Curmudgeon's Lair

The book came in just over 50k. It's the same length that most genre titles were published at back when I first started going to bookstores.

I am currently working on Blood Lies, book nine in the series and hope to have it finished by August. The rough draft is sitting at just slightly over 30k words and I suspect that it will be longer than Blood Hope. there are two more books in the series after Lies is finished.

I know that a lot of you are waiting for this. It has been over a year since I wrote another Dark Brothers of the Light novel. Well, fear not, I'm getting very close to finished. Despite tossing out a great portion of my previous draft, Blood Hope is getting close to finished.

42,821 / 75,000 (57.1%)

Dane Jayce, who some of you met in the Sacred King novels and in the first books of the Dark Brothers series, returns, bringing revelations about the origins of the demon-eaters, the true nature of Isranon's opponent, Gylorean Galee, and the locations of secret laboratories that survived the previous godwar.

Kady's Vengeance is out at Fictionwise and when I looked this morning was #13.

Publisher's Blurb:

Kady Maguire made her husband a promise. If anything happened to him she would flee to their allies in Creeya and not return without an army. When a treacherous assault by Malthus Estrobian leaves Kynyr crippled and close to death, Kady keeps her promise. Now heads are going to roll, as Kady places Kynyr's legendary grandfather, Todd Sinclair, in command of her forces. Cooley Blackwood steps into his father's shoes and goes in search of Stoneriver who is leading an army into Red Wolf to provide reinforcements for Kady. Malthus' ally, Belgair Doherty has rallied the Thanes of Red Wolf to place Malthus' son on the throne. Yet, neither Kady nor Malthus are prepared to handle the situation when the ancient vampire Lord Hoon arrives.



The Shadowed Princes has been turned into the editor with everything fixed.

One of my critters has still not forgiven me for one of the turns in the plot.

I sent the first draft of Blood Hope, the next book in the Dark Brothers of the Light series to my editor, Steven Beeho. While I'm waiting for his feedback, I am working on the first book in a new series that I plan to show around to agents. "Sins of Innocence" is the first novel in "The Child Profane and Sacrosanct" series.

okay, i sell well, but apparently I'm a washed up has-been. Have a look at the flamewar in progress over at Rusty Nail and this thread there also.

Enjoy the curmudgeonry.

With the Lycan Blood series completed, I have begun to get myself sorted out on two projects.

The first is the anthology, Things Are Not What They Seem. I need to go through the submissions I have already accepted and make certain that contracts went out on all of them. I'm thinking that the best way to approach that is to create a new folder and sort the copies of the contracts into it. The second is to make certain that I still have copies of everything from when I started it originally. Some of this will mean comparing what I have to what Natalie has and making some lists of it.

Once that is finished, I will place all the stories I have received recently into a new folder and start reading them and getting in touch with people.

The second project is Blood Hope, the next book in the Dark Brothers of the Light series. I am hoping that I can finish the series this year. At this point I estimate that, including Blood Hope, there are only three books left to complete.

First, I am doing a read through of what I have written already. Making a list of what needed to be done helped me a lot with the final book in the Lycan Blood series. It kept me focused. So i intend to do that with what I have so far on Hope.

On a rant note, if I should ever sell the DB series to a print company, I intend to put my original titles back on the books. I really dislike my publisher's insistence upon two words titles that start with the word 'blood.'

Next complaint, is that I really hate the first line of the blurb for Kady's Vengeance. Maybe I'm being vain, but I think the blurbs that i write and send Jean are better than the ones she writes herself. And nine times out of ten, when she does use the one I write, she adds something to them that makes me wince.

The final volume of the Lycan Blood series is now complete in first draft. The Shadowed Princes came in at just over 70k words. By the time i smooth it all out, I expect that it will be somewhere between 90 and 100k words long.

Over the next few weeks, I will be concentrating on my anthologies, and getting contracts and payments out to people. Acceptances and so forth. I feel very good about it.

I am weary and very satisfied by the way the novel tumbled out. I wrote the final two chapters in a blaze of inspiration, feeling driven to keep going until I was too tired to think each day. But it's finished.

Once i wrap up the anthology, I will be back to finish the final volumes of the Dark Brothers series.

CritGit said recently that the Lycan Blood books read like westerns. He hit the nail on the head.

The playlist I assembled for writing them included the soundtrack to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Additionally
The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton
Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean
The Ballad of Ira Hayes
Sink the Bismark by Johnny Horton
Jim Bridger by Johnny Horton
Ghostriders in the Sky by Johnny Cash
The Highwayman by Johnny Cash
The Gambler by Willie Nelson

How could ME (medieval) girl and modern girl have differed?

ME girl knew everything that she needed to know to run a household by the time that she was fourteen. She could cook, sew, weave, manage finances, cook, and knew how to deal with children because she had been caring for her siblings. Modern girl does not. My great grandmother could do everything that she needed to when she married at fourteen in the late 19th century. they were raised to be wives and nothing more. Modern girl is raised to have a job or even a career.

As far as sex went, ME girl frequently slept in the same room as her parents and siblings and knew the fundamentals of sex from her earliest memories. Modern girl does not.

Although Modern Girl's hormones awaken to the same extent as ME girl's, she is not prepared to deal with the complexities of relationships, child-rearing, and running a household. ME girl was frequently illiterate. Modern girl starts learning to read at five or younger.

One of the best arguments for the artificially prolonged childhoods in the western world, is simply that our societies are far more complex and it takes far longer to learn the things that are necessary for modern life.

For many reasons, Modern Girl and ME Girl are not the same even when they are the same age.

More to come.

I have recently been subjected to false accusations of being in favor of pedophilia. I expected that because I felt certain that some people would misunderstand the nature of my posts on the subject of Age of Consent. In those posts I made no value judgments whatsoever, neither pro nor con.

There are some solid arguments for the prolonged childhood that is encouraged in the Western World, especially America, and I intend to eventually go into them. The most important thing to note is that our cultural values might not be someone else's.

Madame du Pompadour saw one of her royal bastards married off at twelve. Marriages in France of that period were governed by the influence of the Catholic Church. This made divorce nearly impossible to get. The reasons for child brides among the nobility was to secure an alliance between houses. In those cases, the marriage was more of a promissory note. Until consummation occurred, the marriage could be set aside and annulled. Once consummation occurred, divorce became impossible. The twelve year old girl was wed to a seventeen year old boy and went to live with him and his family. Pompadour tried to persuade her daughter to consummate the marriage as soon as possible so that it could not be annulled if a better offer became available to the boy's family. However, the family wisely waited until the girl was fourteen before allowing for consummation to occur.

In the cases of child marriage within the western world, consummation could not occur until the girl got her menses. For me that would have been 10 years old. A modern American ten-year-old girl is not equivalent to a ten-year-old girl in the middle ages or even in the 19th century when my great grandmother married at fourteen. How can a ten year old girl from one period in time differ from another? You would be astonished. But we will get to that. But keep in mind that you cannot judge the past by the present.

At that time, very few people ever made it to forty, much less what we consider to be old age nowadays. Accident, disease, war, and hard living accounted for a large number of lives each year and not even the nobility were immune.

<a href='http://marriage.about.com/od/arrangedmarriages/Arranged_Marriages.htm">A good set of definitions</a> At one time children, especially daughters were little more than property. They were raised to be obedient in ways that are anathema today.

My Dark Brothers of the Light series is now available at amazon.com as part of their Kindle books line.

And GUD Magazine is now available at Fictionwise and they listed me in the byline.

What we have here today is a mixed bag. Part rant and part update.

The Zokutou word meter is back up. They disabled it just before the start of Nanorimo because use had skyrocketed and was crashing their system.

I'm not as savvy about computers as I was ten years ago. I've fallen out of the loop with many things and that is one of them. Zokutou put the code up for do it yourselfers, but i was just not knowledgeable enough to use it. Now that it's back up, here's the status for Kady's Vengeance. The Exile Returns ended on a cliff-hanger, so I can understand the impatience to get it going again. With luck (and hard work) the novel should be out the first week of January.

81,289 / 75,000 (108.4%)

So long as it does not go over 100,000 words, Jean will not start pressuring me to break it up. I could lie about the length, but my publisher reads my blogs.

And now the rant. As DragonSlayer is fond of saying about me "Cover your ears, the lizard is about to rant."

Rant One:

A never ending source of amusement for me is the stupidity of the members of the Axhole of Imbecile. Dungstain posted over at Rusty Nail that I had angered Philbin. He seemed to mean it as a threat. Philbin posted on his blog, taking many things out of context that I had said (that appears to be the standard operating procedure of a lot of folks, not just the Axholes) and then bragged that I'm giving him great PR.

As I stated before, controversy does not sell books. My readership would never purchase a book called Bukkakeworld. They are looking for another type of writing completely. As for those who hate me and read this blog, all of them hate Philbin more. So he's really not getting any place.

My rants are thoughtful and considering, while his are filled with empty vitriol.

The problems lie not with Philbin, Pacione, and Dagstine, but with a certain type of mentality that is finding less and less acceptance on the internet. There is (as I am certain many of you are aware) a netiquette movement among websites, messageboards, and blogs. When I first encountered it several years ago, I was irritated because I felt that it violated my freedom of speech. However, as time passed and i saw how toxic the net had become, I began to reconsider it. Vitriol for the sake of vitriol serves no purpose in the general sphere of positive interaction. It should never be allowed to become commonplace.

It has long been held that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But what happens when that squeaky wheel is abusive? I am certain that you have all encountered folks who attempt to destroy a conversation by abusive language, derision, and nastiness rather than have a quiet discussion of the pros and cons of something on a messageboard. More and more messageboards are becoming aware that the problem needs to be nipped in the bud before it ruins a board for the majority of those who go there.

i post a lot at sfreader because even when the topic of a thread becomes heated, the folks there stay within bounds and no one descends into abusive patterns to take cheap shots at folks. Another nice place is Spinetinglers. Both of them are good boards. The admin at Silverthought intervened and squashed abusive posting there. It needs to be that way. Reducing the toxic level at boards makes it more friendly.

There are always places to post one's ire. I prefer to do it on my blogs. But I also try (and hopefully succeed) at finding a postive angle for my complaints.

Rant Two;

How the hell do I stop the telemarketers from calling? It used to be that real people were on the other end and when the answering machine picked up they went away. Now it is all being done by computer and last night the calls filled up my answering machine with computerized pitches for everything from Viagra to new car loans. I was sound asleep when I was awakened by one of them. Annoyed, I sprang out of bed and jerked the connections to the phone loose. I reconnected the phone a couple of hours ago and deleted all the messages. However, it was an aggravation that i could have done without.

Kady's Vengeance is currently sitting at 79k words. There are a few scenes in the middle that need to be expanded and the last four chapters still need work, but it's getting closer and closer. I believe that it will go to the critters before the end of the month.

I just read about the bruhaha involving whether or not Hillary Clinton left a tip at maid-rite. Well, the response by the waitress in question is fabulous and I wish more people were as pragmatic as she is. American politics are rife with pettiness and an obsession with the trivial.

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.” New York Times

There's no must have on my brain getting lost and not seeing that I was actually trying to force more than one story beneath a single set of covers.

Starting in late 2004, I became a slush reader for a literary agency. That effectively doubled my workload. By the end of 2005 I was so burnt out that I was starting to make a lot of mistakes.

Here's a classic one I made that will illustrate my point. I was given a manuscript to read by a big name author. The agent, knowing that I had been an editor in my heyday, wanted an opinion on it and I gave it. I assured her that I found nothing wrong with it. It was well written.

Then she asked me a second time if I had failed to spot errors.

Well, the problem was glaring at me, but I was too exhausted and burnt out for it to register.

The author had used eyeballs instead of stars to indicate scene changes.

When 06 dawned, I left the agency and started trimming my workload. The money was not worth killing myself over. But being a workaholic, instead of getting more rest, I kept working. I put all that effort into my own writing, but the burn out and exhaustion were haunting me in ways that I never expected and could not recognize even with them glaring at me like those eyeballs.

When my computer started to die in late 06, I kept buying parts for it in a vain attempt to fix it. In the end it turned out to be the memory on the motherboard. The computer must have overheated at some time, and damaged the onboard video memory. As the computer died, i was less and less able to write on things or keep in touch with people. the last thing to go was my IMs. I had friends posting my blog entries for me to keep them going. I had to write longhand or not at all and I spent months with a recurring cold/flu that would get a bit better and then turn about and bite me on the arse again.

It all boiled down to an enforced rest I would not have taken. During that period of enforced inactivity, my head cleared up and I saw what i had done.

Like those eyeballs, they were glaring at me. I had not one series, but four squeezed into the pages of what was supposed to be a single series.

So I hope that people will bear with me while I correct my mistakes and eat my serving of humble pie.

Seeing something naked shows up the flaws. We all fuck up.

when I hit Blood Paladin in the Dark Brothers of the Light series, my brain must have started to get lost in left field. I added a thread, sub-plot about a sa'necari infiltrator going after Isranon's son.

that was not in the original rough draft I did four years ago. It was the first time that I had veered away from the original to that degree. I thought i would tie everything up in a few volumes and that would be that. It is also why most print publishers want a detailed outline for a series before they buy it. To avoid creative brain farts like that one.

I also was not realizing that I could do more than one series at the same time and have them dove tail together. That knowledge came to me in the course of lengthy conversations with people who had read my work. Their feedback has helped me continue to grow as a writer.

Had I stayed in fiction, instead of rushing over into a fifteen year stay in Journalism, I would probably have known that already. But that's water under the bridge.

It was when I started work on Blood harvest that i really started to become aware that what i was doing was way off base. the tale of isranon became more and more lost amongst the tales of the sub plots, especially the lycan one and the tale of Lukasz.

I kept obsessively trying to fit them together by alternating chapters precisely. But then my publisher's determination to have the books stay under a certain length made it harder and harder as the books became more and more crowded with excess plots and stories.

When I finally ripped them all apart last year at this time, and realized what i really had, i started to see the holes in everything. The emperor was naked.

If all the chapters that took place among the lycans were stipped out of Blood Paladin, arcane, and harvest, what would I have? Well, when i looked at it I saw i had a novel and the protagonist was Malthus.

At this point, you might wonder how I managed to write a book about a villain. I have absolutely no clue as to how or why I did that. The muse is mightier than the writer and the writer is blind to her depredations.

Any way, I pondered while I was waiting for my January royalties to get here and I was constrained to write out the next book in long hand. A new character had popped into my mind: Kynyr maguire.

Suddenly malthus had an opponent and i liked him a lot.

At first I agonized over the entire 'lost prince' concept and then I accepted that i had to work with it. it simply felt right. It helped that i was driving poor Debbie Moorhouse, author of Sundown, crazy and she kept telling me to have more confidence in what I was doing and that I was beginning to sound depressed. I listened and listened and listened, and then I went back to the beginning and wrote Kynyr into the book from the get go.

Now, I was going to start the lycan series with the murder of Caimbeul. However, when I showed the initial draft to another critter, Lilac, she pointed out to me that she was completely lost and asked if I would please start at the beginning. So I started Serpent's Quest with the entrance of Malthus into Red Wolf. She said that was better and she was no longer confused.

My advice to readers at this point is to skip the lycan sections of the Dark Brothers novels. I have redone the material in the lycan books.

The Angrim thread and the Lukasz thread are also being broken out into their own expanded volumes. I intend to go more deeply into what is happening in Angrim and Beltria. I am going to show more of Stefan and how he hid the Oracle of Badonth and why he put the clues for lukasz to find in the hidden room. Readers will encounter the Hermit of Jasmine Falls early on.

I have written about this before at my xanga blog, but that has not always been accessible to non-xangans.

I started off writing the lycan sequence as a side story in the Dark Brothers of the Light Series. The two storylines were intended to merge at a certain point. Problems developed when I added the side story of Lukasz and then a third one arrived. In Blood Harvest, the main thread about Isranon had become lost and it shows that the book is flawed.

Around the time that Blood Harvest came out, my computer started dying. I tried to fix it to no avail. It was old and the parts were obsolete. Problems with it continued for months until it finally died and I was without while waiting for my royalties.

During that time I became more aware of the problems caused by the side threads. I broke them out of the Dark Brothers novels. At first I thought I could just pick up with them at the point they ended in DB. However, I had two new critters at the time and the consensus opinion was that it would be nearly impossible to understand what was happening unless I started at the beginning.

So I ripped all the chapters out of Dark Brothers and looked at them.

Just before the the computer died, I printed out all the sections I had torn from the books and had them in front of me.

Writers can be blind creatures, myself especially.

Once the chapters of each thread were seen in isolation from the rest of the tales, I realized that I had written them about Malthus. Writing a book about the villian rather than the heroes is not something I was willing to do.

Since it was not completely cast in stone, I took the chapters and refashioned a new story around them. In the beginning, Kynyr showed up later in the DB books. but seeing it all isolated, I realized that he needed to appear much earlier. I started putting him in and in the course of it, he stole the books.

the chapters taken from Dark Brothers stop appearing in the fourth book. Most of the material is new. The last sequence from Dark Brothers to appear in the Lycan Blood series is the scene where Malthus plots to kill Caimbeul. The addition of the Kynyr and Kady storyline required me to alter most of the sequences from the earlier version. If I ever have the opportunity to do a new edition of the lycan novels, I have a huge list of things I want to add and even scenes I took out that I would like to add back.

As to the repeated descriptions, some of them I just happen to like a lot. Others are inadvertant. I keep a file of descriptions so that i won't make a mistake and describe something wrong, such a a character having black hair in one book and the next he is a blonde. I'm trying to alter them more. they have become a kind of stock footage.

It's now day ten of chantix. According to the documents, I was supposed to stop completely after the seventh day, but i talked to some others about it when i found that I could not quite do that. Here's what has been going on.

The first four days I was still smoking like a chimney and going through two packs a day. But by the sixth day I had noted a difference, I simply forgot to smoke. When I did smoke I was disinterested and rarely smoked my way completely through a small cigar (I smoke mainly Swisher Sweets little cigars). Day five I had smoked only half a pack and it took me two more days to finish that pack off, which put me to day seven and still smoking.

Yesterday I smoked two, just two, cigars. It was not a matter of will power, as I had given myself permission to fail if the entire process became too hard to take. I simply had no interest or desire to smoke. This morning I took two puffs from a cigar and put it out. I simply did not want it.

I'm very impressed with chantix.

I picked up my prescription for chantix today. I took my first tablet. From what I have read, Chantix has a 44% success rate and that's better than any other 'stop smoking' aids.

For the first week, I continue smoking normally while taking the meds. At the end of seven days, i stop smoking. It is supposed to reduce your desire and craving for it. they also have a support group online, however, I hate support groups. So I'm going to skip that aspect of it.

Originally, I planned to do two more books in the lycan series, Kady's Vengeance and Shadow's Prince. Then I changed my mind because it looked like I could get it all into a single volume. WRONG. I'm back to making it two books. It hit 75k and finished was not in sight.

Back to my first plan.

Because I'm doing the ebooks, I can pretty much do as i like with them. If I ever manage to get into print editions, I'm going to miss that freedom.

I've been going through a sick spell again and have been extremely tired for the past three days. However, I have written a tiny bit on Kady's Vengeance.

58,539 / 75,000 (78.1%)

This is the primary draft. Once I have gone all the way through it to the end, I will toss it at the CritGit to read for flaws. We found a way to turn one chapter around that I was having trouble with. I don't normally like to show unfinished material at anyone. I also rarely let anyone read an early draft. I am insecure about my early drafts and they are usually changed a great deal before they go to my initial readers.

One of the biggest challenges on doing a series is that after awhile it becomes difficult to see what is really there because you have covered it so many times. Until CritGit had a look at my novel Kynyr's War, I had not realized how much information had been left out of it. For instance I had not described what many of the characters looked like. Nor had I explained what the sa'necari were and how they function. I had done that in the earlier books, but now my head had programmed itself in such a way that I perceived it as being there and it was not.

First readers, especially highly perceptive ones like CritGit are invaluable.