Literary Sidewalks

In case you were concerned by the cliffhanger ending of my last post…I’m still alive. I successfully reached the island, where Robin gave me a Hollywood reception under sun-bathed palms. Now that I am here, and have a rudimentary office, allow me to explain a bit about why we moved because I’m both optimistic and arrogant enough to assume you want to know.

There are many reasons we have semi-moved to Key West. The motive almost everyone who transplants here gives is the weather. Three hundred days of sunshine and a tropical climate that has never known frost or snow makes it highly desirable, but that's not number one on our list.  For us it's because the people on this island are…well, different - and so are we. 

 The inhabitants of Key West have tried on several occasions throughout its history to secede from its mother country (and actually did so on April 23, 1982).  The short story about that is they (a) officially seceded (b) declared war on the United States (c) surrendered one minute later, and (d) requested foreign aid. That said, they did not secede when Florida left the Union on January 10, 1861. So, yeah, the island has been known to be a magnet for mavericks, eccentrics, pirates, and those that are just plain "odd." But a common thread to all these groups is that they are fiercely independent and free-minded. Those who know me, or have seen the Indie Author movie, understand why I find this appealing.

And yet the instigating reason for choosing Key West was far less philosophical and more practical. It is the farthest south we can get to by car. I’m not a huge fan of air travel, not too keen on driving either, but there is also an auto train that cuts the trip down by more than half, which is quite nice. Just having three options makes me happy since we are keeping the cabin in "the Valley" and plan to migrate. Am I concerned that the island may be literally underwater in forty years? Not particularly because we won’t be alive to see it. 

What I am embarrassed to admit is that there was another reason for me to move here that I only recently discovered—Key West is a literary Mecca. Unbeknownst to me, this is where writers go to work and live, and have for over a hundred years. I’ve long known that Ernest Hemingway had a home here—still does, only now it’s a museum. He, however, was only one of many. The list is ridiculously long, but notables include (in no particular order) the likes of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Tennessee Williams, Thomas McGuane, John Hersey, Alison Lurie, Robert Stone, Judy Blume, Jimmy Buffet, Shel Silverstein, and Truman Capote. 

How I came to learn this common bit of knowledge is odd, and therefore typically Key West. Just this last autumn, I was walking out near the lighthouse on the 900 Block of Whitehead Street. Robin and I were returning from a lovely dinner, when I saw something beneath my feet. Written into the concrete of the sidewalk were words. This wasn’t a child’s scrawl, these letters were carefully inscribed. So, I stopped, and in the light of a late night street lamp, I read a poem by David L. Sloan.  

Who goes to the effort to inscribe literature into a nondescript sidewalk? I was impressed enough to snap the above photo and walked on. The following day on the way to brunch, Robin and I happened upon another bit of seemingly random etched graffiti, this one a distinctly appropriate poem by Eden Brown:

At this point I was more than impressed—I was intrigued. The next day, Robin and I swam at the Casa Marina pier where I found Tennessee Williams swam there every morning and was quoted as saying he wrote best in Key West. At this point I had to investigate, and learned the island was drowning in a legacy of writers. 

I quickly discovered David L. Sloan was a local author by virtue of his many books featured at the city’s bookstores. I purchased Quit Your Job And Move To Key West by Christopher Shultz & David L Sloan just in case there were other things I ought to know about before buying a place on the island. Eden Brown is also a local poet. This led me to discover that the concrete verses were the result of The Key West Sidewalk Poetry Project conducted by the city’s Art in Public Places Board. More than 200 Florida Keys writers submitted poetry, prose, lyrics and haiku, in a contest that granted a cash award and a place in the city’s history. 

It would seem this tiny island at the southernmost point of the continental United States, with it’s tropical climate, ocean breezes, roaming roosters, and creative, quirky, and artistically minded residents, attract writers like Reese's Pieces pull in lost and lonely aliens. And the island has embraced this tendency for writers to settle here, by establishing yearly seminars and other organizations and events. It would seem artists, musicians, and writers are the island’s more respectable mascots. 

I suppose if I had the chance at put words to sidewalk, it would be a simple question posed to me by Robin. “What took us so long to get here?”

Fingers Crossed . . .

 

My wife and I are moving to Tur Del Fur. Not entirely, and not exactly, but she’s already there and I’m leaving to join her today. Truth is we bought a house in Old Town Key West, and if my last novel, Drumindor were to be made into a movie, Key West is where they should film it. Truthfully, the architecture would be all wrong, and the time period completely off, but the essence, the spirit, and the feel are a perfect match. To a large degree, Key West was my inspiration for the setting of that novel: independent, artistic, freewheeling, and a culturally diverse city of Tur Del Fur where Ghazel, Dromeians, and Fhrey bumped elbows without a thought – a happy place, a unique watering hole where lions and antelope drink side-by-side in a tranquil paradise. 

I said we aren’t moving entirely because we are keeping the cabin in Shenandoah, and will return to it in the summers. This will make us “snow birds” a term for lucky old people who have the means and the wisdom to understand why birds migrate. 

You see, Robin — she’s my wife, and I feel silly explaining that because most know her by now, and she’s certainly more beloved—suffers from the winter blues. She becomes depressed when the leaves fall, spirals downward when we “close up the pool,”  and it gets worse as days shorten and grow colder. We don’t know if it is a true case of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or not, but it happens each year and appears to grow more pronounced with age. Even I’ve started to feel it. Short, dark, cold days have a way of making a person focus on that unpleasant topic we all prefer to not think about—how few years you have left. Less years, more focus, greater morbidity in winter. 

Over the years, we’ve traveled to the Keys for at least a week in various winters. I even did a blog post in March of 2019 about how we’d take the auto train down to Orlando, then jump in our Jeep and drive the rest of the way to the islands. The trips clearly helped, so this last November we tried an experiment. Sure, it’s fine for a week, for a vacation, but how would it be to live there? For a test we rented a house for six weeks in the Old Town section of Key West.  

For those of you who don’t know, Key West is the last inhabited island at the end of the overseas highway. A 113-mile stretch of road that connects more than 40 small islands utilizing 42 bridges including one that is 7 miles long. The island itself is quite small just 4.2 square miles (approximately 4 miles long and 1 mile wide). In 1829 it was even smaller than that (just 2.5 square miles but it’s been “added onto” over the years the biggest project of which happened during the 1950’s and 1960’s.  

Key west also has the distinction of being the southernmost point in the contiguous United States. It is closer to Havana than Miami, and it has a tropical climate. The surrounding water tends to mitigate huge temperature swings keeping it mild for most of the year, and it enjoys 300 days a year of sunshine. It really doesn’t get cold there; it’s record low was set in 1886 (41 degrees F), and I have been told it is the only place in the continental United States that you can drive to that has never known frost. 

As you might imagine, the island is quite crowded there are about 3000 buildings many of which date back to the 1800’s; it looks like Main Street Disneyland if Walt had decided on a tropical garden theme. 

After our six weeks, we discovered that we loved it. The bad news (as you might have already guessed) is that we loved it. 

You see, Key West is not cheap. 

A realtor showed us a house with a separate building that was being rented to a ship’s captain. It was one room with a low ceiling, no windows or running water, (there was an outdoor shower and toilet nearby). I think it must have been about 10 feet by 15 feet, and the captain paid $2000 a month in rent! But it’s not just the cost of housing that’s expensive there. Since so much is brought in by the Overseas Highway, or by boat, most things are pricey. Living is Key West these days was a crazy (and we thought) unobtainable dream.

But a funny thing happened over the last two decades. A lot of people bought my books. And because Robin and I grew up poor, we never spent very much of that money. And as the shorter, darker days keep reminding us, we don’t have that many years left. So we bought a little piece of paradise. 

We closed on a little yellow shipwright cottage in “the Meadows” at the start of February. No not the one I described above. The “house hunt” was an adventure in its own right, and maybe Robin will post about it. The plan was for Robin to go down, get things “setup” and then I would follow soon after. Little did we know that Virginia (and a wide swath of the east) was inundated with snow and crippled by seriously cold temperature turned the “white stuff” surrounding our place into “snowcrete (a new Virginia term for really thick and immovable ice).  

In early February, we were like borrowing field mice not peaking our heads out of the cabin at all, but we did have to get the closing papers notarized so we took a trip to do that. While I parked the car, Robin walked toward the cabin and went down hard.  I rushed after to help, and fell as well.  The result was an acute transverse fracture through the surgical neck of the proximal humerus extending into the greater tuberosity. In other word, she fractured her upper arm where the ball of the bone sits in the shoulder.

The prognosis of her arm wasn’t great, but the weather predictions were worse. Temperatures were going to be below freezing for weeks so none of the snow was going to melt.  To make matters worse another huge storm just came through south of us so travel through that area was “dicey.” Now, anyone who knows Robin knows that she is not one to be daunted. If you put obsticles in her way she’s going to go around, over, or under them so she threaded a needle found a few days when setting out might be possible and so I loaded up the Jeep with essentials that had to go by car (including or cat Loki), and she and our daughter Sarah set out.

So, she’s been down there these last five weeks. Winged as she was, there wasn’t a lot that she could do, but Lorian (my co-author for After the Fall), and her husband came down to help. Sarah was able to stay for a few days, and one of our oldest and dearest friends, Cheryl, came to the rescue. So she’s not been alone for the entire time—thank Maribor.

This is the longest the two of us have been apart in forty-six years by a margin of four weeks. It hasn’t been pleasant. We honestly like each other’s company (something our daughter refers to as co-dependency). 

I’ve stayed in the cabin working to finish the third book of the Cycle, because I didn’t have an office at the new place yet, and I didn’t want to stop while I was “on a roll.” Alone in the snowbound Shenandoah Valley, in the short, dark, cold days I thought I could get a lot done, and I have, but it has been miserable. Not nearly as nice as Stephen King made it out to be in The Shining. I didn’t have a helpful ghostly bartender to cheer me up. 

I don’t watch much television, but I started to when night fell as that’s when I noticed Robin’s absence the most. The late lonely hours are especially nasty and get worse as you get older. So, I watched a Ken Burns special on Hemingway, about how he killed himself in a remote cabin. I followed this up with the new Michael Caine movie Bestseller about an aging writer at the end of his life who credits his wife with making his career by her wonderful editing, but who passed away and now everything is bullshiite (an actual word used in the film.) As you might imagine, neither of these helped. No, not at all. 

The phone has been our lifeline. We talk almost every night (exceptions held for when people were visiting). Maybe that’s what denied me my rightful bartender, I don’t know. What made it bearable was how happy she sounded. In some weird way, it was like she was dead, and I was making phone calls to heaven. I was either still alive or in hell. I’m not sure which. These days it’s hard to tell the difference. 

But the book is done. The snow is gone. I have a backpack filled with my notebooks, iPad, a portable hard drive, and a plane ticket. And in 15 minutes my plane will be boarding, so  I’m going to see my wife in paradise. 

If my plane crashes, this post is going to sound weirdly prophetic. But for now my fingers are crossed.

Time to Celebrate!

 Hey all, Robin here. I'm writing today because it's time to . . . 

What do I have to be so happy about?  Well a few things.

First and foremost, I have some important news about the third book in the Cycle series.  When Michael started writing it, he put a "target date" of May 1st, and his computer gave him an estimate of how many words each day he had to write to finish by then. Some may know that we were in Key West from Late November until Early January, and while I thought that would slow him down a lot (and therefore push that date further back), it turns out he was able to keep to his normal writing routine while in paradise, and his required word count per day actually came down rather than going up.

When we got back to Luray, I started hinting that a REALLY nice birthday gift would be if Book #3 could be finished by April 8th. Since there were only a few months until then, I thought it was a lot to ask, but hey, if you don't tell the one you love what present you want more than anything else then there is no hope of getting it.

Well, Michael did a bit better than April 8th.  As of March 10th, the book is officially finished!! I can't wait to get my hands on it - which leads me to the second reason why I'm here to celebrate.

You see, for the last 35 days, Michael and I have been apart from one another -- separated by about 1,200 miles. There has been times when I was in one place and him another, but in more than forty-six years, I can count on one hand the number of times we've not been "attached at the hip" -- and on those occasions it's rarely been more than a week in duration. Well, in about 34 1/2 hours that will be rectified, and we'll be together once more.  And yeah, I'm counting the hours and grinning from ear to ear just thinking about our reunion.

What has caused this separation? Well, I'll leave that to Michael to explain. I asked him to write a blog post about "recent events," and he sent it to me last night. So, stay tuned. There's more on this tomorrow. But suffice to say I have a lot be happy about. 

The Storm - The First Cycle Story now Available to all

As many may be aware I'm currently writing "The Cycle" - a five-book post-Riyria Revelations series which will pull characters and plot points from all 20 books written in Elan including:

• 6 books of the Riyria Revelations
• 5 books of the Riyria Chronicles
• 6 books of the Legends of the First Empire
  
• 3 books of the Rise and Fall

As part of The Cycle, there are a number of "foundational works" that I wrote to provide added context - and to leak clues as to what to expect in my current work in progress. The first of those is "The Storm" - a short story that takes place in the timeline of The Riyria Chronicles, but introduces a character and some "concepts" that will be expanded upon in The Cycle.

This short story was published in an anthology created by Grim Oak Press to spotlight Indie authors. As for availability:

• The physical book is still being printed, but pre-order is available.
• Backers of the Kickstarter received the tale on January 11th,
• But the ebook is now available to everyone: Amazon | Grim Oak Press Site

So if you've been excited about getting into The Cycle - pick up a copy of Unavowed, and read The Storm!

Theft of Swords ebook on Sale - $1.99

 From time to time Orbit, my publisher for the Riyria Revelations, puts the books on a deeply discounted sale. This is one of those times.  The book is currently $1.99 (previously $6.99 originally $12.99) and the price change happened on February 1st. I'm not sure how long it will be at this price, probably for a month, but if you haven't started this series . . . or more importantly if you know someone who has expressed an interest but needed a good reason to start . . . now is the time.

Here are some links from some major retailers:

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Kobo | Apple | Google Play | Better World Books

Robin down - expect some delays.

For anyone who has been watching the news latel,y you'll know that there was a massive storm that came to our neck of the woods a week ago. All in all it wasn't as bad here as other places - 5" of snow but some freezing rain on top of it which made all surfaces outside treacherous.  Our approach to this was to "huddle inside" and not venture out.  Well, there were some really important documents that needed a notary so Robin and I did set out to do that.  Well, on the way back into the house she fell and when using her hand/arm to brace the fall the "snow" (which is really solid ice at this moment) didn't give an inch.

Those who know us, are aware that we never go to the doctor, but the day it happened she thought a trip to urgent care was warranted.  Turns out the only urgent care in the area didn't have x-ray facilities, so we turned back.  The next day, she got an appointment with our local "multi-disciplinary" clinic and the x-rays did, indeed, indicate that she fractured the ball of her arm that fits into the shoulder. They gave her a sling, which helps a lot with the pain and got her an appointment with an orthopedic specialist for the next day (yesterday).

The orthopedic specialist confirmed what the general practitioner said. And while there may be some "soft tissue" damage as well (like a torn rotator cuff) none of that can be addressed until after the bone has enough time to mend such that it won't "slide apart" and cause more series problems.

As for the warehouse - it's pretty much "snowed in" until we an get some melting - not even going to attempt accessing it as the effort would be too great based on it's location (very far back and divided from "civilzation" by crossing a bridge to get onto the property and a long distance and large parking lot that is 100% buried.

The good news, is most of the shipments were taken care of just prior to this. But for those that haven't (mainly overseas orders) you can expect some further delays.

Life just got harder for writers - New scams to avoid

Being an author has never been easy. It's difficult to write a book, and nearly impossible to create one that is "good" (defined as a story that after reading others will tell their friends about it).  Then there are always a mountain of rejections, being taken advantage of by retailers and publishers who take the lion's share of the profits leaving them crumbs, and then there is the whole issue of how to "get the word out" so that people know your books exist.

But lately it's been even harder. Anyone reading my posts knows just how much Robin does for me.  One of the most annoying jobs as of late is organizing the email. She goes through it every day and puts fan mail to my attention, and takes care of any "logistics" stuff like contracts, shipping issues, coordination with copyeditors and Tim (our narrator), and so forth.

With the advent of AI there has been an explosion of what I can only assume are AI generated emails. One category are people who "run bookclubs."

They are remarkably similar and always include some "generic praise" such as: 

"The dynamic between Royce Melborn and Hadrian Blackwater is so good. The contrast between cynicism and idealism, and the moral tension woven into such a concise Riyria tale, sparked great discussion among our members.

They bring up being "featured" but usually don't mention money - not yet. But Robin likes to "play along" and tells them I'd be happy to join the group for an Author Q&A.  Then they do ask for cash (either to cover the logistics of setting up the feature or to pay for "snacks" for the group."

It's all a scam of course, and the simple thing would be to just ignore them, but Robin doesn't like the fact that they are besmirching the bookclub's name without them even knowing it's going on.  So she's been going the next step which is:

1. Contacting the real bookclub to verify they didn't send the request (so far none of them have)
2. Filing a abuse report to Google because these people are impersonating others

It's a time consuming process, and it's no doubt "tilting at windmills" but she feels like she's making a difference in some small way, so who am I to stop her.

But there was a recent email that has been even more nefarious. This one is from a guy (Rob Cox) - with the email robcox.bookpublicist@gmail.com.  He offers various "marketing services" that run from $550 - $6,750. Robin hopes there is a real person and not just an AI because she keeps asking for "more information" to burn his time.  At one point, he offered up an reference: Mark Lawrence with an email address that is NOT Mark's.  But Robin was like a cat with a mouse so she wrote to it with the subject "Hey Mark, is this really you."

And of course a response came back! 

Hi Robin,
Yes, this is Mark.
First, congratulations on Michael’s works in progress! The Cycle, After the Fall, and Blythin Castle all sound like exciting projects, and it’s impressive to see such a strong lineup coming together.

I want to clarify upfront that I don’t work with multiple marketing people, I only work with Rob Cox and his team. They are the ones who have handled all of my marketing and consistently delivered results.

We first connected by email when I engaged them for marketing support for my books. Since then, Rob and his team have been my sole marketing partners, managing everything from strategy to execution.

Before we go further, could you let me know who provided you with my email for a reference? I want to make sure my contact information is only shared appropriately.

If you would like to verify their work or get more details on the results they’ve achieved, you can reach out to Rob directly. I’m confident he and his team can provide all the information you need.

Best regards,

Mark Lawrence

Oh the "balls" on this guy.  Now Robin also sent an email to the real Mark Lawrence, and hopefully he can take action against these guys for using his name to defraud others. But I can't believe how much effort this guy has put into this. He's later sent Robin three other authors as references, and she, of course, hae told them how they are being used.

For many years critics of my writing say that my glasses are too rose-colored. And I'll admit, I try to think better of people than worse - but Dear Maribor, this kind of scum make something that is so hard to begin with so much worse that it's more than a little disheartening.

Okay, I'm off my rant and back to writing.