Patricia S. Bowne

from Kioskea.net

We had a three-day week at work but we packed a semester’s worth of angst, meetings, and general academic brouhaha into it. So I am  feeling rather crabby in spite of a very nice walk in the woods with a friend.  What to do but purge my blogroll of all the blogs that irritate me?

First to go are professional publications’ blogs which post seductive titles with no content – only links to pages where you can pay to read the article.  I don’t mind paying for articles but they should tell me up front, not make me click through to find out.

Next up? Another set of blogs that send titles only, and uninformative titles at that.  ‘Whither and Wherefore’ has appeared in Obscure Magazine, they pronounce. Whither and wherefore will they go when I click that delete button?

There’s a whole mess of blogs whose authors ‘break’ their posts so feedly only gets a teaser. Unfortunately the ones that irritate me most with this are too useful to delete. Instead, I’ll take out my spleen on the science blog that has posted its thirtieth article about homosexual necrophilia in ducks. Not that I’m judging — yes, I am. Not the interest itself, but the level of interest … delete.

This purge was a great relief, so much so that I began to reflect on the blogs that I do like. IFLScience has taken over from Wired as the prime site for popular science, so far as I can tell. I follow Rod Dreher at American Conservative because he runs the best comment section of any political blog out there.  The Art of Animation showcases pictures by artists on DeviantArt, and you never know what you’ll see. I hunted up one of their featured artists last week and bought a print. And of course I follow The Bloggess. Doesn’t everybody?

But what should I add to replace all those irritants I just removed? I’m open for suggestions.

This is as close as I've been to Vikings -- seen from the waterfront boat tour in Copenhagen

I sold two stories to an anthology of scandinavian-inspired folk tales, but one of them was obviously set in a non-scandinavian region – not surprising, since in my fantasy world there is no scandinavia at all, nor any other real-life countries. ‘Selanto’ and ‘Kasidora,’ the editor pointed out, are not really scandinavian-sounding place names.  Couldn’t I replace them?

I know two words of Danish, and that’s it — and naming the two cities ‘excuse me’ and ‘thank you’ would probably not suffice (let alone that folks’ behavior in the story suggests that they don’t know those words). So off I went to the internet and found a Viking place name generator.  I picked out a few that seemed as if they’d sound right with a little tweaking, googled the results to make sure they weren’t the names of celebrities or well-known obscenities, and sent them off. But man, what an uneasy feeling it gave me!  I didn’t know a thing about what these names meant. I didn’t even know the language well enough to identify the word roots I should be looking up.

Sure enough, one of them meant ‘Valley Lake,’ and there is no lake in the valley I’m writing about.  The other meant nothing, so far as my norse-speaking editor can tell.  So we go into round two of creating the names.

It’s sort of fun — but that’s because I have someone helping me who knows the language.  If I were on my own I’d be too uneasy about the possible hidden meanings to enjoy it at all. This is why I write fantasy instead of historical fiction, and name so many of my characters after fish.

This summer’s sales are moving closer to actual publication.

Great Light’s Daughters, a creation tale from my work in progress, will appear in the Abbreviated Epics anthology from Third Flatiron anthologies in November. You can wait for hard copies, or you can pre-order the e-book at Amazon or Smashwords.

Years after writing A Lovesome Thing, I’ve finally realized it’s about the internet.

How did I miss it at the time?  A magical land where you can build anything you want, be anything you want … where nothing has real-world consequences … a place where people who have to be ‘good’ in real life can shed their inhibitions and act just like the monsters they conquered.

But then it turns out to be a place where in fact, each of your million different personae is trapped in the consequences of its own actions, dragging around the hates and resentments of those its path has crossed.  And those heroes who thought they were just playing at villainy find that they’ve become the demons, after all.

When I wrote this book I had been on the internet for over 20 years. I started using it before it was a thing, when scientists were first transmitting data sets to one another.  I got onto the first internet service established in Milwaukee, back when you could crash someone’s computer by sending them an image file.  I’d been through the usenet groups, the bulletin boards, the first trolls and pitiful demands for kill-filing capability, Eternal September.  But I had no idea I was writing about it.

I wonder what I’ll discover the new book is about, ten years down the road? And is this normal for authors?  Anybody else have the same experience?

Once again, Double Dragon has issued a book way faster than I expected.  Swept and Garnished, the third Royal Academy novel, is now available at their website .

What you’ll find in it: After barely surviving the semester at the Royal Academy, Hiram Rho heads home for the summer and his department chair, Warren Oldham, departs on a well-deserved vacation. While Rho tries to get his powers back, Warren’s vacation takes an unexpected turn that leaves him battling a demon from inside it. Back in Osyth Russell Cinea, the senior demonologist, is finally in charge – for a week full of demons, exorcists, and unexpected temptations.

Also, Rho’s mother and Warren’s wife take on the biggest, ooziest demon ever.  This is my ‘old ladies ROCK’ book.  Enjoy!

I’m reading a book about a vampire hunter.  At least, for the first 48% of it I believed it was about a vampire hunter.  But I have come to suspect that it is about competence.

It’s hard to write a book in first person, I suppose, without it being mainly about the protagonist’s opinion of him or herself.  Even harder if the book is about someone doing their job.  Triply harder if it’s a job that really requires expertise… but there are bigger challenges, to my mind, in protagonists who focus relentlessly on their own expertise; and I find myself falling out of like with being told what an expert vampire hunter does with every waking minute, and how every step is planned and every contingency considered.  It was nice at the beginning, when I was learning about the world.  Now I’m waiting for the book to come to life and be about more than how competent the main character is.

clip art from clker.com

What really made this stand out to me was that in between chapters of this book I’m binge-watching The Good Wife, a show which is about competent lawyers at work but which doesn’t have any of the ‘yeah, I get it, you’ve thought of everything,’ effect on me. Because the lawyers in The Good Wife have never thought of everything.  They are always being blindsided and coming up with last-minute seat-of-the-pants saves, and being blindsided again or making stupid decisions because of their personal lives, and sometimes they lose in important ways.  That makes the moments when their plans do work out shine, and lets me share their triumph rather than begrudging it.

And strangely enough, it’s the fiction in which nobody is going to lose more than their job that feels high-stakes and suspenseful, and the one in which being torn apart is a risk with every page-turn which has started to bore me.  To make characters look nimble, you need to let them get off-balance.