Galley Ho!

My publisher told me today that the galley for my upcoming book Blood of her Fathers is ready. In case you don't know what this publishing term means, or you think that it's the nautical term for a ship's kitchen, a  proof, originally one set from type in a galley, taken before thematerial has been made up into pages and usually printed as a singlecolumn of type with wide margins for marking corrections. Www.dictionary/reference.com. In other words, it is the final coppy of the book before the final published version.


This, to me, was a sign that I'd better publish a blog to my Blogger account, My Life in Publishing as soon as possible. The novel, in 27 chapters, is due for release on March 5^th. I first got the idea for the novel in 2007 after the publication of my story about werewolves during the Yuletide season in a small Minnesota town. I researched for this book quite thoroughly. I bought 2 rather encyclopedic books about vampires, and saw not only Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, but also the Hammer films of the 50s into the 70s that expounded on the Dracula myth, and carried it further. I decided to use the classical literature to provide me with plot devices in my story. My vampire would not be related to Vlad Tepesh Dracula, but would be from the same region as he, born 2 centuries after Dracula. My vampire hunter, however, would be a scion of the famous Van Helsing family, and I even went so far as to trace out a family tree for her, although it would not be included in the book.


The points-of-view I used turned out to be a daunting task. I used three points of view: My vampire hunter, Jamie Van Helsing, who is dragged into the family business after her best friends are killed and turned, leaving their two young children in her care; thevampire Armand Ragoczy, an alchemist and merchant from old Romania; and Denton Charles, a police detective with a dangerous secret. I think that's why I left it for so long. But now it's done, and I'm ready to release it out into the wide world. Well, the Internet, which is my world, these days.



Since I first got published so late in life, I decided never to become blasé about the experience, no matter how many I may get published in the future. So I am very excited about this one at last getting to see the light of day. I know that, unlike my vampire character in the book, it will not burn. It will be available from Crimson Frost Books on March 5^th. Stay tuned to this space for more links where you can purchase this long awaited opus.

What to do while waiting for edits redux.

What to do while waiting for edits redux.  While I’m waiting for something, I like to keep busy with something else.  It’s the best substitute for patience I’ve ever found.  When people see me crocheting, they often comment on my great patience.  The truth is, I’m not patient at all.  I have to keep busy, or I go crazy and my anti-rage med threatens to fail.  One of my dreams is to organize a readers’ theatre Shakespearean group while waiting in line.  Then all of us would be entertained.  When my anti-rage med threatens to fail, I visualize a huge image of that med projected on the wall above everyone or I engage those ahead of me and behind me in conversation.  People love to talk about their pets.  I discovered a fellow cat fancier just the other day.  Discussing our pets probably ranks equally with talking about our kids or grandkids.  My sainted mother taught me how to engage in small talk.  

Currently I am trying to decide whether to work on my autobiography, which is on a back burner, or on a story about Merlin the magician, which I gave his original Cymric spelling to, Myrrddin,  which is on another back burner.  And of course, there’s coloring, which I do when the words won’t come in either narrative. Also I’m getting ready for the main NaNoWriMo which begins in a few days.  I need to get my research and playlist shipshape.  

I’m pretty excited about my story this time around.  It’s a story I’ve been trying to write since I was 16, about a girl who goes back in time twice, the first time to 1920s Chicago, and gets involved with gangsters, the 2nd time to World War II with a mission, to get the Japanese-Americans out of the internment camps and into uniform to fight in Europe against the Nazis and the Fascists.  Then she comes back and has to cope with the results of her time travel.  This time around, I’m adding a 3rd time travel trip to 1949, to prevent the Vietnam war.

There’s an old song from the 60s that I’m reminded of right now, “Countin’ flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all, playin’ solitaire ‘til dawn with a deck of fifty one.  Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangaroo, Now don’t tell me I’ve nothin’ to do.”  I don’t smoke or count flowers on the wall.  I’ve way more creative things to do than the guy in the song does.  If worst comes to worst, I can always take out my paper dolls and design clothes for them. I find it a great pity that just when a  kid learns to color inside the lines, and fairly accurate rendering of the flow of fabric, she must give up paper dolls in favor of more mature pursuits.  It was paper dolls that got me interested in fashion, and in the history of costume.

Then there is the library book I’m reading, continuing my reading of Don Quijote de la Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervantes, who was a 17th century author, and the novel is a broad parody of the romances about knights, damsels in distress, and the derring-do that were popular during the Siglo del Oro, the Age of Gold that occurred after the Spanish were defeated by the English in 1588.  I find that reading it in the original 17th century Spanish is enough of an intellectual challenge that I can stave off senility for a few more years.

Getting the Word Out

This blog is about writing quickly, trying to get at least 2000 words a day.  In this kind of writing, you say whatever comes into your head.  It's almost stream-of-consciousness, although I try to write complete sentences.  I'm using Dragon, a speech recognition software package I purchased about 4 years ago.It greatly cuts down on the need to type, since I type about 33 words per minute with 5 errors.  So this was a welcome change from fingers constantly banging on the keyboard.  There was just one hitch sometimes what my Dragon heard, and put on the screen was as far from what I'd said as the Earth is from the Sun.  The Earth is in the "Goldilocks" orbit around the Sun, the perfect distance for life as we know it.  But what my Dragon renders with my perfectly grammatical prose is not in the Goldilocks zone of what I meant.  Is it my diction?  My accent?  I am without an accent of any kind.  I learned to speak my native American Standard English in the town that radio and TV broadcasters go to to learn American Standard English.  Minneapolis, MN carries the standard for our language.  I do, however pepper my speech with words from the languages I've studied and picked up over the decades.  For example:  I've never studied French but can speak more of it than my SO Dallan, who studied it for at least 2 years in high school.   He blames his teachers, but I think it's because he didn't practice it.  I practiced my Spanish, most of the time on my poor long suffering English mother, since my classmates wouldn't speak it with me.

Writing like this, you don't do a lot of editing, unless like me with my pet Dragon, when what you say comes out, many times, as gobbledegook.  The only pauses come when I'm less than inspired, and the words aren't flowing as they should be.    I go back and edit it later,when I'm putting it together to submit to my publisher.   I must say, her being a writer herself does give her a lot of clues as to the care, feeding and bruised ego massaging of writers/authors.  Oh, yes, we have egos.  Make no mistake.  If we didn't, we'd keep all our stories in our desk drawers, and never seek publication; never seek to put ourselves out there.

Writing is something I wanted to do since I learned to read.  Back then, it was relatively difficult to write, and almost impossible to get published.  You needed an agent, and those agents charged money, a lot of it, to even read your work.  I was up against the same adversary I have been up against all my working life:  the curse of the beginner.  Everyone wanted a sure thing.  No one wanted to take a chance on a novice.  At least I had access to a typewriter, and a supply of paper.  My mother worked for the Northwestern Farm Management Co., and she brought home paper, on one side there was a much duplicated letter on the Northwestern Farm Management letterhead; but the other side was blank.  I had writing fever, which I later would call a disease, an addiction.  I didn't write because I wanted to, I wrote because I had to, it was a compulsion, related to the compulsion to arrange everything just so, wash one's hands obsessively, or compulsively clean; or, to kill.  I was lucky though.  I had no need to spend thousands of dollars I didn't have on weapons.  I had a weapon my pen or typewriter and my mind.  I could create characters, then kill them off.  I could create characters based on those who tormented me, then my main character or heroine based on myself, of course, could kill the villains in poetically appropriate ways.

Time moved forward, as it always did, and so did technology.  The PC was born, and I discovered the joy of the electronic word processor.  But still I dreamt of a mechanism that could take my spoken words, and turn them into a story.  The first Dragon was beyond my paltry means.  But then I received a boon, in the shape of my dearly departed SO's  insurance policy.  My half paid for a new PC and the version of Dragon that was going out, because a new version was coming in.  I didn't care.   And the movie that was playing on TV as I was beginning to train my Dragon, and starting to play around with her (My toys and tools are always female.  It's my protest against a world that was still too much run by men.)  was Disney's How to Train Your Dragon.  Both Stephen (who had received his Dragon a few days ahead of me) and I found this to be synchronicity.  Stephen hesitated to use his, but I dove right in, and soon I was dictating like a pro.  And so it's been ever since.  Len has had to learn that when I'm talking, I'm not addressing him; I'm talking to my Dragon. This isn't an ad for it, but if you do get one, it'll be money well spent, if you use it as I have.

When I was 58, I got published.  It was an ebook house called Silk's Vault, that published romances.  I wrote some things for it, and some of them got published.  The editor founded her own house, and I followed her there.  Two more of my works were published there.  One of them got published as a Young adult novel, and I got my first taste of fame when I was interviewed for internet radio.  David Bowie's song "Fame" became my anthem.  Then because of an illness she had, and fearing a flareup after caring for her old curmudgeon of a dad, she had to close down FireDrake's Weyr.  I existed without a publisher for nearly 6 years, until in 2015 I was introduced by the same dear woman who had introduced me to my first publisher to the publisher I have now.  And I have signed 6 contracts to get my works published, of whom one has already come out.  I'm eagerly awaiting and soon, working on, the other 5.

Writing: From Inventory to Storytelling

Writing: what is it? It is the art of putting pen to paper or words on the screen for the purpose of communicating either facts, an opinion, or telling a story. I'm sure that I haven't covered all the purposes writing serves; not even close to it. The prose can be as dry as an academic paper, or as moist as the purplest of poetry.


Human beings first developed writing as a method of inventorying agricultural products and it is believed by many that it was women who developed writing for that purpose. Back at the very beginning of civilization, people offered the Gods and Goddesses the products of their labors in the fields. This had a dual purpose: to express gratitude or to propitiate the Mighty Ones, and as a hedge against famine and disaster.


I write to tell stories. Storytelling too has a long history. Around the campfire thousands of years ago, stories were told about the Gods and Goddesses and the arrangements of the stars in the sky that we call constellations. The shaman or seanachie also told stories about their the powers about other powers of nature and why things were the way they were. Today we call such stories myths. Many dismiss them as fantasies, but they all have a kernel of truth buried inside them. My speculative fiction and fantasy stories also have kernels of truth inside that. They do come from my subconscious; that roiling cauldron composed of all the experiences, racial memories of the collective unconscious, and the reading and viewing I've ever done and eventually my sub-unconscious spits out a story.



By psychiatrists and psychologists, writing, as well as other forms of artistic expression, is a kind of emotional catharsis. In the ancient dramas which were reenactments of the myths, there definitely was an emotional catharsis; especially in the ancient tragedies of the Greeks by such dramatists as Sophocles and Euripides Choeritus, Aeschylus, Phrynichus, Achaeus of Eritiea, and Eumenides. These are all dramatists of the 6^th and 5^th centuries BCE. The plots follow a pattern which is still largely followed today. Joseph Campbell described this plot so well when he came up with the hero's journey which starts with with the call to action. In Oedipus Rex the call to action is the Oracle's prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his own mother. The refusal of the call, when the infant Oedipus is at first exposed then farmed out to a farmer's family. His foster father, the old farmer, died and Oedipus is on his own seeking his fortune. He meets a man on a bridge who refuses to give way to him. He kills the man not knowing that this is his own father and meets the Queen Jocasta, who appeared to him to be an attractive older woman, and the realm she rules isn't bad either. He marries her and has children with her. The climax of the story comes when Oedipus realizes how he did fulfill this dire prophecy and blinds himself and Jocasta takes her own life. That is the emotional catharsis in the story then the denouement lets the audience down easily from this catharsis and ties up all the loose ends. Don't forget to buy a copy of my e-book Palulukon. I think it follows this ancient plot line and that you will enjoy it, although it is not a tragedy.