I now have two blurbs.

The first one is from Lyn McConchie and I received it for the first edition of Serpent's Quest.

Janrae Frank's books are always something I grab the moment I have the chance. They are wonderful reads, well written, dense and richly evocative. She makes the reader see the worlds and characters which she has created and want always to see more of them as well. Her work is brilliant, hard-hitting, and the sort of thing I for one tend to be reading still at 2am since I can't put it down until I know how things are going to turn out.
Lyn McConchie


The second one is from Bob Freeman and is for the second revised and expanded edition.

"Janrae Frank is more than a writer, she is a world-builder. Serpent's Quest defies the limitations of genre because it is bigger than any one label can contain. It's an epic adventure, filled with unbridled horrors and sweeping romance, but more than that, Serpent's Quest is populated by characters who are visceral and alive. Serpent's Quest captivates you not only because of its larger than life drama, but because you become invested in the world as a living and breathing place."

______

Not bad blurbs for a worn out old has been.

On a personal note, there's a rumor going around that Lawrence Dagstine has volunteered his services to "Simone" to help her investigate me for sins against Scientology.

It's one of those writerly ironies. I get moare fan mail about the wolfweres (my lycans), but I sell more copies of the DB series. It took The Shadowed Princes two weeks to reach the front page of the dark fantasy section at fictionwise. It took Blood Hope a day. When I went to bed last night, it was sitting at #22.

I get more mail from people complaining about not being able to handle the level of darkness in the DB books, the level of sexual violence, and so forth. (And they have been almost all males who ojbected).

I really wish I had some inkling about it.

Blood Hope will be out on Monday the 12th at fictionwise. An excerpt has been posted on my website.

This is the first Dark Brothers of the Light novel to come out since November of 06.


It has been a long time coming.

You know that Murphy is knocking on your door when nothing wants to go right. I just had three weeks of Murphy visitations.

First I had a really bad cold that held on for just over two weeks. My friend has let me re-post their recent experiences with a similar cold:

feel 'orrible. My nose is so blocked up I'm sure it must be inflated. My chest is wheezing, and I keep coughing. Sometimes a little ech!, but often a hacking cough that is me trying to expell the bile. I tried to have a hot bath, and I mean really steaming, but the water went cold halfway through. ARraghh! I hate these head colds that leave you feeling as if someone has packed icky cotton wool into your head. Every movement you make leaves you feeling as if you're stepping from one dimension to the next. Light hurts, noise stings, breathing is a pain and my appetite - ah well, that's good. I'm having those doughnuts tonight and nothing will stop me! Seriously though, why is it in this day and age that this common illness isn't a fading memory? Where are the drugs to cure me, or why aren't my antibodies fighting back? What really gets me though is why is it always the weekend when this stuff kicks in? Blargheegh!

-- The Git

And then the first day that I felt well, a software issue crashed my computer. I could not get it to load. Typical curmudgeon, I just kept restarting until I annoyed the computer into running chkdsk. Errors were found and fixed, but once I got it successfully booted, it ran about as fast as molasses in midwinter. So I ran my virus software. It ran so slow that I dozed off in my chair waiting for it to finish.

The day after that I went to Walmart to get my meds filled. I used a debit card. Unfortunately, although I hit the button with the stylus that said "no cash back" the machine thought I said "give me oodles of money." So much that it would promptly overdraw my account. I only realized this when the cashier tried to give me the money. When I protested, she told me that the purchase could not be cancelled and that I had to take the money and leave. dwerenat and I then rushed home for a deposit slip and then back to the bank to get the money in before the debit could clear and land me with an overdraft fee.

We were very relieved when that was done. However, Murphy was not done with me yet.

On the way home, I flicked an ash out the car window and it promptly blew back and burned me on the finger.

DAMN YOU MURPHY! THUS I REFUTE MURPHY! NOT EVEN THE LEGENDARY MURPHY CAN STOP AN OLD CUSS FROM CUSSING.

On a rocky beach, curled into a fetal ball around a bottle of whiskey, a drunk woke screaming in a desolation of the soul more deep than death. He had found himself this small corner, little more than a wedge of large stones last night when he realized the drink was close to overcoming him, rather than trying to make it home. Josh often did that. Eventually someone would come looking for him. They always did since Aejys took him in. The Vorgeni called him Josh the Sot, or more often simply The Sot and left it at that. No one else invoked as much contempt in the town as Josh.

Sand crusted his grey-brown hair and untidy beard. The bridge of his nose, crooked from a childhood break, was squarish and his chin was blunt like pushed-in clay. He reeked of whiskey and vomit, yet he pulled the cork and got another drag down, causing his stomach to heave again. Josh slapped at the cobwebs of images still lodged in his half sleeping mind. Demons on thin legs pranced through his thoughts and tore him with knives that left no blood in their wake. He twisted and howled again.

A voice echoed in his mind, "Once there were three brothers, Brandrahoon, Isranon called Dawnhand, and Waejonan the Accursed."

Josh screamed and howled, clutching his bottle, gulping at it. He raised his eyes and stared out at the waters, thinking how easy it would be to simply walk out far enough into the tide to let the undertow catch him, to let the terror end, to let it all be over. He straightened and started toward the water, feeling the fear draining out of him as he listened to the waves. Josh kept swigging from the bottle as he walked into the water. Suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, a group of children rushed around him and he hesitated.

"Grandfather is looking for you," shouted a little girl, her black hair in two braids and sand coating her buckskins.

Josh blinked and the lure of the water was broken. Yes, he thought, someone always comes looking. Before Aejys, it had been just Branch and his grandchildren and great grandchildren. The old Kwaklahmyn shaman had befriended him when he was a child. Now there were many watchers, as if they all recognized the despair in his soul. But his despair came from within. He had Aejys and others now who cared. So long as they were around he did not feel that void as keenly and could distract himself from his awareness of it. It was only there, pounding in his awareness, when he found himself alone.

A comment at Rusty led me to discover that Dearest Mike Philbin has simply updated an old blog post in which he accuses me of being a pedophile. Many of you will remember strikeout 2007. That was responsible, in part, for my continued exploration of Age of Consent.

Philbin is talking the same old shit. I made a long study on Age of Consent and patterns of courtship in non-western societies and I said that people would misunderstand the nature of those posts.

I have already answered it here.

My reply to Philbin which I made last November.

I will up the date on it so this to today. I see no reason to go over it twice.

The origin of the quote

There is the post from which Philbin derives the quote about pedophilia.

I have a love for cultural and historical accuracy. Which was one, among many, reasons to pick that topic. I understood the risks in discussing it during these anxious times.

Feel free to post links to the material.

I am certain that everyone is familiar with my temper. The only thing that comes close to matching me is a half-starved junkyard dog.

The roll call for the Legion of Nitwits is:

Lawrence Dagstine
Nickolaus Pacione
Nicholas Tillemans
Mike Philbin
Kristy Tallman

Small press authors whose egos are larger than their (non-existent) talent.

One in particular has been hassling me of late: Kristy Tallman.

I am copy-pasting this across my blogs to be certain that she sees it. She has labeled me many nasty things, including a "meth/coke addict." She did that because I discussed the fact that I have been clean for 20 years in comments at Rusty Nail.

Here's what GUD Magazine said about her novel All Soul's Faire

Kristy likes to make her betters appear small. So she posts that picture of me that i have on my website. Well, I’m in my mid 50s and there is no hiding it.

There is no way that I’ll ever look Kristy’s age again. But there is a new picture up at my website (it's at the bottom of the bio) of what i looked like at the start of my professional career. Amazons had just won the World Fantasy award for best anthology and I had sold a trilogy to a publishing company that i would later work for as an editor.

You will not see any of the hard-eyed meanness that you see in all of Kristy’s photos of herself.

My looks have faded with age, but you can’t take away from me the fact that I was attractive enough in my youth that Asimov kissed me. Nor can you take away my talent that has grown better over the years.

I want to challenge Kristy to go back to my website where she stole my picture from, take the worst piece of my writing she has found there, and compare it to the best piece she has ever produced. One full scene each.

There’s plenty to chose from, Kristy. There’s even a couple of typos if you look hard enough. So give it your best shot.

Come on, Kristy. Let me help you. There are two stories on my website that have some tiny flaws in them. I switched one story from first to third and did not manage to correct all the pronouns when I decided to alter the story from one to the other. The other story was switched from third to first.

And again, I missed it in two places. Now, I could go back and fix those, but I want to be fair about this.

Go on and grab them and show EVERYONE how much better you are than I am.

We could post both samples at a neutral spot and have an open poll posted.