David Lee Summers's Blog, page 88

Astronomy and Wildlife

I suspect one of the last things people consider when they think about working at an observatory is encountering wildlife. However, it can be a surprisingly common part of the job. During my last shift at Kitt Peak, I had two very close encounters with wild animals, both at the room where I stay. The first happened in the afternoon when I was heading out to do my laundry. I looked over to my left and saw a bobcat walking away from me. It stopped and looked at me, then continued on its way. Unfortunately, it vanished before I could get a photo. Two days later in the morning, I heard a rustling by the garbage can near my dorm room. I turned and looked out the window and a very disgruntled bear walked by, just outside my room. I was able to get a photo of the bear just before he disappeared into the woods.

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Wildlife encounters aren’t limited to the wilder areas away from the telescopes. Sometimes wildlife visits us in the control rooms. I’ve seen ringtail cats on three separate occasions in observatory control rooms. For those not familiar with ringtails, they’re not actually cats, but a member of the raccoon family that lives in the desert southwest. One time, we saw a ringtail in the control room of the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope. He peered out at us through a hole in the ceiling tiles. Another time, I was working at the 2.1-meter telescope when a ringtail jumped out of the ceiling, landed by a computer, growled at us, and then disappeared into a conduit. Another time I looked over and saw a ringtail in the control room of the Mayall 4-meter telescope, peering out from behind a garbage can. This was especially remarkable, since the console room for the 4-meter is some twelve stories above the ground. As the observer and I were trying to figure out what to do about the animal, it disappeared down a conduit never to be seen again.

Famous astronomers are not immune from wildlife encounters. I once heard a story that Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, had finished observing one night at Lowell Observatory and was walking to his room in the dark. He saw what he thought was a dog and held out his hand to pet it. The animal backed away, growling. The next morning, a caretaker spoke to Tombaugh and said he’d seen some strange tracks in the snow. It appeared that someone had approached a mountain lion very closely!

Encounters like this helped to inspire a scene in The Astronomer’s Crypt where the telescope operator, Mike, encounters a raccoon at the telescope. I won’t give more details than that to avoid spoilers for the scene, but it’s the kind of reality from my day-to-day life at the observatory that I’ve tried to inject into the novel. You can learn more about the novel at http://www.davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html. And remember, you can learn about all of my books and short stories by visiting http://www.davidleesummers.com

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Perhaps one of the things I miss most from years gone by is the ability to tune in to network television on Saturday morning and find a wide variety of animated cartoon programming. Much of this is due to television networks in the period of 1992 to 2002 deciding they didn’t make enough money to continue supporting animated programming. Also, around 2001 my wife and I decided that neither cable nor satellite TV were necessary items for our budget and we could see all the TV we wanted with other media such as DVDs. Of course, our decision was all part of the national trend that helped to kill animation in the first place. Not many people eschewed broadcast TV altogether as we did that early, but the number of choices available made it harder for networks to justify the expense of animation when certain cable networks specialized in it.

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I grew up watching cartoons in the 1970s. I fondly remember many teams of crime-solving kids from shows such as Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats. The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour provided some great comedy, much of it originally produced much before my time. I was already a Star Trek fan and loved the animated adaptation that aired in the mid 70s. There were even some cool live action experiments during that time such as Land of the Lost about a family trapped in a land of dinosaurs and the superhero-themed Shazam/Isis Hour.

I never really fell out of love with cartoons, but the 1990s ended up being another high point for me. That was in the early days of my astronomy career and cartoons became an escape from my working life. They were also a welcome treat when my first daughter was young. What I particularly remember from that period were some exceptional superhero shows such as Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men. There were also some great animated superhero parodies such as Earthworm Jim, The Tick and Freakazoid.

Of course, for all the gems, there were many forgettable shows as well. Still, what I find amazing living in the times we do is how many of these shows that I thought I would never see again are readily available on video or with the touch of a button on the internet. For a guy like me who occasionally wants a dose of nostalgia, these are great times. That said, the real joy of those Saturday mornings was the fun of discovery and I think that’s what I really miss is having that easy means of discovering new favorites.

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Giving people a way to discover new authors was much of the reason I edited Hadrosaur Tales followed by Tales of the Talisman. Publishing those magazines also helped me appreciate the economic reality that caused the networks to take Saturday morning cartoons off the air. Like TV shows gone by, you can still get most of the back issues of both magazines. There are some great stories there by authors such as Neal Asher, Nicole Givens Kurtz, David Boop, and Janni Lee Simner and many more. You can find the back issues of each at:

Hadrosaur Tales: http://www.zianet.com/hadrosaur
Tales of the Talisman: http://www.talesofthetalisman.com

As it turns out, I can do better than just give you nostalgia, Hadrosaur Productions has published two anthologies of stories set around planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. Be sure to check out:

A Kepler’s Dozen: http://hadrosaur.com/kepler.html
Kepler’s Cowboys: http://hadrosaur.com/keplers-cowboys.html

Villains and Antagonists

When I started the rough draft of my novel Owl Riders, I had a set of characters whose goals were going to be odds with the novel’s protagonists. As I’ve come to the end of writing the rough draft and have come to know those characters and understand their motivations better, I find myself pondering the nature of villains and antagonists.

It can be great fun to watch a movie or read a book and encounter a true villain who blocks the hero at every turn, but ultimately meets their comeuppance at the end of the story. That said, there’s an old saying that no one sees themselves as the villain of their own story and I think there’s truth to that. In general people have a set of objectives and sometimes one person’s objectives will exist at cross purposes with another person’s. When those people come into contact, there’s conflict that can help drive a story.

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I do think in certain types of stories, such as horror stories, it’s possible to imagine a character such as a demon who understands they’re an agent of evil and actively pursues that objective. Even there, a character who sees themselves as “evil” might see themselves as bringing some form of balance to the cosmos and thus performing a necessary function. My character Mr. Vassago in The Astronomer’s Crypt falls into that category.

Often when I think of the most wicked villains, I think of characters like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon whose only motivation seems to be personal greed and power. It’s tempting to dismiss such characters as cartoonish caricatures except that some people in real life do seem to fit this mold. Villains like this can be fun to write and it can be fun to imagine their ultimate humiliating defeat, but sometimes its more interesting to explore how a character got to be like this and explore any redeeming characteristics they might have.

Another great villain is Darth Vader who thought he was bringing peace and order to the galaxy by choosing the path he did. Although the handling of his origin story is soundly criticized, it was still satisfying to see his ultimate redemption when he defeated his master who was motivated primarily by greed.

Perhaps a more frightening type of villain is the true monster like the xenomorph in Alien motivated by the need to feed and make little aliens, but who can’t be reasoned with. At some level, this type of monster is very understandable and not necessarily evil—after all, it just wants to live—but the only way to defeat this type of villain is to destroy it utterly.

Most antagonists in fiction aren’t going to fit these almost archetypal extremes. Most are going to be people like you and me. That might feel cheated or wronged. They might see an opportunity and try to exploit it. They might actually feel like they’re attempting to do good, but don’t realize they’re causing harm to others. These are the types of antagonists I’ve tried to create in Owl Riders and what makes them scary to me is when I realize that I don’t always have to reach too far from my experience to create a character who my protagonists might see as a character who needs to be stopped.

Do you have a favorite villain or antagonist in fiction? What makes them a particular favorite of yours? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments.

The Magic of Old Books

This past week, I finished the rough draft of my fourth Clockwork Legion novel, tentatively titled Owl Riders. These novels are steampunk steeped in history. The first novel, Owl Dance starts in a wild west very much like the wild west of history. However, as an alien character called Legion interferes in human affairs and humans themselves gain confidence in their inventions, the world of the novels gradually diverges from the world of history.

Because I start in the world of history, I like to do my homework and understand the places and peoples I describe in my books. Even when I diverge from history, the cultural experience of the people in the novel will be the same up until the divergence point. Reading books that discuss the history of the region and peoples I’m writing about is, of course, important, but one thing I like to do over and beyond that is find books written by people who lived at the time the book takes place.

One of the challenges of Owl Riders is that I have some scenes set in Persia of 1885. [image error] I found some good histories of Iran which gave me insights not only into the country in the nineteenth century, but how that history helped to shape the modern country. However, I wasn’t sure what I would find written at the time period. A search at my local library didn’t turn up anything. On an off chance, I went to COAS, our wonderful used bookstore in Las Cruces and happened on a book called Land of the Lion and Sun by Absalom D. Shabaz, published in 1901. The book’s subtitle is “Personal Experiences, the Nations of Persia—Their Manners, Customs and Their Beliefs.”

This sounded perfect, a personal viewpoint of someone living in Iran within a few years of my story’s time period. On closer inspection, I discovered that the book was written as a guide for people hoping to be Christian Missionaries in Persia. I’ve just started the book and I find that Shabaz was raised a Christian in Persia and had to deal with the reactions of his friends and neighbors. This actually proves to be an interesting viewpoint because it combines elements from both my protagonists, Ramon Morales who is a Catholic-raised lawyer visiting Persia for the first time and Fatemeh Morales who converted to the Bahá’í Faith as a young woman and then left home.

For me, the real magic of a book like Land of the Lion and Sun is that I can hear the words of the author speaking directly to me across more than a century. I can read a personal perspective in the language of the time, with all the attitudes and prejudices of the time intact. I think it’s important to start by reading modern histories precisely because an author of a particular time can’t help but share their prejudices. It allows me to separate the perceptions of the historical author from history as it unfolded. I look forward to seeing how Mr. Shabaz experienced the history I’ve read about and see where that might lead me as I prepare to revise my novel.

While you’re waiting for the fourth novel, be sure to catch the three novels that are already published. Clicking the titles will take you to pages with more information:

Owl Dance
Lightning Wolves
The Brazen Shark

Haiku

Last week, I learned that one of my haiku was selected as a finalist for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s Dwarf Stars Award and will be appearing in this year’s Dwarf Stars Anthology. Here’s the poem:

dead jackrabbit glares

at my car

with one glowing eye

[image error] The poem first appeared last Halloween in Lupine Lunes, an anthology of horror poems and short stories edited by Lester W. Smith of Popcorn Press. Pick up a copy to see several more of my haiku plus some great poems and stories by such folks as Deborah P. Kolodji, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Gary Davis, Deborah Walker, and Stephen D. Sullivan. Clicking the book cover will take you to Amazon’s page for the book.

I imagine there are a few people who will look at my poem and say that it’s not truly a haiku. Many of us were taught in school that a haiku is a three-line poem of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. In fact, that’s rather a poor approximation of the most formal Japanese approach to haiku.

In fact, in Japanese, a haiku is typically written as only a single line. A formal haiku will be heard as three lines of five, seven, and five sound-beats. The word for those “sound-beats” in Japanese is on, literally “sounds” and often translated as syllables. However, poetically, these sound-beats don’t really work like syllables. As an example, take the name of Japan’s northern most island: Hokkaido. To an English speaker, that’s three syllables. In Japanese, it’s spoken as “ho-(pause)-ka-i-do-o” or five sound-beats. Another example might be the word for one’s spirit or will, seishin, two syllables in English, but in Japanese there are four sound-beats, spoken as “se-i-shi-n.”

The upshot of all this is that the 5-7-5 syllable structure in English often results in haiku that are wordier and clunkier than their Japanese counterparts. My poem above is written in lines of five, three, and five syllables. This English-language haiku structure is called a lune because its structure resembles a crescent moon. It’s also the reason an anthology focused on werewolf stories and poems is called Lupine Lunes.

One of the goals of haiku as a poetic form is that it endeavors to capture a moment in time, a little like a snapshot. More than a snapshot, though, it also tries to present the emotions that go with that moment in time.

My brother, Dean Summers, has been writing haiku since 1969. His haiku have been published in such acclaimed journals as Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest and Cicada. With Ruth Yarrow, he served as a judge for the 2004 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards. I can’t honestly remember whether I first learned about haiku from Dean or in school, but much as I’ve always loved the form, I was afraid to play in the haiku sandbox for a long time, just a little intimidated by his success.

What finally motivated me to really explore the form was discovering so called “scifaiku” and “horrorku,” basically haiku with science fiction and horror elements. As someone who already wrote science fiction and horror, this allowed me to move haiku into my “comfort” zone. I could imagine future moments in time or scary scenarios and imagine what my feelings would be and play with that in word form. In fact, encountering a dead jackrabbit by the side of a dark Arizona highway was a real moment in time involving an authentic sense of horror. Fortunately, all it did was glare, otherwise I might not be here to write this post!

I need to give a shout-out to my daughter Autumn Summers who helped me find a good way to explain on as related to haiku structure. Be sure to visit her craft blog at: https://entropycreations.wordpress.com/

My brother, Dean, has a great page about haiku which includes an in-depth article about haiku structure, tips for writing haiku, and several of his poems at: http://www.hollybooks.com/haiku.htm

The Biggest Explosions of All

I’ve spent a lot of time in my astronomy career pointing telescopes at some of the biggest explosions of all—type 1a supernovae. This kind of supernova starts with a white dwarf star and another star orbiting each other. White dwarfs are very dense stars at the end of their lives. The only objects more dense are neutron stars and black holes. The white dwarf’s gravity draws material off the companion star until it reaches critical mass and the whole thing explodes. One such star that I had the chance to observe in detail in was Supernova 2011fe in the galaxy M101. Here’s an image from the Mayall 4-meter at Kitt Peak, one of the telescopes I used to observe this object. The supernova is the bright blue star outshining everything else in the upper right-hand part of the image.

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Image by T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), H. Schweiker & S. Pakzad NOAO/AURA/NSF

These cosmic explosions are pretty interesting in their own right. Our own star is expected to end its life as a white dwarf and these explosions give us a glimpse at the hearts of these stellar corpses. These explosions are also one of the ways heavy elements formed in the cores of stars get distributed out into the universe. Supernova 2011fe was, in fact, one of the closest Type 1a supernovae we’ve ever observed. We caught the explosion soon after it happened, watched the supernova brighten to maximum, then start to fade away.

Type 1a supernovae also have another useful property. Because white dwarfs have a fairly uniform mass, the brightness of the explosion is also uniform. So, if every Type 1a supernova observed were placed at the same distance away from you, they would all, more or less, be the same brightness. This means that by measuring the apparent brightness of the supernova, you can figure out how far away it is. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but there are ways to calibrate that information based on the how fast the explosion brightens and fades.

Back in the 1990s, an astronomer named Saul Perlmutter was granted target-of-opportunity time on Kitt Peak telescopes. In this case, it meant if a type 1a supernova went off, he could ask the telescope to point to it and take an image and calibration data. He and his colleagues hoped to get distances to as many galaxies as possible. I helped acquire some of that data which was combined with a lot of other data from a lot of telescopes to provide evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Perlmutter would go on to share a Nobel prize with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt for this work.

This is one of those discoveries that shows some of the true fun of science. We learned that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but that raises an even bigger question. Why is it accelerating? Typically that’s attributed to something called “Dark Energy.” This attribution isn’t meant to be an answer in itself. It’s meant to be a placeholder. It’s “Dark” energy because we don’t know precisely what kind of energy it really is, or even if it’s energy at all! Later this year, a new instrument called DESI will be installed on the Mayall 4-meter which will endeavor to get answers to some of those questions. But like all good science, I expect a veritable explosion of new questions raised for every answer we’re able to get.

Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day, the day set aside for remembering those soldiers who gave their life for the country. I was surprised to learn that although Memorial Day has been recognized by the states for a long time, it only became an official Federal holiday during my lifetime. Memorial Day was one of the holidays created by the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which went into effect in 1971. That’s the point that the Memorial Day holiday started being celebrated on the last Monday in May.

The Memorial Day weekend has become traditionally associated with the beginning of the summer season in the United States. [image error] This year, my schedule at Kitt Peak worked out that I had to work the entire holiday weekend. Normally, working at the observatory over a holiday weekend isn’t much of a hardship, but this year, my shift started with wild 55 mile per hour winds, too high to open the telescope. Also, I’ve been suffering from a bout of sinus congestion. When we were able to open, the telescope where I was working developed some networking problems, which meant instead of working on cosmic mysteries, I was busy running between a couple of buildings (in the high wind) swapping out parts trying to solve more mundane computer mysteries. Fortunately the weather has improved as the weekend has progressed, and last night we were able to open the Mayall 4-meter to clear skies as shown in the photo.

Of course, I’m not the only person working this Memorial Day weekend. It’s all too easy to forget that many people have to work on weekends to do everything from keeping essential services running to keeping our favorite retail stores open so we can go shopping. In fact, if I weren’t working at the observatory this weekend, I’d likely be at a convention this weekend discussing my books and manning a booth. My next event will be Westercon 70 in Phoenix, Arizona, on the July 4 weekend.

Even though I’m not at a convention this weekend, I still had a unique opportunity to give a presentation about my writing work. I was interviewed by Emily Guerra of KRWG-FM, the NPR affiliate in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the PUENTES: Bridges to the Community segment of the station’s Fronteras news show. You can listen to the interview at their website: http://krwg.org/post/astronomy-steampunk-fiction. I was also pleased to see a review of my novel Owl Dance at the Steampunk Journal website: https://www.steampunkjournal.org/2017/05/24/owl-dance-david-lee-summers-review/#

One of the goals of my Clockwork Legion Steampunk series is to tell a good tale where the protagonists are actively doing their best to find peaceful solutions to the problems they encounter. In a way, I think that speaks to the spirit of a holiday like Memorial Day. After all, what better way to honor those who have fallen protecting us and our freedoms than working toward a world where no one else has to fall in battle.

Seven Samurai … In Space!

I’m a big fan of both Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai and John Sturges’s American remake with gunfighters instead of swordsmen, The Magnificent Seven. Here at the Web Journal, I’ve discussed both the anime series Samurai 7 and the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven. However, I’ve never discussed the first version of Seven Samurai I remember seeing—Roger Corman’s 1980 film Battle Beyond the Stars. [image error] This cheezy, but fun film is arguably a classic of the “space cowboy” genre.

The movie stars Richard Thomas as Shad from the planet Akir. Thomas is most famous as John Boy from the the critically acclaimed TV series The Waltons. The planet’s name is a clear nod to Akira Kurosawa. The peaceful world has been threatened by the villainous Sador, played by John Saxon. Shad must go out and recruit fighters to help him. In this version, the seven are: Gelt, a mercenary played by Robert Vaughn who like his character in the original Magnificent Seven must always watch his back; Cowboy played by George Peppard, a literal space cowboy who is also a gun runner; Nanelia played by Darlanne Fluegel, a technician who provides the Akira with sensors; Cayman, a reptilian captain who has a vendetta against Sador played by Morgan Woodward, who I fondly remember as Captain Tracy of the Exeter in the original Star Trek; Nestor, five members of a race of clones—their leader is played by Earl Boen; St. Exmin, a Valkerie played by Sybil Danning; and Kelvin, a pair of beings who communicate through heat. The seven of Battle Beyond the Stars actually provide a nice preview of the diverse cast we would get in the 2016 Magnificent Seven. One thing that was especially gratifying in this version is that it’s the only one to date that includes women among the seven.

Of some note, Battle Beyond the Stars features one of the first film scores by James Horner. As it turns out, the 2016 Magnificent Seven would feature Horner’s final film score. That said, Horner’s score from Battle Beyond the Stars reminds me more of his score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan than his score for The Magnificent Seven.

If you’ve seen any version of The Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai, there will be few plot surprises in Battle Beyond the Stars. Like most remakes, the fun is in the details. Even though the effects are clearly low budget, there are several interesting space ships including Shad’s ship, Nell, who is a sentient AI. Nell proves to be a great character in her own right—something of a smart-ass, but genuinely helpful. Befitting the low budget, this film doesn’t take itself as seriously as its more earnest cousins. The actors clearly deliver their lines with tongues fully in cheek.

Have I missed a remake of Seven Samurai? If there’s one you know of that I haven’t mentioned in this post, let me know in the comments!

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As I said at the outset, I believe this would have been the first version of Seven Samurai I actually saw. I believe I first saw this in 1985 at college, about five years after the original release. It’s clearly one of the films that gave rise to my love of space cowboys—a theme Steve Howell and I explored on planets discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope in the anthology Kepler’s Cowboys. In the book, Steve even does his own space-based retelling of a western classic: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. If you’d like to check out our anthology of space cowboy stories, visit: http://www.davidleesummers/Keplers-Cowboys.html

Coming Soon – Straight Outta Tombstone

As of today, we’re just about six weeks from the release of Straight Outta Tombstone, a weird western anthology edited by David Boop. [image error] I’m excited about this anthology for several reasons. First of all, I was able to bring two of my favorite worlds together in one story. Larissa and Billy from the Clockwork Legion series encounter Marcella and Rosen from my Scarlet Order Vampire series during the historical Albert Fountain disappearance. What’s more, this story appears in an anthology including several people who I admire, many of whom I’m lucky enough to call friends, including Jim Butcher, Jody Lynn Nye, Phil Foglio, Robert E. Vardeman, Nicole Kurtz and more!

People who have read both the Clockwork Legion novels and the Scarlet Order novels may wonder how I can bring the two together. I only briefly mentioned vampires in Owl Dance, and more as a literary concept than a reality. Also, savvy readers will notice that I killed off one of the Clockwork Legion characters in Vampires of the Scarlet Order. The way I could make this work was to realize that the Scarlet Order novels are essentially a “secret history.” They’re set in the shadows of our world. However, the Clockwork Legion novels are set in a distinctly alternate history. So the Scarlet Order vampires you meet in my story “Fountains of Blood” are the ones who exist in my Clockwork Legion world!

I’m not the only author playing with a world of my creation in this book. Larry Correia explores the roots of his best-selling Monster Hunter International series in “Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers.” Jim Butcher reveals the origin of one of the Dresden Files’ most popular characters in “Fistful of Warlock.” Kevin J. Anderson’s Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., finds himself in a showdown in “High Midnight.” Alan Dean Foster brings us a new Mad Amos Malone story in “The Treefold Problem.”

Here’s the complete table of contents:

Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers by Larry Correia
Trouble in an Hourglass by Jody Lynn Nye
The Buffalo Hunters by Sam Knight
The Sixth World by Robert E. Vardeman
Easy Money by Phil Foglio
The Wicked Wild by Nicole Givens Kurtz
Chance Corrigan and the Lord of the Underworld by Michael A. Stackpole
The Greatest Guns in the Galaxy by Bryan Thomas Schmidt & Ken Scholes
Dance of Bones by Maurice Broaddus
Dry Gulch Dragon by Sarah A. Hoyt
The Treefold Problem by Alan Dean Foster
Fountains of Blood by David Lee Summers
High Midnight by Kevin J. Anderson
Coyote by Naomi Brett Rourke
The Key by Peter J. Wacks
A Fistful of Warlocks by Jim Butcher

Hope you’ll join us for ride out to an old west far stranger and scarier than the one your granpappy told you about. This one includes soul-sucking ghosts, steam-powered demons and wayward aliens. The book will be released on July 4. You can preorder it right now at Amazon. You can also visit the book’s page at Baen Books, where you can get a sneak peak of the entire first half.

Lightning Wolves on Audible

Lightning Wolves, the second novel in my Clockwork Legion steampunk series, is now available as an audiobook at Audible.com. [image error] In the novel, it’s 1877 and Russian forces occupy the Pacific Northwest. They are advancing into California. New weapons have proven ineffective or dangerously unstable. The one man who can help has disappeared into Apache Country, hunting ghosts. A healer and a former sheriff lead a band into the heart of the invasion to determine what makes the Russian forces so unstoppable while a young inventor attempts to unleash the power of the lightning wolves.

One thing that makes this release special is that I love to listen to audiobooks while I’m driving from my home in New Mexico to the observatory where I work in Arizona. Elements of this novel were inspired by the very same commute. Almost every week, I pass the Whetstone Mountains which house Kartchner Caverns State Park. I drive by the turnoff for Tombstone, famous for the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. I drive through the Dragoon Mountains where Apache warriors made camp. All of these locations feature in Lightning Wolves. I look forward to giving the book a listen during a couple of my upcoming commutes through the region. Here we have a look at one of the real-world settings in the novel.

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As it turns out, I’m revisiting a lot of these same locations in the novel I’m currently writing. I left a few plot threads dangling at the end of Lightning Wolves which didn’t get resolved in The Brazen Shark because pirate captain Onofre Cisneros took my protagonists Ramon and Fatemeh first to Hawaii and then to Japan. Also, it seemed like it would be fun to leave those dangling plot threads alone for a few years worth of story time and see how they develop. The result is that Southern Arizona is in quite a mess by the opening of Owl Riders and you know Ramon and Fatemeh will be right in the middle of it, presuming other aspects of their life don’t get in the way.

The audiobook is narrated by Edward Mittelstedt who did a terrific job on Owl Dance. What’s more, Lightning Wolves was a top ten finisher in the best steampunk novel category of the 2014 Preditors and Editors Reader’s Poll. My daughter Autumn created Larissa, the young inventor mentioned in the story’s description. She served as the model for Larissa on the book’s cover.

You can listen to a sample and buy a copy of the Lightning Wolves audiobook at: https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Lightning-Wolves-Audiobook/B0716QC53Y