Writer's Grove

Now that I’ve finished my draft of Hammered and I’m waiting for my agent to give it a read, I’m free for a few days to relax—for the first time since last year, actually. It was about this time last year that Evan said he’d represent me, and ever since then it’s been non-stop writing to complete the first three books in my series. I mean, there were days I wouldn’t write, but I was always thinking about it and kind of working in that regard. Now I’m trying to chill and get my mind out of the fantasy world…with very little success. I’m already thinking about the next books. Heh!

But I’m confident that I’ll be able to spending time in upstate New York with the Watsons, my in-laws. They have fifty acres with a bunch of stuff just growing wild around their place. It’s beautiful here. Because I grew up in the desert and have lived there most of my life, I’m awed by all the green stuff. I took a few snaps today as I walked around a small fraction of the property. I’ll take some more and post ’em in another installment later on. ALSO COMING SOON: next Tuesday, my interview with urban fantasy author Nicole Peeler; Thursday or Friday, my trip to the big city; and a trip to either Ommegang or Cooperstown breweries. Heck, maybe both!

Happy dancing abounds, for Harper Voyager in Australia is going to publish Hounded, Hexed, and Hammered! I hope all the Aussies and Kiwis really like the books and make me come down there. ;-) The plan is to release them simultaneously with the US editions, so that’ll be April, May, & June of next year.

Today I also finished Hammered—or my first draft of it, anyway. This makes me happy because I’m still a month out from my due date. I’m going to read it all through with a critical eye and make some minor revisions suggested by my alpha readers, then I’ll send it off to my beta reader and my agent. Delivery to Del Rey will follow shortly thereafter.

I’ve kept tabs and posted plenty of updates on the writing of Hammered for my own curiosity, so that I could go back at a later date—say, this one—and see if anything interesting emerged. I’m going to take a more in-depth look at my archives later and see if I can make a fancy chart, but the first thing I’ve noticed is that this one took a bit longer to write. It’s to be expected, really: I knew when I finished Hexed I’d probably never write that fast again. From the first typed word to final delivery in New York, it took me only five months. Hammered is already pushing six months and it’s still not ready to deliver…but it will be soon. The takeaway here is that I wrote two novels in 11 months. I didn’t know that was possible for me until I did it. :-)

Also, I’m getting very excited because next week I get to meet my agent and editor in person for the first time! Here is what I know about them so far:
1. Evan is male.
2. Tricia is female.
I think we’ll have plenty to talk about, don’t you?

You probably noticed before now.

But when one has a really good day, the question must be asked, why was it so good? Can we isolate the goodness? Did it involve small furry animals at their cutest? Pizza at its tastiest? America’s home videos at their funniest?

For me, really good days are those of staggering accomplishments, and today I accomplished a stagger, amongst other things.

Fueled partially by beer and partially by this incredibly hypercaffeinated song called “Valley of the Damned” that I had playing on loop, I wrote 4,000 words today. Usually I manage a mere thousand or a little bit more. It probably helped that I was writing a battle sequence between my Druid and twelve Valkyries. I mean, you’re not going to listen to DragonForce with the speakers turned up to 11 when you’re trying to write a poignant mother-daughter scene in a melancholy train station. Or maybe that’s exactly what you’d do, because you’re just that edgy…I don’t know. ;-)

But when you want to have a really good day writing about people swinging swords at enemy appendages, you owe it to yourself to start out watching this video, which is what happens when the Platonic Ideals of Luxurious Hair and Manual Dexterity meet. Seriously, endure the commercial at the beginning, watch the whole thing and you’ll be amazed. By the time you get finished watching the part where they have isolation cams on the guitar players’ hands, you’ll want to go get some high quality shampoo and conditioner, scrub it into your scalp really really fast, and then write about people killing each other. Heh!

74K now on Hammered. Next up, the climactic battle in Asgard! I just need to find the right song….oh, wait! Here it is! If that can’t inspire me to write up some total carnage, I’m doomed. (Though I think parts of this video are unintentionally funny…)

Well hi there! A couple of these are older releases but they’re new to me, so I’m featuring them with citrus, a small topnote of berries, and a side o’ watermelon:

I’m still not sure where I fit on the nerd/geek/dork continuum. I took this test and discovered that I’m 61% Nerd, 48% Geek, and 57% Dork. That adds up to more than 100% so that’s probably pretty nerdy of me to point out. Or maybe it’s geeky?

In terms of geekiness, there’s this flow chart of the Geek Hierarchy, and if we were to stipulate this as being true then I’d be at the very top…or at least I will be next April. However, methinks there is much more to being a geek than simple fiction/entertainment preferences.

There are role-playing games, for example, like the classic Dungeons and Dragons, or Warhammer. There’s some argument out there that D & D is like a “gateway drug” that leads to all sorts of nerdy-geeky-dorkdom, but bah, there can’t be anything to that, can there?

Well, if it’s true, I’m doomed. Or blessed, depending on your point of view. At least partially. I never played D & D, but I got into Warhammer last year with a friend of mine. The rules are slightly different, but yeah, it’s a bunch of nerdy dudes with pizza and beer and many-sided dice talking about what their fantasy characters are going to do. Here’s a sample of what our game play sounded like:

“I’m gonna slide up behind that demon minotaur and take a whack at his low-hanging balls with my axe, bitches.” Except you have to salt that with about four F-bombs and punctuate it with a belch or a fart, then roll the dice and figure out whether the minotaur got to keep his nuts or not. Good times, good times.

 We had a paladin/priest dude, a ranger/scout dude, a messenger sort of gal who had a crossbow, and then there was my character: Oläf Umlaut, Dwarf Runesmith! Oläf was the best dude of the bunch, no doubt about it. He brained an undead five-year-old girl once with his hammer and saved the group from becoming zombie snackage, though the group didn’t realize when he did it that she was freakin’ colder than Hecate’s frosty gazongas. As a result, they all thought he’d killed an innocent little girl and got insanity points. I thought Oläf was so awesome that night; when you can simultaneously save the group and turn them insane, you are a bona fide badass.

Oh, and we didn’t play with little Lord of the Rings action figures, either. We had custom figures made from cannibalized Warhammer figures and painted up all nice n’ special by my very talented friend (and game master) Alan! You want to meet Oläf? I know you do. Here he is, in all his miniature glory:

Check out that braided beard! And the war hammer slung on his left side! In his right hand he’s carrying some blacksmith tongs, because that’s his skill, and in his left hand he’s got a freakin’ stein of ale, because drinking is his other skill! Here’s another shot of Oläf from another angle:

For Alan, painting Oläf was easy-peasy nice n’ cheesy. He’s seriously talented at model painting and Warhammer nerds fork over lots of cheddar to have him paint their pieces. He’s won awards at conventions and shit. Check out this gallery to see what he’s capable of producing.

But alas! Our merry band of nerds/geeks/dorks had to disband because of heinous flakery. We’d only play once a month, but some of the guys couldn’t seem to make it regularly and it fizzled. I’d like to play again sometime, but in the meantime Oläf is retired and enjoying all the frothy ale he can drink. In any case, my Nerd Cred has now been firmly established.

Color me excited! (I think that’s alzarin crimson with a touch of cadmium yellow.) I’ve just received my first blurb for Hounded from fantasy author Ari Marmell:

“Offering a page-turning and often laugh-out-loud funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic, Hounded is perhaps one of the most fun debuts I’ve read in a good long while. I don’t know what Hearne has planned for the future, but I’ll be watching for more.”


Woohoo! Happy dance bereft of grace! Cute puppies! Hot chocolate with marshmallows! Thanks, Ari!

I don’t actually know Ari. Somebody at Del Rey who knows somebody knows Ari, and they asked him if he’d be willing to read Hounded and maybe write a little something if he thought it was nifty. He said yes because it’s always good to rack up Karma Points. He got absolutely nothing out of doing this besides Karma Points—not even something cheap and nasty, like a convenience store hot dog. Authors do this sort of thing because they hope that someday, somebody else will read their book and say nice things about it too. If they don’t like a book, they don’t lie and say they did—what would be the point? There’s no upside to recommending a snorefest to people; it damages your credibility. That’s why I’m so grateful for this blurb; he didn’t have to say any of that, but he did.

Several other people are taking a look at the book and may offer blurbs down the road. If/when they come in, I’ll be sure to share. ;-)

Whenever you’re tackling a big project like a novel, small goals are important, and the word count is an easy way to measure achievement. I’m at 60K words on Hammered today, so that’s technically three-quarters of the way to my word count goal. It’ll probably wind up going over 80K—Hounded and Hexed are both in the mid 80s—but heck, you take your milestones where you can. And I’m not saying these 60K words are golden. They’ll get edited and revised and some passages will get cut out completely and replaced with something else. In the meantime, reaching a word count goal is an excuse to do a happy dance, because you need them while you’re writing. It’s far too easy to get discouraged otherwise.

Here’s the difference between writing during school and writing during the summer: During school I averaged only 2550 words a week. During this first week of summer, I’ve written 9,000. It’s really encouraging to make so much progress. I’m hoping I can keep up the pace to finish by the end of June…my deadline’s at the end of July, and I like to be early if I can.

In other news, my brilliant wife, Kimberly, is also going to be published. Her article on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American dream was accepted by The Explicator, an academic journal, and will appear in their next issue. She’s amused that students can now cite her in their papers about The Great Gatsby.

And for fans of Norse mythology (I know you’re out there, Amalia), check out Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout if you haven’t already. His protagonist is a valkyrie and he knows his stuff really well. He switches POV between the valkyrie, one of Odin’s sons, Hugin and Munin, and others. I’m not finished with the book yet, but I’ve been entertained so far.

The typical urban fantasy cover shows us an attractive young woman in leather holding a weapon. It’s staggeringly popular and I’m not here to question why. I mean, duh, what’s not to like? But Hounded is a wee bit different from most urban fantasies in that the protagonist is male. There are a few other male protagonists out there—Harry Dresden, of course, and then the dude in Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages series and Simon R. Green’s Nightside books—but mostly, it’s a genre dominated by kickass heroines.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Plenty of people want to be dominated by a kickass heroine.

But I can’t put one of those on my cover. I can’t even put my character in leather, because he doesn’t wear it, and he doesn’t wear a trench coat or a leather duster or a hat pulled low over his eyes. To make things more difficult, my main character isn’t a vampire or a werewolf—nor is he in love with a vampire or werewolf, employed in the vampire and werewolf-slaying industry, or related to a half-vampire and raising werewolves in the basement. He is, in fact, a Druid—but not the kind with giant beards and white robes.

So. How does one design a cover for such a character? How does one come up with something that will appeal to fans of the genre? Well, stay tuned. People smarter than me at Del Rey are figuring it out, and you can be sure I’ll post it here when it’s available. But I think it’s safe to reveal two things at this point:

1. There will be no purple.
2. There will be no man boobs.

And I will not apologize for those things, because they are wrong.

Along with all the delicious fantasy, today we shall enjoy watermelon, nectarines, saturn peaches, and a bit o’ tea with honey:

Yeah, that’s a red onion in there. I’m just making sure you’re paying attention.

A bit about the fantasy: Neil Gaiman + Charles Vess = Yum. Enough said. In the back on the right, we see The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. If you read a lot of fantasy, you’ll find this really amusing. I was reading it in Starbucks and laughing out loud, drawing glares from staid, sober types who always glare at me when I laugh out loud. (I might be the only person who laughs in my neighborhood. I really need to move out.) The Tough Guide deals with all the clichés of fantasy, and let me tell you, they’re still getting used even though this book came out a few years ago. My favorite is how everyone eats stew. Even though it takes hours to make stew from scratch, especially over a camp fire, all these heroes are eating stew on their journeys instead of slicing off a steak from a slain animal and cooking that in a few minutes. Seriously, have you ever tried to make stew from scratch, without using pre-made broth or stock? Try it and then check out how long it takes them to do it in a novel. That’s magic.

The featured book here is The Light-Years Beneath My Feet by Alan Dean Foster. This is also a few years old, but what I really want to do is express my fanboy ecstasy for Mr. Foster’s body of work rather than draw attention to any particular book. He’s written over thirty-five books for Random House alone. He’s written more with other publishers. Check out the list here. That’s a long, prolific career, friends. He’s written science fiction and fantasy; he’s written series and standalones. And no matter what you pick up, you’ll get a good read, guaranteed. He’s not a #1 bestseller (I don’t think?), he doesn’t win fancy-schmancy awards, he just gives you an entertaining read, every time, and he’s been doing it since 1972. I first got hooked on him with The Man Who Used the Universe. I’ve read it so many times that my copy is falling apart. After that I read The I Inside, and I liked that even more. (Those links are to Powells, and you’ll probably have to find those books at used bookstores because they’re out of print now.)

There are only a few authors who write books that I read multiple times. I revisit Card’s Ender’s Game quite a bit; McCaffrey’s Dragonsinger series; Herbert’s Dune; Stephenson’s Snow Crash; Tolkien, of course; and then there are these little books by Mr. Foster that I just dig for some reason. The first book of his Damned trilogy, A Call to Arms, keeps me coming back. I really enjoyed Drowning World and Life Form, too. And Mudge, the otter from his Spellsinger series, started me laughing out loud in public early on and drawing glares from stuffy old people. If you’ve never given Mr. Foster a look, he’s worth a try. He’s bound to have written something you’d enjoy with fifty or so books to his name. He’s basically the guy who got me hooked on science fiction when I was young; his Spellsinger books were also the first fantasy I ever read. In many ways, he’s the reason I’m a writer now. Mr. Foster, I salute you—and thank you for all the great stories.