Sunday, June 30, 2019

"That ceiling, though": Treacherous Ground is live.

I wanted you guys to be the first to know: the ebook edition of Treacherous Ground, the second book in the Elemental Keys series, is live on Amazon as of right now. And yes, that's Collum, Raney's favorite gnome, on the cover.

For this book, the action has moved to Ireland. Our Elemental superheroes -- Raney, Collum, Rufus and Gail -- are helping to return some of Collum's dead brother's things to his parents, who live in County Kilkenny. But they're also trying to beat Raney's father, Damien Jones, to... uh, a magical thing. I don't want to give away any big plot points, so let's just say the thing Damien is looking for is not what the team members think it is.

Anyway, Ireland is an amazing place, and I am stoked because I get to tell readers all about the cool stuff I saw when I was there three years ago. Well, not all the cool stuff I saw. That would take more than a blog post, or a book, even. It would certainly take more than a novel, because you've got to work in some kind of plot or else it would be a travelogue.

I did, as it happens, blog about the trip, but that post only highlights one small portion of it. One of the things I left out was my visit to Kilkenny Castle, so in Treacherous Ground, I let Raney and the gang take a tour. And one of the coolest things about the castle -- other than, you know, it's a castle -- is the portrait gallery. Here's Raney's description, but sometimes words don't do a thing justice, so I'm including a photo, too.

***

Portraits aren’t really my thing, but it turned out the paintings weren’t the main draw. Gail and Rufus were standing in the center of the room, craning their necks to look up. So I did, too – and was gobsmacked again. The whole ceiling – rafters, braces, and walls – was painted with beautiful designs, including Celtic knotwork, and the ends of the cross-beams were capped with gargoyles. It was as if someone had taken the illustrations in an illuminated manuscript and transferred them to the ceiling.

I managed to do the polite thing and give a little attention to all the old Butlers hanging on the walls. That ceiling, though.

***

Gobsmacked, she was. So was I. And when I was there in 2016, I snapped a photo of the informational sign at the door to the gallery:


If you're ever in Kilkenny, I recommend the castle tour -- as well as a stop at the Kilkenny Design Centre across the street, where you can find lots of Irish souvenirs, including yarn. Not that I would have bought any yarn in Ireland.

Anyway, Treacherous Ground is available now -- and in the nick of time, too, as Camp NaNoWriMo starts again tomorrow and I was planning to draft Book 3 then. I'll get a late start on that, as I still need to format the paperback edition of the second book. I can catch up over Fourth of July weekend, though, right?

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These moments of gobsmacked blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Sunday, June 23, 2019

When crafting gets political.

b0red | CC0 | Pixabay
Some weeks I'm scraping for a blog post subject, and some weeks I'm spoiled for choice.

Take this week, for example. We're getting close to the release of Treacherous Ground, book 2 in the Elemental Keys series, so I could talk about that again. I could also talk about planning for book 3 (assuming I'd gotten started on it, which I kind of have, but not really).

Or I could talk about an article I read a couple of days ago about the ages at which people begin to experience a performance decline at work. In fact, that's what I intended to write about this week -- but I'll keep the idea in my back pocket for another week or two, because just today, I got a better one.

Alert hearth/myth readers know that among the websites where I'm active, if sporadically, is Ravelry. It's a free website, privately owned, where eight million fiber artists from around the world get together to talk shop. Mostly I'm there to post photos of my completed knitting projects -- partly for the kudos, but mainly so I can keep track of which yarn I used for what so I don't machine wash something that isn't machine washable.

The Ravelry logo, sporting a rainbow flag for Pride Month.
The site includes message boards, and of course people go off-topic. And just like on every social media site, sometimes people start talking politics, and sometimes things get ugly.

Now for those of you who still think knitters and crocheters are all little old ladies who sit in their rocking chairs, sipping tea, while their G-rated work flies off their needles or hooks, let me point you toward the graphic up top. It's a pussy hat. Knitters around the country made thousands of them to protest the election of President Trump. I made several of them myself -- and I found the pattern on Ravelry.

Today Ravelry posted a new policy, effective immediately:
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content...  We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
...
  • You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
  • We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
  • We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
  • We are not banning people for past support.
  • Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
  • Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.
In their announcement, the moderators at Rav reference a similar policy enacted last October by RPG.net, an online gaming community. That site posted a list of Trump-related links supporting their decision. If you need anything more, I'd refer you to the most recent coverage of the way this country is treating migrant children at our southern border: separating them from their parents and putting them into #Trumpcamps where the kids aren't even allowed access to soap or toothbrushes. This isn't a political issue anymore. It's a moral issue.

For anyone complaining that these sorts of policies violate the First Amendment, let me take this opportunity to remind them that the First Amendment protects your right to speak freely without being censored or sanctioned by the government. Private enterprises like Ravelry -- and for that matter, Facebook and Twitter -- are free to set any rules they like.

That is, until their rules allow foreign governments to illegally influence our elections. But that's a whole 'nother topic, and anyway I doubt very much Rav has attracted many Russian bots.

Anyway, kudos to Ravelry for their new policy. And let's make sure the migrant camps become known far and wide as #Trumpcamps. I can't take credit for the term, but I'm happy to do my part to popularize it. After all, he loves seeing his name on stuff.

***
Sorry -- I still don't have a firm release date for Treacherous Ground. Stay tuned.

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These moments of subversive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, June 16, 2019

An Elemental Father's Day.

Annalise Batista | CC0 | Pixabay
In our last exciting post, I promised that this week I'd talk about Treacherous Ground. It's Father's Day here in the US, so I might as well talk about the fathers in the book.

I feel like I haven't said a whole lot about the Elemental Keys series at all, and here we are, nearly ready to shoo the second book out the door. So here's a quick recap.

In Rivers Run we were introduced to the four major characters: Raney Meadows, Collum Barth, Rufus McKay, and Gail Oleander. All of them are half-human and half-magical-Elemental-creature. So Raney is half undine, a Water Elemental; Collum is half gnome, an Earth Elemental; Rufus is half magical salamander, a Fire Elemental; and Gail is half sylph, an Air Elemental. They all meet in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and there they also run into another major character: Damien Jones, a wealthy sociopath who happens to be Raney's father.

Damien would never win a Greatest Dad contest. He had captured Raney's mother and held her prisoner as one of his collection of singular things. When she tried to escape by disappearing into water, he moved her to his home in the desert. But when the monsoons came, someone left a window open and Ondine departed among the raindrops, knowing she was carrying Damien's child and vowing he would never find out.

And then Raney went and blew it by calling him "father" the first time she came face-to-face with him.

The thing is, Damien's been possessed by an ancient evil creature, and this creature intends to destroy the Earth. First it must collect a series of Elemental Keys from where they've been hidden around the world; then it must use them to unlock the door that the Doomsday device is behind. And Raney, Collum, Rufus and Gail are tasked with stopping Damien...while Raney is trying to hide from him.

For all that Raney, as an undine, feels emotions deeply, she doesn't react to her father as a daughter might. She feels him pulling her to him, but she can tell there's no love behind it. And too, he gives off an unmistakable aura of evil. Suffice it to say that he won't be getting a Father's Day card from her, let alone a gift.

There's another father in this saga: Collum's. Part of Niall Barth's job as an Elemental gnome is to guard certain magical places. Right now, he's keeping an eye on one in County Kilkenny, Ireland -- and in decamping for Ireland, Niall left Collum in charge of guard duty in Harpers Ferry. As your typical stoic gnome, Collum is not one to let his feelings show. But Niall's been gone a long time, and Collum has build up plenty of anger and resentment. The Barth family dynamics come to something of a head in Treacherous Ground. Let's just say Niall would be lucky to get a tie from Collum on this Father's Day.

All that, and golems in a bog, too. Treacherous Ground will be a fun ride...

***
I was originally aiming for publication this coming week, but the schedule has been pushed back slightly. I'm now hoping to get it out the door the following week -- June 26th or so.

I do need to publish it soonish, because I've been planning to write Book 3 during Camp NaNo in July. Time's a-wastin'!

I'll have more info on all that next week.

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These moments of fatherly blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, June 9, 2019

Journalism isn't going to save us.

Tama66 | CC0 | Pixabay
Brace yourselves: This post is going to be political.

When the movie All the President's Men came out in 1976, I was in college, majoring in journalism. I admit that I came away a bit starry-eyed about the profession I was aiming for.

In the movie, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose work went a long way toward bringing down President Richard Nixon and his corrupt administration. The movie opens with Redford, as Woodward, sitting through a routine court arraignment -- the sort of thing a young reporter might be relegated to by an editor looking to fill a few column-inches with details of local burglaries. Woodward comes to attention, though, when he realizes the prisoners are charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. And they have ties to the CIA.

Woodward is teamed up with Bernstein, and together they follow the trail to the highest reaches of government. Everything you know about Watergate -- from the Plumbers to Deep Throat to Nixon's resignation -- all of it began in June 1972 with Woodward paying attention at a nothing arraignment of crooks involved in a third-rate burglary attempt. Two years later, Nixon resigned.

As a journalist, Woodward and Bernstein were, if not my idols, then certainly icons I looked up to. Investigative journalism seemed like a noble profession.

Oh, how times have changed. Here we are in 2019, increasingly aware that our current President is a crook. The Mueller Report has detailed ten counts of obstruction of justice against him, and strongly suggests, without coming right out and saying it, that the House of Representatives ought to begin an impeachment investigation.

But where has the press been? Where's our latter-day Woodward and Bernstein?

As it turns out, a lot of what Special Counsel Bob Mueller detailed in his 400-plus-page report had already been in the news. But as the Washington Post's media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, wrote in a column today, journalism is a different business now. In 1972, we had a very small number of national news outlets doing daily journalism: ABC, NBC, CBS, and a few national newspapers, mainly the Post and the New York Times. Cable news hadn't been invented yet, much less talk radio, podcasts, or blogs. If you watched the national news on television, you watched Harry Reasoner, John Chancellor, or Walter Cronkite. There wasn't anybody else.

Fewer choices made it easier to be a news consumer -- and to trust what you were being told. Now, as Sullivan says, we're subjected to "a polluted firehose blast of information mixed with disinformation." Sure, the TV networks sometimes toed the government-issued news line a little too closely back in the day (as one example, a lot of Americans today don't understand that the people who are coming here from Central America are fleeing political unrest that our foreign policy caused). But nowadays, it's hard to figure out who to believe. Especially when the President routinely calls the news media liars and "enemies of the people." (Not to put too fine a point on it, but dictators including Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have used the same phrase to undercut popular trust in news reporters.)

At the local level, newspapers are going under at an unprecedented rate. More than one in five closed up shop between 2004 and 2018, and those that remain often don't have the resources to cover their localities the way they should be covered. Investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are usually among the first to get the ax.

The reasons for these changes are many; it would take a book, if not several, to detail them in-depth. The point is that journalists aren't going to play the same role in bringing down the current corrupt administration as they did during Watergate. Even impeachment looks dicey. Our best hope for justice is probably the ballot box next year.

***
Apologies for the political rant. I'll talk about Treacherous Ground next week -- it's politics-free, I promise.

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These moments of wistful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Book marketing 101: Why not to sell to other authors.

I'm a member of a bunch of indie author groups on Facebook, so I see this a lot: An author puts their book on sale and, with dreams of shooting up Amazon's bestseller list dancing in their head, immediately posts about the sale to every author group on Facebook to which they belong.

But a lot of these groups don't allow marketing posts at all. Or they limit the posts to certain days in threads specifically set aside for that purpose. Groups always, always post their rules -- either in a pinned post at the top of the discussion section, or in the About section, or (ideally) both. And still it happens.

I had to spike a buy-my-book post this weekend in a group where I'm an admin. I was in a good mood, so I tagged the author in a new post and explained what had happened to hers. Her reply was along the lines of: "But it's a free book! We can't post those in here, either?"

Well, no. You're still asking people to buy your book. It just so happens that the current price is $0.

Then it occurred to me that maybe folks don't understand why so many author groups ban buy-my-book posts. I'm sure a lot of folks think it's because the ads would clutter up the discussion, so that eventually, actual discussions would be lost. And yes, that's part of it. But the other part is that marketing to your fellow authors is not going to do your career much good.

What every author dreams of is a huge, dedicated fan base, made up of readers who will buy their newest book as soon as it comes out. Right? Well, the way to find these superfans is not to hit up a group of authors. Yes, authors are all readers (or we should be, which is a topic for another day) -- but we read, and write, in all sorts of genres. My books are mostly urban fantasy. Laurie Boris writes mostly literary fiction. Chris James writes sci-fi thrillers. K.S. Brooks writes both thrillers and children's books. Shawn Inmon writes speculative fiction and memoir. Leland Dirks writes contemporary fiction, often co-writing with his dog Angelo. J.D. Mader writes gritty urban thrillers. All of these folks are kickass writers, by the way, and if you haven't read their stuff, you should. But we'd have a tough go of it if, for example, we traded newsletter mailing lists to try to drum up more readers for our own work. Our fandoms might overlap, but not by a lot.

Even if you do make fans out of a bunch of fellow authors, it won't help you much at Amazon beyond that initial sale. Most indie authors are leery of writing a review for another author because the Zon has a habit of deleting such reviews -- especially if they can figure out the authors know one another. (You can still post a review of a pal's book at Goodreads, as far as I know, but getting involved at Goodreads opens another can of worms. I think a lot of authors are still steering clear of it, lest they say something that enrages somebody and cause their books to be showered with one-star reviews.)

And yes, putting your book on sale for free is still selling your book.

All that said, there are Facebook groups for readers looking for their next good book. Those groups would love to have you post there. There are also a host of websites and newsletters dedicated to book marketing; many of them cost money to advertise on, and some don't work as well as they might. The best way to find out what's working right now is to check out indie author groups on Facebook like 20 Books to 50K. Just don't post a buy-your-book ad there.

And as always, I recommend indiesunlimited.com as the best website for indie authors.

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These moments of bloggy advertising advice have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.