"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.

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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. 

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.

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.

Everything you know about haiku is wrong.

I know, I know -- the title is clickbait. I'll get to that in a minute. But first, some news:

• Rivers Run got a lovely review this week at Big Al's Books and Pals. My favorite part is the reviewer's last line: "However, then she lays down a sentence like this, 'Her mournful rasp sounded like the barest trickle of moisture in a desert creek bed.' And minor imperfections are quite forgiven." Did I really write that? Huh. I guess I'm not half-bad, after all...
• The first draft of Treacherous Ground, the next book in the Elemental Keys series, is very nearly in the can. I have fewer than 1,400 words to write in order to win Camp NaNoWriMo, and I'm pretty sure I'll wrap up the story line at that point, too. Hoping to do that tonight before I go to bed. We'll see how it goes.

And now, about that haiku thing.

Every year, the Golden Triangle Association in DC runs a haiku contest. The Golden Triangle is the designation for the part of downtown DC that the office for my day job happens to be in, and so every spring I see some of the winning entries posted around town. This year, I posted a photo of one of them on my Facebook timeline -- and several people complained that the poem wasn't really a haiku, because it didn't have the 5-7-5 syllable scheme we were all taught in school: five syllables for the first line, seven for the second, and five for the third.

Turns out we were taught wrong. That format is not what makes a haiku a haiku at all.

Just as fiction writers have National Novel Writing Month, haiku enthusiasts have National Haiku Writing Month, or NaHaiWriMo. And they have covered this very topic on their blog, because it comes up every year. It stems from a misunderstanding about the Japanese language -- which counts sounds, not syllables, when crafting a haiku. For example, as I learned at the link above, English speakers consider the word haiku as having two syllables. For a Japanese speaker, though, the word has three sounds -- ha-i-ku. In fact, most Japanese words have more sounds than we would count syllables. So a five-syllable line in English would have far more words than would a five-sound line in Japanese. 

Moreover, haiku's emphasizes the content of the poem, not simply its form. A proper haiku, or so the article says, includes a kigo -- a word indicating the season in which the poem occurs -- and a kiregi, or cutting word, that divides the poem into two parts. Ideally, one part of the poem will be a juxtaposition of the other, and both parts will focus on concrete images that allow the reader to feel what the poet felt when viewing the event.

Here's the photo I posted on Facebook earlier this week. It doesn't look like a haiku under the rules we were all taught, but with our new understanding of the process, I think it qualifies. And I think blackbird is the kigo and turn is the kiregi. What do you think?

One more bit of housekeeping: I'll be on vacation for the next couple of Sundays. Alert hearth/myth readers know two weeks is an unusually long hiatus for me. I'll try to put up a post on one or another of those days, but I can't promise, as wi-fi access is liable to be spotty.

And now I'm off to put a lid on Treacherous Ground. Wish me luck!

***

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

The love of money.

New cars today have a lot more bling than they did when I bought my last car in 2008. Remote door locks were just becoming a thing, and you had to pay extra for high-end stuff like cruise control. Now, it seems, electronic keys and cruise control are pretty much standard.

Another thing that was brand new in 2008 was satellite radio. Back then, I thought it was a crazy idea -- why would anybody pay for radio when they could get it over the air for free? But then the radio business changed and stations seemed to switch formats all the time, and I couldn't find an oldies station that played more than the Beatles and a few other hits I'd heard a million times before. (This phenomenon is worse for people who worked in top-40 radio. Each radio station used to have its own music director -- an actual human who decided what songs to play. Now stations are programmed by consultants who use committees called focus groups. Members of focus groups always give high ratings to songs they recognize, and in the case of oldies, they recognize songs because they got a lot of airplay. But even now, the guy who gave them all that airplay is heartily sick and tired of them. Like retail-workers-at-Christmas-carol-season tired of them.)

Anyway, I had pretty much quit listening to the radio in the car, except for my own CDs. And then I got Eli, who came with a trial subscription to Sirius XM. Once I found the '60s and '70s channels, it was all over. I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in decades -- including this one by the O'Jays from 1974.

For a moment, let's leave aside the irony of hearing a song about the evils of money on a radio station I'm paying to listen to, when I first heard it over the air for free.

It did, however, get me thinking about morality and how things have changed. Wikipedia says what spawned the song was a Bible verse, specifically 1 Timothy 6:10. It's the one about how the love of money is the root of all evil. I've seen a few truncated versions of the verse -- most often, "Money is the root of all evil" (the Monkees had a sampler on the wall of their pad), but also the snarky "Money is the root of all."

But the original text is about the love of money, a.k.a. greed. I'm no biblical scholar, and maybe a Pagan shouldn't be sticking her nose into this at all -- but my understanding has always been that simply having money isn't the problem. Money is neutral -- neither good nor bad. What's problematic is grabbing and hoarding as much money as you can.

I find it interesting that back in the mid-'70s, this song got a lot of airplay. Not long after, though, we started to see wealth, and the pursuit of wealth, put on a pedestal -- and some of the biggest pushers of the idea were megachurch pastors who told their faithful to send money to fund their big church buildings in order to glorify of God. I guess their mansions and fat bank accounts were meant to glorify God, too.

This idea that wealth is okay as long as you're not a miser seems to have fallen by the wayside, though, in this new Gilded Age, where the top 1% of earners in the US make, on average, 26.3% more than the bottom 99% combined. That's higher than the income disparity in the last Gilded Age. In 1928, just before the Great Depression, top earners made 23.9% more than the rest of the work force. What's more, income inequality has risen in every state since 1975. That's right about the time the O'Jays were singing about the dangers of the love of money. What a coincidence, huh?

A certain faction of the American public talks about making America great again. I think going back to those mid-'70s values, when the top 1% of earners made just 8% of total US income (compared to 22% in 2015), would go a long way toward that goal. I'm not saying America was perfect in the '70s. It wasn't -- not by a long shot. But at least the middle class had a decent standard of living back then.

***
I'm moving right along with the first draft of Treacherous Ground. April has been a busy month, but I'm happy to say that I'm at 40,000 words as of tonight, so I should have no problem making it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. That puts the book on track for publication in mid to late June. As always, I'll let you know how it goes.

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

The run-up to Rivers Run.

I've just a quick post tonight, as I've been working on Rivers Run all day and I'm kind of tuckered out.

The good news is that we're on track for publication this Thursday, as promised. I still have to finish the formatting and write the author's note. But here's the cover, which I finalized today:

And here's the description:

The last thing Raney Meadows needs is more notoriety. She has come east from Los Angeles to escape her life as an actor by getting back to nature. But while hiking the Appalachian Trail, she finds a body in the Shenandoah River -- a drowned kayaker who was neither a kayaker nor a drowning victim -- and the river's goddess tells Raney she has to make it right. Why Raney? Because she's a Water Elemental. Her mother is an undine.

Before long, Raney discovers she's not the only Elemental in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia – Earth, Air, and Fire are here, too. Moreover, these four Elementals have been brought together for a purpose: an ancient evil has awakened, and only by joining all of the Elements together can the earth be saved.

Raney wants to help, but she is torn, because getting involved would put her mother in danger. Her very human father has been looking for his undine – and he may be involved with the ancient evil that aims to destroy the earth.

Once the Kindle version is live, I'll put notices in all the usual places: Facebook, Twitter, and my mailing list. I usually aim to get the paperback out at about the same time as the ebook, but I suspect it will be next weekend before I can get that done. I will let you know.

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The other good news is that I signed up today to do Camp NaNoWriMo next month -- during which I'll be writing book 2 of this series, which now has the working title of Treacherous Ground (oooh!). Stay tuned for more on that.

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