News & Updates: The Rocket that Flew to Mars

Hi! I’m back again, very briefly.

So...

...without ever coming here to mention it, I’ve got another book done, and it’s finished, formatted, up for sale, and everything. I'd like to get some of my old novels back on my project list at some point, but it's been easier to focus on short projects. And, realistically, I don't have have the time to run two separate blogs right now, so it’s unlikely I’ll be back here for a while. Which means that if you want to know what I’m up to, you can find me one of these places:

Facebook page: www.facebook.com/aesauble
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/audreysauble
Website: www.aesauble.com
Email list: http://eepurl.com/cADKCH

And my book? It's another picture book--this one a proper space-age nursery rhyme. It's patterned after the poem 'The House that Jack Built,' but it tells the story of a a rocket, a robot, a 3D printer building the first biodome for the first colony on Mars, with a surprise at the end.

I do have a giveaway running for this book, if you want to check it out and enter. I'm giving away three hardcover copies of the book. Hope you'll take a look!

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07664Q5MC
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-rocket-that-flew-to-mars

Book updates

Just quick note this time:

First, my author website is up. You can visit it over at 'Audrey Sauble'. In fact, I've got a new post up this morning, with an update with a little info more about "Who Laid the Egg" and how the book happened (http://www.aesauble.com/2017/02/about-who.html). I'll have to do a longer one someday with all the weird details about getting ready for publication, because that is an extremely complicated process, especially for a picture book.

Second, "Who Laid the Egg" will be released this weekend. I'm planning a small launch party with a giveaway and an ebook sale to celebrate. I'll post here when that happens, but you can also sign up for email updates on my new site, since I will be posting more book details there as well.

Third, my plan for now is to keep writing/story posts over here, while starting an occasional series about kids' art projects at my new site. Again, I've got a form there if you want to follow that. I'll try to avoid duplicating posts on the two sites as much as I can.

Finally, on a different topic, I just got my review copy of Jill Williamson's newest release in the Kinsman series, King's Blood. I haven't written my review yet, but I'm planning to get that up at some point next week.

See you in a few days!

Puppy Observations

Back in college (over five years ago now), I spent one class reading, re-reading, and generally analyzing short sections of Scripture. The goal was to come up with as many observations as possible.  If you spend enough time on a project like that, you can come up with quite a lot.

And, as it happens, you can make quite a few observations on children’s books too, after multiple re-readings—especially when you start with the basics, such as:

1. This is a book about puppies.

2. There are five puppies in this story (not counting the mother).

3. These are very unusual puppies, because they get chocolate custard for dessert.

Then there are the more subtle observations, and the various inferences you can draw from them:

4. Four of the puppies, on three different occasions, have to look for the fifth, the pokey puppy.

5. Even after finding the pokey puppy in the green-grassy space twice before, the other puppies don’t think to look there first when he disappears again.

6. If the puppies see a strawberry while on a walk, they get strawberry shortcake for dessert.

7. The puppies see six other ‘creatures’ on their walk, besides the desserts.

8. Five of these creatures, including a toad, a grasshopper, and grass-snake, are pictured in the book.

9. Only one creature, the “big black spider,” is not shown, suggesting that it must have been a truly terrifying spider, unfit for the pages of a children’s book.

Also:

10. If you listen carefully, you can identify chocolate custard by the sound a spoon makes as it is scraped over the side of a bowl.

11. The pokey puppy is a dog (presumably), and yet he manages to eat five servings of chocolate custard with no side effects.

12. And, even after eating 10 servings of dessert over the previous two days, the pokey puppy is still able to squeeze through a wide place in the fence that the other puppies have heretofore overlooked in their escapades.

If you really want to know what to take away from this story, though, just remember that the pokey puppy is the arch-villain here.

I mean—he lures the other puppies out under the fence and abandons them while he waits to discover what dessert will be. Then he ‘lets’ the other puppies arrive home before him. Once they are safely dispatched to their beds, he sneaks home to devour the dessert himself. 

But—in his final attempt—the other puppies accidentally foil him, saving the dessert! (For themselves, of course.)

#####

Oh, and I might be back next week with a more serious book review.

One, Two Buckle My Shoe...

Over the summer, I've returned to a very old form of literature. It's also a very simple form of literature--in some ways.

No, it's not "See Spot run!" But that's a good guess.

I guess it's something that happen when you have a toddler in the house--you start reading books you first heard twenty (or more) years ago. It's an interesting experience. You start noticing things about the books that you never noticed as a kid.

The stories can be fairly innocuous at times.

Kids don't know much about the world yet, so it's easy to introduce them to new things. "Look! This is a strawberry. Strawberries are red. And caterpillars turn into butterflies."

Sometimes the stories make you scratch your head and ask why. Not, "Why is the world this way?" Rather, "Why? Why did anyone thing that was okay to write?"

I mean, if you were a mother bird bringing breakfast back to your just-hatched chick, and your chick started telling your about this cow and the dog and a hen and a thing called a Snort, wouldn't you start squawking bloody murder? If that happened to me, I know I'd want all the how-comes and where-fores.

I won't even get started on the stories that are all about the message--You can do it, if you try. Don't talk to strangers, or else. Don't be a greedy pig. Be nice to the kitty. It's going to be okay.

Good messages all of them (usually), but they can be overwhelming when they're rammed right down the throat of an innocent storybook.

Some of the stories are just devious.

One of the books we read recently was about a little old man who couldn't read. He could make beautiful wooden toys, but he only survives because his wife (who can read) handles the shopping...and the rest of his business, presumably.

Then she goes off on a trip and tells him what he needs to get at the store for his next few meals. As a kid, of course, I just thought this was part of the story. Trips are a normal part of life, right?

As an adult, however, I totally get it. If all she really cared about was his food, why didn't she just buy the groceries for him and leave them on the counter at home? She knew he couldn't get through the shopping trip without being able to read--she was setting him up for failure.

Then there's the entire Suess canon. I think we shall return to that topic when it's time to learn about alliteration, repetition, and rhymes.

Still, I would like to know--what if you do try the green eggs and ham...and you don't like them, even then?

Back Again, Almost

Hello again!

I haven't exactly been on top of things this year. My last post was about five months ago, or 159 days if you want to be precise. At the time, my husband, toddler and I were in the UK, and we've only now gotten back to our home state. 

Craziness might be the best word to describe this summer, considering it started with over 12 hours of flying and ended with driving across the entire US--with a toddler who dislikes long car-rides no less. But we made it.

We're technically not settled yet, since we wanted to take our time about deciding where we would be living for the next couple of years. We've planned another four months in temporary lodging while we make those decisions, but for now, our longest car-ride will be under two hours to visit family.

I meant to post more and tell some of the stories from our trip, but the craziness was a bit too much for that. I have worked on a few projects over the summer, including practicing some coding and html so I can work on websites. I also worked on some outlining for one of my novels a couple of times, but that needs a lot more focus still. I'd like to make that happen in the next couple of months, possibly using NaNoWriMo as my personal Finish Writing a Novel session. We'll have to see how that goes, though...

What about you? Any goals for NaNoWriMo or just for finishing a particular project by the end of this year?

A Goat With an Attitude?

I saw this guy at the zoo yesterday. What do you think? Is he just enjoying the sun, or is he a character waiting for a story?

Rewriting Monsters

Have you ever met a good ork?

They're about as rare as a duck sitting on a rooftop, aren't they?

Recently, I read Rick Riordan’s House of Hades, and a small part of that story got me thinking about another book by Donita K. Paul. I don’t remember which book specifically, but it was one of the later books in the DragonKeeper series.

Both books—and both series as a whole—have several groups of characters who start out entirely bad. Riordan’s villains are the Titans and Gaia’s monsters in general; Paul’s are the seven low races of Amara. Partway through both stories, a character shows up who belongs to one of the ‘bad guy’ groups, but isn’t actually bad himself.

Now, my initial reaction was—“That’s odd, why would an author suddenly decide bad characters can be good?”

Oddly enough, I happened to run across two different articles on the topic soon after reading House of Hades, while I was still pondering the question.

The first was Rebecca LuElla Miller’s post on Speculative Faith, where she discusses why so many stories and movies want to reinvent the villains from older stories. Miller argues that this sort of story tries to erase the reality of evil by explaining the story behind it: “The problem, as I see it, with this kind of thinking is that evil is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, there really is no evil—just evil circumstances or evil influences.”

Evil is real. We can try to understand why someone would want to commit murder, but even understanding doesn’t change the fact that some people murder because they can and they like to do it.

Like Miller, I don’t really like the idea of explaining away evil, so at first I wanted to extend that line of thinking to Bob the Titan. If a group of characters are functionally orcs—their role in life and their nature is to attack humans—how can one of those characters suddenly be not an orc?

That line of thinking didn’t quite fit, however. Miller was writing about stories like Malificent (which I haven’t seen yet), with a misunderstood villain. My issue was with good characters belonging to villainous races such as orcs or trolls or Titans. The real question was whether those characters might be heavily influenced, but not trapped, by their background.

I found a better answer in another blog post—this one about portraying cultural drift in fantasy cultures. In this article, Hannah Emery, a sociologist, suggests developing fantasy cultures realistically with a full range of skills, opinions, personalities, styles, and motives. She points out that American culture—from McD’s to homesteading—is bigger than just one stereotype, so why can’t dwarf or orc cultures be the same?

The challenge is that you have to treat the characters as individuals—not as stereotypes or a chip of the cultural monolith.

Even Tolkien did this, I think. There may not be any good orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien suggests that some characters fight on one side or another simply because that’s what their culture taught them to do. Some of his orcs fight humans because that’s what orcs do, but some would rather just get away from the bigger, meaner orcs, back to their nice, cozy, stinky orc dens.

Of course, that's the challenge with writing any character—even if the guy is evil, despicable, and thoroughly rotten, you still have to develop his personality. It’s not okay just to say “And this dude is evil, despicable, and thoroughly rotten” and leave the story at that.

Well, it might work if you are writing a parody of some kind—as with Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. Even in that series, though, the villain has a very distinct personality, motives, and methods.

That’s where I think Paul actually failed, while Riordan succeeded. Paul’s redeemed character felt like a side to the main story. His presence forced the other characters to reconsider their view of the low races, but he himself left very little impression on anyone.

Riordan, on the other hand, produces someone with a background and a personality, someone who is confused and struggling with the idea that he’s supposed to be bad but maybe wants to be good. He’s something more than a showpiece, and his presences makes a difference in how the story plays out. Plus, there are hints that maybe Bob is not the only one with a conscience.

Maybe it’s not so much about rewriting monsters as suggesting that the old stereotypes are more of a guideline than anything else. After all, ducks do sit on rooftops sometimes.

A Case Study in Spontaneity

Sometimes brilliant ideas are so brilliant that everyone thinks of them at once. My husband and I had one of those ideas last night. 

Like half of the population of the northern United States, we were sitting at the dinner table, talking about the chance of seeing the aurora borealis last night.

So, I came up with the brilliant suggestion—why could go camping! Find a place, pitch the tent, go to bed, and wait for the munchkin to wake us up at midnight or 3 a.m. He’s quite good at that, so we might get a couple chances to venture out and see what we could see. We could even take the leftover pancake mix from our August camping trip to make breakfast before coming home.

After a ten-minute discussion and a quick check to find a campground, we decided on a plan. If we hurried, we might make it out before it got too dark, so—yes, camping trip; yes, northern lights (we hoped); and no, pancakes.

That last part was just as well, because I was only thinking about the pancake mix. I hadn’t made it as far as remembering the skillet, peanut butter, syrup, or jams, much less plates, forks, knives, and napkins. Or even a mixing bowl…

We didn’t have two sleeping bags, so we planned to take a couple of quilts instead. We had the car packed, the baby in pajamas, and were out the door about forty minutes from the time we first floated the idea. We also forgot the second quilt.

Of course, night always comes a little faster than you expect, and you never get out the door quite as fast as you expect. We were only halfway to the campground before night caught up with us. As we left the highway and headed uphill to find a site, we could only see the road ahead of us in the darkness. We went on, though, past the main parking lot and along the windy logging road until we reached the entrance…

…and found the campground was full. We drove the loop anyway, but the sign at the entrance was correct—no room here.

Now we had to come up with Plan B.

We didn’t have a map, but we knew we could find a couple lookout points along the route back into town. With that in mind, we decided to head back and stop the first place we found something promising. Maybe we wouldn’t camp, but we could at least hang out and watch the stars.

Perhaps we should have thought better of that plan when we found the traffic backed up over a mile from our destination.

The cars were creeping up the steep hill, all of them waiting to turn the same direction.

We joined the line, though, and eventually reached our turn. Past that point, the traffic was moving pretty quickly, so we went on, scanning the dark shoulders for a sign. The drive took a bit longer than we expect, but soon enough we passed what we were waiting to see—lookout point, one quarter mile.

The lines of parked cars started just after that. By then, we knew the parking lot would be packed, so we pulled off into the first empty spot we could find on the shoulder.

Our plan was pretty simple by this point—let’s see what happens. So, we loaded up the baby backpack with a water bottle, a tarp, and a blanket, tucked the baby into a front pack, and grabbed our pillows.

We saw a few other stragglers headed down the road to the lookout, but as we approached the entrance, we met a tangle of cars—those still hoping to get in, as well as those who had given up and were headed out. The backup worked in our favor here, and we made it across the road in one piece, only to meet a larger crowd of people gathering on the hillside below the parking lot.

At this point, the adventure was about to lose its charm.

Fortunately, we had visited this place about a year ago. On that trip, we discovered a secret trail that looped along the hill below the main lookout area. Now, we headed down it, expecting to meet another crowd at any moment.

This time, the plan worked. When we got to the place we remembered, a flat stretch of trail overlooking the river, no one else was around. We had an area wide enough to spread out tarp with a little extra room, and we had a gorgeous view of the sky—everything we could ask for.

Somewhere on the hillside above us, a laser beam swung back and forth across the sky. Down in our little nook, the munchkin stared around fascinated for a few minutes, fussed around for a few more minutes, and then settled down to sleep.

The wind was blowing hard all the while, but we settled under our quilt and watch the sky. The quietness last for half an hour, maybe an hour.

Then other people began wandering down our secret path. The rest of the trip didn’t last very long after that. We moved to another section for a short time, but the wind was still blowing steady, even though it wasn’t too cold. Plus, the moon had come up, and our slim chance of seeing the aurora borealis had faded. It was just time to head home.

So, we gathered up our stuff and trekked back up the hill. The parking lot had quieted down somewhat, but it was still packed—think about fifty cars trying to fit into a place meant for twenty. It was 11 p.m. by the time we reached our car and packed up, but more cars were still driving up. When we reached the turn back down the hill, the line had doubled from what it was before, and we were just as glad to be heading home.

We didn’t see the lights after all, but as they say—fun was had by all.

Merlin's Nightmare: The Legends

Welcome back for the third day of the CSFF Blog Tour for Merlin’s Nightmare! As before, you can find more posts from the tour here, as well as my review of Merlin's Blade and Merlin's Nightmare. Today, though, I want to talk about the legends behind Arthur and why I like Robert Treskillard’s new version of the story.

What do you think of when someone mentions King Arthur? If you are like me, you probably have a mental image of medieval knights in armor riding about the countryside doing good deeds. (Maybe the original boy scouts society?)

I do know this image doesn't fit reality. 

One of the earliest mentions of Arthur is linked to a 6^th Century British saint, St. Gildas. Oddly enough, Gildas never mentioned Arthur in his own writings, even though he supposedly was born the year Arthur defeated the Saxon invaders at the Battle of Mount Badon. The reference comes from a biography of Gildas written almost five centuries later. I can guarantee that the author for that hagiography didn’t have access to the Internet, so his fact checking was probably limited to reading up on legends in the local monasteries or listening to ballads at the inns.

Most of the other major sources for Arthurian legend—and the most well-known author, Sir Thomas Malory of Le Morte D’Arthur—have about the same level of authenticity. Malory, for example, may have been a brigand-knight during the War of the Roses. Scholars speculate that he wrote his famous work while in prison. He doesn’t have history or imagination on his side, since the knights of his story sounds more like 15^th Century contemporaries than true Briton heroes.

The reality is, any historical King Arthur would have more in common with Beowulf.

Growing up, I was most familiar with The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, so I certainly don’t mind Malory’s version. I love the other Arthurian stories as well, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Edmund Spenser’s brief encounter in The Fairie Queen. I just like knowing where the stories might have come from as well, and I also have a particular fondness for the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasion with the changes it brought to England.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed Treskillard’s Merlin Spiral so much. He takes Merlin and Arthur back to the time when they might really have lived and recreates their world in considerable detail.

Several other bloggers have noted the amount of research Treskillard put into these stories. I noticed this as well, but I also noticed the way Treskillard interprets the fragments of history we have, combining them with bits of Arthurian legend.

So, while scholars try to identify Arthur with the Roman war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus, Treskillard’s Merlin is Ambrosius, hiding under a false name to protect himself and Arthur from the murderous High King Vortigern. Arthur becomes Merlin’s foster son under the name Artorius, another legend name, suggesting that their complicated relationship explains the later muddle about who they actually were.

Even better, since we’re talking about a wild conglomeration of legends and historical fables, the Merlin Spiral goes beyond the history. I like the history, yes, but I also like how Treskillard creates a story of magic and faith, demons and monsters. 

It fits in well with the Arthurian legends and the other stories we have from ancient England—from Beowulf to the hagiographies written about St. Gildas.