Renaissancing at Canterbury Faire

Last weekend, Husband and I drove over the Cascades to attend a Renaissance Faire in Silvterton, OR, The Canterbury Faire. We drove through a place aptly named Sublimity which provided this feast for the eyes. It's worth clicking on the photos for larger views. Honest.

We arrived in time for the knight's show with feats of skill.

And jousting.

 

We were for the green knight, Cody, who did not fare very well. In fact we were soon chanting, "Dead Guy, dead guy, dead guy."

Afterward, we snagged some victuals and found a hay bale to sit upon in the beer garden. We were well entertained by the Scottish Tarts who sang bawdy songs. Which were quite funny.

We walked around, saw jugglers. Met venders. Very nice people who happily answered my questions and gave me their cards. We met the Queen.

 

Lots of fodder for my next book, The Renaissance of Hetty Locklear. We had such a good time, I look forward to attending the next Renaissance Faire. With scenery such as this, I never mind a trip over the Cascades.

Mt. Jefferson and Detroit Lake

  Mt. Washington. A forest fire about 10 years ago left the trees bare in this area.

I must say, I love Oregon. Beautiful, beautiful, Oregon.

I'm up at the observatory this weekend. Hope to get some Moon shots. Note: I'm buried trying to finish up my manuscript for Hetty Locklear, so I won't be posting again until next Wednesday.

Hope you all have a marvelous weekend.

Please Note: This blog has moved to http://mpaxauthor.com/blog/ Please join us there. I will only be simultaneously posting on this blog two more weeks.

Real and Virtual Festing

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Happy Friday everybody!

Chocolate Makes the Galaxy Go Round. The topic of my guest post on Becca Campbell's Inspiration for Creation.

The official launch of book 2 of the Backworlds series, Stopover at the Backworlds' Edge is this coming Monday. It's not to late to join the party. Sign up HERE. Or send me an email at mpaxauthor [at] gmail [dot] com and say you'd like to help announce Stopover.

Congratulations to Leigh T. Moore on her three book contract with Simon and Schuster's Pocket Star imprint. Really, really awesome. 

Tara Tyler thank you for the Magic Eight Ball tag. I decided to answer you for IWSG on August 1st.

Karen Elizabeth Brown is looking for assistance in putting together her launch party for Medieval Muse, August 1-6.

Christine Rains is having a blogfest to celebrate her release of Fearless. August 7th-9th, post your childhood monster. I <3 Tawa, do you?


Husband and I fested at Summerfest here in town last Sunday. This weekend we're festing at a Renaissance Fair. I checked the year five hundred times. 2012. Monday we fest for book 2 in the Backworlds series. Yay.

 

Some crazy Barbie art at one vendor's booth.

Have a great weekend!


Reminder: This blog is moving to http://mpaxauthor.com/blog/ on August 20th. You can read it there now, same posts on the same days. Hope to see you there soon.

Seven and Author News

I was tagged with the Lucky Seven by Madeleine Maddocks of Scribble and Edit

The rules:  
1. Go to page 77 of your current MS/WIP
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines, sentences, or paragraphs, and post them as they're written.



Well, I'm not up to page 77 in The Renaissance of Hetty Locklear yet. That's what I'm writing right now. I'm also editing The Backworlds, which will be done by end of next week. Then I start formatting. So, I'll give you an excerpt from The Backworlds: (release date: May 7, 2012 :D )

“Do we have a plan?” Craze asked.

“When we took the ship to the docking facility, after loading up our cargo,” Talos said, “First Officer Lepsi ‘n I were fortunate to spy a spacecraft with black smudges painted on the aft panels. I went to examine closer ‘n noticed the contours of the Fo’wo symbol underneath.”

        Craze took cargo to mean the aviars had the chocolate bars stashed on board. “An actual Fo’wo vessel?”

Want to read more? You can read chapter one HERE.

Madeleine is also hosting a bloghop on April 17th. To correspond with the letter P, she's hosting a Plotfest. Sign up to the linky and post your tips and secrets on how you plot your novels. Even if you are a Pantser rather than a Plotter, there must be some methods you follow when writing your stories. Or you can post about any aspect of plotting. SIGN UP

Suze of Analog Breakfast and Anna Smith of Universal Gibberish on the Versatile Blogger award to me. Thank you awesome writer women. Seven truths ...

1.  I spent most of my childhood in a stable. I rode Western. One of the few cowgirls on the east coast.

2.  I dreamed of a crawfish invasion the other night. What was that? My college roommate was in it, too. She drew some crazy cartoon of a rabid dog. For some reason it was very important, but I had lost the cartoon, and I didn't want to tell her. Please forgive my carelessness, Valerie. I blamed the crawfish.

3.  I am highly sensitive to caffeine and had to give it up over the summer. :-(

4.  Husband Unit and I have been together 21 years, married for 17. We met in a bar. I hit his car on our first date. I was pretty convinced he'd never want to see me again... I almost didn't get out of the car.

5.  I had never looked through a telescope before starting work at Pine Mountain Observatory five years ago.

6.  I lived through the Blizzard of '77 in Buffalo, NY. The house was literally buried under a snow drift, a two story house. I've only seen more snow on the high peaks of the Cascades. Not this year though. We've not had much snow or winter.

7.  My favorite book as a kid was Man O' War by Walter Farley. I read it a few hundred times or more.

Tara Tyler--A Picture Paints 1000 Words Blogfest, March 26th-28th.

Here's how it will work:
1. Sign up in Mr. Linky below.
2. Tell your friends any way you want and send them over to sign up for the party.
3. Choose a picture to inspire your short story (the story can be about what you see in the picture, or just something that it sparked in your imagination.)
4. On Monday-Wednesday (March 26-28), post your story of 1000 words or less and go around to visit the other participants. You may want to post early, see below.
5. The four of us at UB will do the same and pick our four favorites to post links to on Wednesday night.
6. On Thursday you get to read the four and vote for your favorite.
7. The winner will be announced on Friday. They will have a choice between a first chapter critique from those of us at UB, or a $20 gift card to Amazon (courtesy of me).

Congrats to:

Nancy Thompson, who signed a contract to have her suspense/thriller published. Wooot! I can't wait to read it.

Ciara Knight, Rise From Darkness

Alexander Lorre gives new meaning to the term “tormented teen”. He’s a newly fallen angel, which means he has the self-control of a three-year-old, the hormones of a teenager and the strength of an angel. When he rescues Gaby Moore from drowning, the chemistry between them is undeniable. With a local demon threatening Gaby’s life, he struggles to find a balance between remaining close enough to protect her but distant enough to control his desires.

As danger draws closer, Gaby uncovers shattering secrets that will lead to an ultimate choice. Will she fight alongside her father, an earthbound hunter killing fallen angels and demons, give into the demon blood coursing through her veins and join the demon world, or save the man she loves from both? The first two choices damn her, but the last one could destroy them all

Brinda Berry, Whisper of a Memory

 Weapons training and winter formals… a deadly combination

All Mia ever wanted was to fit in at Whispering Woods High. But being a portal-finder who dates a guy from another dimension sort of makes it hard. A month ago her brother disappeared, and agents from the IIA began policing people’s movements through dimensions. She’d trusted Dr. Bleeker from the local university when he’d told her the IIA were the bad guys. But even a girl with an extraordinary ability to sense things can make mistakes.

Now two people are dead, and as a portal gatekeeper for the IIA, Mia needs to find Dr. Bleeker before he hurts anyone else. And her boyfriend Regulus, an Agent for the IIA, carries secrets of his own. Between learning about weaponry, finding the perfect dress for the winter formal, and catching bad guys, who has time to fit in?

Cherie Reich, Defying Gravity

Homesick upon the SS Perseid, Linia, a young linguist, thinks she signed up for a mission of peace, but her crew members have another plan: attack the planet Medusa.

Bored with his dying planet, Alezandros, a space cruiser pilot, joins the Medusan army in his quest for adventure.

When the SS Perseid clashes with the Medusans' cruisers, Alezandros and Linia's lives intertwine. Sucked through a wormhole, they crash upon a post-apocalyptic Earth and are captured by cannibals. In adjacent cells, Alezandros and Linia cast their differences aside for a common bond: escape. But when romantic feelings emerge between them, they might do the unthinkable because for a Medusan and a Persean to fall in love, it would defy gravity.

Rachel Morgan, Guardian

1. Receive assignment.
2. Save a life.
3. Sleep.
4. Repeat.

Protecting humans from dangerous magical creatures is all in a day’s work for a faerie training to be a guardian. Seventeen-year-old Violet Fairdale knows this better than anyone—she’s about to become the best guardian the Guild has seen in years. That is, until one of her assignments—a human boy who shouldn’t even be able to see her—follows her into the fae realm. Now she’s broken Guild Law, a crime that could lead to her expulsion.

The last thing Vi wants to do is spend any more time with the boy who got her into this mess, but the Guild requires that she return Nate to his home and make him forget everything he’s discovered of the fae realm. Easy, right? But Nate and Vi are about to land themselves in even bigger trouble—and it’ll take all Vi’s training to get them out alive.

Donna Galanti, A Human Element

One by one, Laura Armstrong's friends and adoptive family members are being murdered, and despite her special healing powers, there is nothing she can do to stop it. The killer haunts her dreams and leaves cryptic notes advising her to use her powers to save herself because she's next.

Determined to find the killer, she follows her visions to her hometown and the site of a crashed meteorite. There she meets Ben Fieldstone, who seeks answers about his parents' death the night the meteorite struck. In a race to stop a mad man, they unravel a frightening mystery that binds them together.

But the killer's desire to destroy Laura face-to-face leads to a showdown that puts her relationship with Ben in jeopardy and her pure spirit to the test. With the killer closing in, Laura discovers her destiny is linked to the stranger and she has two choices – redeem him or kill him.

 OK. That was more to get through than I thought. Congrats to Nancy, Ciara, Brinda, Cherie, Rachel, and Donna.

What are you up to this weekend? I'll be writing and editing. One of my local author friends is having a signing at B&N on Saturday. So, I'll be going to that and meeting up with a few writer friends. So, congrats to Karen, too!

Sometimes I think it's so weird that I now hang out with writers, and that doing stuff like this is just normal. It's so cool. I may get paid crap, but this is an awesome job. Have a great weekend everybody! :)

Happy REAL St. Patricks Day

I made a kind a 'squee' type announcement this week. GO SEE in case you missed it.

Now onto my Got Green? bloghop contribution. Hosted by Mark Koopmans of Aloha! Mark Koopmans says hi from HI.

Followers of this blog know that I celebrated St. Patrick's Day a month early this year. I was so bogged down in January and February that my thoughts started jumbling. So last month I thought, "Oh, it's almost the 17th. I always forget St. Patrick's Day. I won't forget this year." I made my list for the grocers which included corned beef fixings. Days passed, I did not realize my mistake.

On February 17th I started making the corned beef. I had a guest post up on Melissa's Imaginarium that day and thought, "I should have wished everyone a Happy St. Patricks Day in the post. Damn." Then I started to wonder why no one else on the interwebs had mentioned St. Pats.

"That's odd," I thought. It finally occurred to me that it was because it was February and not March. When Husband Unit came home I said, "Happy Not St. Patricks Day." He'd also had a brutal week and absently replied, "Happy Thanksgiving." So, Patsgiving has been born, and next year we will celebrate again on February 17th.

Happy REAL St. Patricks Day everybody.

I Appreciate You

First I want to thank all of you awesome folks for helping me out with my blurbs. I redid them. You can read the revisions HERE. I'm probably not quite done with them yet...I'll probably still change words now and then. Applause and more applause for you guys.

Have you checked out my other blog lately? Recent topics include End of the World as We Know It, Full Metal Jousting, Sliding Doors, and What is a Nebula.

I was given the Kreativ Blogger award and tagged by Leslie Rose. Thank you, Leslie. Stop by and say hello.

What book(s) have stayed in your head?
All by Jane Austen, Steppenwolfe by Hermann Hesse, anything by the Brontes, Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, Dune series by Frank Herbert, the Provence books by Peter Mayle, Snow in August by Pete Hamill, 2001: A Space Odyssey, other novels and several short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, anything by Margaret George...the list goes on and on. I still think about Gateways by Frederick Pohl and Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Adams, too. And some stories by Jack Finney.

What kind of books do you like best? Science fiction, classic literature, historical fiction, speculative fiction. I like some poetry now and then, too. And, I read nonfiction: anthropology, Sumer, archeology, physics, astronomy, science, mythology...and whatever I'm currently researching.

How much do covers influence your buying a book? They rarely do. I buy authors I like, regardless of cover, books for research, books I’ve heard were good, great literary works, and, these days, I mostly buy books by writers I know.

I end with a few photos from a trip Husband Unit and I took last summer to the Painted Hills. A stunningly beautiful place in the middle of nowhere Oregon. The striation of color was made from volcanic ash a really, really long time ago. If you ever go out there, make sure you have a full tank of gas. Luckily, we've lived here long enough to know that rule--do not leave town without a full tank of gas. Clicking on any photo will give you a larger view.

 Have a great weekend everybody.

I Want an Alien For Christmas

Best of the holiday season to you all!

See you in 2012!

Reframing and Repackaging

My perspective on my writing career received some reframing this year. All the changes in the industry made me pause and mull a number of things over. Meeting Lindsay Buroker was another shove in reframing my ideas about becoming a published author: I could do what I love and what I wanted to do. I could do it now. Thank you, Lindsay. If I can follow in her footsteps of success, I'd be thrilled. In one year she's sold over 10,000 ebooks. Woot, Lindsay!

The growth of the ebook industry, some positive rejection I'd been receiving from some of the big science fiction rags [SFWA worthy], and the uncertainty of the traditional publishing model led me toward taking my career into my own hands.

It began with releasing Plantgirl, Small Graces and Translations in late June. Free reads I initially released on Smashwords. They're now also up on Scribd and Feedbook. The point of releasing free reads is to get the work into as many hands as possible. I recently discovered reads can be uploaded to Goodreads, too. So, I'll get that together in the next couple weeks and get them there, too.

Putting out the Free Reads was a very positive and rewarding experience. I received a lot of feedback, and after adding the newsletter signup to the end of my stories, I've gotten people I don't know who want to be kept in the loop as to my future releases.

Downloads stagnated for a bit. I had never really liked the cover for Translations, but it was the best I could do at the time. I kept playing around with Paint.net though and began formulating a better idea. Then I stumbled across the perfect piece of art for it and it all came together beautifully. Everything else got repackaged after that so they didn't look like cheap cousins beside Translations.

I liked the original Semper cover a lot, but in thumbnail [which is what most people see] it just looked like a brown square. My skills at Paint.net were improving, so I tried something new. It turned out beautifully. Yea.

Repackaging can work to improve downloads and sales. Although, I'm no bestseller yet, I've made inroads into a start. I think sometimes my problem is I'm not as confident after a release as I need to be, and probably should be. I think, 'Oh, it's just a short story.' If I short change it, well, I have to quit doing that. I love Semper Audacia. It's a good story. It deserves a better attitude from me than it's gotten. I'll do better. Perhaps a topic I'll address in more depth for IWSG in January.

I'm not stopping. The polished draft for Stopover at the Backworlds' Edge should be done by the end of the year. Then it goes through a second coat of polish. Refining, adding some new detail, and making a few changes per my local crit group. I redid its cover, too. Mostly because I noticed video gal and I had a typo in the title -- which I didn't notice for several months. The apostrophe goes after the s in Backworlds, not before. But now I think I might release Stopover in paperback, too, which means redoing the cover again. That's OK. I'll manage.

The Backworlds is a prequel, which I intend to release before Stopover as another Free Read. It will come in somewhere between 20-30,000 words. Thanks to my crit partners Misha Gericke and Tony Benson here in bloggyland for their feedback.

The Backworlds Series will be a space opera series set on planets in our galaxy. My premise is that humans on Earth 'improved' ourselves to be able to live on a variety of worlds. Then humans decided they didn't like what they had created and try to take it back. This resulted in a war. The series begins during a truce between the Foreworlds and the Backworlds. Thank you to the Husband Unit for the last bits of inspiration both of these stories needed.

Also coming in 2012: The Augmentation of Hetty Locklear. Redid her cover, too. She's still in 1st draft stage. This will also be a series. A mix of contemporary sci-fi and urban fantasy. It will eventually morph into sci-fi. Right now it's envisioned as a trilogy. Folks' love for Plantgirl was its inspiration.

Wandering Weeds Anthology should be coming out this year, too, in which is my novelette, The Tumbas. I wrote it so long ago now, I'm not sure what I think about that.

Anyway, all of you are the ribbons on my year. Thank you for the inspiration, the support, the encouragement, the new directions and the success I've found. It's not measured in dollar signs at this point, but in winning over some grains of sand to my beach. Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I can't wait to see what 2012 brings for all of you. There's an amazing amount of talent out there and I'm fortunate to rub elbows with a lot of that great talent.

Happy Holidays and a Joyous 2012. You're all my stars. [This is my last post for the year -- there will be a holiday themed post going up on Thursday -- regular posting will resume January 2 -- Will be talking about Super 8 on the website tomorrow, then it goes on hiatus until January, too].

Around Oregon -- Benham Falls

Sharing some photos from over the summer. This is a trail in the Deschutes National Forest on the other side of the river from the Lava Lands [where the astronauts trained for the Moon].

Here, we're looking at the lava flow on the other side of the river.

Despite the alien manipulated mosquitoes trying to devour us, the best thing about living where I do is beautiful places like this.

DL Hammons of Cruising Altitude is hosting the Deju Vu blogfest on December 16th. Easy as you post up an article you wrote BC - before comments.

Posted a photo of comet Garrad taken at the observatory this summer on the website's blog -- M. Pax. Will be talking about Odyssey 5 tomorrow (where I learned more about transhumans by a former transhuman -- Peter Weller (Robocop)). Odyssey 5 was a series on Showtime.

See you here next week for IWSG -- Insecure Writers Support Group, hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh -- and I don't know what my other post will be about yet. It'll be a surprise.