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Strep Throat

Blech. No new updates today. My poor wife came down with strep throat and was feeling so bad she called in to work to stay home. With strep, of course, there’s the danger of infecting everyone around you, so she didn’t want to subject anyone else to the illness as well.

Anyway, my morning has been spent driving her to the doc, getting her medicine, and pampering her a bit, so there will be nothing especially clever or insightful on the blog roll today.

Send my wife some good thoughts, although she’s in no real danger, just discomfort. And keep fingers crossed my kids don’t come down with it. Or me. I don’t want to come down with it either!

With that, I’m headed back to ancient Baghdad, although I’ll be on call all day in case my wife needs glasses of water or more pillows or anything.

Medal of Honor

I had planned a series of articles this week about research and the writing process. But if you’re a writer, you must write, and today I found myself applying the Dr. McCoy test to ask whether I was a writer, or a blogger.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m contemplating talking about heroes all this week. I don’t think there are any archives of heroism that could exceed the records of Medal of Honor recipients. If you want to find stories of real heroes, I urge you to visit the Congressional Medal of Honor site any time you think the world is only grim and dark and that everyone is out for themselves.

The text that follows is ALL © Copyright 2012 Congressional Medal of Honor Society. But the heroics belong to Lucian Adams. I picked him at random from the archive page of the web site. You can find equivalent tales about real life figures by clicking on any one of the names on the site. Many of the stories are likely to move you to tears. I urge you to visit. Marvel at their accomplishments and think of them any time someone sneers that there are no heroes. Honor their achievements, their sacrifices, and their memory.

Thinking of Heroes

As I’ve been pondering villainy and heroes over the last few days, I thought it a good time to revisit an old post I’d made on the Black Gate Livejournal page a few years ago. I imagine a lot of you haven’t read it; if you have, I apologize for the repeat.

Today’s My Birthday

So you may have heard that today’s my birthday.

What do I want apart from universal peace and brotherhood and some quality time with my family? (And maybe a piece of cherry pie? Cakes are overrated.)

Well, I wouldn’t mind it at all if everyone who liked The Desert of Souls got a copy for a friend. You could say: “Here old chum, it’s Howard’s birthday, enjoy his book.” Preferably with a ridiculous English accent.

Or, if you enjoyed the book, I’d be grateful if you just dropped by and said a few kind words on the Amazon Desert of Souls page. It wouldn’t have to be very many words, either, just a few. I’d liked to see that review number climb to 50 or higher.

If you really liked the book, you could consider buying the short story collection, The Waters of Eternity, or pre-ordering The Bones of the Old Ones — although it’s always better for an author if you can buy a copy of a book from a physical bookstore, which could also take your pre-order. It’s strange but true. It has something to do with a record of physical sales STILL being tracked as more important than online sales. Maybe that will change, eventually, but it hasn’t yet, and so sales numbers from stores help authors more than online sales. (Although if the choice is online sale or nothing, every one of us will choose online!)

Oh, one last thing. If you didn‘t like The Desert of Souls, it being my birthday and all, perhaps you could just keep it a secret.

Right, well, that’s about as clever as I feel like being right now. Keep your fingers crossed on that pie for me.

Hannibal’s Words

I suppose a lot of writers are weird kids. I was, though I was enough of an introvert you couldn’t necessarily tell by looking just how weird. I was too worried about what people thought. I didn’t have enough social acumen to realize that part of the reason I wasn’t exactly popular might be the clothes I wore, or my lack of interest in sports, or my obsession with the original Star Trek, or the way I was always reading or playing D&D. Part of the problem was surely that I was just a skinny pale kid. With glasses. And braces. And freckles. And a sort of light bulb shaped head.

But this makes it seem like I feel sorry for myself, and the truth of the matter is that I had a fantastic childhood, with great and loyal friends and a loving and supportive family. I don’t think I’d change anything except a few poor decisions, and a few words I’ve since regretted. And I surely wouldn’t trade in my idols for the popular ones. Sure, I always dug The Beatles, and still do. And there are probably a lot of men my age who picked up cues from Kirk and Spock. (And no, I don’t mean how Kirk got to score with alien babes; I’m referring instead to compassionate leadership and standing up for the right thing, and always coming through for your friends and allies even at risk of your life or your career.) But my biggest idol was Hannibal of Carthage, and I’m sure I never met anyone else my age who thought he was as cool as I did. Or thought that he was cool at all. That was just weird.

Running in Low-Gravity

It certainly wasn’t worth all the pain and expense of my surgery, and therapy, but one cool thing happened the other day because of my knee injury, and that was getting to run on a zero gravity treadmill.

The space of the treadmill is pressurized, and the person who’s getting ready to run slips on a pair of super-tight shorts that are zipped into place at the top of the pressurized chamber.  The first experience, as you’re pulling those things on, is sort of “huh,” unless you’re used to wearing a diver suit or fighting evildoers in spandex. But once you’re actually running the treadmill it’s pretty enjoyable. My own weight was set to 50% Earth normal, which is less than I would weigh on Mars. And then I took a jog. For the first little bit I didn’t even notice the pain in my knee, which makes sense, because the whole object of the zero gravity treadmill is to get damaged joints back up to speed gently. But because I’m a long time science fiction and fantasy nerd I was thinking the entire time about jogging on another planet, or wondering if this is how John Carter felt when he ran, and other nonsense.

4th of July with Dry Ice

With record breaking triple digit temperatures and a pronounced lack of rain, my community banned all  4^th of July fireworks except for those that were being handled by the pros.

Here at Jones central, on our tower by the Sea of Monsters, 4^th of July is fairly low key, but we do typically get some sparklers and snakes and snappers and a few small fountains. It’s my son’s favorite holiday, and I think he was the most disappointed of the four of us. But he and my wife cooked up a backup plan. Some time last year my son had discovered an amusing science video out there on the interwebs, and he suggested we try the experiment out in lieu of fireworks. So, with an old plastic pretzel container, a tube, some soapy water, and some dry ice, we managed to amuse ourselves for an hour or so. It didn’t occur to me until after all the dry ice sublimated that we should have tried some food coloring. My science genius wife tells me it probably wouldn’t have worked, but some red and blue bubbles would have made the whole thing feel a little more patriotic.

Follow this link to see an official Boo Bubble demonstration from Steve Spangler science. Yeah, it really is that cool in person. We built our own bubble device, but this one looks pretty nifty.

The Fierce Impatient Side of Things

Lately I’ve been reading through the Del Rey Robert E. Howard collection El Borak And Other Desert Adventures. I’ve read a lot of these stories in various beat-up old paperbacks, but some are new to me, and others haven’t been read by me in ten years or so. As I’ve said elsewhere, Robert E. Howard was a vivid writer and brilliant crafter of action scenes. I love how swiftly he brings a scene to life, and how visual and cinematic his fight scenes are. I always learn something or catch some great turn of phrase whenever I’m reading his work, and I usually enjoy myself immensely.

Sometimes I find myself growing annoyed with some of the artifacts of the era and magazine genre for which he wrote, particularly the racism, or the tendency for characters to infodump or villains to monologue. I know Robert E. Howard wasn’t himself a racist or sexist, but anyone who pales at seeing racism or sexism will be in for a rude awakening when they try out adventure fiction from the pulp era. Anyway, sometimes these aspects of the fiction that I otherwise quite enjoy start to irritate me… And then I think about how little I enjoy the sense of pacing in so many modern fantasy novels (how do people read such loooong books where nothing much happens for long stretches of time?) and how uninterested I am in novels that are mostly social criticism, and I remind myself how pleased I am to be reading some REH, who, like Conradin, seemed to celebrate the fierce, impatient side of things.

July 3rd Update

I’ve gone ahead and created a contest page, which makes the menu bar temporarily crowded. I hope any of you who are Dabir and Asim fans will help spread the word about the  chance to win an advanced copy of The Bones of the Old Ones.

I haven’t been quite as active on the blog this week because I’ve been helping babysit the Black Gate web site while publisher John O’Neill’s away on a secret mission. So far I’ve posted a review of Goodman Games’ new Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game, and on the nature of reviewing, and tomorrow I’ll have a post on one of my very favorite adventure writers, Leigh Brackett, so I hope you’ll swing by and see what I’ve been talking about, in addition to all the usual great material. Ryan Harvey’s just returned to his examination of Burroughs’ Mars series, a sequence of articles I’ve really been enjoying.

The galleys of the second Dabir and Asim novel will be coming my way before the end of the month, which means before long advanced reader copies will be bound and on their way to reviewers, and one contest winner. In the mean time, the third Dabir and Asim novel is coming along nicely. I’m having an awful lot of fun writing it, so it’s my hope it will be an awful lot of fun to read.

In other news, Twitter still bemuses me. I have friends on it all the time, but I find if I leave it running I end up checking it all the time to see what’s happening rather than getting work done.  I always hear about how writers constantly need to market themselves. Maybe I’m just too easily distractable to be heavily involved in Twitter. Also, I’m not sure I have a whole lot that’s worth saying in so short a space. Perhaps I’m just not pithy enough for it.

Name the Dabir and Asim Series

As I mentioned last week, I’m launching a contest to win an advance reader copy (known as an ARC) of the next Dabir and Asim novel, The Bones of the Old Ones. Now Bones won’t actually be available until December 11 of 2012 through bookstores (or via Kindles and Nooks and what have you), but ARCs will start going out to reviewers within the next few months. And one of them could be headed your way.

Here’s the deal. The Dabir and Asim series needs a title. I haven’t yet come up with one that’s especially electrifying, so I’m throwing open the gates, and from now until July 22nd I’m accepting your suggestions for series titles. The series title will appear on the final version of the cover, probably in the place where this version of the cover reads “A Novel,” and on all following Dabir and Asim novels.

Here’s how to enter:

1. E-mail me (with no spaces in the actual e-mail address) at joneshoward AT insightbb.com.

2. Use Dabir and Asim Contest as the subject line.

3. Provide me with the series title you like best, and an e-mail where I can reach you.

4. You can list several ideas in a single entry, or just one. If you’ve already sent me one or more ideas and think of others later, just send me a new entry.

My editor Peter Wolverton and I will sort through all the entries and pick the winner from them. Should we choose a series title some other way, I will still select my favorite entry from this contest, and that person will receive an autographed ARC. On the outside chance that several people suggest the same title that Pete and I end up loving, then we’ll select one of those entries via random draw.

Pretty straightforward, right?

The only other thing you need to know is that I need all entries by Sunday the 22nd of July. I’ll announce the winner by the end of July.

I look forward to your entries!