret not. We’re still a ways away from Digit coming to visit you under its own volition. You can see the guy controlling it in the video—he’s the fella in gray.)

As impressive as this technology is, I cannot help but wonder what people will do to a lone Digit in the wild, especially here in the good ol’ United States. We don’t have a particularly good track record when it comes to treating friendly robotos with respect.

Raunch Review: Farscape

Raunch Reviews is a series about profanity. Not real profanity, but speculative swearing. Authors often try to incorporate original, innovative forms of profanity into our own fantastical works as a way to expand the worlds we build. Sometimes we’re successful. Often we’re not. In this series, I examine the faux-profanity from various works of sci-fi and fantasy, judge their effectiveness, and rate them on an unscientific and purely subjective scale. This is Raunch Reviews, welcome.

[image error]Raunch Reviews: Farscape
The Author: Rockne S. O’Bannon
Work in Question: Farscape


The Profanity: “Dren”

If there is one series that gets requested for Raunch Reviews all the time, it’s Farscape. For the uninitiated, it’s a cult Australian-American sci-fi show filled with great story, fully realized characters, incredible muppets, and not-so-incredible faux profanities. Which leads us to today’s word of choice: “dren.”

Ha! I bet you thought I was going to focus on “frell!” But no! I pulled a fast one on you and switched it up. Why? Well, because “frell” is bad—it’s used in confusing ways and is born from the same onus as “frak” nothing more than a slip around censors. Those don’t rank highly on Raunch Reviews. In comparison, the word “dren” is much more elegant, if not stinkier.

First, its use is not original (we have to be honest it’s another censor-slip/replacer-word), and, similar to its real-world comparisons, it’s idiomatic. “Dren” is used as a vulgarity, meaning essentially an “unwanted substance or act.” It’s easy to pick up on its English counterpart when it’s used in phrases like “piece of dren.” But, unlike “frak” and “frell” it doesn’t follow similar patterns in pronunciation and it spelled nothing like its real-world counterpart. I think that’s important. For these sorts of faux-vulgarities, you want them to be punchy—longer words drift and shrink, becoming manageable enough to work as modifiers. “Dren” does that—and it does it pretty well.

If you’re going to make poop jokes, at least get creative with it and the writers of Farscape did exactly that in this case. Creativity goes a long way and while this is still a censor-slip, it’s a more creative censor-slip. The uniqueness and originality set it apart from others, so “dren” gains some points for that.

Score: [image error][image error][image error][image error][image error] (3.0)

Previous Raunch Reviews

“Quiznak” from J. Dos Santos & L. Montgomery’s Voltron: Legendary Defender
“Smeg” from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s Red Dwarf
“Burn Me” from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
“Slitch” from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday
“Yarbles” from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
“Cuss” from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Feth” from Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts from Warhammer 40k
“Shazbot” from Garry Marshall’s Mork & Mindy and Dynamix’s Starsiege: Tribes
“Seven Hells” from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire/Game of Thrones
“Mudblood” from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
“Frak” from Glen A. Larson’s, Ronald D. Moore’s, & David Eick’s Battlestar Galactica
“Jabber” from China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series
“Storm it”/”Storms”/”Storming” from Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archives

Have a suggestion for Raunch Reviews? It can be any made up slang word from a book, television show, or movie. You can email me directly with your recommendation or leave a comment below. I’ll need to spend time with the property before I’ll feel confident reviewing it, so give me a little time. I have a lot of books to read.

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Forget Talent

“Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.”

—Octavia E. Butler

Back around the beginning of the year, I shared a quote from Butler that’s quite similar to this one, but instead of talent, that previous quote focused on inspiration. The reason they sound so similar is that they’re both are taken from the same essay on writing advice: Furor Scribendi.

The essay was initially published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume IX but luckily you can find a reprinting of in her collection Bloodchild: And Other Stories which I’d recommend for the titular story alone.

The Visions of Graces

If you’re in Seattle next week, and you’re looking for something to do, might I suggest swinging by Roq La Rue Gallery on Thursday, June 13th from 6:00–9:00 PM for the opening of The Visions of Graces, a three-person show featuring my brilliant partner, Kari-Lise Alexander, the always incredible Laurie Lee Brom, and the inimitable Syd Bee. (Be sure to check out Syd’s show from April, Dear Illusions, as well—it’s a stunner.)

Each artist is bringing three to four pieces, and I’m excited to see them up on the walls. I’ve gotten a few glimpses at what’s to come, and I cannot wait for everyone to see the work these talented women have been creating. It’s going to be great. I’ve included a few small previews of what’s to come below, but you’ll soon be able to see more.

Kari-Lise Alexander

See more on Kari-Lise’s Instagram feed
Visit Kari-Lise’s website

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Almost 2 weeks until “The Visions of Graces” 3 person show opens at @roqlarue here in Seattle! Here’s a sneak at the largest piece I’ll have in the show. I can’t WAIT to reveal more. I’ll be showing along side @sydbeeart & @laurieleebrom. Make sure you saved the date June 13th to come and check it out!

A post shared by Kari-lise Alexander (@karilise) on May 29, 2019 at 11:44am PDT

Laurie Lee Brom

See more on Laurie Lee Brom’s Instagram feed
Visit Laurie Lee Brom’s Website

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Here's a cropped version of a new piece for the June show with @karilise and @sydbeeart @roqlarue huge thank you to @glassolive for modeling for this series. Please message the gallery to be placed on the preview list of your interested in buying any of these. The full size of this piece is 24×36"

A post shared by Laurie Lee Brom (@laurieleebrom) on May 29, 2019 at 10:55am PDT

Syd Bee

See more on Syd Bee’s Instagram feed
Visit Syd Bee’s Website

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Here’s another #wip for the upcoming “The Visions of Graces” show with @karilise & @laurieleebrom at @roqlarue

Graphing the Distribution of English Letters

I came across this old post on prooffreader.com from 2014 from data scientist and developer David Taylor and found it fascinating. I figured my readers would as well.

Below you’ll see a graphic visualization on the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle, or end of words. The data set comes from the Brown Corpus in the Natural Language Toolkit instead of a dictionary, this great because the results are weighted for usage based on the frequency of use.

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If you’re a data nerd like me, there are a lot more details in the original post that explain these findings. If you want to learn more about the methodology, then be sure to check out the extended version of the post on prooffreaderplus. I appreciated Taylors final thought:

The most common word in the English language is “the”, which makes up about 6% of most corpuses (sorry, corpora). But according to these graphs, the most representative word is “toe”.

I’m glad the word that ended up representing English the most is somehow “toe”—for whatever reason I find it oddly fitting for our mongrel language.

A Weekend of Smoke

This past long weekend, I took a day off from edits and spent a pleasant day reading and hanging out by my grill and smoking a variety of foods. While I enjoy posting about my fiction, my writing, inspirational quotes, weird plants, mapping projects, or my historical research, sometimes it’s nice to take a break and share just random happenings—occasional incidentals. This Smoke Report is one of those random happenings.

[image error]My cheap but effective offset smoker—they’re not the easiest to learn on, but they’re fun.

In total, I cooked for about six hours, keeping the temp around 225º for the duration of the smoke—I was delighted with the results. I’m getting pretty good at maintaining a constant temperature with chips and chunks and only experienced a few flareups which I was able to quickly control. Preparation is key to doing this right. I like to soak most of my wood overnight (I used mesquite for this go-around), but I like to have some dry wood handy as well. I find that being able to quickly shift a fire’s momentum is important in maintaining a constant temperature.

[image error]My smoked wings were rubbed in the Sweet Sizzle rub from For the Love of Spice which added a nice base flavor.

Chicken wings were the first thing off the grill. These were namely a snack/lunch break while we waited for the main course—a three-pound pork butt—to finish. I think they turned out really good. I brined them for an hour before smoking, and I’m glad I did, it kept the meat juicy while the outside crisped up nicely. Afterward, I ended up turning the remains into a bone-broth, It’ll probably end up in a risotto.

[image error]Smoked onions, garlic, and corn—be sure to soak vegetables in water for at least an hour before smoking.

Along with the meat, I smoked garlic (fresh from our garden), onions (also fresh from our garden), eggs (not pictured), and corn (from the grocer.) The garlic was terrific and became soft and spreadable like roasted garlic but with an added kick of smoke. The onions were much sweeter and less smokey than I expected but an excellent little addition to the feast. The corn on the cob turned out well although it’s still early in the season for corn and the ears weren’t the high-quality corn we’ll find later this summer.

I’m not sure if I’d smoke eggs again—they get an interesting texture and color. The outside turns a golden yellow-brown, but they really don’t carry a lot of extra smoke flavor. Outside of looking unique, I don’t think smoking eggs adds all that much.

[image error]My excellent pork butt sitting atop a Ruby Pear Woodworks cutting board.

As far as the main course went, this was easily the best pork butt I have ever smoked. I dry rub all my smoked meats—I tend to prefer it over sticky/saucy barbeque.  It finished about an hour earlier than I expected so I wrapped it for an hour while I finished everything else. This only helped tenderize it further. The final result was incredibly tender with a fantastic flavor thanks to a solid smoke ring.

[image error]Grilled flatbread with olive oil, rosemary (from our garden) and—of course—salt.

At the very end, I grilled homemade flatbread and some beautiful turnips (sadly not pictured) which were also great. It was a delightful little feast all in all and a relaxing day. It’s fun to take days like this to test recipes of perfect techniques. I learned a bunch, and I am quite happy with my results.

Below, I’ve shared my dry rub recipe—it’s great for pork, but it’s a solid all-around rub that works across a variety of food from vegetables like cauliflower steaks or a protein like chicken. It’s also easy to manipulate so throwing in your favorite spice can add a unique and personal spin. Enjoy!

My Dry Rub

4 tsp Seasoned Salt
2 tsp Dark Brown Sugar
1 1/2 tsp Granulated Sugar
1 tsp Smoked Paprika
1 tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 tsp Ground Pepper
1/4 tsp Dry Mustard
1/4 tsp Ground Cumin
Pinch of Ground Ginger

Can be stored in an airtight container for up to a month.

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Like My Books? Here Are a Few Recommendations…

I’m still hard at work on Gleam Upon the Waves, and while I’m making significant progress, I don’t have a specific timeline for release. So, if you’re a fan of my work and you’re looking for something to read in the interim that strikes a similar weird-fiction chord s, let me recommend a few of my favorite novels from a whole bunch of amazingly talented writers. In no particular order…

[image error] Cherie Priest

What to Read: Maplecroft & Chapelwood

Priest is a talented and multifaceted author who has written a great many books in a variety of genres. However, if you like books where heroes willingly fight against the madness of Lovecraftian monsters then I cannot recommend her series The Borden Dispatches enough—the first book is a solid new-mythos entry with great characters and a fascinating premise, but Priest really hits her stride in book two, Chapelwood, a humid deep-south foray into the mythos. Pick them both up and read ’em in order.

John Hornor Jacobs [image error]

What to Read: The Incorruptibles & The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

Jacobs is well known among mythos enthusiasts for his 2011 novel, Southern Gods. But lately he’s stepped up his game; first, there’s his weird-west trilogy: The Incorruptibles, a combination of classic western, high-fantasy, and Roman mythology. His latest mythos novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky (one of my favorite books from last year) is an absolute masterpiece of modern cosmic horror—I can’t wait for the follow up: A Lush and Seething Hell.

China Miéville [image error]

What to Read: The Scar

If you like my strange city filled with a variety of even more unusual inhabitants, then you’ll love the steampunk-influenced world of New Crobuzon.  Miéville’s writing is evocative, his world rich and vibrant, his characters flawed yet relatable, and everything is weighted in a deep history that always leaves me in awe. While all three in the series are solid books and huge influences on me, my favorite is easily the middle novel, The Scar. A swashbuckling adventure that takes place in the mobile pirate-city of Armada.

Fonda Lee [image error]

What to Read: Jade City

I discovered Lee’s work after sitting on a panel with her at OryCon in 2017. After hearing her talk about her urban fantasy wuxia novel, Jade City, I knew it would be something I enjoyed. I wasn’t wrong. The city is captivating, the worldbuilding fantastic, and Lee’s characters are grounded and flawed. There’s a lot here, and it’s worth exploring. If you like gritty cities and enjoy crime dramas, then I’d recommend you take some time and spend a few days in the streets of Janloon. (The sequel, Jade War is coming soon!)

[image error] Brom

What to Read: Lost Gods: A Novel

My friend Brom is both an incredible artist and a fantastic writer. For me, his 2016 novel, Lost Gods, stands out. It’s a rich exploration into the bizarre and brutal world of Purgatory and the people, monsters, and strange creatures who live (and die) therein. It’s a vast story that mixes a variety of mythology and weaves a remarkable and splendid tapestry of broken and complex characters and has you cheering for an unlikely protagonist searching for a way home.

[image error] Felix Gilman

What to Read: The Half-Made World

I love a good weird-west book, and there isn’t enough of them. The world of Gilman’s novel is stunning in its intricacies and feels vibrate and alive and offers up something unique and engaging that feels thoroughly fresh. I want more. There’s a lot of love: warring factions, a clash of cultures, an unlikely set of anti-heroes, and a surprising plot that feels as unique as it is enthralling. A rollicking gunsmoke-tinged romp that I found delightful.

There’s a wide variety in this list, everything from cosmic horror to steampunk to weird-west. I’m sure you’ll find something to enjoy. All the links go to Amazon, but if you can, I’d recommend asking for them at your local indie book store. Once finished, be sure to leave a review for other readers on Amazon and Goodreads and share your thoughts about the books. It’s a small but powerful way to help out an author and your fellow reader.

What about you? Do you have any reading recommendations for folks who enjoy my books? Leave a comment below and help others discover some of your favorite novels.

Happy reading!

 

The Final Sentence

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”

—Joyce Carol Oates