Someone, who will not be named, recently posted on an open web forum about how she though fantasy writing was simple and then went on to state she had never read any.

Sighs. For the record, my upcoming publication, Shadow Over Avalon has eight major threads aside from the primary one. It also has many peripheral threads. World building is crucial in fantasy. Also, what many people do not appreciate is that fantasy and sci fi must be compatable to literary fiction.  Aside from extensive world building,, extensive research went into this project. Is it simple? Just try manipulating multiple threads and tell me if it is simple or not.  As it happens, I went back to the tenth century for data on this project.

Walk a mile in my shoes before you slam fantasy as simple.

A query letter should be so good that it is fit to occupy the back cover of a book. That is the ideal scenario from everyone’s point of view. This is the single most important few words an author can write, aside from their book, and these words are also the hardest. How to encapsulate an entire novel in three paragraphs?

Not easy. Ok, so I didn’t need a query letter for Shadow Over Avalon, but I still needed a blurb, which is the same thing. Yes, I will admit there were dry runs behind the scenes. I came up with one, not my first attempt, that fitted the bill, or almost. My publishers tweaked it just a little to reduce the wordage to fit the back of the book. Loved it. I now have what I consider to be a wicked blurb.

Note, this comes after countless hours spent in workshops trying to perfect a query. This is not the result of getting lucky the first time. It comes with work. It also helps to have publishers who know how to tweak something to make it fit the space available in the very best way.

Totally shitty day, punctuated by bad internet connections, which made me late to deliver on something I had promised. Not impressed. If I had another option that gave me unlimited, I would take it in a heartbeat. Yah boo sucks, Eastlink. You suck big time.

On the writing front, I am totally spinny right now. Things are happening and I can’t concentrate. Maybe I will be back to normal next week.

Bandit Book Tour Bloggers.

I have been busy all day tidying the yard. I had chunks of tree to cut down as I have two Mayday trees, (Prunus family), and they have been infected with Black Knot fungus. It means cutting out the infected branches periodically. I did a lot in spring, before the leafed out, but I see it has come back. The areas are high and this calls for the pole pruner. It has to be done or the fungus will girdle the branch and cause a die-off so the branch is toast anyhow. 

Aside from this, we took a trip into Canadian Tire to see what offers they had going on plants. Picked up a barberry bush, a hosta, a coral bells, a chrysanthemum, two lilies, an ivy and a sage plant. Some of these will be for inside, but I got all the outside plants spudded in. I also planted the hydrangea I had on my deck as I know it will not survive the winter otherwise. There was a nice spot where a rose had died, so it was just perfect.  I was hoping for some more ferns, but these were all gone. Still, next week might bring some more reductions and I would like some more shrubs around the fence. The cats really like shrubs. This is their area of privacy, where they can spy on the flying munchables.  

Perhaps tomorrow I will get more tree cut down and clear out my deck planters. The frost has been coming at night and the annuals are dying, so might as well get it done now. I would also like to do some weeding as I haven’t been able to get on the beds because of the constant rain/t-showers. Methinks I might cheat and spray some round-up on the bad areas. 

Snippets.

I have a little non- fiction piece up on readwave at the moment. It is a capsule in time and my recollections of then as it happened. This is through the eyes of an eight-year -old child and this is the perspective. I am well aware that putting it up in a public domain mean the first rights are shot and it is unsaleable.

It seems readwave have gotten themselves a lot of staff readers. They all seem to have zeroed in on my harmless little idly. After a slurry of suggestions for vamping the piece up, which would be appropriate if it were fiction and for sale, I post that it is non-fiction and on a non-fiction page. The very next comment I get is ‘is this non-fiction?’ Face palm.

There was also the interesting grammatical correction seriously suggesting I put a comma in front of the word ‘that’. Had I used ‘which’ I would have understood the need for a comma. One wonders if this person’s mind has ever been violated by Strunk and White, or the Chicago Manuel of style. Perhaps not.

Speech may be silver, but sometimes silence is golden.