Land, Sea, Sky: the blog posts, vol. 4.

I have three bits of business to get out of the way first:

1. Crosswind is here! It's now available as an e-book at Amazon and Smashwords, and as a paperback through CreateSpace. I expect the Smashwords edition to migrate to Kobo, B&N, and other retailers shortly, if it hasn't already. And I just noticed the paperback is up at Amazon! It should be available from other retailers within the next couple of weeks.

2. I'm making good progress on Undertow, my NaNo novel and the second book in the "Land, Sea, Sky" trilogy. I was at 42,205 when I went to bed last night. That's not quite as far along as I'd like to be right now, but I'm still ahead of the curve, and the last 8K is definitely doable before the 30th. But I tell you what: Doing NaNo in the same month as a book launch has been pretty darned stressful. I'll be glad when November is over -- as long as I win NaNo, that is....

3. Don't forget about the big Master Koda Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion coming up next weekend on Facebook. I'll be hosting on Cyber Monday (December 2nd) from 7pm until 9pm Eastern time, and I've got some fun stuff planned. But the best part for you guys is that the authors participating in the event are marking down some of their books to 99 cents for the weekend. You can click here to get to the event page on Facebook. Hope to see you there.

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I promised to wrap up my "Land, Sea, Sky" posts this week by explaining the structure of the series. That's not all that complicated, so I thought I'd throw in a few Fun Facts to Know and Tell, too.

When I first started thinking about a follow-on series to the Pipe Woman Chronicles, I knew one thing for sure: the Morrigan was going to be in it. I don't know why, other than the fact that She is generally perceived to be one of the darker goddesses in the Celtic pantheon, and I expected this series to be a little less lighthearted than the Pipe Woman Chronicles (if you can call Naomi's story lighthearted).

Anyway. Once I'd settled that, then I realized three books would be the perfect size for the series. The Celts, like a lot of Indo-European cultures, considered 3 to be a sacred number. A whole bunch of Celtic sayings follow a "three things" formula. Here are three examples:

• Three words of counsel: know thy power, know thy wisdom, know thy time.
• Three candles that illume every darkness: truth, nature, and knowledge. 
• Three things it is best to leave alone: a strange dog, a sudden flood, and one wise in their own eyes.

Too, many Indo-European cultures developed a belief that the Universe has three realms. For the Celts, the three realms were -- wait for it -- Land, Sea, and Sky. They held these three so sacred that they would swear oaths upon them:

If I break this oath, may the sky fall down and crush me, may the earth open and swallow me, and may the sea rise up and drown me. (link)

On top of all that, the Morrigan is a triune goddess, comprised of Badb, her warlike aspect; Macha; and Anann, her Earth aspect, after whom twin hills in County Killarney, Ireland, are named the Paps of Anu.

Having gotten this far, it made sense (to me, if no one else) to have each book in the trilogy dedicated to one of the sacred realms. And it also made sense to have three main characters, with each sort of representing one of the three realms.

That's why I've been saying cryptic stuff like, "I consider Crosswind to be Tess's book." Crosswind is the Sky book -- hence the wind turbine on the cover -- and it's Tess's book because she is a journalist, and communication is related strongly to the element of Air. Also, the book is set in and around Washington, DC, which, as we all know, is chock-full of hot air.

Undertow is the Sea book, and it's Darrell's book both because he is a sailor, and because Water has always been important to the Potawatomi way of life. And not just for fishing: the Ojibwe, another Anishinaabe people, still harvest wild rice by rowing their canoes into a stand of the plants and beating them until the seeds fall into the canoe. The plot of Undertow takes place in Hampton Roads, VA -- mostly Norfolk and Virginia Beach. The "roads" in the name Hampton Roads refer to the Elizabeth, Nansemond, and James rivers, which join there before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay.

Which leaves Sue, the realm of Land, and Scorched Earth. Sue is the Right Hand of the Earth goddess Gaia -- 'nuff said. (To be honest, I haven't gotten much farther than that with the planning for this book. When I figure it out, I'll let you know -- how's that?)

Okay, so, Fun Fact to Know and Tell #1: We used to live in the townhouse where Sue, Tess, and Darrell live. It's in Alexandria, VA, in a complex called Brookville Townhomes, which is bordered on the south by Holmes Run Park. In one scene in Crosswind, Sue walks over to the park to sit by the creek and do some thinking. Here's a photo of the creek that my daughter Amy took. It was taken downstream from Sue's vantage point, but it should give you an idea of the setting. Amy took lots of pictures of Holmes Run when she was in high school, and I've got a few of them on a Pinterest board here.

Fun Fact #2: We lived in two different townhouses in Brookville; for this series, I put the kitchen (and its pass-through) from one into the other one. The teeny-tiny bedroom that Darrell rejects? That was my room. But one detail I did not change was the infestation of spider crickets in the basement.

And Fun Fact #3: The Potawatomi own and operate several casinos. One of them is in New Buffalo, MI, which is about 15 minutes from the house where I grew up.

So there you go. Hope you like the series. I think I'll go now and try to knock out a few more words on Undertow.  Happy Thanksgiving!

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These bloggy Fun Facts to Know and Tell have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

"Luuuke, I am your..." "Ack! No! Spoiler!"

I have a friend who, bless her heart, hates spoilers.  Hates 'em.  We were talking at one point about Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next books (which are hilarious, by the way) and I happened to mention that in one of the books, he includes one of my all-time favorite jokes.  "Don't tell me," she said.

"Well, but I'm just going to tell you the joke," I said.  "It doesn't have anything to do with the plot -- it's just a joke."

"Please don't do it," she said.  "If you do, I'll be waiting for the joke and it will spoil the book for me."

That seemed like an extreme case to me.  But there are a whole lot of people who don't like to be spoilered before they've had a chance to read a book -- or see a movie.  My daughter Kat says friends told her everything about "Rise of the Guardians" well before she had a chance to see the movie -- and in fact, she still hasn't seen it.  Even today, there are probably people who would be angry at me if I told them Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, even though "The Empire Strikes Back" has been out for thirty-three years.  (Gods.  Thirty-three years.  Here, let me sit down for a sec....  Okay, I'm better now.  Thanks.)

Interestingly, though, it's been shown that spoilers can actually add to your enjoyment of a work of fiction.  Researchers at the University of California-San Diego did a study in which they found that readers who knew what was coming at the end of a story enjoyed the story more.

If you've ever re-read a book, you might have experienced this.  Did you find yourself lingering over the book the second time?  Savoring certain favorite passages?  Maybe it was because you weren't racing headlong to the end to find out what happened.  Because you already knew the ending, you could relax on the re-read and stop to smell the flowers along the way.

A lot of authors complain about spoilers in book reviews.  Some reviewers will retell practically the whole story, as if they're doing a book report.  Some authors are livid when that happens because they believe it will spoil the book for new readers.  Me?  I'm just grateful for a review -- any review.  Just don't totally give away the ending.

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I hope you guys enjoyed the Tapped travelogue this week on my Facebook page.  (Pretty sure the pictures didn't spoil anything....)  I happened to glance at the calendar on Monday and think, "Hmm, this is the week that Naomi and Shannon are in South Dakota, isn't it?  Hey, I could post some pictures!"  And it was off to the races.  If you missed it, or if you're not a fan of my Facebook page, click here and head on over to take a gander.  (And feel free to click "like" while you're there.  Thanks!)  I had fun finding the pictures and I sure hope none of the copyright holders track me down and sue me for using them....  If you'd rather not go hunting all over my timeline to find the pictures, I've also got them pinned to a board on Pinterest, which you can view by clicking here.

Gravid is greenlighted (yes, it's a verb -- leave me alone) for publication on March 20th, give or take a day.  More details to come...

Yes, I've signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo next month.  I need to get moving on writing Annealed and this should light a fire under my butt.  I've set 50,000 words as my goal, but I'm hoping to start writing the book well before April 1st.  If I manage that, I will probably adjust my NaNo goal downward -- which, it turns out, you can do during Camp NaNo.  Who knew?

Finally, welcome to anybody who made his or her way here from Smashwords' Read an Ebook Week!  I hope you enjoy your stay.

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You want to hear the joke?  Okay, but don't complain to me that I spoiled the book for you by telling it here....  Fforde presents it in a slightly different way, but the punch line is the same.  Here's how I heard it:

A reporter was doing man-on-the-street interviews -- you know, where you poke a microphone in a random stranger's face, ask him or her a question, and then record the answer.  This particular day, the question was, "What's the most amazing invention you've ever heard of?"

This one fellow stops and thinks for a moment, and then he says, "The thermos."

"Really?" the reporter asks.  "Why's that?"

"Well," the fellow says, "it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold."

"Okay.  And?"

And the fellow asks, "How does it know?"

(rimshot)  Thank you!  I'm here all week!

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

Between you and me, grammar matters.

First, a couple of bits of housekeeping: You'll notice a new book cover added to the slide show on the left, and a new video trailer on the Book Trailers page.  Yes, the clock is ticking down for publication of Gravid.  We appear to be on track for the scheduled release on March 20th -- which is also the first day of spring.  I expect there will be a contest involved again, although it won't be a three-week extravaganza because, oh haha, I'd have to start it this week and I'm not ready.  Anyway, stay tuned for more details.

Also, Read an Ebook Week starts today, and in observance of the week, all my titles at Smashwords are discounted.  Seized, in fact, is free.  Feel free to send your friends and neighbors to my Smashwords author page -- or, heck, head over to Smashwords and pick up a book for yourself.  I know for a fact that at least one of my Rursday Reads books is on sale. (Hint: it's Drawing Breath by Laurie Boris, and it's free!)

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If ever a genie wants to grant me three wishes, I am all set.  First, I would wish to always stay at the perfect weight, no matter how much I ate.  Next, I would wish for financial security, so that I could quit my day job and never have to take another one.  And my third wish would be for Amazon and Smashwords to insist that every indie title be vetted by a competent proofreader before they will publish it.

I admit it:  I’m picky about this stuff.  It’s probably because I internalized grammar and spelling rules early. Please don’t hurt me, but I was one of those annoying kids in school who always got good grades on her English papers.  I was a spelling whiz, too.  One of my college journalism professors gave his classes a test on commonly-misspelled words at the beginning each semester. I had two classes with him, so I had to take the test twice.  When I aced the thing for the second time, he wrote on my paper, “People in radio don’t need to know how to spell!”  I’m still not sure whether he was trying to recruit me for the student newspaper.  (If so, it’s clear that he never saw my grade in photography.)

Anyway, my point is that sometimes these days, reading is almost painful for me.  Writers drop so many commas that someone needs to start a home for orphaned subordinate clauses.   Writers also use bad grammar or the wrong words – many times without realizing what they’ve done.  

Sometimes, the result is really sad.  I happened to look at some of the posts on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards discussion boards after the first round of cuts this year.  Submissions in the first round are judged not on the book itself, but on the pitch – the advertising copy, if you will, that goes on the back cover of a paperback and in the “book description” of an e-book listing.  It’s also sometimes called a blurb.  In one of the discussion threads, some of those who didn’t win had posted their pitches for critiques.  Should they cut the sentence at the top?  Maybe move paragraphs around? But to me, it was clear what was wrong, and it wasn’t anything that moving the furniture would cure.  One poster’s pitch had her main character quitting her job to “attend” to her ill husband; the verb she wanted was “tend.”  Another pitch included a sentence whose syntax was so mangled that I couldn’t tell who was doing what with whom – nor, I suspect, could the ABNA judges.

What’s so sad is that these authors didn’t know they were doomed.  An e-book is judged not only by its cover, but by its blurb.  Your blurb must be perfect.  It’s your potential readers’ first opportunity to see your writing.  If what they see is that you can’t write a couple of paragraphs without a mistake, they will pass you by.

Indie authors already face an uphill battle for respect.  Granted, the hill has recently begun to level out, but for goodness’ sake, don’t make things any harder on yourself.  Don’t just rely on Word’s spell checker and grammar checker.  Look stuff up if you’re not sure.  Alert readers of this blog know that one of my go-to grammar sources is Grammar Girl.  I like her site because she's very clear about when something is a rule and when it's simply a style choice.  Sometimes my "rules" turn out to be style choices, which annoys me.  But still, it's good to know. 

Grammar Girl sponsors National Grammar Day, which this year is tomorrow, March fourth.  How about if we all agree to observe the day by checking and double-checking everything we write for errors, and by recruiting competent proofreaders to back us up?  

I can’t tell you how happy that would make me. I’d really rather spend my third wish on a hot guy.

This post appeared, in a slightly different form, on IndiesUnlimited.com on March 1, 2013.

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

Winter Solstice Advent Countdown, Week 1.

Joseph howled. He shed his jeans jacket and shirt. And then he changed.

He had always shielded me from seeing him shift. I mean, I had seen him do it in his battle with Loki in the time-out-of-time. But those were spirit shifts, if you will; no actual human body was involved. Body parts just sort of melted and reformed there.

But here in the real world, it was real, and it looked painful.

-- from Fissured

It's release day for Tapped!  The e-book with the glowy wolf on the cover is now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in all kinds of formats from Smashwords.*  (The paperback, with the same cool cover, will go on sale sometime this week.)

In celebration of the new book -- and because, as you know, this year's winter solstice is a Very Big Deal in the Pipe Woman Chronicles -- I'm going to run a contest every week for the next three weeks.  The prizes will get bigger as the month goes on, with a grand prize in the final week.  (Not to say the Cosmic Coyote pin isn't cool. By the way, the pin looks huge in the box below, but in real life, it's two inches square.)

Um, well, I don't know what else to say here.  Hope you enjoy Tapped (and if you do, please go back to where you bought it and leave me a review -- thanks, you rock!), check out the contest rules below, and good luck!

* Alert readers of the Smashwords version of Tapped will find a link at the very end of the book to the first two chapters of Gravid: Book Four of the Pipe Woman Chronicles.  I'm providing these chapters with some misgivings.  First, Gravid was my NaNo project this year, so this is only a first draft and may change (a little or a lot!) by the time the book is published in the spring. Second, there is a major Tapped spoiler, right up front, that I could not take out.  Sooo...if you should decide to read the sneak peek on Smashwords before you read Tapped, don't come crying to me that it ruined Tapped for you.  Okay?  Okay.  Just so we're clear.

The Rules (sorry, gotta have 'em):

1. Friends and family may definitely enter.
2. Winners from my previous contest may win again.  However, winners from previous weeks in *this* contest may not win *this* contest again.
3. If there is no winner one week, the prize(s) will be added to the following week's contest.  I am getting this stuff out of my house, one way or the other.
4. As always, the judge's decisions are arbitrary, capricious, and final.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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

What a difference a year makes.

Nowhere, I submit, is the upheaval in the publishing world more apparent than at writing conventions.  At last year’s World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, I attended a panel during which an agent (or maybe she was an editor) made some disparaging remarks about self-publishing, and a few audience members stood up and respectfully explained to her why she was wrong.

Fast-forward to 2012.  This year’s World Fantasy Convention, in Toronto last weekend, featured a whole panel discussion about e-publishing.  

One end of the dais seemed to be spewing dinosaur breath.  The former editor-in-chief of Del Ray (Random House’s speculative fiction imprint), Betsy Mitchell, complained that her business is drying up; she said indie novelists aren’t willing to pay $3,500 for the kind of top-notch professional editing job she can offer.  (I wondered whether it had ever occurred to her that the vast majority of indies simply can’t afford her.)  Next to her sat Robert Runté, an acquisitions editor for a small Canadian press, who called the indie trend of using beta readers “editing by crowdsourcing.”  He also said he used to write reviews of speculative fiction novels for money – but “that job is gone.”  Who’s taking up the reviewing slack?  Bloggers, said Emily Craven (although apparently she doesn’t review books on her own blog).  

The panel agreed that 99-cent e-books devalue the author’s hard work, although there was some support for a 99-cent price point for the first novel in a series.  Craven suggested a reasonable price for an e-book would be half the price of a paperback edition.  Leslie said most e-books published directly through Kobo’s Writing Life list for $2.99 to $5.99, while Smashwords authors tend to undervalue their work; prices for Smashwords titles sold at the Kobo Store average from 99 cents to $1.99.  

Ah, Smashwords.  Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld.com said, “Friends don’t let friends use Smashwords.”  He went on to explain that the site’s automated Meatgrinder conversion software “doesn’t always work as well as it should.”

The panelists also warned indies away from making their own cover art.  One suggested using a site such as bibliocrunch.com, where you can list your project and your budget, and artists (and editors, too) can then bid for your business.  Still, they advised, it’s best to ask for samples and references before hiring an artist or editor for your book.

In terms of the market for science fiction and fantasy, the panelists said Amazon accounts for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of sales, with the rest more or less evenly split among the other sellers.  Leslie also said only about twenty percent of self-published authors make money from their books.  But then, that’s not all that different from the way traditional publishing works.

I could have wished for more on the nuts-and-bolts of indie publishing.  Heck, I would have liked to see more indie authors and book bloggers on the panel.  Ah, well.  Maybe next year.

This article first appeared at IndiesUnlimited.com on Nov. 9, 2012.

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This moment of bloggy reportage was brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Fruits of the First Harvest.

In this week's news wrapup:

• The Seized trailer was featured this weekend at Indies Unlimited. I hope you've had a chance to stop by and see it -- and to see the new blog setup.  The Evil Mastermind put the blog through an upgrade this week; we're still working out the kinks, but it's coming along.
• If you haven't yet picked up your free e-book copies of Seized and SwanSong at Smashwords, time's a-wastin'!  The sitewide Summer/Winter promotion ends Tuesday.  Hie thee to Smashwords and pick up some good reads (not just mine!) to see you through the end of the season.  
• In case you need an extra impetus to get those free downloads now, prices for the e-book editions of both Seized and SwanSong will be going up next week, once the Smashwords promotion is over.

Speaking of the end of the season, it may not seem like it yet, here in the US, but summer's on the wane.  This coming Wednesday is Lughnasa, the cross-quarter day named for the Celtic god Lugh.

Lugh of the Long Hand is often mistakenly called a sun god.  He's not; he's the Celtic god of light.  (The Celts' sun god was Belenos, for whom Beltane is named.)  Lugh is also associated with lightning, and is sometimes called their storm god.

But don't think Lugh's a slacker just because he's not a god of the sun.  Far from it!  It's clear from the tale told of his arrival at Tara, the court of the Tuatha de Danann.  Lugh approached the gate guard while the Tuatha were inside, feasting, and asked to be let in.  He might have thought he would have no trouble being admitted, seeing as he was the son of Cian, one of the Tuatha, and Ethlinn, the daughter of the king of the Fomorians.  But the gate guard told him he could come in only if he had a skill with which to serve the king, who was Nuada at that time.  Lugh said he was a carpenter; the guard said they had one already.  Well, said Lugh, he was a smith; no, they had a smith already, too.  Lugh then said he was a champion, but they had one of those as well.  He then asked after a string of other jobs:  harper (no), poet (nope), magician (uh-uh), physician (sorry, no), cup-bearer (we have nine!), and a worker in brass (negative).  Finally, Lugh told the guard to go and ask the king whether he had one man who could do all those things.  When Nuada heard the guard's report, he told him to try the kid at chess -- and Lugh won every game.  Then Nuada let him in.  Later, when Nuada was wounded, the Tuatha made Lugh their king.

As pleasant (and competent!) a god as Lugh was, you didn't want to cross him.  The three sons of Tuireann learned this to their sorrow when, on impulse, they killed Lugh's father Cian.  When Lugh heard of it, he called the three men before him and bade them pay for their misdeed by bringing him nine precious things from all around the world -- things which they would have to steal, because their owners would likely not part from them otherwise.  Lugh assumed the brothers would be killed on their quest.

So the brothers embarked on their journey, and with a mixture of pleading, chicanery, and magical help, they managed to procure eight of the nine precious things.  For the final item, the brothers were to give three shouts on the Hill of Miochaoin in Lochlann (probably either Norway or northern Scotland).  The hill's owner sent his three sons to fight them, for no one was allowed to shout upon the hill.  The sons of Tuireann killed the other three, but were mortally wounded themselves.  They sailed back to Ireland on the brink of death, and bade their father to ask Lugh for healing.  But Lugh refused.  So the sons died of their wounds, and their father died of grief.

(The tale of the sons of Tuireann is one of the three great Irish tragedies.  The story upon which SwanSong is based is another, and the third is the tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows.)

After Lugh's foster mother Tailtiu died (she had taken it upon herself to clear the land for crops, and died of exhaustion), he set August 1 as the day of her funeral feast and a series of games and sporting events -- a celebration that became an annual tradition.  Today, Neopagans also mark the season with games, and with mourning the passing of summer as the first crops are harvested.  Bread made from new grain is often served, and Lugh's blessing may be asked that the rest of the harvest not be ruined.

May Lugh bless you and grant you a fine First Harvest this year.  Happy Lughnasa!
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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.

Penguin bought WHAT?!?

It was just a couple of weeks ago when I did a post about Author Solutions (also known as ASI) and what a sleazy operation it is.  To recap (in case you're too time-pressed to click the link), Author Solutions is the umbrella company for a host of vanity presses, including AuthorHouse, Xlibris and iUniverse.  Essentially, all of these companies are in business to separate would-be authors from their money.  They charge huge fees upfront to "edit" your work, then pester you mercilessly to pay for additional services.  Then they do the bare minimum to "market" your work.  And then they pay you pennies on the dollar in royalties.

I also mentioned that Author Solutions was owned by Bertram Capital, which looked to me like a venture capital firm -- the sort of outfit that takes an under-performing company (i.e., one that isn't making enough money to satisfy its shareholders), tweaks it, and then sells it for more than its investment.

Well, sooprise, sooprise, sooprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say.  The news this week is that Bertram has sold Author Solutions to -- brace yourself -- Pearson plc, which owns the Penguin Group.  Yup, that's right.  The company whose well-respected and award-winning author stable includes Toni Morrison, Patricia Cornwell, Garrison Keillor and the Dalai Lama now owns a pile of, uh, bad-smelling stuff.

David Gaughran has written a great piece about this at IndieReader.com. But I think one of his best observations is in the comments below the article.  Author Solutions boasts that it publishes 150,000 authors and 190,000 books.  Compare that, David says, to Smashwords, which has been in business for a much shorter period of time, and yet has published 140,000 books by just 40,000 authors.  If you had to guess, who do you suppose has the better customer satisfaction rating?

Speaking of Smashwords, Mark Coker was the first commenter on the PublishersWeekly.com article about the sale:

While Pearson is smart to develop a long tail strategy that includes self-published authors, the challenge with ASI is that its business model is entirely dependent upon blinding the eyes and stealing the dreams of unsuspecting authors. It earns 2/3+ of its revenue selling services and packages to authors, not selling books to consumers. That's a recipe for parasitism and exploitation, and in the long run as indies wise up, it's not a sustainable model.

Hear hear, Mark.  And thanks for the Indies Unlimited plug in your reply, too.

Going back to David's post for a moment, he mused about why Penguin would want to own something as unsavory as Author Solutions.  The answer, I think, is that traditional publishers simply can't tell the difference between vanity publishing and indie publishing.  I read a blog post not long ago (and wish I could find it again so I could post the link -- sorry) by a literary agent who was complaining about the terminology used by the indie author movement.  She chided us for calling ourselves "indie" and suggested instead that we use the term "self-published", because it's better understood in New York publishing circles.

The comments generated by that post made entertaining reading, and I believe the agent got an education.  But if her attitude is any indication, the Big Six consider "self-publishing" to be synonymous with vanity publishing.  Apparently many in the trad publishing business lump Smashwords, Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt, CreateSpace and Lulu (and others) in with Author Solutions and others of their ilk.  If it didn't come out of trad publishing, in other words, it's just one big slush pile of steaming crap.  Viewed in that light, Penguin's purchase of Author Solutions makes perfect sense: if this "indie publishing" thing is going to undermine their core business, they need some skin in the game to stay viable, and purchasing an existing company in, you know, that end of the industry is just good business sense.

Are you gonna tell 'em?  I'm not gonna tell 'em.
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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.