Writing is hard. You work alone in a closet, you struggle with doubt and fear, and then when you produce a book, no matter how good it is, someone feels obligated and entitled to beat you up for it.
And then once in a while, amazing things happen. Like you meet Luca Sabotino (and his dad, Eric), and Luca reads your book, and reaches out to tell you what he thought about it.
Luca, thank you. I’m thrilled to be your friend.
And I know this mystery, that sinners will alter and copy the words of truth, and pervert many and lie and invent great fabrications, and write books in their own names.
1 Enoch 104:10
I’m usually amused when Autocorrect mangles my perfectly intelligible text into something I didn’t intend. It’s funny, mostly. But now Autocorrect (as embodied in Amazon’s search algorithms) is giving me heartburn.
Here’s the issue: my novel WITCHY EYE is coming out in March from Baen. If I search today for “witchy eye butler” on Amazon.com, the algorithm autocorrects the search to “witch eye butler” and DOES NOT SHOW MY BOOK. I have had people tell me they have looked for the book on Amazon using the correct author name and title and not found it, and I have to explain to them that they have to double check the search results at the top of the page to be sure Amazon is running the search they actually entered.
This is not funny. This is going to hurt my sales. If someone searches for “witchy eye butler,” really, my book should appear as the top search result.
Today I’ve contacted Amazon for the second time about the issue. Last week, they did nothing. This time I am assured that for real, promise promise, this’ll get fixed.
Hmmm.
www.bn.com, by the way, doesn’t have the same problem.
******** UPDATE ********
November 8. My friend Kevin Keller, who works at Amazon (and really, really not in a customer service capacity) fixed the problem. Thanks to Rohan and Sunitha for trying, but huge gratitude to Kevin, whose job it was not, but who did me a favor and sorted this out.
[Sabbatai Sevi’s] transgressions, which formed so characteristic a part of his behavior, did not become a “normal” pattern. Their significance was purely symbolic. They were indicative of some special, exalted condition of the soul.
—Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, Gershom Scholem
I wanted to share this quote because it ties into a comment I made on a panel at Salt Lake Comic Con — that in the real world, wizards and holy men (the line is often fine) often show that they have transcended ordinary mortality by deliberately violating taboos.
Keith is a gregarious, open-minded college student, with a gift for persuasion. He’s so open-minded that he turns in a paper for his Sociology class on what first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would look like, so open-minded he’s willing to believe in little people, and indeed, so open-minded that when he comes across evidence that some fellow-students are getting special tutoring from an elf in a secret room of the library, Keith sneaks into a meeting of that class and gets himself accepted.
Unfortunately, he’s also so persuasive that Keith has already persuaded the student government to renovate that very same library… which would destroy the elves’ home.
MYTHOLOGY 101 is the first book in Jody Lynn Nye’s Mythology series. This is comic fantasy about a magical world that lies within our own, and the adventures of a good-hearted but sometimes bumbling protagonist who tries to live his life in both. I laughed many, many times.
Ryk Spoor’s PHOENIX RISING is book one in a straight-up, classic fantasy trilogy. This is an adventure story for people who like fantasy role-playing with lots of the familiar stuff — elves, dwarfs, ogres, ancient prophecies, lost homelands, unassailable coasts, dark forces threatening the world, impassable mountain chains, sorcerer-kings — and more than a few twists — my personal favorite being that one of the principal characters is an adventuring toad.
Yep, toad.
PHOENIX RISING follows a smallish adventuring band of three main heroes. Kyri, whose brother Rion is murdered by a traitor among his own order of Justiciars, becomes the god’s own appointee / avatar to investigate the murder. Tobimar, prince of Skysand, is called by an oracle to enter into his family’s perennial and never-resolved quest to find their lost homeland. And Poplock Duckweed — the toad swordsman, crossbowman, and tinkering magician — having accidentally interrupted and therefore delayed the summoning of horrific beings from beyond the world, has now become said horrific beings’ target.
Naturally, the three heroes’ paths cross and their separate quests become entangled in delightful ways. Spoor has a great flair for the epic — vast prophetic vistas, mighty regal pomp and ceremony, declaimed semi-poetic speeches, and ferocious dooms litter this adventure tale along with its lizard-men, evil spiders, and multiple sects of elves. I understand that this world began life as a setting for a roleplaying game — it sure feels like a good one. PHOENIX RISING is a guaranteed pleaser for fans of Terry Brooks and R.A. Salvatore.
Here’s another follow-up note from that Salt Lake Comic Con panel on writing and roleplaying authentic magicians.
Games tend to put spellcasters whose abilities derive from gods into one bucket, and other spellcasters into a different bucket. Clerics vs. magic-users (D&D etc); channeling vs. essence vs. mentalism casters (Rolemaster); rune magic vs. spirit magic vs. sorcery (RuneQuest III); etc. What a spellcaster can do depends on how he gets his magic, as does its effectiveness against spellcasters of other types.
Real-world magic tends to be bucketed differently. Frequently, the distinction is between initiates / insiders on the one hand, and non-initiates / outsiders on the other, even when the two groups do exactly the same thing attempting to achieve exactly the same result. In other words, the difference is often social.
Examples: the village priest vs. the cunning man in medieval and early modern England; an initiated mambo (woman) or houngan (man) vs. the non-initiated Voduisant attempting to work travay in Haitian Vodou; the initiated member of the Ojibwe Midewiwin medicine society vs. the merely professional “juggler” in command of some of the same lore; and the believing braucher or hex doctor practicing in the community vs. the liminal or outsider witch.
WITCHY EYE: coming out in March.
Colt the Outlander is a bounty hunter, a treasure seeker, and a scoundrel. He’s an antihero, a rough man who just wants wealth, women, and to be left alone. He’s a rock and roll Conan armed with big guns, riding his hover-bike around in the desert looking out for number one. There are bigger events swirling around Colt and threatening to sweep him up, but he stays resolutely focused on making his idiosyncratic, stubborn, and messy way in the world.
Ember is a Rifter. Operating out of a multi-story underground bunker and guided by their ghost of Nikola Tesla, she and her fellow-Rifters — with no memory of their personal pasts — travel through time, backward and forward, protecting the integrity of the timestream.
Lex is a Hollow. With the assistance of a mysterious person inhabiting a deep sea diver’s suit full of exotic black fluid, the Hollows (also memoryless) travel forward and backward in time attempting to change the events of history.
But after Lex’s girlfriend dies on a mission, he goes rogue and breaks into the Rifters’ headquarters. He’s after Tesla technology that he thinks will help him bring back his lost love, but he finds much bigger things instead: his memories; and with those an understand of what’s going on that gives him a new sense of purpose; and a new ally, in Ember.
EXTRACTED is fun time-travel adventure fiction for teens. It’s science fiction with a steampunk feel. It’s got fun history tie-ins — not only Tesla, but the “lost Imperials” of the series title, who are the Romanovs. EXTRACTED is romantic while being appropriate for readers of any age. It’s got a roundhouse kicks-and-wisecracks formula that puts it into a charming space somewhere between BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and QUANTUM LEAP. You know, for kids.
Cover reveal! I’m in this anthology, inspired by the original Steven “Hell” Peck novel, A Short Stay in Hell. Anthology drops soon!
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