Posts tagged as “Dragon Writers”

Clockwork Alchemy in Transit

Published May 25, 2015 by centaur

No time to blog this proper - things are moving too fast. But here's a flyover of Clockwork Alchemy in pictures.

There's an awesome dealer's room … with droolworthy clothes (not my size, or it would be mine):

There's an awesome art show, with epic props and artwork:

And I do mean epic:

There are amazing costumes of all kinds ...

... with bleedover from Fanime and Baycon:

There's an awesome Author's Salon organized by the redoubtable volcano lady, T.E. MacArthur …

... and featuring alternate historian Harry Turtledove, Madeline Holly-Rosing of the Boston Metaphysical Society, Kaja & Phil Foglio of Girl Genius ...

... and me!

Many people at Thinking Ink Press helped out, either getting materials together prior to the con or helping out at the table ...

… and we managed to make many fans happy by bringing them LIQUID FIRE!

… and much more! For the very first time … someone bought the first Skindancer trilogy as a bundle!

Let's end on that happy note, and I'll have more tales of the con soon! One more day to go...

-the Centaur

Jeremiah Willstone and the Sorting of the Secret Post

Published May 21, 2015 by centaur

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If you love steampunk, flash fiction, or cool things printed on paper, come by Clockwork Alchemy this weekend. I'm pleased to announce that Thinking Ink Press is printing two pieces of ephemera for the con - the flash fiction Instant Book "Jagged Fragments" and the short story Snapbook "Jeremiah Willstone and the Sorting of the Secret Post."

I had hoped we'd have JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ready for Clockwork Alchemy, but Debra, my editor at Bell Bridge Books, thought we should focus on getting Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE, out first - and she was right. That's out right now, in fact, just in time for the con - I got the books early this week.

But Betsy Miller of Thinking Ink Press suggested that I put something together for the con, thinking of three pieces I already had - the flash fiction pieces "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms" and "If Looks Could Kill" and the essay "The Rules Disease". Not to be daunted by taking on too much, I decided I wanted a piece teasing THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

So I wrote a brand new short story just for the occasion, "The Sorting of the Secret Post".

Hand-printed copies of these books will be available at the con. We aren't sure what we'll do with these in the future - the beauty of instant books (books printed on a single sheet of paper) and snap books (chapbooks printed on conventional printers) is that they can be printed on demand for an event. We call them "ephemera" and they enable us to experiment with the printed word.

Here you see Keiko O'Leary of TIP folding instant books (and Liza Olmsted of TIP scowling at a tax form). The editions we've produced this time just came together in time for the con. You can't even have the first ones - Nathan Vargas of TIP bought the very first copies of both books, one-of-a-kinds that will never come around again.

"The Sorting of the Secret Post" in particular is a direct prequel to THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it isn't clear whether we'll reprint it once the book from Bell Bridge is out (though I hope we will, we haven't decided). So come on down and get your copies … because whatever they become in the future, they'll be something different.

-the Centaur

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice

Published May 18, 2015 by centaur

There's a current brouhaha in science fiction circles in which one group of (largely conservative) authors and bloggers (whom I read) got upset about how they were being treated by another group of (largely liberal) authors and bloggers (whom I also read) - and decided to stuff the nomination ballots for the Hugos to show how irritated they were.

The situation isn't black and white - there are legitimate complaints on both sides - but it isn't symmetric either: regardless of any legitimate differences, the side of the ballot-stuffers has engaged in some truly egregious behavior towards their fellow writers, towards the integrity of the awards process - and towards their fellow human beings.

Their complaint is that science fiction is being invaded by "social justice warriors" who put message over story, but, as one of my friends put it, you know you're in trouble when your name for your enemies includes the word "justice".

I am a social justice warrior.

I may have been raised in a conservative environment, I may have been a College Republican, I may be a devotee of Ayn Rand and my philosophy may be steeped in libertarian ideas … but I know what social justice is, I know why we need it, and I am proud to be one of the ones fighting for it.

Social justice is the simple concept that our society is structured in a way that systematically disadvantages certain groups, and that it is our moral responsibility to take positive action to make sure that our society does not continue to abuse them. That's it, and both the factual premise and the moral conclusion drawn from it are simply true.

It's your responsibility to understand the kind of society in which you live, to recognize how it is stacked against some groups of people within it, and to try to level the deck, and, because this advocates change, it often gets associated more with liberals trying to improve our world rather than conservatives trying to preserve what's already good about it.

But your responsibility to work towards social justice does not mean that it's your obligation to support the policies of some particular liberal who happens to think that he or she owns social justice. Ronald Reagan had a point when he said "Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals."

Our society stacks the deck against all kinds of people: all races, creeds and colors; liberals and conservatives, the marginalized and the rich, laborers and businessmen, criminals and the honest. There's almost no place in our society where some collection of wealth or poverty, some amassed prejudice or complacency, or some unjust law or lawlessness doesn't trap someone in a place where they get the short end of the stick - and the policies that cause this are both liberal and conservative.

But one of the biggest traps we've had is sexual prejudice: the discrimination against and marginalization of people based on their sexual orientation, identity, or preferences. When I was growing up, being "gay" was an insult; when I was a teenager, it was OK to marginalize and mock gay people; when I was in college, memorably, a young gay man was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die. We've come a long, long way since Stonewall … but we still have a lot farther to go.

That's why I'm so proud to see LIQUID FIRE appear high on the list of Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bisexual eBooks on Amazon. Dakota Frost, the protagonist of my series, is bisexual (and so am I) and my series is filled with as many races, genders and politics as I can fit: white and black, gay and bisexual and straight, liberal and conservative and noncommittal.

But my first goal is always to tell a good story.

When I start writing a Dakota Frost book, I have a little formula: I pick an alternative culture practice and make it magical, I pick a monster and a guest monster, and I pick a disability. For FROST MOON, that was magical tattooing, werewolves and vampires, and blindness; in BLOOD ROCK that was magical graffiti, vampires and werewolves (just switching the prominence), and Tourette's Syndrome; in LIQUID FIRE, that was magical firespinning, dragons and vampires, and deafness.

But those are only seeds: I let each of those things give me ideas … then I give them the prominence that they deserve as I tell the story. For example, in FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK, the disability was an important plot hinge, making things happen; in LIQUID FIRE, the disability was a feature in the background - still important to the plot, but not center stage.

The same is true of race, or politics, or sexual identity. I include them in my stories because they exist. Showing people both black and white in Atlanta represents the real racial makeup of Atlanta. Making my protagonist date first a conservative agent and then a liberal activist represents the real political makeup of America. And having my bisexual protagonist date a man in one book and a woman in one book represents the real nature of sexual relations in our world. But it always serves the story.

My books depict magic because it's fun and entertaining, but deep down, they represent a reality: they use that reality to ground the tales of the fantastic so that you can stay engaged and interested. But even reality must serve the story: good books employ not realism, but verisimilitude: the carefully crafted appearance of reality which orchestrates a reader's perceptions to compensate for the fact that they're reading the "reality" depicted in the book, not actually living it. Authors are always slicing and dicing reality to make sure that their readers are captivated by their tales, and I'm no different.

My goal is for everyone to be captivated by my books. But by showing that last slice of reality, the one often sliced out - the slice that shows the full spectrum of sexual expression in our world - I hope my books do more than captivate everyone; I hope they provide a small ray of hope for anyone different who wonders whether there's anyone like them - and gives them a hero they can relate to.

Her name's Dakota Frost. I think she's pretty cool. Go check her out.

-the Centaur

P.S. David Colby was the friend who came up with the phrases "you're in trouble when your name for your enemies includes the word justice" and "because they exist," and while I already had similar ideas, I have shamelessly stolen his wording. :-)

It’s Official

Published May 15, 2015 by centaur

After what seems like forever attending as a fan, and at least a decade of being an Eternal Member, it's finally official: I'm a "guest" of Dragon Con:

Anthony Francis

By day, Anthony Francis works on search engines and robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. He's the author of the Dakota Frost, Skindancer series including Frost Moon, Blood Rock, and Liquid Fire, and is the co-author of the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide.

Technically I'm an "Attending Professional" as I am at San Diego Comic Con, but at least now I will appear in the program, which will hopefully make it a bit easier to find out where I am supposed to be.

Last year, I was about to head to dinner with a friend and recalled that there was an interesting sounding panel. "Hang on a bit," I said over the phone, "let me see who's on this panel." I checked. I was listed as one of the panelists. I quickly excused myself from dinner and ran down to the Writing Track, about a minute or two before the panel started. "So," I asked, "who's moderating?" All eyes swiveled to me, and I quickly pulled out the program to figure out exactly what I was supposed to be moderating.

It was a great panel. But I like a little warning, and hopefully being a bit more official this year will help.

See you at Dragon Con Labor Day weekend, or if you're in the Bay Area, at Clockwork Alchemy this Memorial Day weekend … if you bring me a copy of LIQUID FIRE, I'll sign it for you. I might even sign other books too. :-)

-Anthony

LIQUID FIRE and TWELVE HOURS LATER

Published May 6, 2015 by centaur

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I think I'll be posting this everywhere for a while … LIQUID FIRE, my third novel, is now available for preorder on Amazon. I talk a bit more about this on the Dakota Frost blog, but after a lot of work with beta readers, editing, and my editor, I'm very proud of this book, which takes Dakota out of her comfort zone in Atlanta and brings her to the San Francisco Bay, where she encounters romance, danger, magic, science, art, mathematics, vampires, werewolves, and the fae. It comes out May 22, but you can preorder it now on Amazon! Go get it! You'll have a blast.

And, almost at the same time, I found out this is coming out on May 22 as well…

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TWELVE HOURS LATER is also available for preorder on Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace. Put together by the Treehouse Writers, TWELVE HOURS LATER is a collection of 24 steampunk stories, one for every hour in the day - many of them in linked pairs, half a day apart … hence "Twelve Hours Later". My two stories in the anthology, "The Hour of the Wolf" and "The Time of Ghosts", feature Jeremiah Willstone, the protagonist of "Steampunk Fairy Chick" in the UnCONventional anthology … and also the protagonist of the forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE from Bell Bridge Books. (It's also set in the same universe as "The Doorway to Extra Time" from the anthology of the almost identical name).

And, believe it or not, I may have something else coming out soon … stay tuned. :-)

-the Centaur

Hustle and Bustle at the Library

Published May 6, 2015 by centaur

I've felt quite harried over the past few weeks … and talking with another author, I realized why.

In April, I finally finished my part of Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE - sending comments to the publisher Bell Bridge Books on the galley proofs, reviewing cover ideas, contributing to the back cover copy, writing blogposts. I also as part of Camp Nanowrimo finished a rough rough draft of Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON. But at the same time, I had recently finished a short story, "Vogler's Garden", and have been sending it out to quite a few places.

In May, we expect LIQUID FIRE will be out, I have two stories in the anthology TWELVE HOURS LATER, and I have three guest blog posts coming out, one on "Science is Story: Science, Magic, and the Thin Line Between" on the National Novel Writing Month blog which has gotten some traction. And I'll be speaking at the Clockwork Alchemy conference. Oh, and I'm about to start responding to Bell Bridge's feedback on my fourth novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

Holy cow. No wonder I feel so harried! But it's all for a good cause.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a friend at work shattered his monitor and inadvertently made art.

I stand corrected

Published May 2, 2015 by centaur

I stand corrected. I thought I'd succeeded at Nanowrimo eleven times, and technically that's true. But it turns out that I've taken on a Nano challenge thirteen times and succeeded at it twelve - because of Script Frenzy.

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Script Frenzy was the event that predated Camp Nanowrimo in April - a challenge to write 100 pages of a script in the month of April. I took on Script Frenzy once, in 2012 - I think that may have been the last year that it ran. Since 2014, I've been doing Camp Nanowrimo, and won at that twice. So every time I've taken on an official Nano challenge, I succeeded.

That's a little over a half a million words. Wow.

But I took on Nano one more time, on my own - in August of 2014. Perhaps because I lacked the support of the community - this was an "unofficial" Nano on my part - or perhaps because the book needed more editing than writing, I only got 10,000 words into the challenge that month. But I'm still very happy how it turned out.

So, to confirm: viiictory, twelve times.

-the Centaur

Viiictory the Eleventh

Published April 29, 2015 by centaur

Woohoo! I just completed Camp Nanowrimo 2015, writing an extra 50,000 words on my novel SPECTRAL IRON! And, for special bonus points, I basically ran out of novel - I finished the end to end rough draft a few days ago, and to get the final few thousand words I had to actually go back through and start fleshing out and polishing! Double woohoo!

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This makes this not just the eleventh time I've finished Nanowrimo, it makes it the first time I've finished a novel during the month. This draft will need a heck of a lot of editing, but it is finished end to end and I had to come up with some very inventive stuff to get it there in the month - which, as always, is the beauty of Nanowrimo.

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As you can see, I spent most of this month in the red, because I started off dealing with nine kinds of crazy. I actually can't remember all the stuff that happened - I remember editing on LIQUID FIRE and nonsense at work and disasters at home and a truly horrific tax situation - or wait, i do remember it all, I just don't want to.

Regardless, I was able to power through in three big chunks, getting close to 3000 words a day most days and 4000 to 5000 words a day when i really cut loose. And some of the things I discovered as I churned forward, cleaning up the plot, took the book from "where is this going" to "I can't do that, can I?" to "O.M.G. that's an AMAZING idea!" which I now love.

Lots to do to clean this up. Can't really show an excerpt - all of this stuff is too near the end of the book. Spoilers.

But still … viiictory.

Now, on to the edits of … THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE! After a nap.

-the Centaur

Climbing the Mountain

Published April 24, 2015 by centaur

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I recently was talking with Debra Dixon, my editor for the Dakota Frost series, and we realized that if we wanted SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #4, to come out next year, we needed to get a final book (from me) in her hands by January to have time to edit it before year was out.

Given that when we had this conversation we had not yet finished LIQUID FIRE (book 3) and I have yet to edit THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, this caused some understandable panic.

So, rather than keeping to my schedule to work on part 2 of PHANTOM SILVER (book 5) during this April, I decided to bump up my schedule and work on part 3 of SPECTRAL IRON so I'd have a draft done early this year.

I think it's working - the story is coalescing - but as you can see from above, the copyediting and page proofing of LIQUID FIRE ate up a lot of my time to write SPECTRAL IRON.

So I'm scrambling. Probably few blog posts until this month's 50,000 added words are done.

Onward!

-Anthony

TWELVE HOURS LATER

Published March 20, 2015 by centaur

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I'm super stoked to announce that Jeremiah Willstone, my favorite steampunk heroine and protagonist of my forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, will be appearing in two stories in the TWELVE HOURS LATER anthology!

Created by the wonderful folks at the Clockwork Alchemy writer's track, this anthology features twenty four short stories each focusing on a single hour of the day. My two stories are 3AM - "The Hour of the Wolf" - and 3PM - "The Time of Ghosts".

Here's a taste of what happened on Halloween of 1897 … at 3AM, the hour of the wolf:

Jeremiah Willstone ran full tilt down the alley, the clockwork wolf nipping at her heels.

Her weekend had started pleasantly enough: an evening’s liberty from the cloisters of Liberation Academy, a rattling ride into the city on a battered old mechanical caterpillar—and eluding the proctors for a walking tour of Edinburgh with a dish of an underclassman.

Late that night—or, more properly early Halloween morning—the couple had thrown themselves down on the lawn of the park, and his sweet-talk had promised far more than this ersatz picnic of woven candies and braided sweets; but before they’d found a better use for their Victoria blanket … Jeremiah’s eyes got them in trouble.

“Whatever is that?” she asked, sighting a glint running along the edge of the park.

“Just a rat,” Erskine said, proferring her another twisted cinnamon scone.

“Of brass?” Jeremiah asked, sitting up. “With glowing eyes, I note—”

Uh-oh! What have our heroes found? And what will happen later … at 3PM, the time of ghosts?

Half a mile under Edinburgh Castle, lost in a damp warren of ancient masonry lit only by his guttering candle, Navid Singhal-Croft, Dean of Applied Philosophy at Liberation Academy, wished he’d paid more attention to the ghost stories his cadets whispered about the tunnels.

Of course, that was his own fault: he led the college of sciences at the premiere military academy in the Liberated Territories of Victoriana, and he’d always thought it his duty to drum ghost stories out of the young men and women who were his charges, not to memorize them.

Now was the time, but where was the place? A scream echoed in the dark, very close—and eerily familiar. Shielding his candle with one hand, Navid ran through crumbling brick and flickering light, desperate to find his father before the “ghost” claimed another victim.

If he couldn’t rescue his father … Navid might never be born.

DUN DUN DUNNN! What's going to happen? You'll have to buy the anthology to find out!

Stay tuned to find out where to purchase it! I'm assuming that will be "everywhere".

Prevail, Victoriana!

-Anthony

Dakota Frost and the Copyedit of Doom

Published March 20, 2015 by centaur

At long last, LIQUID FIRE is on its way to production at Bell Bridge Books!

This was a particularly difficult copyedit - not because the copyeditor was demanding anything particularly weird, but because a misunderstanding on the style guide led to an edit with five thousand annotations.

At one point working with the PDF, I was zooming in the text 200% to try to see what the copyeditors did, and even when what they were suggesting was clear, the number of edits caused everything to jump around crazily.

Finally I had to ask Bell Bridge to send me a .DOC file, so I could use Microsoft Word's superior tools. I was quickly able to identify 2,500 of the edits as being completely correctable - ellipses and spellings and such - and started a style guide.

Many of the rest were simple things like the Oxford comma, which we had a style change on. Counting these took us down to about a thousand edits.

Most of those thousand were minor changes which I readily accepted. The copyeditors had different suggestions than me on things like the use of the colon, which I often accepted, and paragraph breaks, which I generally did not.

But there was one particular thing - a replacement of the colon with the dash in sentences that already had the dash, which irked me intuitively, and which also turned out to violate the very Chicago Manual of Style rule the CE was citing.

Because we'd gone back and forth on this so much, what I finally sent back to Bell Bridge was a document with 200 tracked changes - mostly, the copyeditor's comments with extensive responses from me on what CMOS rules I was citing.

(We also had changes to Cinnamon Frost's broken English, contributed by the linguist Keiko O'Leary who helped me develop Cinnamon's dialect; but these were largely nonproblematic).

Debra and the copyeditors accepted these with few changes - but still sent a document back with over forty comments. At this point, even if I didn't agree with them, I took the changes very seriously.

A lot of their remaining suggestions violated some of the "rules" that I write by. But those are not hard and fast rules - and the fact that Debra critiqued them told me that, regardless of my "rules", the particular text at hand simply wasn't doing the job.

I accepted most of these comments. I rejected a small handful of others. And in a few cases, I took Debra's suggestions and solved them a different way, with a larger rewrite which just made the whole problem she saw just go away.

The manuscript I sent back to them had 30 comments or changes. By my count, it was close to the 130th distinct numbered version of the LIQUID FIRE manuscript that I've worked on.

Debra accepted it and sent it on to production on Thursday.

That was a good day.

Now on to the edit of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE!

-the Centaur

Copyediting in Process

Published March 9, 2015 by centaur

Copyediting of LIQUID FIRE is in process. Please hang in there. That is all.

-the Centaur

P.S. Remember to breathe.

I’m Not Dead

Published February 28, 2015 by centaur

Seems like I need to post these once in a while … I am, indeed, not dead.

Since finishing National Novel Writing Month last year, I've all but disappeared from this blog. Those who follow Dakota Frost on social media know at least part of the story: I've been working on LIQUID FIRE, Skindancer #3, and have just sent it off to copyedits after several rounds with my editor, Debra Dixon (who helped me make it a much better book).

That's not the only thing going on - I was also working on two stories for an unannounced project in the Jeremiah Willstone universe, desperately trying to finish a novella in the same universe, and working my ass off at the Search Engine That Starts with A G on a new project which I can't talk about at all other than that it's awesome.

Add to that working with Thinking Ink Press on the upcoming release of The Parent's Guide to Perthes, with the Write to the End group on various other projects, with my friend Nathan Vargas on his M-Theory system, and my wife on her art projects, and it's been a hell of a busy time.

But, yes, there were a few rounds of illness: more than one cold from air travel and food poisoning and some general bouts of the blehs - a week-long vacation is a GREAT time to catch up on that illness you've been putting off. A hell of a lot of that has been going around this year - I can think of a probably ten people who were out over the last few months.

I do worry about winter illnesses: my father used to get sick around the end of each year, and we thought it would eventually kill him. But it never did. And he stopped exercising from back pain, heart disease and long before the end. In contrast, I'm fine, healthy, exercising, recently taking in four hours of hiking with my wife in Monterey:

So, to recap: not dead, just busy.

-the Centaur

Viiiictory, Ten Times

Published November 26, 2014 by centaur

Yaay! Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month … this will be my 10th successful Nano. I've only been doing it 9 years, but this year, I started tackling Nano more often - in April and August. April was a success, but August I found I wanted to do more editing than writing, so I've officially succeed at Nano just 10 times out of the 11. November Nano 2014-11-26a.png

I'll let the August one slide, as it was really ambitious (and I also really try to reserve the time leading up to October for preparation for 24 Hour Comics Day) but when November rolls around, I get serious. This is the time all of my novels are born, and when I see a month start off with the kind of deficit you see above, I get cracking. November Nano 2014-11-26.png

I'm so serious about this, I take the whole week of Thanksgiving off every year just to work on this (something that is easier because my family is a rough plane ride back over Thanksgiving, and I see them every Christmas). But you know what? I want to enjoy my Thanksgiving … so I really poured on the juice near the end. Screenshot 2014-11-26 15.09.24.png

The National Novel Writing Month site has some awesome word tracking tools, but I often turn off the Internet during Nano, and so I have developed my own Excel spreadsheet specifically for this purpose, which shows me, graphically, how much I need to write to get on track. Cells turn from red to white as I successfully get ahead of the game, and so by the end I was pushing 3-4000 words a day, trying to finish early. And I did, yesterday afternoon, at Panera Bread near my house.

PHANTOM SILVER is one of the oddest books I've worked on yet. The plot has taken many strange twists and turns, including some that popped out of a deep harvest of some of the older material in my massive cuttings file. It's also turning into a deeply personal story, as my exploration of ghosts has led to an exploration of my characters' ghosts, and, by extension, since my characters are often based on me and my family … I am exploring the ghosts of my own friends and family as well.

This picture was taken standing quite close to my father's grave (not visible in the picture) and while my father won't picture in the story … I'm having fun exploring Dakota Frost's background, since she came from a (fictional) place in the South that is literally right up the street from where I grew up in real life. But, as fun as it is … I'm glad to be done with this chunk. Already (since yesterday) I've finished a first draft of a short story in the Jeremiah Willstone universe (due at the end of December, for a Clockwork Alchemy special anthology) and I look forward to diving back into the editing of LIQUID FIRE, which is going *very* well. Hopefully you'll see it soon. No excerpts on PHANTOM SILVER, though; there are too many horrible spoilers for other books. You'll have to wait on this one, and I know it will be a while, because SPECTRAL IRON and LIQUID FIRE and HEX CODE must come first; till next time. -the Centaur

Within Striking Distance

Published November 22, 2014 by centaur

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8 and a half days to go, 11K words remaining. Looks like we are going to do this… oh, an excerpt. Hard to summarize this one, there's so many spoilers for parts of books that aren't out yet:

“Most of the universe is made up of stuff that’s completely invisible,” Doug said. “Matter that we can’t see, holding the galaxies together; energy we can’t feel, pushing them apart. What if there’s a dark magic underpinning the world—undetectable, but influencing everything?”

Till next time.

-Anthony

P.S. DOORWAYS is still on sale. Go buy it lots.

DOORWAYS is on sale!

Published November 21, 2014 by centaur

DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME, the anthology I edited with Trisha Wooldridge, is now on sale for 99 cents on Kindle! What a deal! If you ever wanted to know what would happen if you got an extra hour in the day, now's your chance! And apparently this has done well enough for the anthology that it's bubbled up in the Kindle lists:

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Any day where something I wrote or edited is running neck and neck with Ray Bradbury is a good day.

-the Centaur

It’s Nano, and I’ve been busy…

Published November 19, 2014 by centaur

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… working on Dakota Frost #5: PHANTOM SILVER. What's this one about? Well, the first paragraph says it all:

“Tell me, Dakota Frost,” intoned the squat fae gargoyle, leaning forward, his wide stone face looming until his hooked nose took up nearly the whole of the Skype window on the screen of my shiny new MacBook Pro. “Have you ever thought of becoming an exorcist?”

As you can see, I've been busy catching up from a slow start:

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Between travel, food poisoning, and catchup on work and editing LIQUID FIRE, it took me until almost the 9th until I got on track, and even then I think it was the Night of Writing Dangerously that got me back on track.

More on that later. Caught up on my word count today, and am even a day ahead, but I gotta go to work.

-the Centaur

And we’re off!

Published November 1, 2014 by centaur

National Novel Writing Month is here again. For those who are just joining the party, it's a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November - and it's also the event which finally broke through my creative barriers, helping me at last produce a complete publishable novel. I've done it eight times in the past:

2002: DELIVERANCE (Frontiersmanship series #1, as yet unpublished)
2007: FROST MOON (Dakota Frost series #1, published by Bell Bridge Books 2010)
2008: BLOOD ROCK (Dakota Frost series #2, published by Bell Bridge Books 2011)
2009: LIQUID FIRE (Dakota Frost series #3, forthcoming from Bell Bridge, 2014)
2010: JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (Jeremiah Willstone series #1, forthcoming from Bell Bridge est. 2014)
2011: HEX CODE (Cinnamon Frost series #1, manuscript in progress)
2012: MAROONED (Serendipity series #1, manuscript in progress)
2013: SPECTRAL IRON (Dakota Frost series #4 manuscript in progress, estimated submission 2014)

and now 2015: PHANTOM SILVER, which will be Dakota Frost #5. I'm planning on focusing on Dakota for a while now, trying to get books 4-6 to Debra (and my fans) so that they have six books in their hands, hopefully enough to tide them over while I get Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone and Serendipity out the door.

I could say more about Nano, or do link salsa to the text above to provide references. But I'm not. I'm going to get back to writing; it's already 10pm on Saturday November 1, and I'm only about 500 words in, when I need almost 1700. Arr, back to work, ye scurvy writer dawgs! It's Nano time!

-the Centaur

Pictured: a creepy Halloween cat at a nearby hardware store, thematic because I'm shooting for a slightly creepier Dakota Frost tale this time around, focusing mostly on ghosts.

It was a good weekend …

Published May 28, 2014 by centaur

… and not just because I sold 22 copies of my books at Clockwork Alchemy. Though that was a big part of it, the sales themselves aren't what really mattered to me; it was that 22 copies of my books are in people's hands, and they were in people's hands because for the very first time, I had an author's table.

For the four days that I sat behind that author's table, behind a fort of my books and my postcards and my wife's steampunk gears and shelves and even a small tiger, I became part of a community of people - and not just even the wonderful people at the Clockwork Alchemy author's alley, whom I hope to see again for years and years to come.

No, I became a part of the broader community of science fiction authors, connecting with their readers through science fiction conventions, the way I myself first really connected with the science fiction community, after many years of reading alone. I've been a published author for years, and written in a small community for longer, but now I feel connected as never before.

This is a new level of interaction, a new level of connection, a new opportunity for a whole family to create an author's delight by buying their books and holding them over their heads like mouse ears. Somehow, everything feels more real to me, and I am more inspired than ever before to keep writing and to get the ideas in my head out … and into yours.

I hope we both enjoy it! God bless,

-the Centaur

Sunday’s Events at Clockwork Alchemy

Published May 24, 2014 by centaur

Today's talk on Real Women of the Victorian Era, led by the redoubtable T.E. MacArthur, went well. In a weird bit of synergy, an audiobook I was reading, Victorian Britain in the Great Courses series, had a section on Florence Nightingale which was not just directly relevant … it played just as I was driving up to the hotel. Perfect.

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 25th, I will be appearing on the panels Avoiding Historical Mistakes at noon in the Monterey Room (it is rumored that Harry Turtledove will be on the panel as well) and Victorian Technology at 2pm in the San Carlos room (not 1 as I said earlier), and giving a solo talk on The Science of Airships at 4pm also at San Carlos.

The rest of the time, I will largely be at my table above, which will look more or less like you see it above, except I may be wearing a different outfit. :-D

-the Centaur