Elsewhere on the web, there was a discussion going on about whether readers of popular fiction would tolerate an unlikeable main character, and I stuck my oar in – well, a whole galley’s worth of oars actually. I thought I would try to summarize some of my opinions here:
Continue reading “Likeable and Unlikeable Main Characters”Happy Easter!
Spring Book Sale
Happy (Upcoming) Easter!
This year, I’m participating in AetherCzar’s Based Spring Book Sale.
Steampunk author Hans G. Schantz (aka AetherCzar) has graciously included Shadow Captain in his sale. As usual Hans pulls together dozens of indie and small-press titles, which emphasize fun and escapism over Serious Messages and the grinding concerns of the real world, all on sale or for free. I hope you can find something you like here.
Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3
So, here’s my final review on the bookbinding kit that I bought:
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3”Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 2
The third bookbinding project in this kit was somewhat more complicated. It involved sewing multiple signatures (sets of folded paper leaves) together over linen “tapes” using something called a kettle stitch. The end product was what the instructions called “an adventurer’s journal” and I called a naked text block, ready to be “cased in” (bookbinding term for putting a cool cover on a fully assembled text block). Not everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but a fair amount did…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 2”Wolf’s Trail is Free Until Friday!
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Wolf’s Trail, the first book in Hunter Healer King, my gothic gaslamp fantasy series, is free for all readers until Friday, March 22, 2024!
You may know me from my clean romantic fantasy novels in the Jaiya series and the Ancestors of Jaiya series, or my space operas, the Star Master duology. Wolf’s Trail still combines adventure, mysticism, romance and fun characters, while avoiding harsh language and the more graphic forms of violence and sexuality. This new series is written for fans of steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, lost civilizations, and monster hunters like Van Helsing (the more action hero version of the character, as portrayed by Peter Cushing and Hugh Jackman).
EBookDaily is Featuring Slaying a Tyrant
This website spontaneously decided to promote the permanently free Slaying a Tyrant today, and asked that I link to their site, so here’s the link: https://ebookdaily.com/free-kindle-ebooks/2024-03-16/B07WDSZRV2
Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Book Binding, Part 1
So, sometime back I watched this video and it got me interested in bookbinding and rebinding. I looked at a few videos, and tracked down a self-contained kit on Amazon. Thoughts and pictures below.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Book Binding, Part 1”Where Did That Come From? The Posh Guy in Wolf’s Trail
We’ve discussed the origins of the feisty girl/posh guy idea before, and the evolution of the feisty girl in my head into Chloe Fortabat of Wolf’s Trail. The evolution of the posh guy was less dramatic, because for a long time I thought primarily of him as a foil to the heroine. Here are the different phases, numbered to match the entries under Feisty Girl:
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Posh Guy in Wolf’s Trail”Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl in Wolf’s Trail
(Note to pedants: I use “girl” here in a colloquial sense, as the counterpart to “guy.” All the female character concepts mentioned below were college age or older when I stopped to think about how old the character ought to be.)
As previously stated, the basics of the feisty girl/posh guy teamup came to me while watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. It was a long road from there to Wolf’s Trail.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl in Wolf’s Trail”