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Orville is a 12 year old boy who spends his nights risking his life to preform secret and forbidden alchemical experiments in his secret laboratory.
Tonight his assistant has gathered what he hoped will be the necessary components to unlock the secret of life itself.

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Cover is finished!

In this case, a lack of updates is indicative of progress. Editing is done, cover is done, rewriting is done, only formatting left to tackle!

Second revision sent to be edited!

I wound up tidying/rephrasing almost half of the story and re-writing one whole section from scratch, but it's done and it's off to the editor. I feel like it is definitely better than it was before. We have an appointment to go over it on Thursday, but depending on how well that goes I might be formatting the final draft for publication  and making a cover this weekend!

I'm very excited.

Historical note: This Little Piggy (the one who goes "wee wee wee" all the way home) was first recorded in part in 1728 and published in it's full format around 1760. 250 years of counting on toes!

I have no clue why one of the pigs eats roast beef, though.

First round of editing: done!

Finally got my editing notes for my Orville story. Mostly it was a lot of little things: Apparently you 'pore' over something if you are reading it thoroughly but you 'pour' a liquid. This needs a hyphen, that's two words, that kind of stuff. Typed a real word, so spellcheck didn't see it but it's not the word you want. Stuff like that I never catch in a dozen re-reads of my own stuff but it really does stand out in other people's writing.

I did get one short and one long section of the story that I need to re-write, so I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the day and tomorrow too. Better to know, and to fix it, then to send out something that drags in the middle or gets confusing near the end!

Still working on ideas for the cover, let alone actually working on making it happen.



Historical notes: you might know that the "Golem of Prague" was a man-like thing created from clay (like Adam in Genesis) and given a sort of "life" with little pieces of paper that told it what to do. It defended the Jews in Prague ghetto from progroms.

You might not know that the man credited with creating the golem was an actual real life person: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a scholar of both the Talmud and the Kabbala who lived from c. 1512 to 1609. He was one of the most influential Rabbis in Prague and when he moved to Poland he was elected "Chief Rabbi of Poland." He lectured the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II on Kabbala. It's this obvious depth of knowledge and understanding that led to the legend that he uncovered the secret of how God created Adam to use for his Golem.

Lack of updates is not indicative of progress.

The Orville short story is currently trapped in editing-limbo where it is expected to remain until next week.

So what I should be doing is going through and rewriting or finishing the three other stories I currently have In Progress.

But, well, Easter and Portal 2 and Cryponomicon and Easter and 75-80 degree days without too much pollen or too many bugs.

I've also been reading a few books from other self-publishing authors: The Red Man by Alex Meleg which was an exciting Dr. Moreau-esqe short and Bodily Harm by William Vitka, which just came out of left field and went in a direction I never expected. Animal Farm meets your fears of getting older. Very cool.

Historical notes: Any single-edged sword might be called a "back sword," since the back end is unfinished.
 Fencing swords from the French or Italian schools will be thin back swords. Foils, epees, and fencing sabers, among others. They're pretty long but not like a long sword from D&D/Tolkien, more like 5 feet. These swords have a slashing edge but were mainly used for stabbing motions in real combat. They were also widely used in dueling, where the slashing edge would only but against something like a silk shirt, not a plate of armor.
A cavalry saber is also a backsword but otherwise completely different from the fencing kind. It is thicker and often curved. The extra weight and curve both aid in its goal: killing people who are running away from your horse. A slash to the back of a fleeing infantryman with a fencing sword might buckle the sword on his collarbone or spine, but a slightly heavier sword will just cut him open and leave you free to go. A scimitar is essentially a cavalry saber.
A cutlass, the so-called pirate sword, is also a backsword. It's larger and heavier than a cavalry sword, more like a machete. Like a machete it is useful not only as a weapon, but also as a tool. If the heavy ropes on a ship get tangled or tied they might need to be moved immediately without enough time to untie or untangle them, so a sword capable of chopping through is a useful sword. It's also useful for chopping up the rigging on a ship you happen to board, if you are indeed a pirate.

One step closer!

I couldn't sleep so I was up this morning at 6:30 reading and rewriting and polishing my short story.

Anyway, now it's sent in! Nothing more I can do until I get an email or a call with notes. So I'm going to take it easy today. I'll start on making a cover for it tomorrow.

Historical notes- borosilicate lab glass (like Pyrex) was not invented until the 1890s. The Pyrex brand wasn't introduced until 1915. So before 1900 lab glass was a whole lot more fragile than it is now.

the short story is (almost) done!

I just finished my as-yet-untitiled short story about Orville the Alchemist. Just need to re-read it, polish, send to the editor, revise on her notes and make a cover.

That's a lot of steps left, but still, the principle work is done! I'm very excited.

Historical Notes- All of the following were available in the 1860s: Dry ice, microscopes, and the electric battery.

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I'm working on a (hopefully) novel-length story and a short story both set in the same world. I'm also waffling between editing the first work I wrote in that world into a novella or just sealing it away from the light of day.

When the novel is finished, this will be the first page. The historical bent should be pretty apparent. I thought it was pretty neat to find out that Mexico not only used to be an empire, but that that empire was huge. It continues after the cut.

In the year 1810 a massive seismic shift drove the entirety of both Upper (called Alta) and Lower (called Baja) California into the Pacific Ocean. This entire land mass shifted further out to sea leaving a massive coastal shelf along the new ocean front properties in the west. As a result, the few areas of the Californias still above water, transformed from ranchos and missions into stony or desert islands, were those which had been coastal already.

Reading about heraldry

As I've given the story a second breath, I've also made it much more historically based and much more tied to the real life version of where it takes place. I think that this will make for a much more interesting story: "young man pilots flying warship against unknown foes during the American Civil War" has a lot more punch than "boy's journey to adolescence through a guild in a Dickensian city."

So, the great thing is that learning more about the real world history of the elements that will be included in the story leads to a richer and more vibrant story. The down side is that I wind up spending hours reading about the history of alchemy from the Egyptians through to the modern age. Or reading about heraldry for an afternoon. All of which is fun, but none of it gets the story closer to finished.

For example: at the top of this post is a crop of the sleeve insignia for the US Transportation Command. In heraldry, a sea horse doesn't look like the fish, it looks like a normal horse but with a fish tail. Lots of the time the front legs will have flippers. Sometimes the mane will be a fin. In this case the sea horse has wings.

When great advances in transportation were made people always compared them to what came before. The automobile was the horseless carriage, the locomotive was the iron horse. An airship is just that: a nautical ship that sails through the air instead of the sea. A sea horse given flight. I found the Transport Command crest while I was looking for examples that would be similar to what the flying guild will use for their crest. It isn't exactly the same, but it gives you an idea.

Back in the swing.

The bad news is that I had a fever for over a week. That sucked. The good news is I got a ton of reading done. The great news is that I sat down today with my cup of coffee this morning and started a brand new adventure! So far it's only 200 pages in, but I've made some pretty serious changes to the world.

Things are about to get 500% more swash-buckling in the near future!

Least relaxing bath of my life.

I'm still a bit sick, so I put the stopper in the tub and ran the shower on full hot to make a hot bath and steam up the room at the same time. The steam helps my throat and congestion like nothing else. So I hot in the hot water, settle in and hear this weird noise that sounds exactly like an angry wasp buzzing at the skylight over the tub.

It was had to be the pipes so I ignored it for a while, but when finally I got my glasses it turned out it was a huge pissed of wasp buzzing at the skylight! And one downside of a Kindle is that it's pretty bad for smashing wasps.

Long story short: I chased a wasp all over the bathroom with an old New Yorker and almost broke my neck trying to catch it. And when I finally got it, bits of it fell into my mug of my absolute favorite mint tea.

So I took a shower. Stupid wasp.

I need more tea.

I decided that there could be no better way to publish a story set in "Victorian" times than to publish it in the popular 18th century way: as a serial.

And then I caught a chest cold, and now I can barely speak. Obviously I can still type, but I have a sneaking suspicion that what I write today will wind up cut by my editor next week. This seems like an ominous first post.