In The Cosmos, And At Home

I received this flyer earlier today from Sean Miller, co-editor of the upcoming Scriblerus Press anthology Riffing on Strings. I'm one of the contributors. Félix Sorondo is the artist. More information about the anthology is at http://scriblerus.net. See the large view for more detail.

Scriblerus Press has some cool promotions planned for next June and July, including a "virtual book tour." Stay tuned!



The photo above was inspired by the Flickr Moleskinerie group discussion, "Show us your desk or writing space with a photo," begun by writinglife. I took this picture right after reading the discussion thread, which appears on the computer screen.

Today marks one of the few instances where I have both my journal notebook and my computer open on my desk for purposes of writing rather than transcribing notes. Usually I write in my notebook on top of a closed computer, or I'm journal-writing in another room or outside the house.

My journal notes here are ruminations on Book #6 of my series, in progress.

The red translucent travel mug (I've since topped off the coffee) was a gift from the Citrus County Library from when Belea Keeney, Loretta Rogers, and I were panelists talking about craft at the library's NaNoWriMo kickoff event.

The sheet of paper directly to the right of my notebook contains Mary's instructions on how to find Comet Holmes. We're including the instructions in an e-mail to her family.

The rest is assorted clutter that keeps getting inexplicably magnetized to my desk.

[end of entry]

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and also can be ordered from AbeBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and Target. The Deviations page has additional details.

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

By Jove, Holmes!

No, Doctor Watson, Holmes isn't by Jove. It's in Perseus!

Mary and I were outside from about 1:15 to 2:45 this morning, being dazzled. And my camera was reminding me that it was limited to a 4-second max exposure and wouldn't give me a focus on anything.

Temperature was in the 50s F. The sky was crystal clear, enough for us to see the Milky Way. And:

Mars (which is stunningly bright to the naked eye right now);

The Orion Nebula (a little fuzz when seen by the naked eye, gorgeous even in our low-end but excellent Astroscan);

The Andromeda Galaxy (again visible to the naked eye as a little fuzz, and a very pretty oblong fuzz in the telescope);

Two meteors, one of which left a trail that must have taken at least a second to fade;

Stars everywhere, of course (including the Pleiades, one of the prettiest clusters around); and

Comet Holmes, just about the most ethereal thing I've ever laid eyes on.

So that's stars, a planet, a nebula, a galaxy, meteors, and a comet, after the Moon had set.

Wednesday's St. Petersburg Times contained a small item about comet 17P/Holmes. That sent me to Sky and Telescope online, which has this article about a comet that has suddenly brightened, enough to be visible to the naked eye if you know where to look.

I knew Holmes was in Perseus. Mary found it first on all three counts -- naked eye, binoculars, and telescope. Seen with the naked eye, Holmes was a dim little fuzz.

Then I looked at it through the binoculars and said, "Oh. My. God."

This image by Bryan Lashley is almost identical to what I saw.

Shortly before 3 AM we finally came back inside and shared some celebratory hot cocoa before bed.

[end of entry]

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and also can be ordered from AbeBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and Target. The Deviations page has additional details.

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

Edible Lava Lamp and Other Curiosities

Edible Lava Lamp



Our local Winn-Dixie no longer sells the quart-sized bottles of Texas Pete hot sauce, so I've turned instead to WD's home brand, Thrifty Maid. Its bottles aren't quart-sized, but for now they seem the most economical choice in the neighborhood.

One difference between Texas Pete and Thrifty Maid is in their suspension qualities. The Thrifty Maid needs to be shaken.

Here Mary has emptied the last drops of an old bottle into a new one, and the unsettled addition has formed a plume.

More curiosities ahead....

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer. No, the Other Way!

Thanks to Colleen at Loose Leaf Notes for her reference to the dancer below:



This Right Brain vs. Left Brain Test comes courtesy of Australia's Herald Sun -- click on the link for the full text. Says the article: "If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa. Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it."

Mary and I were having all sorts of fun with this. At first I watched the dancer passively, where she began by turning in a clockwise direction and then switched to counter-clockwise, then back to clockwise. By de-focusing I could eventually instigate a switch in direction. In Mary's case, the dancer began by turning in a counterclockwise direction, but Mary got her to switch back and forth before she'd even completed a rotation.

Candle Holder in the Wind (keeping to the Elton John theme here)



This candle holder sat on the ground next to a dumpster yesterday. I retrieved it and sent our community theater an e-mail with these photos and the specs: 6 inches high and 8 inches at its broadest point across. It felt like iron and I estimate it weighed 1-2 pounds.

This morning I heard back from one of our directors, who wrote, "This looks like something I could use in my upcoming play. Thanks for finding and rescuing it."

The candle holder goes to its new home on Thursday.

How Green Was My Cockroach



This critter really brings home the fact that cockroaches and praying mantises are in the same Order (Dictyoptera). I'm pretty sure it's a Green Banana Cockroach (Panchlora nivea, Family Blaberidae, also called a Cuban Cockroach because it's native to Cuba), but it's got a decidedly mantid-like head. Mary wondered at first if it was a kind of katydid, but the body type looked wrong for that. The body type looked roach to me. The head looked mantid.

The two main ways it differed from the usual roach I encounter was: (a) it was green, and (b) it was slow, as roaches go. On my ick scale, that made it almost likeable. (For more on my roach philosophy, see "A Night With Max.")

Then I discovered on Bugguide.Net that people buy these things -- for $25 a dozen, to be exact ("popular as a pet ... due to its bright green color and because it is not an invasive indoor species"). I captured mine and freed it in the hedge before my V-8 moment: I could'a made $2.08 plus shipping & handling!

Theoretically, that is, according to this price list.

Right now, locally, I'm selling copies of Covenant at the same, special pre-release discount that Aisling is offering. I figured out that minus sales tax and what I paid for the books at author discount, that leaves me with a pre-income-tax profit of $2.39 per book, not counting royalties or tax on the royalties or associated business deductions (truly, we're talking Klein Bottle Economics here).

***Raises fist in triumph***
My book generates more income than the roach!
WHOOOOOOOOOOO!
***Wipes brow, calms down***

As you were.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and also can be ordered from AbeBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and Target. The Deviations page has additional details.

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

Point-Counterpoint

I originally created this image (using MS Paint and MS Photo Editor) for Flickr's Manipulate This! group. To Hashim A's "Mehndi III" I've added my "Handprint."

After the fact, I realized that the following entry would probably fit the "Left & Right" prompt for this week's Sunday Scribblings...

I've got two major "courtroom drama type" scenes planned for Book #6 and am about to embark on the first one. Before the actual drafting begins, I've been doing my version of outlining, which here consists of constructing a "To Do" list of everything I want that scene to accomplish. I've got:

1. The two Big Issues of the book, which together form the underlying main conflict because they are intimately related and they polarize the characters. They form the heart of the "courtroom" debates. One in particular will drive this first debate.

2. The motives of everyone in the room, as seen through the eyes of the POV (point of view) character for that chapter. That's where the Big Issues become personal, so that I'm not left with a bunch of talking heads. Among the characters in attendance, two are leads, two are strong minor characters, and the remaining four are my equivalent of a Greek chorus, there to provide world-building information and to underscore the motives.

One character is trying to rewrite history and would like nothing better than to kill the one whose worldview threatens her legacy. Two (including the POV character, whose loyalties are divided) are trying to change a paradigm. Two, who right now possess differing opinions, will become lovers when one goes to the other for refuge.

The risks: species extinction and environmental destruction, about which the principles are in disagreement in the big picture; and tragedy and trauma versus triumph on the personal end.

This book is a challenge to write on several levels. Translating the political into the personal means I'm whittling the Big Issues down to the gut level, to lend the characters emotional authenticity. I have to get into their hearts so that I know what drives them. Since this is the sixth book in the series, their histories and hearts now possess established precedents from which I can draw. The narrative voices belong to the younger and now adult generation, which lets them provide some recap from a different perspective.

This is also a first-person-narrative book in an otherwise third-person-narrative series, which means I must treat the voices themselves in a different way than before. I must tighten my focus on each. Each voice possesses its unique style of speaking and of perception, so it's a case of not only what information the character gives, but of how he or she gives it. That was true in the third person, but it's even more pronounced in the first person.

My visual analogy (subject to interpretive debate, I'm sure) would be Seurat versus Warhol. Seurat's "third-person" painting presents different characters and objects, each with its individual style but all presented within a pointillistic context: a single underlying and overarching visual narrative:


Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884

In contrast, Warhol repeats his portrait of Marilyn Monroe using different and individual color combinations. "First-person" perspectives on the same subject relate to each other but possess their own microcosms of visual rules:


Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967

(Both images come from Sweet Briar College student Maria Lacy Kitchin's paper, "Art and Expression," art history senior seminar, Spring 2004.)

Trust me, I didn't set out to write a story and go, "Let's see how hard I can make this on myself!" This is what my Muse is demanding of me right now. Sometimes she just leads me by the hand through a magical wood and all I have to do is type away and go Oooooh! Some of the chapters are like that, thank goodness: straightforward and simple and a helluva fun ride. But right now my Muse is a drill sergeant: You say you've never done chin-ups before? Well, start training, bucko!

Oof.

So I scribble in my journal, working on the scene's foundation and on ways to translate ideas into dialogue and emotion, using the available props and planting little seeds of foreshadowing. On a canvas, this would be called the underpainting. If I do my job right, my overlying colors will stand out and won't turn my picture into mud.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and also can be ordered from AbeBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and Target. The Deviations page has additional details.

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

Festival and Covenant News

The Art Center of Citrus County booth at the Festival of the Arts in Inverness, November 3-4, 2007.

I've still got a long way to go, but three overflowing trash bins later the studio now has a significant chunk of visible floor and I can actually see some desk. We won't discuss the need to catch up on filing. In the meantime, I've finally finished drafting and have submitted the short story I'd begun during the summer and have also added new material to Book #6....

I have never before done so much research for a piece of short fiction -- my notes top 9,000 words for a story under 6,000, and only a small percentage of those notes actually made it into the draft. But that's all worth it if it adds believability to the tale and especially if the story makes the cut for the anthology that inspired the idea in the first place. Mary's technical term for this is "armwave-armwave."

The anthology deadline isn't until February, but that story's been nagging at me to get it out the door. That makes eight prose pieces off to market (four fiction, four nonfiction) and two poems, with more waiting in the wings for me to do something with them.

Before my critique group meeting, I talked with Bill Bissell of Rainy Day Editions, a terrific bookstore in downtown Inverness (Citrus County, FL). He said something that at first seemed counterintuitive to me and that I'd heard nowhere else, but that made sense as I thought about it. He said, "The best thing that can happen to me is if a Waldenbooks opens up across the street."

I was used to thinking of the chain stores as threats to independent booksellers and asked him to explain.

"We're not competitors," he said. He added that the chain stores attract customers, who then go to the nearby independent store to see if (a) they can find the same book for less, and (b) they can find books the chain store no longer keeps on its shelves. This can prove especially profitable with expensive coffee table books that are in vogue one year and are old news the next.

Coexistence! That made me grin. I compared the relationship to that of one bicyclist being able to draft off another, though that's not an exact analogy.

Two days later I was volunteering at the festival, and followed up some associated heavy lifting with an evening of dancing. I got a good workout that Sunday.

Our booth at the festival held costumes and props from the Art Center's theater department; drawings, paintings, and photographs from various visual arts groups; and books (including mine) from writer members. We had on hand our general brochure, fall class schedule, and the theater's show season brochure.



Too small to see in any detail here is one of my favorite pieces in the display. It's a drawing of an occipital bone made by Stacey Griffis, our visual arts VP, who took a course in anatomical drawing while a pre-med student. Her textures and shading are exquisite. I'd seen her perform on stage (she's wonderful), but I wasn't familiar with her art until now.

The Art Center renovations are now complete. On Thursday we held our first post-renovation membership meeting and artist demo in the "new" place:


Large view

Vicki Pritchard was our demonstrator, in both portrait painting and copying the Old Masters. Her art has been exhibited at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, the Jacksonville Museum of Arts and Sciences, and the Ted Williams Museum in St. Petersburg, and her designs have been used by various churches for stained glass windows. At the request of her local Congressman, she displayed work on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

I had a chance to sit in on part of her fascinating talk before my free-writing meeting began. Vicki has taught Old Masters material in prisons, with detailed instructions on technique that can range over 40 pages. They're not only amazing blueprints, they're great philosophical treatises.

In the meantime, Covenant is listed on the Science Fiction Poetry Association's "SFPA member books" site (generously provided by Malcolm Deeley) and its cover is up on the New Covey Awards site for November as entry #27.

The New Covey Awards are monthly awards given to both the best new book covers and the best book trailers. Anyone can visit the Covey Awards site and vote, but no matter what the outcome the site provides a month of free publicity to authors, which is the whole intent of the exercise. Covers are voted on in two categories, most eye-catching and most relevant -- which means that synopses are presented along with the artwork. The site showcases a very neat collection of different genres and artistic styles. Thanks to Bruce Boston (whose cover for his novel The Guardener's Tale is also posted for November) for informing me of this venue.

October's winner for "most eye-catching" is Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc's horror sinisteria novel Left To The Night Alone. Andrea's table was next to mine at Necronomicon -- she's also an Aisling Press author -- and Mary and I enjoyed meeting and speaking with her.

Thursday's mail brought two journals. My art is on the cover of the September/October 2007 Star*Line:



Star*Line is the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. The montage combines one of my moon shots, a snail on my front walk, the Atlantic Ocean surf photographed during a visit to Daytona Beach, and much-manipulated constellation shots. I edited Star*Line from 1986-1988.

On the SFPA's Speculative Poetry News page, I'm the one behind the camera in the Necronomicon photos from October.

And my article has appeared in Wagner Magazine, which with this issue has revived its old title, having formerly been The Link:


More legible in the large view.

In addition to my English minor, I graduated Wagner with English honors. To attain English honors, a student had to submit either a collection of poetry, a collection of short fiction, a novel, or a play. I submitted all four. I also edited three of the school's publications, including its literary magazine, Nimbus.

I learned yesterday that TriggerStreet.com is now accepting short stories and novels. Up until recently, TriggerStreet was accepting only short films and screenplays. Since then, they've added plays and now short stories and books to their site.

From their e-mail to me:
"Since its inception, TriggerStreet.com has been the place to go if you wanted to find exposure and feedback for your Screenplays and Short Films online. Now, in addition to being able to upload your Short Stories to the site, a section we launched earlier this year, you can now also upload Books that you have written."

Normally a member must submit a couple of reviews of others' work before submitting their own, but there is currently a "free" period (meaning no previous review is needed) for short story and book uploads.

Creative Commons has a post that pretty much encapsulates what TriggerStreet is about, at
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4419.

I haven't used the TriggerStreet site, myself, but I became interested in it after seeing Kevin Spacey (who founded it) interviewed on the Charlie Rose PBS show a while back.

Deviations: Covenant can be pre-ordered from Aisling Press and also can be ordered from AbeBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and Target. The Deviations page has additional details.

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