Under the full moon, which is brilliant tonight...

Off to a rough start last night, the first chunk of text, though probably usable, needs heavy editing and isn't a suitable opening. Met today's quota with a better opening chapter. I'll post it tomorrow morning, probably and start publishing the link here for those who are curious enough to look.

Current word count: 2682
Target count would be: 3334

As always, I strive for quality, not just quantity. ;p Better a little slow now than floundering later, and I'm off work next week to make this thing move along.

Also pulled together my contributions for the Authors and their Novels staff party on Sunday. You may remember I was to create a multiple choice quiz on the topic.

Here are the questions:

1. Which of the following successful novelists was NOT a woman?

a. George Eliot
b. James Tiptree, Jr.
c. Samuel Richardson
d. George Sand


2. Which of these “trilogies” really does have exactly three books?

a. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
b. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
c. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
d. The Wolves of Time by William Horwood


3. Who was the original author of the unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

a. James Fenimore Cooper
b. Edgar Allan Poe
c. Agatha Christie
d. Charles Dickens


4. Which of the following authors continues to appear as a byline on new work, despite being quite dead and buried?

a. Isaac Asimov
b. V. C. Andrews
c. Frank Herbert
d. All of the above


5. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is often credited as the “father of the modern novel.” His epistolary novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was parodied as An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, later credited to which well-known novelist?

a. Mark Twain
b. Daniel Defoe
c. Henry Fielding
d. George Sand


6. The Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, are easily confused by most of us. Though Charlotte was the most prolific of the three, she did NOT write which of the following novels?

a. Wuthering Heights
b. Jane Eyre
c. Villette
d. High Life in Verdopolis


7. A number of 20th Century American novelists have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Which of the following did NOT win this award?

a. Saul Bellow
b. Willa Cather
c. John Steinbeck
d. Pearl Buck


8. Which of the following authors is generally believed to have been the first to submit a typewritten book manuscript to his publisher?

a. Henry James
b. Bret Harte
c. Francis Parkman
d. Mark Twain


9. The Science Fiction Writers of America awarded its first Grand Master title to Robert A. Heinlein in 1977. As of 2008, 25 authors have received this award, and only three of them were women. Two are very well-known authors today, Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. LeGuin. Who was the third?

a. Andre Norton
b. Marion Zimmer Bradley
c. Kate Wilhelm
d. Elizabeth A. Lynn


10. Which of the following mystery writers is most often acknowledged as the first woman to succeed in the field?

a. Agatha Christie
b. Dorothy L. Sayers
c. Mary Roberts Rinehart
d. Amanda Cross

( Answers under cut )

Tags: authors, books, nanowrimo, writing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: busy

It has been raining more or less continuously since last night. Sometimes just light sprinkling, other times a deluge. Gary drained a half inch from the rain gauge this morning, there was another 5/8 inch at sunset, and it hasn't quit raining since then. Supposed to rain all day tomorrow and probably into Saturday. Of course, if all this were to be snow, we'd have more than a foot. Hmm...

Maybe just as well we called off that trip to Ohio. Tentatively reset for second full weekend of November. I'll have to miss a guild meeting, but that's OK. If we go then, we get to visit the Ft. Wayne hamfest, giving me a chance to sit for my long-delayed extra class exam. I have the week before that off work, ostensibly to work on the NaNoWriMo but should also give me time to brush up on the exam questions. After 27 years as a licensed amateur radio operator, I really should finish off the exam cycle and get the highest available level. Most folks were held back by the 20 wpm morse code test, but that has been abolished. I actually was able to pass the code test, but distaste for the pointless grilling about satellite operation modes and memorized frequency tables was what kept me out of the exam room. The added privileges, though there are some, are of little value to me, and I have no interest in changing my station call sign. The extra class does add a little more credibility to your status as a radio op, I suppose.

Since I'm not going to Ohio, the day off I scheduled for tomorrow will not be taken up on the road. That means I get to either squander it on nothing or do something useful, or maybe a mix of the two. UPS say they will deliver some weaving tools I ordered tomorrow, so I should probably clean up the weaving room and make room to try them out. On the other hoof, I just started reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and it's off to a good start, so I could just sit inside where it's dry and read. Hmm. Hard decision.

The sound of the rain is not unpleasant, except that it brings back the worry about hay. I think it unlikely that there will be any more hay made this year. The forecast calls for rain every day well into next week, and temperatures are dropping so that hay cut now will probably not cure properly. We can still get more hay from storage, fortunately, but the excess rain makes the approach to the barns soft and treacherous for a heavy-loaded vehicle or trailer. That means probably we will have to wait to take delivery until the ground freezes. The first delivery that we got is enough to last until New Year. We'll need at least two more that size or three smaller ones to make it into next year's hay season.

Tags: books, farm, geekery, reading, weather, weaving
Current Location: Soggy oak grove
Mood: weird

No, not vore-aciously, thank you.

This is the proposed draft for a library READ! poster featuring yours truly and Ms. Janet, who read the book for the kids. (Winston the Book Wolf by Marni McGee.) Click image for a larger view.

No, a "locovore" is not someone who eats locomotives, either.

Tags: books, fursuiting, reading, work
Current Location: At work, alas
Mood: amused

How many of the older adventure stories involved animals, either as companions or characters of a sort? I'm referring here to natural animals, not fantasy animals who wear clothing and live in houses, but animals whose forms we would recognize as perfectly normal, yet they reasoned and in many cases spoke as if they were human to some degree.

Here are a few authors that came to mind today after I started thinking about the first of them:

James Oliver Curwood

wrote several novels in which various animals were primary characters whose thoughts and feelings were revealed, including Kazan, Baree, and The Grizzly King. The last was made into a film called The Bear just a few years ago.

Jack London

was author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Anna Sewell

wrote Black Beauty to promote more humane attitudes toward working horses.

Marshall Saunders

was the author of Beautiful Joe, which sought to do for dogs that Sewell did for horses.

Mark Twain

published two short stories later in his life, "A Dog's Tale" and "A Horse's Tale," that highlighted issues similar to those discussed by Sewell and Saunders.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

in his Tarzan series presented thinking rational animals, some of whom had their own languages.

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.

Felix Salten

was the author of Bambi and Perri, both of which were eventually made famous by Disney adaptations.

Albert Payson Terhune

wrote many dog stories, most of them about collies. Lad: a Dog is probably the best known of them.

I'm cutting off my list somewhere around World War II, though there are many later authors who created remarkable animal characters. What other authors can you add, who wrote prior to about 1940? I contend that these authors are the fathers and mothers of modern furry fiction, and all of them are worthy of study and emulation to some degree. None of these authors were writing for children, though most of the works mentioned here are today shrugged off as children's stories.

Tags: books, reading, writing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: tired

*taps keyboard to see if it is on*

I admit I'm not entirely sure whether to take the Amazon Author Central invitation seriously. I've been writing for quite a while, but only a tiny bit of my fiction has ever made it to general publication. I'm confident that most readers would have little interest in my non-fiction, and it's all out of print now anyway.

The question of why anyone would write anthropomorphic fiction comes up pretty regularly. People who devour Patterson, Higgins, and Grisham usually do not find fantasy or science fiction suited to their tastes. Those of us who write in this narrower genre have an equally narrow audience.

We do have some very well known writers as models, though. Richard Adams (Watership Down and other novels,) William Horwood (Duncton Wood and many others,) and Brian Jacques (Redwall and sequels) come to mind as modern exemplars. Looking back through the years, we can't omit Orwell's Animal Farm, or Salten's Bambi, or Grahame's The Wind in the Willows either. I find it interesting that all but one of these authors was British, and all but two of them wrote with an adult audience in mind rather than children. Critics and educators alike have a tendency to lump all fiction that features anthropomorphic characters into children's literature, just as they often assign all animated films to the children's audience. I think those critics and educators are short sighted and very unimaginative if they can't see the adult messages that underlie works like Watership Down or Bambi.

Human history and prehistory is filled with stories that use talking, rational animals as their enactors. There is something that links those legends and tales directly to our souls and makes them stick with us (or at least, with those of us who aren't critics and educators.) The Native Americans told each other about Coyote and Loon around the fire or under the moonlight, and Aesop taught his lessons of ethics and wisdom by using animal characters more than two millennia ago.

We are all animals, after all. No matter how much we try to separate ourselves from our animal brethren and cousins, they manage to remind us that they share a good portion of our heritage. When the protagonist in a story is a coyote or an owl, it lets us skip past some of the assumptions we make about humans, and see things in a different light. Or at least, I think it does and strive to make use of that leverage in my storytelling.

For those with deep curiosities (or idle ones for that matter) I can be found on Twitter (Altivo) and have an older website that links to some of my podcasts and reviews: The Clydesdale Librarian. I do try to respond to questions and comments when received.

Tags: books, reading, writing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: working

Somehow it doesn't feel like much, but it's still sort of giggly like having had too much champagne. I became an official "author" today, according to Amazon.

Here it is, complete with photo.

Yes, that's the real me hiding behind the bearded collie (whose name was Sarge, and he was father to my Simon.) Obviously, it's a few years old as the only gray is in my beard, and now the snow is accumulating on my head too. ;p

Thanks to Alex at Bad Dog Books for triggering this appearance, as it were. It's both amusing and kinda surprising to be named as one whose work was purchased along with that of Kyell Gold. Not that I think it means much other than that we both happen to write furry stuff, and there's not a lot of that on Amazon.

Today was a beautiful day, sunny and breezy. Tess went out in the morning and came in when the flies got bad. We went to Woodstock and had lunch on the square, then did a little shopping, but Gary still has a bad cold and grew tired quickly. I baked the promised apple pie, which we haven't yet cut into but we will. We went up River Road to Cody's Farm Stand, ostensibly to inquire about hay, but the hay man was out cutting. So we bought sweet corn, a canteloupe, and some zucchini instead. The corn was good, we had some for dinner along with steak(!) on the grill and baked potatoes to celebrate the spiritual end of summer. An inexpensive Australian shiraz went with the steak. (No, I don't often eat steak, but maybe a couple of times a year it's a celebration of some sort.)

And tomorrow? Back to work. At least it's now a short week.

Tags: books, cooking, food, horses, pets, weather, writing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: cheerful

It's been a strange day. I didn't get a lot done, other than the usual chores. Yesterday's blog post got a lot of replies that needed more commentary, for one thing. Then I came in from feeding horses and sheep and found several messages in my Earthlink mail that had been somehow lost in the spam trap. It's a wonder they weren't deleted. Those went back a couple of months and needed replies at least out of politeness, though some of them made requests that had already expired by now. One was an invitation from Alex at Bad Dog Books urging me to set up an "authors central" page at Amazon.

Seems like overkill, since I have only one story that appears in one book on Amazon, but I was curious enough to go through the motions. Of course, it's a marketing tactic, and Amazon asks for a photo and a biographical statement, which ought to be no problem. Except... they ask that the photo show only a portrait of you, without friends, mates, or pets. I couldn't find one. I finally sent them one of myself with a dog. Heck, lots of authors appear on the backs of their books in a photo with their dog. Big name authors, like Dean Koontz and Nora Roberts, in fact. So we'll see what happens with that. Apparently there's still an activation process that involves them contacting Bad Dog Books to make sure I'm not an imposter. Heh. Who'd want to impersonate me?

Speaking of Amazon, most of you probably remember the fuss in July when they decided that they had improperly distributed some materials to Kindle owners for which they did not have the correct distribution rights. So they went and deleted those books from the Kindle devices of those who had bought them. Without asking first, without any advance warning... Well, the outcry was enough to force their CEO, Jeff Brazos, to issue an apology and offer to return the deleted items or credit the accounts of any user who was affected. Presumably Amazon has reached a settlement with the actual rights holder for George Orwell's novel 1984, which was one of the major items involved.

I find this particularly ironic given the facts of the case. I also find it frightening in light of the story I cited yesterday, about a prep school near Boston that is eliminating its paper library entirely in favor of online resources and a few Kindles and Sony readers. Given that the Kindle allows Amazon to delete users' content without warning or consent, the potential danger of using it for school library resources should be obvious. You are giving Amazon censorship rights over your students and faculty. Worse, we all know that computer security is tenuous at best. Suppose Amazon's control system is hacked or duplicated? Imagine an anti-evolutionist deleting all the copies of Darwin's works from all the Kindles in the world. Imagine a religious fanatic, of whatever stripe, deleting books with which he or she disagrees, in whatever subject area. This seems like a very, very bad precedent, Amazon.

I don't own a Kindle. I do own an Ebookwise reader, and I like it very much. It is smaller and lighter than the Kindle, closer to the size and weight of a mass market paperback. The screen is backlit, unlike the Kindle. It offers a huge selection of materials at lower prices than the average Kindle items I've seen listed. And it lets me load my own materials, or books from Project Gutenberg, at will. As far as I can tell, Ebookwise has no ability to censor or delete files from my device. Since it uses a removable SMC memory module, I have a backup copy of everything that's in it anyway. I can transfer files between the Ebookwise and my PC, or make a duplicate of the SMC in the Ebookwise and store it somewhere as a backup.

Neither of these devices is suitable as a substitute for printed library books, though. Both of them lock most of their titles to a single device, and do not allow them to be shared among multiple readers. A library cannot maintain a list of Kindle books, for example, and load them at will to the reading devices of individual users, nor can they transfer books from one Kindle to another (at least, not the last time I heard the details.)

I don't deny that a digital revolution is going to come and shake the foundations of publishing as we know it. I do, however, deny that the revolution is already here. The Kindle is not the revolution, or even a harbinger of revolution.

Tags: books, libraries, reading
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: aggravated

There was a time when books were the exclusive province of the wealthy and the cleric. Neither literacy nor access to the printed word were available to any other socioeconomic class.

Now school administrators in America are deliberately working to recreate that situation.

Exclusive Boston school dumps library completely

No, you idiots, it isn't "all on the internet" yet. Maybe in another century or so it will be, but I doubt it. Buying a few Kindles and circulating them among your students is not a replacement for a library. The number of important works still relevant to education that are not yet available on the Kindle or the internet is still larger than the number that can be found there. A $50,000 coffee shop with an $11,000 espresso maker is never going to serve as a replacement for a real library with a real librarian or two.

It's very obvious that these so-called educators have narrowed down the definition of education to include only "job readiness" and "hireability" and have completely forgotten the importance of breadth, exposure, and serendipity in exposure to literature, history, and, most importantly, VALUES. That last is exactly what these guys lack. I would not send my children to such a school.

Tags: books, education, libraries, rants, reading
Current Location: At work, alas
Mood: angry

I think the rains have finally stopped. Figures, since today was my last vacation day. Back to work on Monday. Unless I've counted wrong, we've had 3.75 inches of rain this week. It rained every day and every night, though the sun peeked through for brief flashes now and then.

For various reasons, like sitting around waiting for a phone call that was scheduled and didn't happen, today wasn't real productive. I did go get some groceries, and filled my gas tank since the price is back down to $2.57 in Marengo. Less than it was a year ago, but more than a dollar higher than the low it hit at the beginning of this year. We were as low as $1.44 or less at that time.

I was up at 3:30 this morning and never got back to sleep, so I'm going to try to go to bed shortly. Gary will get back from Indiana in the morning, but then Sunday has to go to a wedding in Downer's Grove. We'll probably skip the Horsefest, as it keeps getting smaller and more disappointing every year anyway.

Finished up The First Book of Lapism this afternoon. I'll be writing a longer review of it yet this weekend, but I give it at least 4 stars, maybe even 5. Definitely worth reading. Author Phil Geusz definitely has deep insights into human nature and behavior as well as furry fans and their culture. His peripheral glimpses of the Christian churches in America are also spot on, in my opinion.

Tags: books, weather
Current Location: Soggy oak grove
Mood: sleepy

Beautiful clear day. Tidied house a bit (a lot, actually) before my brother arrived. Gary went back to Neal's to work on his computer again. Still not usable. They've restored it five times, and something went wrong each time (different each time) mostly due to the really poor quality backup software Gary had been using. It seems quite erratic.

They think they have it solved now, I guess. But each iteration takes hours to run.

Brother Larry arrived. We went over to the Wild West place in Union because he wanted steak. Much entertaining conversation about his doctoral program, which he has completed now and received his degree. It was good to see him.

I actually got some spinning done today. Gary has classes tomorrow afternoon, so I hope to get some work done then. I also got some reading done, halfway through Phil Geusz's First Book of Lapism and loving it. A religion whose followers have themselves transformed into bunnies? Why not? It's delightful and, as always for Phil, very well written with excellent characters.

Must go to sleep now, it's been a long day.

Tags: books, family, farm, spinning
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: tired