The new episode of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall: 1.5 – Tafl is now live!
And now I have a buffer to catch up on and a file to tweak so the book doesn’t look funky on Kindle.
The new episode of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall: 1.5 – Tafl is now live!
And now I have a buffer to catch up on and a file to tweak so the book doesn’t look funky on Kindle.
Just recently I read a piece on Mad Genius Club talking about just what gothic romance was. Today, I found this on Quartz India and wondered how many gothic romances were inspired here, rather than on the moors of England.
Quartz India: The ghosts of a literary Indian hill town still haunt the writers of the present. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw4r21rTQ
It seems that WordPress might not actually be pushing my project pages like posts. I knew I was going to need to upgrade my account, but I may actually need to move to self-hosting, as well. So! If you haven’t already noticed, Episode 4 is live. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll be able to sit down with a sketchbook and come up with some illustrations for those pages, but to be honest that’s lower priority than the story itself.
In other news, my Patreon account is also live! If you enjoy my writing, and have a few dollars a month you’re willing to send my way, I hope you’ll pop on over there and take a look. Doing well there will help me do things like hire illustrators so that I can keep turning out quality stories – which, again, are my priority here.
While I’m on the subject, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my first novel, Advent of Ruin, is I believe still on track to go live on Amazon on March 1. I have a couple quick changes to make to the text, the glossary to finish, and then it’s just formatting. Fingers crossed!
I’m not on Reddit (wouldn’t have the first clue where to begin), but I kinda feel like this belongs on the “Humanity, fuck yeah!” board.
Jalopnik: Heroic Driver Sacrifices His Tesla To Save Unconscious Man In Runaway Volkswagen. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwp8v2szk
So, saw this on Passive Voice the other day and thought I’d share. We… may need two.
https://youtu.be/34I27KPZM6g
Good morning!
Episode 3 of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall is now live for your enjoyment!
If you like what I’m doing here, it would really mean a lot if you went over and took a look at my Patreon page that just launched this morning. My writing is my job and my business, so your support means I’ll be able to keep writing my stories.
In other business news, I’ve made it through all the comments I had on Advent of Ruin, so when I’m not working on my buffer of serial chapters I’ll be preparing that file to go up on Kindle. My goal is still to have it ready by 3/1.
EDIT 2/17/2016: I’ve rearranged the site somewhat and updated the link above accordingly.
If you haven’t somehow already seen, chapter 1.2 – Aftermath is now live. Enjoy! Feel free to tell me what you think, or tell your friends, or I suppose tell nobody, but that leads to sad writers.
EDIT 2/17/2016: I’ve rearranged the site somewhat and updated the link above accordingly.
So I was scanning through my news feed on my phone this morning, and I stumbled across an article on Slate called “Is My Novel Offensive?“. Now, this being Slate, my first reaction was to mutter sarcastically something along the lines of “isn’t everything?” But I clicked through to read it.
Apparently, in addition to beta readers and copy editors and everything else, there’s now a push for authors to employ “sensitivity readers” to avoid the sort of micro-aggressions that are turning college campuses into some of the least free-speech-friendly places in the country.
This can only end well.
Once I got done face-palming and managed to accept that yes, this was really happening, and I probably should have expected it sooner or later, it occurred to me I probably ought to say something about why this is a bad idea.
Most obviously, it strikes me as the sort of thing the beta readers you already have should catch. To use an example from the Slate piece, the idea that frats are perceived differently in historically black colleges strikes me as basic fact-checking.
This is part of why I prefer to write in created worlds. The rules of the world are mine to determine, and I can pull as much or as little from the real world as I want – so long as it is consistent with what has gone before in that work.
On a deeper level, I can’t help but see the push for sensitivity readers as yet more encouragement for self-censorship, and self-censorship is creative suicide. If I, as an American of northern European descent whose family emigrated in the 1600s and who grew up in rural Idaho, was only allowed to write about people like me, neither the Qaehl Cycle nor The Adventures of Einarr Stigandersen would have ever come into being.
You see, the world of the Qaehl was inspired by a single class I took in college on the art history of India. I was fascinated. The art, the sculpture, the music, the mythology, the melting pot of societies (don’t believe me? If you can get your hands on it, John Keay’s India – A History is a fascinating read. Or the Bollywood movie Jodhaa Akbar makes for an entertaining introduction.) – gave my inner creative self lots of room to play. By 2008, when I was brainstorming the first iteration of this first book, I was beginning to tire of fantasies after the mold of Tolkien, where the settings had been becoming more and more generically European and the subject matter had been getting progressively darker.
Yes, this is where I confess that I can’t read Game of Thrones. I got halfway through the second book and decided it was just too much. Meanwhile, I’m impatiently waiting for book 3 of the Stormlight Archives, so it’s not a matter of length.
What about Einarr? That world came about when I decided I wanted to do a pirate story, but at a lower tech level than you usually see, and I wanted art to be magic. (Quite literally. I may post more about that later, depending on how my Patreon goes.) If I wanted to do pirates, and I wanted to get away from the rum-running scoundrels of the Caribbean or the Letters of Marque of the renaissance, Vikings gave me the most room to play (because come on, Norse myth is badass).
But, you’re about to object, those are your people!
No, they’re really not. Wherever my ancestors came from (mostly the British Isles, but there’s a fair bit of Germanic and Scandinavian in there, too) I’m an American, and what little experience I have on the water mostly comes from paddling around in our family’s canoe when I was a kid. Furthermore, I’m a girl, and a tomboy-ish one at that. Based on that, what gives me the “right” to write about a 20-something dispossessed Viking prince? I’m separated from his likely mindset by culture, gender, and hundreds of years. But Einarr could never have been “Einara.” (Although that is a cool name that I may have to use elsewhere.)
Caveat: none of this is to excuse anyone trying to write from their research. Research is what allows your world to be internally consistent. I just can’t imagine that encouraging yet more paranoia about offending people will have a good effect on the stories we try to tell. Or that “teachable moments” are an unmitigated good in fiction. If I wanted to be preached at, I’d go to church. You can’t control how other people react to your work, which means that your best bet is to tell a story, and make it entertaining, and let your views come through naturally – without forcing them. Let people decide for themselves. You get better results that way.
Speaking of, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I’ve got the first chapter up of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall posted. Chapter 2 goes up tomorrow. I’m getting ready to launch a Patreon page, so if you like what you read I hope you’ll consider funding more. I’m not going to pound that drum too loudly in this space, but there’s not much point in doing it if I don’t tell anyone it’s coming. Now I need to get a couple administrative things out of the way so I can get back to the fiction.
The first entry in my new web serial, “The Adventures of Einarr Stigandersen,” is now live: 1.1 – A Sudden Squall can be found behind that link. 1.2 will be published on Thursday.
On a related note, I’m also getting ready to launch a Patreon to help support my writing. Most of the rewards and such I have in mind are tied to the serial, but there could be other cool things in the works, too. I want to give everyone a chance to see my work before I launch that, though, so if you think you might be interested in supporting my crazy dream you should definitely go check out the first chapter. It will probably be next Tuesday at the earliest before that goes live, so that will give people a few chapters to base their decision on.
I’m just about ready to lock in a publishing imprint for myself, and then I think I’m on track to have Advent of Ruin available on Amazon by March 1. This is the cover I’ve come up with:
When a messenger seeking safety, a girl seeking the future, and a soldier seeking something to protect are swept up in the end of an era, what new world will they bring forth?
EDIT 2/17/2016: I’ve rearranged the site somewhat and updated the Episode 1 link above accordingly.
Why, you may be asking yourself, would anyone bother making this from scratch when a box is just a buck? It’s a rice pilaf convenience food.
My first answer is to point you at the list of ingredients for their flavor packet. This also allows you the option to either brown the broken vermicelli before you add the rice or omit it entirely for gluten-free.
DH has a couple favorite meals from childhood that require chicken Rice-a-Roni, so this is what I came up with so that I can make them without the ingredients list making me blanch.
Serves: 2
Melt your butter or ghee (or other oil of choice) in your skillet of choice. Add the broken vermicelli noodles and sautée until they begin to turn golden, then add the rice and sautée briefly. Add chicken broth, onion powder, salt, pepper and parsley flakes and bring to a low boil. Cover your skillet and reduce heat: simmer 20-25 minutes, or until rice is done.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m sure you could use beef or vegetable broth instead. If you play with it, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear how it comes out.