Some Thoughts on Writing

1. Writing is never wasted. Sometimes I just write individual scenes involving characters or settings, without really trying to make them a story. Often, some of these scenes later tie themselves together in various stories, although they usually need to be revised to fit. I have a computer file called “Parts,” where I keep such unconnected scenes.

2. Related to the above, I started pretty early to keep a kind of "Encyclopedia" for each invented world I came up with. This would have brief descriptions of characters, races, plants, animals, cities, etc. It’s fun to do and also helps me hold the disparate threads of stories or settings together in my head where my unconscious can  work on them. Some of these kinds of elements end up in my dreams because of that.

3. Remember that "you can write ugly" when you begin. The 'story' doesn't have to be anything publishable when it first comes out onto the page. Writing allows you time to fix all that stuff later. I find that the act of writing itself often generates a flow of creativity and things come out better than I would have thought when I was just 'thinking' of the story.

4. Related to #3, writing is really "rewriting." I've learned to enjoy it. I never have anything come out right when I first put it down, but I have confidence that I'll be able to fix it down the line.

5. A story idea belongs to you. Just because you’ve written it one way doesn’t mean you can’t rewrite it in another way. I’ve taken stories that I wrote early in my career and revised them based on experience, sometimes turning the core into a completely new story, and sometimes just an expansion of an original tale. Many writers do this. Poul Anderson and Louis L’Amour spring to mind. I have multiple versions of some stories, either with different endings, or just ones that were better developed as I grew in experience.

6. Reading a story is like flying over a landscape in a plane. Writing that story is trudging the ground, going up and down the hills, fighting through the underbrush, wading the streams. It's a lot more difficult but one experience can't replace the other.  When I first started out, I sometimes took really strong scenes by other writers, such as Howard, or Bradbury, and typed them out for myself to get a feel for sentence length, paragraph length, etc. 

Gods of Talera

Well, I intended to get a post up about Gods of Talera sooner but then final exams came in and everything else went out the window. So I’m finally getting around to it.

As most of you know, the fourth and fifth books in the Talera series are finally out, just in time for the holiday season. I posted a bit about Wraith of Talera last blog. Gods and Wraith make a duology, a grouping of two books that complete a single story. 

Gods also marks a kind of ending for the series. The story line of Ruenn Maclang, which began in Book 1, Swords of Talera, reaches a logical conclusion. I don’t, at current, have any plans for further books about this particular group of characters, although I am interested in exploring some other aspects of the planet of Talera, perhaps through some novellas.

Gods also provides a final reveal on some of the questions that have been troubling Ruenn Maclang throughout the series. Namely, who actually created the planet, what happened to them, and what do they have to do with the Asadhie, the group of sorcerers that Ruenn has been in conflict with throughout the series. I had fun writing that part.

The Talera series started as a labor of love, and has ended that way. The Barsoom books of Edgar Rice Burroughs were a huge part of my formative years and for as long as I can remember I wanted to tell Sword and Planet stories in the ERB tradition.  I’m proud of this series. I hope many readers will feel the same way. 

Wraith of Talera: Shai!

A few years ago, Shauna Roberts, a fine writer herself, told me that she had enjoyed the Talera trilogy but was hoping sometime to see a true warrior woman show up in the series. For those of you who have read it, you know that Rannon is a powerful warrior herself but we’ve almost never seen her in action, and her role as Queen of Nyshphal does make it a little hard for her to go leaping about freely with a sword.

Shauna’s comment hung around in the back of my mind and eventually coalesced into a warrior named Shai in Wraith of Talera Here’s how she was introduced: “A shape leaped through the new sphere gate. A man. No, a woman. She wore an armor of bones, carried a rapier in either hand.”

Shai becomes an ally of Ruenn Maclang and stands with him in the final climactic battle of Wraith. I think it’s one of the best battle scenes I’ve written in the series. I won’t tell you whether Shai survives. You’ll have to read to see.

Happy Happy News: New Books Out

Well, after many delays due to the death of Robert Reginald, my original editor at Wildside/Borgo Press, the next two books in the Talera series have finally been released and are loose in the world. These are books #4 Wraith of Talera, and #5 Gods of Talera. They form a connected duology, separate from the original trilogy (Swords, Wings, Witch), although, of course, characters and settings and history are carried over. I’m pretty pleased with how they came out and it’s wonderful to see them in print at last. I’m pretty fond of the covers too, which continued the theme of the earlier books but put some nice twists on that. The covers are below. (Thanks to Steve Coupe for his work on this.)

The original Talera Trilogy involved the earthman Ruenn Maclang being transported to Talera, establishing himself there, and dealing with the witch/goddess known as Vohanna. Witch of Talera finished that basic storyline but left some loose ends. In Wraith of Talera, those loose ends come back to haunt Ruenn—pretty much literally—and that book and Gods of Talera deal with these events. “Gods” brings the primary story line of Ruenn to a natural close and it will be the last Talera book, at least for a while. I do have a couple of novellas planned to examine other aspects of the planet—not directly related to Ruenn’s story. I don’t know when I might get around to writing those.

Gods of Talera is dedicated to Robert Reginald, my editor at Borgo Press, and later with Wildside Press. Rob was the editor on most of my published books, up till now. He was excellent—hands off enough to let me take the stories where I wanted them to go, but hands on enough to shepherd them through the minutia. It was a great relationship and I still miss him. In addition to the dedication there is another acknowledgement of Rob spread throughout the pages of “Gods.” It has to do with place names and down the line I’ll reveal it.

For now, I’m just happy to see these books out. There will be both print and ebook editions, though only print editions are out at the moment. I don’t know about audiobook editions yet. I'm sure these will also go up on Barnes & Noble, but it looks like they're only available on Amazon right now.  

I hope you’ll take a look see. As always, I appreciate your support.

You Think You had it Tough!

You think you had it tough. I grew up in the middle of the woods. When I told my dad I wanted a set of Lincoln logs, he handed me an ax and said, “Go cut ‘em yourself.”

I once told my dad I wanted some Play-dough. He told me, “That’s what mud is for.”

You think you’ve seen cold winters. Most of the time when I was a kid, if I wanted a drink of water I’d have to climb up on the local glacier with a tin cup and a magnifying glass and melt my own.

When folks tell me I act like I was raised in a barn, I say, “I wish I’d had it that good.” I grew up in a dugout in the side of a creek bank. I had twelve brothers and sisters originally but 7 of ‘em washed away in floods. The rest of us had learned how to swim by watching the beavers.

We learned to use every part of our food. For example, you didn’t throw away the hulls once you got the hickory nuts out. They were good mattress padding. (If only we’d have had a mattress to put them in.) Whenever we had fish, we used the spine for a comb and made shoes out of the scaled skin. My sister had a fish eye necklace that was the envy of every kid in school.

I may have grown up poor but at least I had a lot of pets as a kid. Dogs, cats, raccoons, possums, squirrels, rabbits, snakes, grasshoppers etc. Of course, they never lasted long. Acorn and bark stew only goes so far—when you can get it.

I remember we tried raising chickens once but in those days the chickens had teeth and razor blade feathers so it didn’t work out well for us. I’ve still got the scars from trying to gather eggs from those bad hens. We finally just let ‘em run wild. I’ve always believed our chickens were the source of all the Boggy Creek Monster legends.

One of my mom’s best dishes was chicken pot pie. Of course, we never had any chickens to put in it. Just the pot. But if you cooked it long enough and you were hungry enough, it was delicious—if a bit chewy.

I’d have killed to have four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie. We always had to do with five or less. and mostly that was just the beaks and feet. Course, the feet were darn good eatin’. There’d be a pretty good scrap among the brothers every time one of us got hold of a bird foot.

Almost every kid makes mud pies but we took those things seriously. It was the only dessert we ever got. I liked to spread the froth from the creek on top of mine as meringue. I was always the master chef of the clan.

Thank goodness for the thick Arkansas fogs when I was a kid. Cut a slice and spread it between two dead leaves and you had a heckuva sandwich.

I remember one bad winter. It started in 64 and ran through 67. Everything froze so hard you couldn’t burn nothing for warmth. Fire was too cold to start anyway. Thank goodness for family. Especially my brother Bo. He had a bad case of the farts that year and that was the only thing kept us warm.

When I was growing up, the only thing worse than the freezing winters were the broiling summers. Back in 62, it stayed above the boiling temperature for water for three straight weeks. And that was in May. Some folks said it was the hottest summer on record, but 59 was worse. I considered the summer of 62 to be a cool front.

The nearest big city to where I grew up was called Charleston, Arkansas. It had a population of well over a thousand people, if you can imagine that many human beings in one place. I remember once we walked into town and I spent my whole time gawking at the incredibly tall one-story houses and the streets made of stone. They even had these fancy contraptions called au-toe-moe-beels. My brother Pabe got run over three times before he realized they was capable of movement. Fortunately, the wild conditions we’d lived in had toughened up his hide a mite. He ended up a bit lopsided but not much the worse for wear.

After visiting the big city, Dad decided we should get TV. We couldn’t get it to work until we plugged it into an electric eel. I never got to watch it, though. I had to stand on the roof  of the dugout with forks taped to me so we’d have an antenna.

Somebody seemed surprised that we could afford forks. We couldn’t. Our forks were hand made from old discarded beer cans. I still have a set for use on special occasions.

  

Blogging Slowdown

Not sure what is wrong with me of late. Life in general has been pretty good so I don't have that as an excuse. School was very busy the last few weeks but I was off most of this week for Thanksgiving. Yet, I still didn't blog until today and scarcely even visited other blogs, something I used to do religiously. It's also not that I haven't had ideas. I've had lots of ideas for blog posts but it just has seemed more effort than it's worth to put them in actual words.

I've actually not been doing much writing either. I've half a dozen projects part way done and I've jotted down dozens of other ideas, but I just haven't gotten the bit in my teeth on any of them.

Slow downs are inevitable. Maybe it's just that. Blogging seems to be slowly dying away anyway so maybe that is part of it as well. It's always so easy to post a quick line or two on facebook, but you lose something at that short length.

Hopefully I'll get back to blogging soon and with some more substantial posts. I should have some good news to share soon so I'll definitely want to blog about that.

Until then, hang in everyone.