Perun and the limits of Google Translate.

I've mentioned that I'm taking a couple of classes during this year's legislative session, just to keep things, y'know, interesting. One of them is on Cernunnos, the Celtic god of the forest, animals and the hunt (among other things); His most famous image is found on the Gundestrup Cauldron, which was unearthed from a peat bog in Denmark in 1891. Despite the cauldron having been found in the Balkans, experts say it's of Celtic origin. Here's Cernunnos on the cauldron: 

Stolen from https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/the-gundestrup-ghosts-hidden-images-in-the-gundestrup-cauldron/

I grew up in the woods, but I have never had a strong affinity with Cernunnos. Still, the class has been worth taking; it's always good to learn new things. And it may have led me to something else.

While watching the final class video, for some reason I began thinking about Perun, the Slavic god of thunder. Perun has some attributes in common with Thor -- they're both red haired and they both wield a hammer and lightning bolts -- but Perun has a bigger role in the Slavic pantheon than Thor does in the Norse, as Perun has been billed as the supreme god of the Slavs. Now, feel free to take that with a grain of salt. As usual, the chroniclers were Christian, and so they were predisposed to view polytheist pantheons through the lens of "there's gotta be One Big God because that's how it works for us". So maybe Perun is the main dude, but maybe he's coequal with Veles, the Slavic god of the underworld and the animals and is sometimes depicted in the guise of a dragon. He and Perun have an epic fight in the skies at the end of winter every year, complete with thunder and lightning, and Veles is always defeated, and then it's spring.

Anyway, Perun played a part in Dragon's Web, the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy series, so I included Him in A Billion Gods and Goddesses, the companion book to the Pipe Woman universe's mythology. And in that book, I mentioned that I'd found among my mother's things a little songbook that had been produced, I'm assuming in the 1930s or '40s, by a Czech printer in Cicero, Illinois, and in that songbook was a song that I believed called on Perun to fight against Hitler and free Czechoslovakia. When that memory came up, I was sitting at my desk; I opened my desk drawer, and there it was.

Here's a photo of the song I was thinking of. The verse numbered 2, toward the bottom of the page, is the one that mentions Hitler and Perun: 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

My Czech is extremely rusty and was never great to start with. So I figured I'd plug the verse into Google Translate, right? So I did, and...hmm. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Wait a minute. Perun would be thrown into hell? They're equating the top Slavic god with Hitler? I mean, the Czechs had been Christianized for a long time by then (nowadays the country is largely atheist), but man, I dunno.

I sure hope someone who knows more Czech than me reads this. I was sure that Czech-Americans were asking for Perun's help in defeating Hitler -- and given that success, and what we're up against in Washington right now, I was all set to petition Perun for some help for our side.

I asked Mama Google about any connections between Perun and the Czechs in World War II, and I did find a publication that mentions a branch of the Czech intelligence, "responsible for sabotage and subversive operations", that was codenamed Perun. It's kind of sad that the Czechs made their mightiest god go undercover to beat Hitler. But at least He did fight against Hitler -- or anyway, some Czech operatives fought against the Germans in His name.

And it beats the fate of Lugh, the Irish god of light -- the guy who could do anything -- who in later years was turned into a leprechaun.

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These moments of questionable bloggy translations have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!

The Payoff: Justice.

So here we are at week two of the big lead-up to the publication of The Payoff. Our target release date is Friday, April 30 -- less than two weeks from now. I do intend to put the book up for pre-order. I'll send out a newsletter as soon as it's available. (You say you're not on the list? I can fix that! Click here to sign up!) 

So what's this book about? Here you go:

Janis Fowler and Jan Marek grew up together, the only two students at the Institute, a research facility and school for children with paranormal abilities. Or so their parents were told. In reality, the Institute’s director, Dr. Denise Tandy, had her own plans for their talents – Janis can read a person’s past and Jan can see a person’s future – and when the kids resisted her, she was ruthless at getting them to comply.

At last, Janis and Jan escaped – and split up, knowing it was the only way to protect both themselves and each other. But they knew they would reunite someday, when they time was right. 

Forty years later, the time has come. Their old tormentor has turned up again. Her game is the same, but her newest ruse is more dangerous than ever. And she’s recruiting more victims.

Jan and Janis must use their powers to put an end to Dr. Tandy’s vile scheming – without risking each other. It’s a tall order for two people who have been hiding in plain sight for four decades. But with age comes wisdom. And they have waited long enough to see justice served.

As I said last week, justice is one of the three big themes of this book. The obvious association here is with punishment for criminal -- or at least unethical -- behavior. I don't want to venture into spoiler territory here, but Dr. Tandy deserves whatever Janis and Jan can dish up for her.

But it's not just punishment they're after. Janis's creed is that choices have consequences. She can read an individual's past. She knows the situations they have been in, and the choices they have made in those situations. For her and Jan, the future isn't predestined; rather, it's predictable, given the human propensity to do the same thing we did in a previous, similar situation, even if we didn't particularly like the result last time. Dr. Tandy has so far escaped any consequences for the way she treated Jan and Janis when they were children, and our heroes think it's high time she pay.

The usual symbol for justice is a set of scales, often held by a woman who also carries a sword. She is the Roman goddess Justitia, and her Greek antecedent is the goddess Themis. These days, Lady Justice also wears a blindfold, but that's a modern addition.

S. Hermann & F. Richter | Pixabay | CC0

In A Billion Gods and Goddesses, I talked about the pleasant fiction that the statue atop the U.S. Capitol represents freedom, when anyone with half a brain can see that she is Columbia, the goddess of the United States. It turns out Columbia isn't the only goddess in D.C.; Lady Justice is at home in the Supreme Court Building, and unlike Congress, the high court freely admits it. No fewer than three images of Lady Justice grace the place: as part of a statue at the entrance, on the base of a lamp post, and in a frieze in the courtroom itself.

Her scales represent balance, which was our theme last week; her sword shows she is ready to mete out punishment; and the blindfold indicates her intention to be fair. Rich or poor, weak or powerful, all are supposed to be equal before the law. The key there is "supposed to be"; fairness, like justice, is an ideal we strive for, and often we don't hit the mark. And sometimes justice is slow in coming. That's where our final theme -- patience -- comes in. I'll tackle that next week.

***

In the meantime, I'm set to receive my vaccine booster on Tuesday (go Team Moderna!). I got a sore arm from the first shot. From everything I've heard, the second dose packs more of a wallop -- but better that than a ventilator. Or a permanent dirt nap.

***

These moments of judicious blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who will be masking up and maintaining social distancing, even after she's fully vaccinated. You too, okay?

Games night.

I hear there's some kind of sportsball thing happening tonight. Which means some of y'all will soon be really happy, some will be angry and/or sad, and some will be too stuffed from the buffet to care.

Then there's the contingent who suffer through the game just to watch the halftime show. From what I'm seeing in my Facebook feed, those folks are already regretting their life choices tonight.

Well, fear not! I have here a thing that everyone can win.

Do you guys like word searches? I loved them as a kid. I was already good at spelling, and it turned out I was also good at spotting letter combinations in word search puzzles. You wouldn't think that would be a useful life skill -- but then I became an editor.

Anyway, below you will find a word search puzzle. The word list consists of the names of some of the deities in the Pipe Woman Chronicles universe, as lifted from the table of contents of A Billion Gods and Goddesses, 2nd Ed.

I used an online word search generator for this puzzle, and I haven't tried it myself yet. The words can go in any direction -- up, down, across, forward and backward, and diagonally. The generator wouldn't take a word that was more than 15 characters, so White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman has been shortened to "goddess," which is what Naomi calls her most of the time anyway.

Also, the graphic is a .png converted from a pdf. I hope it's clear enough. If not, Adobe owes me fifteen bucks.

Enjoy!

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These moments of bloggy fun and games have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Stitching memories.

You may recall that I was out of town a couple of weeks ago. One of the things I did was to stop by the house where I grew up, and pick up my mother's old sewing machine.

Here it is, ensconced temporarily in my daughter Amy's room. It's a Kenmore Imperial, model number 117.591, manufactured by the White Sewing Machine Company (which also manufactured sewing machines under its own brand) and sold by Sears only in 1942. Which means my mother bought it when she was single; she and my father didn't get married until 1947.

These machines were all steel, and they were workhorses. I found this video where a guy demonstrates a restored one. He got it to sew through four layers of khaki, and even two layers of garment leather. Mom never would have tried sewing leather on this machine, but I'm pretty sure she sewed vinyl upholstery material on it at least once. It doesn't do zigzag or any other fancy stitches, but it can make buttonholes with a massive contraption that you hook up in place of the presser foot.

It's in the original cabinet, and I had never realized how small that cabinet was because Mom always had the leaves folded out like this. The cabinet is only about 32 inches wide when closed. To close it up, you drop the sewing machine on its hinges and then fold the tabletop extensions in. It looks like a small desk, and I suppose you could use it as one if you didn't want your sewing machine on display all the time.

The machine has no foot pedal. Instead, there's a switch that you control with your knee. Another unusual thing about it is that the hand wheel -- which on this machine is the bulbous extension on the left -- turns the opposite way from most machines. So instead of pulling it toward you to start stitching, you push it away from you.

I have a lot of fond memories of this machine. My mother sewed most of her own clothes and mine, too, and I would often stand next to her while she worked. I don't think I learned how to sew on her machine -- I'm pretty sure I learned in home economics in junior high -- but I made my share of stuff on it before Mom bought me a sewing machine of my own. She continued to sew for herself as she got older, but she suffered from dementia in her later years and eventually gave everything up. After she died, I was the kid who sorted through all of her stuff, and I held it together pretty well until I saw cobwebs on this sewing machine. To me, that was the true measure of how far she had slipped away, even before her death. The machine would never have been still long enough to gather cobwebs in the old days.

Anyway, it's here now. I'm tempted to have someone restore it, even though I don't really have a place for it and I rarely sew anything anymore. I'll let you know what I decide to do.

***
Three bits of news:

1. The second edition of  A Billion Gods and Goddesses is out! You can get a free copy at Smashwords with coupon code NA58R. The coupon expires Sunday, September 11th, so don't wait too long to use it.
2. I'm honored to have been featured on The Heroine's Journey today. The organizer, Peter de Kuster, has featured more than 125,000 professionals in his Hero's Journey and Heroine's Journey project to date.
3. Yesterday, I was live on Facebook! The opportunity to be the guinea pig for the Authors Live! group popped up midweek, so I didn't have a chance to blog about it until now. Here's the video, in case you missed it. (I hope the link works. Technology: It's here to help us...) Enjoy, and I'll see you next week.

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

Time flies when you're having fun.

I am grateful to Facebook today. The first thing I saw in my newsfeed this morning was a reminder that five years ago -- on August 21, 2011 -- I notified all of my friends that SwanSong would shortly be available for purchase at Smashwords. 

Just like that, I became an indie author.

I don't think I've ever mentioned this here before, but publishing a novel had been on my bucket list since my twenties. Well, okay, we didn't call them "bucket lists" then; that wasn't until that movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman came out in '07. But the concept of making a list of lifetime goals has been around forever.

Here's the list I made back then, as near as I can remember it, and very likely not in order: 

• Get married and have kids.
• Make $20,000 a year.
• Travel to all 50 states.
• Visit Ireland.
• Visit Czechoslovakia (yes, it was still Czechoslovakia when I was in my twenties).
• Write a novel and get it published.
• Lose twenty pounds.

There may have been a couple more, probably relating to getting out of the city I was living in at the time, but that should give you the gist of it. 

It's kind of fun to look back on, now that I've nailed all of the items on that list. Of course, the marriage didn't stick and the pounds didn't stay off (and brought friends when they came back...), and my salary goal seems ridiculously tiny now (and it ought to give you an indication of how much I was making back then).

But this put me in mind of another goal. Not long after I started this indie author thing, I told myself I would publish three novels a year. So far, I've kept to that schedule -- and when I add in the omnibus editions and short-story collections, as well as all the anthologies I've been a part of over the past few years, my publishing schedule looks crazy: thirty-three titles in five years. And 2016 isn't over yet. I've spent this weekend updating A Billion Gods and Goddesses; the new version should be out later this week. (I'll send out a newsletter when it's live.)

I've learned a lot over the past five years, and there are some things I don't yet have the hang of. Sounds like it's time for me to make a new bucket list -- and here's hoping I'm as successful at completing it as I've been at nailing the old one.

***

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

Happy Independence Day! The turtle has been released.

Ikluft | Wikimedia Commons | CC 3.0

It was crunch time for most of last week at La Casa Cantwell, but we burned the midnight oil (and threw in a few other cliches for good measure) and managed to get Turtle's Weir out the door, as promised, on Thursday.

The paperback edition is still in process -- which is to say that I uploaded the file to CreateSpace this morning -- but it, too, will be along in due course. 

Thanks to those of you who have already picked up a copy of the e-book. You're all my new best friends. To the rest of you: it's only 99 cents through tomorrow. After that, the price goes up to $2.99. So you know what to do now, right?

Finishing this book is allowing me to clear the decks for some other projects. Today, I worked on pulling together an anthology of short stories. Most of them first appeared in the Five59 anthologies, but I'm also including a couple of flash fiction pieces from the weekly contests at Indies Unlimited, and a horror story from another anthology. This is the first time I've created an anthology of my own short stories since I put the three Land, Sea, Sky prequels into one volume, and I discovered I had a fairly large backlog. The working title for this new book is Back Home Again, and I expect it will be available within the next couple of weeks.

Once that's done, I'll turn to updating A Billion Gods and Goddesses. It appears Webb and his friends have only added four new deities to our existing motley collection, so the update won't take too long. I should have it done by the end of the summer. (By the way, my offer still stands: If you bought a copy of the first edition of the gods guide and you'd like the update, email me and I'll send you a copy for free.)

And then there will be an omnibus version of all four of the Pipe Woman's Legacy books. I'll be releasing that near the holidays.

After that? I dunno yet. I usually write something new in the fall for release in November; I expect I'll do that again this year. Maybe I'll start a brand-new series. Yeah. I like the sound of that...

***

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

NaNoWriMo recipes for success.

Yes, folks, it's November 1st, and you know what that means: It's NaNo time!

For those just joining us, November is National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. NaNo. This thing has morphed into a pretty good-sized event, with thousands of writers around the world taking part. The idea is to write 50,000 words in 30 days -- 1,667 words per day. Fifty thousand words is a novella -- or a really good start on a longer novel.

Now, just because you've spewed 50K words on a virtual page by the end of November, it doesn't mean you can upload it to Amazon immediately. Well, you can, but it's not a good idea. It's a much better idea to consider your NaNo work a first draft -- or, as some writers call it, a zero draft. Let it sit for a few weeks (at least!) -- until January, say -- and then dive into it and start hacking it to pieces. Eventually, with a number of rounds of editing, you'll have something you can be proud to publish.

But the thing is, you can't edit a book until you have a draft. That's the real value of NaNo -- it gives you a reason to write the first (or zero) draft in the first place.

I didn't do NaNo last year, although I did Camp NaNo in the spring, and I've done several of both over the past few years. The last couple of times I did NaNo, I thought I could beat the system by ignoring my book all week, and then writing like mad on weekends. The flaw in that plan, I discovered, is that people want to do stuff with you on weekends, and it made me cranky when I couldn't get my writing time in. So this month, I'm going to try pacing myself a bit better, by aiming for 1,667 words on as many days as I can and writing ahead when I can. I know already that writing ahead will be necessary, as I've managed to schedule myself out of town for not one, but two long weekends this month -- and the first one is next weekend, when I'll be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY. (I'm participating in the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading Thursday afternoon at 3:00 pm -- if you'll be at the convention, join us!)

Keeping yourself well fed is another thing to consider during NaNo. Novelists do not live by caffeine and junk food alone -- or they shouldn't, anyway -- and cooking from scratch doesn't really take that long. No, really. Stir-fries are ridiculously quick. Here's a basic recipe that I made for dinner tonight, in fact.

• 1 cup of uncooked rice (brown or white - your choice)
• 2 cups of water
• 1 lb. protein of your choice (beef, chicken, whatever - you could even use tofu, but I've never done it)
• 1 bag of vaguely Asian-style frozen vegetables (I used Trader Joe's Harvest Hodgepodge)
• Ginger-garlic sauce (see below)

First, put your rice and water a 3-quart pot. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let it simmer for however long the rice bag says. If you have a rice cooker, it's even easier: plug in the cooker, put rice and water in the pot, and hit the start button.

Now, mix up your sauce. I use a half cup of water, about 1/2 tablespoon of cornstarch, 2-4 Chinese restaurant packets of soy sauce (so maybe a tablespoon?), and about 1/2 teaspoon of powdered ginger and granulated garlic. Stir it up in a one-cup glass measuring cup, then taste to see if you need more spices. Once you're happy with the taste, set it aside.

Go write while the rice cooks.

Cut your protein into 1-inch cubes (a little bigger or smaller doesn't matter). Spray the bottom of a wok or large frying pan with cooking spray. Dump in your protein cubes and saute (that means cook over high heat while stirring them around) until the sides are browned, which will take a couple of minutes. Dump in the frozen veggies and saute the whole mess for about a minute. Stir your sauce again, and pour it over the protein and veggies in the pan. Once it's bubbling, let it cook for another minute or so, until the sauce thickens. Serve the stir-fry over the rice. Makes about four servings. 

Now you've had a good dinner (with leftovers for later in the week) and you even got some writing in. Nice job! Now go write some more!

***

In other news, A Billion Gods and Goddesses dropped this week at Amazon and Smashwords, and the paperback is out, too. I've been gratified by the response so far; in fact, the book even made it onto Amazon's Hot New Release list in a couple of categories. Thanks very much! You're all my new best friends.

There appears to be a snafu with Smashwords' distribution system to other retailers -- so if you're interested in the epub version, you might want to buy it at Smashwords and sideload it to your device. Let me know if you need directions on sideloading.

***

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

Killing one's darlings, book cover edition.

Book covers have been on my mind lately. It's mostly because I'm getting ready to publish A Billion Gods and Goddesses, but also because other indie authors are also readying their fall releases and looking for feedback on the drafts of their covers in various Facebook groups.

Despite what you've heard about stuff that's been designed by a committee, soliciting opinions on cover design can be a useful exercise. I'm no artist (I'm still pretty proud of that C I got in art class in eighth grade), but now that I've been doing this indie-author gig for a few years, I'm getting better at seeing problems in my draft designs. 

Even so, I like to run my ideas past others before I pull the trigger. Moreover, I think it's a good idea for everybody. Other authors will see flaws that you've completely overlooked. The biggest problems usually surface when the image is reduced to thumbnail size, or the size you see on Amazon. Oftentimes, particularly with newbie authors, one or more important elements of the cover will fade into obscurity when reduced to thumbnail size. Like the title. Or the author's name. Or people will pick a boring font for their cover, instead of one that says something about the genre and what's going on in the story. 

Anyway. Sometimes you can get it all right and design a kickass cover that gets everybody's seal of approval, and still the book doesn't sell.

Which brings me to the Land, Sea, Sky books. When I started to envision the cover for Crosswind, I decided I wanted to differentiate this new trilogy from the five Pipe Woman Chronicles books. So I stepped away from the glowy-animal concept that I'd used for the first series, and went for something more realistic. Crosswind got a wind turbine silhouetted against an ominous orange sky; Undertow got a bridge under a roiling cloud bank; and Scorched Earth got a menacing seedling growing in the parking lot of a bombed-out apartment building. Each cover said something important about the plot of that book.

Unfortunately, sales have not been great, and I've known for a while that I need to swap out those covers with new ones -- especially after I went back to the glowy animals for the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology. And with the god guide's imminent release, I knew it was time to make all the books look like they're part of a whole -- because they are.

Now there are authors who will change their covers at the drop of a hat, like they're rearranging the living room furniture or something. But I've been digging in my heels partly because wrestling with GIMP is not at the top of my list of things to do for fun, and partly because I really like the old covers. The one for Undertow, especially.

Anyway, enough whining from me. Here are the new covers for the Land, Sea, Sky books. (Bonus points if you can tell me why there's now a cat on the cover of Scorched Earth. Anyone? Bueller?)

You should be seeing these live at Amazon and Smashwords tomorrow, and at other retailers within the next few days. 

I'll probably be designing a new cover for the Land, Sea, Sky box set pretty soon -- even though I really like that cover, too.

***

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

In praise (more or less) of trying new things.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I've been working on a companion guide to the Pipe Woman Chronicles, so that folks who aren't up-to-speed with all the gods and goddesses in the series can have one place to look them all up. I'm happy to report that A Billion Gods and Goddesses is now in the capable hands of my editing team, and I'm aiming for release sometime at the end of this month.

No, really. I'm very happy to report that. Pulling this thing together was nothing like writing the novels themselves.

The writing styles are different, of course. With fiction, you just put your fingers to the keyboard and start typing, and with any luck, a story comes tumbling out. There are stops and starts, of course, and digressions, and blind alleys, and characters who creep up behind you and bash you over the head so they can run away with the story. But you don't have to stick to the facts if you don't want to. The characters' emotional reactions have to ring true, yes, but you can pretty much make up everything else.

I think most of you know that I was a journalist in my younger days. Journalism (ideally) deals in facts and only facts. Even when you're writing about someone's emotional reaction to an event, your best bet is to stick to a dispassionate reporting style. Plus the factual details are right there in front of you, or at least fresh in your mind.

Writing the god guide was like neither of these -- and like both of them, a little -- and also like writing a 20,000-word thesis. Except more entertaining than a thesis. At least, it had better be. I'm certainly not using academic prose, and mythology is fun.

The thing is that I did the research for the earliest books in the series three-plus years ago. And in the god guide, I'm reporting on mythology, if you will, rather than using the myths as a springboard for my own creative interpretation, as I did in the novels. So I didn't just have to review my sources -- I had to keep checking the details as I wrote, to make sure I wasn't going too far afield (as well as to make sure I wasn't unconsciously plagiarizing a source when retelling a myth).

In the end, though, it was a good exercise. Authors sometimes talk about the differences in writing short stories vs. novels vs. screenwriting vs. poetry. Each of these types of writing stretches different muscles. Journalism stretches yet another type of writing muscle. And a book like A Billion Gods and Goddesses is an exercise of yet another sort.

Many years ago, when I worked for WKEE Radio in Huntington, WV, one of my co-workers was Toria Tolley, who eventually went to work for CNN Headline News. She made the jump from radio into TV with an anchor job in Charleston, WV. A few weeks after she made the move, I asked her how it was going -- and she said, "Now I can go work in a bank."

That's kind of how I feel about the god guide. It was an interesting project to take on, and it was a good excuse to stretch those non-fiction-writing muscles. But now I can go back to writing novels.

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