Audiovisual

First, hearty and humble thanks to GypsyWynd for posting a glowing review of Covenant on Amazon! It made my day!

Earlier today I received an e-mail from Brad Stager, Program Director of the WUSF Radio Reading Service, who let me know that the station's audio slide show about the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading is now live. Brad had interviewed me when I was at the festival on Saturday.



I come in near the end of the two-minute segment. For a couple of days the show is accessible from the station's home page at http://www.wusf.org/. It's also accessible here.

[end of entry]

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and from Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The Deviations page has additional details.

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From Panel to St. Petersburg

Taken at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading:
Left: My messenger bag from Cafe Press holds copies of Covenant along with brochures, flyers, postcards, and business cards. My choice of color for the bag was between yellow, yellow, and yellow, so TripStone looks a little jaundiced. On the other hand, it's a great color for visibility.
Center: Poster, courtesy of the Festival of Reading.
Right: Tote, courtesy of C-SPAN's Book TV, which features interviews with authors of nonfiction books.

The complete Festival set can be viewed here.

Before the Festival, there was the Panel....

NaNoWriMo Kickoff Panel, Citrus County Library on Friday, October 26


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Belea, Loretta, and I had a great panel at the NaNoWriMo kickoff. We make a very good team because (with some overlap) we write in different genres, use different processes, and mesh energies beautifully. We had enough material to take up the time if our audience was slow to chime in, but our audience was full of questions and the community room was filled almost to capacity. The event was scheduled to go from 10 AM to noon, but we went easily for another half hour.

We've got two more library events and a tentative third one that we're planning to do together. Many thanks to Director Flossie Benton Rogers and her staff for spearheading this kickoff!

St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Saturday, October 27

After breakfast at the bakery and a quick hop to the post office to mail my thank-you card to the library I was on my way, listening to Weekend Edition Saturday until I lost my signal somewhere around New Port Richey. During the broadcast -- I think in an ad for All Things Considered -- I heard a snippet from an interview with Chaz Palminteri, who said (as closely paraphrased as I can remember), "It's not a question of knocking on the right door at the right time. You have to knock on all the doors."

I probably passed that quote along about half a dozen times at the Festival.





Above: Bus from C-SPAN's Book TV.

Most of the drive down was a straight shot on U.S. Highway 19, which pretty much parallels the Gulf of Mexico coastline. The sky was overcast throughout, with occasional episodes of drizzle or a steady light rain.

South of Hernando County US19 becomes more natural only because Nature abhors a vacuum. Three lanes travel in each direction, separated by a grassy median. The area to either side of the road resembles a strip mall, if you had a strip mall over 50 miles long. The speed limit ranges from 45 to 55 mph, but the stoplights every few minutes keep traffic from reaching takeoff velocity. In any lane, any space greater than a car length begs to be filled, with extra points awarded for avoiding the use of turn signals altogether.





By the time I got off 19 my legs needed a good stretch. I stopped to get my bearings and study my directions, because little turns remained and I'd have to pay close attention to street signs in a place I'd never been before. On a residential road with little traffic and a slow speed limit I pulled into a small parking lot, got out of the car, and did the kind of stretches I've done before and after my runs -- bending at the waist with my heel on the bumper, that sort of thing.

That got me an audience, which in this case was about half a dozen people opening their doors in the single-level, strip apartment complex I'd pulled into. I called out greetings, explained where I was from (about 85 miles away at that point) and where I was going, and said that I was stretching and would be off their property in about five minutes. One of the residents was a retired trucker, so he knew what I was doing and why. We all shared a friendly little chat about local accidents and then I was off again.

A short time later I pulled into the University of South Florida parking garage and joined the festival (held on the USF campus), wearing my fanny pack, camera, and messenger bag-o-books, brochures, postcards, flyers, and business cards -- and entered into Schmooz Mode. And I realized that, holy cow, I do take after my mother! I've got my father's Hermit genes and my mother's Schmooz genes. No wonder I get confused when they duke it out.





For the next five hours or so I flitted from booth to booth, showing off Covenant, handing out my materials, learning what other people at the festival were doing and getting their materials, and networking on the fly. Near the end of the day I was interviewed and photographed by someone from the university radio station, who will e-mail me if any of it goes online.







Above: The performer on the Storytelling stage is George Aldrich, "The Original Singing Pirate," joined by a few friends.

I'd passed up all the greasy food at the festival, but two sodas and a hot fudge sundae didn't quite make a meal. After I finished all my little turns and got back onto US19 -- by which time the traffic had ramped up to full throttle -- I pulled into a McDonald's for a quite good broiled chicken Caesar salad and coffee. I must be getting used to this promotional gig, because I sat at a table beneath an attention-getting metal wall sculpture and placed my messenger bag such that its imprinted cover faced out into the aisle.

One of the cool things about that bag is that when people ask me my name I can point to the imprint, which is easier to read than my cover-imprinted but gear strap-covered T-shirt. Then I ask them if they like science fiction. That happened during a conversation I had with a couple at McDonald's (they like science fiction) while we discussed subjects ranging from food to sports and beyond, including the sport of negotiating US19. They lived five miles away and pointed me to as-yet-little-developed Tarpon Springs with its beautiful and still-free nature park less than ten miles up the road. But by this time it was getting dark and I had to get home.

They wished me a safe drive.
I said, "You, too!"
"It's only five miles for us."
"Yeah," I said, "but look at the road you'll be on."



Above: Tampa Bay, seen from the USF campus.

Before I left for the festival I'd told Mary that I expected to be back some time between 8 and 9 PM. I pulled into the driveway around 8:10.

But the night wasn't over yet. There was the Moth on the Sun.



The "sun" is a globe-shaped hanging lamp in our kitchen. Originally the moth was hanging out on the garage ceiling, near the power assembly for the automatic door.



I'm guessing this is a Small Mocis moth. Mary eventually caught it in an empty coffee can. I escorted it outside and set it free.

Next up: Citrus County Festival of the Arts, where I'll have Covenant on display at the Art Center booth. I can't sell any books there, but I can give out promotional literature.

Mom would be proud.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and from Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The Deviations page has additional details.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Artistry

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Over the past week, Mary and I have been treated to artistry of the natural and the human kind. Yesterday we spotted this rainbow over the "post office pond" and its reflection in the water. This is a composite of two shots.

Last week I received this extraordinary birthday present made by my childhood friend, Elana:


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I told Elana that her telepathy was in good working order, because down at Necronomicon I was admiring Tracy Akers's sales table. (I've started reading her excellent Young Adult fantasy, The Fire And The Light -- more on Tracy and her series is here.) Tracy displayed her books on a beautiful, Celtic-style spread. Now that dealer tables are in my future, especially with Covenant being the first in a series, I decided I wanted something for my own display.

The "telepathy" shouldn't be surprising. Elana and I have known each other for more than 35 years. We were joined at the hip as kids, so much so that our teachers and even our parents sometimes called us by each other's name. The way we played together as adolescents was by sitting side by side and writing, then sharing our stories with each other -- which makes this gift particularly special.

Nature had more in store for Mary and me during yesterday's walk....


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Mary found this snail shell on the road as we walked home, not long before we'd passed a lantana bush being enjoyed by a Long-tailed Skipper and a Polkadot Wasp Moth:


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The Long-tailed Skipper (Urbanus proteus, Family Hesperiidae) ranges from Connecticut to Florida, west to California, south to Mexico. It is rare in the Northwest and extreme West. Caterpillars feed on wild beans, mesquite, wisteria, cultivated beans, and a variety of other leguminous plants.

Skippers have the characteristics of both butterflies and moths. According to our Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, they are called skippers due to their "rapid, direct, and bouncing flight."


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Syntomeida epilais, Family Arctiidae. The immature form of the Polkadot Wasp Moth is the oleander caterpillar.

The Moon was rising as we made our way home. Here, it's about 93 percent of full.



An impressive cloudscape was also building. By the time I found a fairly unobstructed view, a dragonfly had joined us, and can be seen as the black speck against the small, shadowy cloud below and to the right of the Moon.


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I also caught a bit of drama outside the supermarket, though I didn't realize just what I had photographed until after I had downloaded the shot. Originally I had seen only a cute little (and I presume young) lizard high up on the wall. Mary and I couldn't figure out why its head was turned so severely.



It was watching a spider make short work of a moth.

Yesterday my e-mail included this flyer:



More legible in the large view. My bio and photo join those of fellow panelists Belea Keeney and Loretta Rogers.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and from Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The Deviations page has additional details.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Thank You, Poe House Books!

The setting: A cozy house with many rooms packed floor to ceiling with books of myriad topics and vintage. Woodgrain tables. Overstuffed chairs. Wonderful hosts who made sure we were comfortable and happy and had enough coffee and baked goods. New and returning customers. Spirited conversations. Authors gathered around tables to talk about writing and publishing as we sold and autographed our works at Poe House Books's author event on October 20, 2007.

I was one of four authors in our room. Among us we represented erotica, horror, mystery, poetry, romance, science fiction, suspense, western, and probably more, though that's as much as I remember right now. Our table had three titles for sale -- Tom Ault's poetry collection The Needed Ones; the anthology Florida Horror, which contains Belea Keeney's story, "The Tale of Trapper Tommy;" and my science fiction/anthropological fiction novel Covenant. We were joined by Loretta Rogers, whose historical western The Twisted Trail is forthcoming from Avalon Books in April 2008.

Thanks to owner Kathleen Ballo for a terrific day! Read on for more details....


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Thanks to Claire Phillips Laxton of the Citrus County Chronicle for this publicity. I have just a couple of corrections on the part about me. The phrase "mystery deviations" is inaccurate -- Deviations is the title of my science fiction series. "A Voice in the Wilderness and Other Places" is not a book, but is the title of my voice-over demo. Finally, I no longer have Hamilton as part of my name, although I published poetry and short fiction under that name in the early 1980s.

I was the first to arrive.







Soon Belea (second from left) joined me, then Tom (far left), and then Loretta (third from left).



I've been critique buddies with all three of these fine people, and Tom's been in my free-writing group since its inception. Belea, Loretta, and I will be co-panelists at the Citrus County Library's November Novelists kickoff on Friday, October 26.



We had a great time connecting with readers, sharing shop talk at our table, and meeting authors who had set up in the other rooms at Poe House. On this same day, the Citrus Springs Memorial Library held its Celebrate Poetry! event, to which I referred people interested in poetry.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and from Barnes and Noble. The Deviations page has additional details.

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Blog Action Day: The Environment

Monday, October 15, is Blog Action Day, in which bloggers are encouraged to write for that day on a single topic. This year the topic is "the environment." You can learn more about the event here.

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"Are you walking a marathon?"

The woman at the table next to us in our local Subway posed the question a few days ago. Mary and I figured it had partly to do with Mary's T-shirt for the J.P. Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, a 3.5-mile run in which both of us had participated back in 2002.

Maybe it had to do with us looking as though we had walked. Which we had....

Our "post office walk" is roughly two miles round trip. The no-frills version takes us from home to our local post office and back, but sometimes (we explained) we take an extra jog to the water tower and/or what we call the "post office pond" several blocks away. The pond is a favorite hangout of frogs, dragonflies, ibises, egrets, and other cool creatures.


Male Halloween Pennant dragonfly

Sometimes we just take an extra jog anywhere. It's about six miles from home to the local Quizno's and back, four miles round-trip for the library.


Mary carts trash and recyclables that she's picked up by the side of the road during a walk to Quizno's. A major town thoroughfare is to her left; the woods are to her right.

"Why is she walking? Doesn't she have a car?"

A friend, to whom someone had asked that question several years ago after seeing me, replied, "She's from the north. They walk up there."


The trail around Horn Pond in Woburn, Massachusetts

My biggest adjustment after moving to Florida wasn't the heat, as I'd expected it to be. It wasn't the humidity, or the bugs, or the palm trees, or even the occasional Confederate flag display. It was having to drive to get places. I grew up on the New York subway and continued my love affair with public transportation when my allegiance changed to the metro Boston "T". I didn't get a driver's license until I was 31.


Avenue N subway station on the F train line (BMT) in Brooklyn, NY -- my home stop when I was growing up.


JFK-UMass "T" stop on the Red line in Dorchester, MA -- my home stop before I moved to Florida.

There's no subway where I live. No bus system. There is a county transport van for those in need. Some brave souls bicycle on the county roads, but that's a scary proposition -- and I say that as one who's bicycled through Boston and environs. The "environs" stretch across much of Massachusetts, into New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and down to my home town.


This map hung on my office wall. The red lines mark where I bicycled in 1995 on my 1983 Univega touring bike, which has a heavy steel frame and handlebars that I changed to non-aerodynamic uprights. I bicycled around 3,500 miles that year.

The long line snaking down through Connecticut and off the bottom left of the map represents the first Boston-New York AIDS Ride (261 miles in 3 days, minus a gap of 19 miles when the organizers had to close the route between the 4th rest stop and our camp outside Bridgeport, CT, due to bad weather). The line tracing the hook of Cape Cod represents my longest one-day ride (so far) of 137 miles. The line extending into New Hampshire and off the top of the map represents my first century ride, which totaled 131 miles.

My most difficult ride is represented by the red line extending in an almost straight horizontal line into the middle of Massachusetts. From my July 9, 1995, journal entry:

"Yesterday we made it to Barre, just before the Quabbin Reservoir. This was a hard one -- beginning in Princeton, we climbed a shoulder of Mt. Wachusett, and the first climb was a long, steady uphill. By the time we did another steady but shorter climb my quads were burning lactic acid; on more than one occasion I was about ready to get off and walk.The last .2 mi on Rt 62 into Barre was an incredibly steep climb -- the only one, David said, where he habitually uses his “granny gear.” I don’t have a “granny gear” -- after the first minute of climbing I dismounted and walked the final hill. My lowest gear is something like 5 gears higher than the one David was using, and by this time my quads were shot. I told myself: Why suffer? Besides, we’d be taking another 50+ mi to get home, on a 114-mi round trip."


I stand before bicycles on the night before the start of the first Boston-New York AIDS Ride in September 1995. I was one of thousands of riders.

When I have to, I rely on my car, which is 17 years old and has 26,076 miles on it at the time of this writing. It didn't pass into my hands until five years ago, when its mileage was around 11,000. At age 44 I became a motor vehicle owner for the first time.

I've learned to love my sweat. Walking is great exercise, it doesn't burn fossil fuels, and it creates its own wind chill when the heat index (and sometimes actual temperature) is in the triple digits. During hot summer days I wear a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses. I carry water and a face cloth. Paradoxically, I sweat more when I step into an air-conditioned building because I've stopped walking and no longer create my own breeze.



(Not that much breeze.)

Walking is ecologically friendly in other ways. One literally stops to smell the roses. Or, more likely down here, the jasmine.


Star Jasmine flower

This time of year I call out greetings to Gulf Fritillary butterflies in addition to my human neighbors. Saddlebag dragonflies hover overhead.


Gulf Fritillary butterfly

The walks increase my awareness of whom I share this corner of the planet with. Instead of the isolation of enclosure in a steel or fiberglass frame, I experience a communion with the natural world.


Scoliid Wasp. I estimate that the abdomen alone on this wasp is at least an inch long. Thanks to Tom Bentley at Bugguide.Net for the ID.

Walking means you're not alone.


155 White Ibises plus 1 Cattle Egret

Unless you want to be.


Carson Beach, Dorchester Bay, Massachusetts. The walk from home to Castle Island and back measured 7-1/2 miles. During low tide, like that shown here, I walked up and down the beach gathering sea-worn glass, broken bits of crockery, and other discards that I recycled into mixed-media art -- like that shown here.

My newly-published science fiction/anthropological fiction novel deals with problems arising from extinctions (you can read more about it here). In addition to the environmental sensibilities I've picked up on my walks, I've also learned from my work in the environmental research area at Abt Associates Inc. and from transcribing shows for the environmental radio program Living On Earth.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and from Barnes and Noble. The Deviations page has additional details.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.