Conmergence is Available in Print!

Yes, finally! Yay!

Twelve Days of Christmas Videos – To The Manger

So how many of you took part in Nativity Plays as kids, where you’d use tinsel on a bent hanger for a halo and bathrobes for shepherds’ frocks? When I was a preteen, I directed a number of these, including one with a science fiction theme: the Nativity in outer space. (It was a Unitarian church, what can I say.) Were you in plays? Where and who put it on? What sets and costumes did you use? Did you sing Christmas carols or just read the New Testament as though it were a script? To tell! Don’t be shy. 🙂

Behold the New Cover Art

Here it is! The new cover art for the first Dindi book, now known as Initiate: The Unfinished Song, Book One. The model is Jessica Trescott, of Faestock on deviantART. The pixie is my very first artwork done in Poser. I’m still not good enough make realistic looking people in Poser, and I don’t want androids on my cover, since this isn’t science fiction. But I think it works well enough for a pixie. What do you think?

Here’s the back copy:

DEADLY INITIATION

A Bumbling Girl
Dindi can’t do anything right, maybe because she spends more time dancing with pixies than doing her chores. Her clan hopes to marry her off and settle her down, but she dreams of becoming a Tavaedi, one of the powerful warrior-dancers whose secret magics are revealed only to those who pass a mysterious Test during the Initiation ceremony. The problem? No-one in Dindi’s clan has ever passed the Test. Her grandmother died trying.

An Exiled Warrior
Kavio is the most powerful warrior-dancer in Faearth, but when he is exiled from the tribehold for a crime he didn’t commit, he decides to shed his old life. If roving cannibals and hexers don’t kill him first, this is his chance to escape the shadow of his father’s wars and his mother’s curse. But when he rescues a young Initiate girl, he finds himself drawn into as deadly a plot as any he left behind. He must decide whether to walk away or fight for her… assuming she would even accept the help of an exile.

A Riddle and a Doll
Dindi discovers a strange corncob doll that could hold the secret to the riddle her grandmother couldn’t answer…or could doom Dindi, Kavio and all of Faearth.

Is it clear? Enticing? Let me know if there are sentences that scan awkwardly or something that could be improved!

An earlier version was much shorter, but it was too short, and also, I feared it made the book sound like it was Middle Grade fiction:

The Tavaedies, powerful warrior-dancers, guard the secret magics of Faearth.

Dindi wants to be a Tavaedi. No one in her clan has ever passed the test. Her grandmother died trying.

But Dindi has a plan.

I’m still looking for taglines. For the print version, I’m thinking of using just, “No one in her clan has ever passed the Test. But she has a plan.”

Suggestions are very, very welcome….

Twelve Days of Christmas Videos – Last Minute Gift Ideas

Christmas is about shopping and shameless self-promotion, so this is a good time to remind you that you can give ebooks as presents! (Hint, hint.)

If you’ve already given all fifty of your friends a relatives gifts of my ebooks, and yet you are still frantically running around, trying to buy last minute presents, as I am, I humbly offer some suggestions in the songs below. There are a lot of good versions of Santa Baby. I chose Madanna’s because it has a cute video. And who better than the Material Girl to represent the material side of Christmas?

Wait, you’re objecting that Christmas is not just about shopping and self-promotion?

Weird.

You mean maybe what we want often bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we need…?

Nah.

I REALLY DO NEED A HIPPO!

The Three Biggest Mistakes to Avoid in the Mystery Genre

In a dream, I received the answer to the problem with my Nano novel (Xenophile): make it a mystery. It’s hard sf, and a lot of the issues I want to explore in this series are pretty esoteric, and I was looking for a way for readers to connect with the characters on some familiar ground to make the harder sf elements easier to swallow. I decided that making them a detective/law enforcement team for hire out on the frontier of human settlements could be a good way to go.

I’ve been reading and watching more Mystery lately. All the subgenres. Police procedural, cozy, thriller, science fiction, history. Gee, this is great stuff, I thought. Why don’t I enjoy mystery stories more often?

Then I tripped over a story that made me want to throw things, and I remembered. Oh, yeah. That’s why.

The number one problem with the mystery genre? The entire genre. Yes, I’m going there!

The number one problem with the mystery genre is caused by trying to avoid the number two problem. The number two problem is caused by the number three problem. So let’s go over them in reverse order:

3. The murderer comes out of nowhere.
This is a noob mistake, right? You can’t have four suspects through-out the story and then suddenly pull a fifth suspect, a character the reader has never even heard about, out of the hat in the final scene. The problem is that if you bring all the suspects on stage, you run into the Problem#2.

2. It’s really obvious who the murderer is.
When I lived in Africa, there was only one channel on TV, and even that channel only aired shows a few hours a day, mostly old re-runs of oddly chosen foreign series. One of the shows was a West German detective show. It was great to watch, because, unlike with American shows, I could never predict who the murderer would be. After a number of episodes, though, that changed. Pretty soon, I could predict which suspect would be guilty with fair regularity. (The murderer was usually a jobless young man, whose motive was always greed.)

With American mysteries, especially on TV, a lot of candidates can be eliminated based on politically correct stereotypes. If a poor, black man is accused of committing the murder to get drugs and an old, white Senator with a Southern accent is accused of doing it to cover up an arms deal, you can bet it’s going to be the Senator.

Most people would say that writing an obvious murderer is the biggest mistake a mystery writer can make. But I think there is something worse.

1. The murderer is absurd.
To me, the biggest mistake a writer can make is to distort the characters for the sake of being unexpected. Credibility is sacrificed to surprise.

Myster writers have pulled off genre-changing surprises. All sorts of creative ideas have been tried. “The butler did it!” was at some point, new. Everyone did it; no one did it (the death was faked); the detective himself was the murderer! And so on.

That’s fine, as long as the writer has paid their dues and planted their clues throughout the story. But you can’t just explain a motive into existence. Sure, if you have two suspects, and one is an angry young man and the other is a sweet old grandma, you can write your story giving the young man an alibi and the grandma an extreme jealousy of her knitting partner’s Christmas cookie recipe. But that is not going to convince me grandma would poke her partner through the eye with a knitting needle. Because, in real life, angry young men commit the majority of violent crimes, whereas jealous grandmas just bitch on the phone to their granddaughters (oh, do they), and I need more than a writer’s need for a surprise ending to convince me otherwise.

Oh, but it gets worse. Mysteries are usually written in series. I’m willing to suspend disbelief about the number of times a sleuth can encounter murderers, even serial killers (though they aren’t actually that common), the number of times a sleuth can be shot and survive with no discernible long-term health issues, the number of times the sleuth can innocently date the murderer before she realizes his true nature while thinking deeply on the matter tied up in the trunk of his car.

But what I cannot forgive is when the writer takes a major supporting character, who, up until now has shown every sign of being endearingly quirky but in no way murderous, and suddenly makes that person the murderer in the latest case. For the sake of surprise. The old “Watson is really Moriarty!” trick. Right. That is surprising. But it’s also stupid. Because crap like that happens only in mysteries.

That’s not say that major characters can’t be suspects or murderers. But don’t confuse motive with character. Someone can have amble motive to murder, yet to murder would be a violation of their character. I would rather guess the murderer in a mystery before then end, but be kept guessing about how the characters will deal with it than sacrifice characters for a cheap twist.

Twelve Days of Christmas Videos – Peace on Earth

There is a great version of Happy Christmas (War is Over) by the three tenors, Pavarotti-Domingo-Carreras, but the You Tube version has terrible sound. I heard this version of I Heard The Bells for the first time when searching for songs on You Tube. I was looking for the older version, but I fell in love with this one.