SHANNIVAR sighting - in Singapore!

An occasion of unexpected delight: learning that the National Library of Singapore -- Singapore! -- now has Shannivar in their collection.

I wonder whether they buy all DAW books, or epic fantasy...or adventure novels with Asian heroes? Shannivar certainly qualifies, and the cover depicts her as clearly Asian. Wait until they see the cover for The Heir of Khored!

COLLABORATORS - Map of Chacarre

For all my readers who love maps, here's the one I drew of Chacarre and surrounding territory. As I wrote Collaborators, I kept a notebook that contained not only story ideas and flow-charts for scenes, but maps and other drawings.

Dotted lines indicate national boundaries. Double lines indicate seacoast. Starred circles are capital cities. The Empty Isles don't have a capital city - they're not nearly organized enough to agree on one. Joosten is also known as the Drowned Lands. The area marked by parallel lines, Demmerle, has historically been part of either Chacarre or Erlind. At the time of the story, it's Chacarran.

GUEST BLOG: Dave Trowbridge on Rehabilitating Our "New" Old Dog

One of the joys of having a dog-savvy partner is being able to compare notes, especially when faced with a challenged dog. Here are some insights from my husband.

When we began looking into ways to rehabilitate Tajji, at least one source noted a tendency for a dog to backslide for “three to seven days” in the relatively complex training required. Two weeks ago we noted something like this in a rebound in Tajji’s reactivity to other dogs, culminating a couple of days ago in her “going off” at an empty yard where she frequently sees a reactive GSD, then nowhere in evidence. About a week ago she added  barking at pedestrians at some distance. Despite the warning, her regression was a bit disheartening after the more rapid progress of the previous five weeks.

Enlightenment followed last Tuesday, in conversation with one of Tajji’s former owners. Deborah and I had misunderstood the order of events, believing that Tajji’s disorderly behavior was the result of not knowing how to behave outside a service harness. Instead, it turns out that the barking and lunging had developed while she was working. Of course, her blind person had little or no warning, and it got so bad that people were crossing the street to avoid her.  Her owners worked with more than one professional trainer, but nothing helped, and so she was retired.

In short, she had a nervous breakdown.