Horse story reprint sale

My short story, "The Hero of Abarxia," (When The Hero Comes Home 2), will appear in the For Want of a Horse. The editor is Evey Brett.

forthcoming anthology from Lethe Press,

Here's the Table of Contents:

Gentle Horse, by Cynthia Seelhammer
Griffen, The High Flye, byJames Baldwin
The Black Horse, a Celtic Folk Tale
The Rocking-Horse Winner, by D.H. Lawrence
The Horse of Brass, by James Baldwin
The Goose Girl, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
The Winged Horse of the Muses, by James Baldwin
Horseman, by Renee Carter Hall
Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse, by L. Frank Baum
The Eight-Footed Slipper, by James Baldwin
Dapplegrim, a Norwegian Fairy Tale
The Horseman in the Sky, by Ambrose Bierce
Sensitive, by Evey Brett
The Fox and the Horse, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Al Borak, by James Baldwin
A Horse Story, by Kate Chopin
Ivan and the Chestnut Horse, a Russian Fairy Tale
The Goblin Pony, a French Folk Tale
Red Dust and Dancing Horses, by Beth Cato
The Dun Horse a Pawnee Folk Tale
The Magician's Horse, a Greek Fairy Tale
The Devil and Tom Walke, by Washington Irving
The Hero of Abarxia, by Deborah J. Ross

I'll post the release date when I know it.

[archives] Blackberry Writing

I'll be head down into revisions of Thunderlord for a while, but on my morning walk, I noticed the blackberries are ripening. So here's a post from  a few years ago, Enjoy!

It's blackberry season, and as is my custom at this time, I went out this morning to pick from the brambles along our little country road. (We have our own patch, but the berries ripen later because it's in a shadier place.) I try to do this early, when it's cool and I'm not having to squint into the sun for the higher branches. As I picked, I thought about the story I'm working on (and currently stalled on 2 scenes-that-need-more), and also writing in general.

Blackberries are tricksy things. They can look ripe from where I stand, but turn out to be all red at the base. Sometimes I can tell the moment I touch the berry -- it's too firm and too tightly attached to the stem. I have to be ready to give up on what looked like a great prospect and move on. When I'm in the flow of picking, it seems I don't even have to think about this. Isn't this like a story that seems promising but doesn't yet have the necessary depth? Occasionally -- well, more than occasionally -- my mind gets set on "this berry gets picked" and I force the issue. I'll glare at the red parts and either pop the berry into my mouth ("for private reading only"). Berries that are almost-ready go well in oatmeal. I freeze quarts and quarts of them for winter breakfasts. They're too sour on their own, but they blend well, adding pleasantly tart notes. That's not unlike taking several different story idea, none of which can stand on their own, and setting them at cross-purposes to make a much more interesting tale.

Thunderlord Progress - First Draft Done!

First draft of Thunderlord is done! That's the good news. The um, challenging news is that it's 220,000 words long. Way too long, even for DAW. I have embarked upon the excision of flabby prose, tedious subplots, and extraneous characters.

Down to 208,000 and counting....

Thunderlord Progress Report

It's been a while since I've posted about my writing progress on the next Darkover novel, a sequel to Stormqueen. I'm currently fine-tuning the penultimate chapter and embarking upon what I presume will be the final one. It's turning out much better than I hoped, but perhaps that it because the "how I feel about the work in progress" swings like a pendulum from "the worst drek ever penned" to "wow, this is really good!"

I should have time to do another pass, making sure that a character who can't knit in chapter 25 isn't teaching someone else in chapter 13. Then it goes off to the MZB Literary Works Trust for approval while I am out of commission during my cataract surgery (one eye, then the other 2 weeks later).

I'm still on track for turning it in to DAW in the fall.

[links] A Poodle Velociraptor and Other Cool Stuff

Lori Duron, who writes the blog Raising My Rainbow, offers 8 Books That Teach Kids About the

Fluidity of Gender and the Importance of Acceptance.  She says:

My husband and I have been committed to showing our son positive examples of differently gendered people in literature. We’ve read the following books countless times and always encourage an open dialogue about what it means to be a boy, a girl, a human. More importantly, we use these books to teach about love, acceptance, equality, empathy, and the beauty of diversity. Read these books to your child to help them better understand their gender identity and be a better friend to the boy who has long hair and wears a skirt or the girl with the short spiked hair who only wears pants.

An ancestor of Velociraptor had feathers, and most likely so did the Jurassic World terror.

Velociraptor would have been a feisty little feathered poodle from hell, not a drab scaly reptilian monster like in the Jurassic Park films,” added Brusatte, who is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences. He co-authored the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, with paleontologist Junchang Lüof of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. The scientists came to their conclusions after studying the near-complete and exceptionally well-preserved skeleton for Z. suni, which lived around 125 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province of northeastern China. Like Velociraptor, it was adromaeosaurid -- fast-running, feathered, sickled-clawed dinosaurs that were close relatives of birds. Z. suni weighed around 25 pounds and, most strikingly, had short, 14-inch-long arms covered with long feathers that looked like quill pens. Today’s eagles and vultures sport a similar type of feather.

Images of Pluto from New Horizons are in the news, but we're continuing to discover new things about Mars, including that its crust may contain silica-rich rock typical of continents.

With the help of a rock-zapping laser, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has detected Red Planet rocks similar to Earth's oldest continental crust, researchers say.
This discovery suggests that ancient Mars may have been more similar to ancient Earth than previously thought, scientists added.

Mostly, I try to keep this blog a politics-free zone (with a few exceptions that touch on my personally, like the death penalty). But occasionally a bit of news tickles my fancy so much, I need to share it:

The Board of Supervisors in Santa Cruz County, California, have taken a bold step. The County has decided that they will not do business, including investment services or bond issuances, with five major banks that the Justice Department found to be associated with felonious acts in May of this year.