swaz

2012, and the first day of the Year of the Water Dragon

2012-01-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

Well, now, let's see. In keeping with the spirit of this Year, I intend to forge ahead boldly, to make the future happen.
I have now published 2 more 'Sherlock Holmes Investigates' stories, 'The Free Trade Consortium' & 'The Lascar's Fate'
http://amzn.to/xbFnOM
& http://amzn.to/xZVJ4I
I intend to assemble the 4 stories located in Hampshire around 1891 into one continuous narrative, and publish that as a novel length work. Those 4 stories are 'Lady Chatterleys Voodoo Dolls' 'The Pink Jewel Conundrum' 'The Free TRade Consortium' and 'The Lascar's Fate'
There is also a story with Hercules Zungo, the witchdoctor from the Kafue River Valley, and Josh Green, the New Forest Gypsy, as the protagonists. This is somewhat steam-punky, and they are involved in some dubious enterprises, the sort of things S. Holmes could not be associated with, and so must have a story all their own, split off from the Sherlock stories. Not quite finished yet.
Also, I have posted 3 more poems on the Poetry page of this blog. Take a look.

2011

2011-12-30T13:03:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. I haven't posted here in too long.
Well then, have you noticed my Poem Page on this blog?
Seven poems, written over the last six years. Very erratic production. Will never produce enough for a whole book, but may as well post them so some might read them.

I have published another Sherlock Holmes story, The Pink Jewel Conundrum, and people are buying it. This is the first finished product from the Nanowrimo effort. More will follow, though I'm spending more time online or otherwise occupied than in editing & revision.

Then, I put Stone Song into the Amazon Select Programme, which allows Prime members to borrow 1 book per month free, and allows authors to have books free on Amazon for 5 days in a 90 day period.
Stone Song was free on the 25th & 26th December, to benefit from the feeding frenzy of new ereader owners. It was downloaded 50 times in the UK and more than twice that many times in the USA over the two days. Then it went back to $3.99 until today, the 30th. It will be free for 3 days this time. My hope was there would be less free books now, while people would still be downloading at a high rate. From the big gains in rank garnered from few 'sales' today, I was right.
So far (4:30 pm) 10 downloads in the US and 7 in the UK have got it to ranks (Amazon Free) of #5,900 US & #2,500 UK.

Eland Dances new cover

2011-10-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Some good news today.
First, Hannah Warren has posted an 'author interview' with me on her blog.

http://www.hannahwarrenauthor.com/?page_id=3722

Secondly, I have permission from the Bradshaw foundation to use one of their images of San rock art for the cover of Eland Dances.
I chose the image they call the 'Rossetta Stone' of San rock Art, the picture of a dying eland with a shaman from Game Pass shelter in the Drakensberg.
Click on the Title to see the new cover on Amazon UK

Sherlock sells

2011-10-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Rambling until I think of something brilliant -- I don't know why the writing I invest the least in proves most popular with readers with whom (as far as I know) I have no contact. I am thinking here of the fact my Sherlock Holmes stuff does sell, while the novels don't. Could be the blurbs, covers, etc are just not eyecatching enough? Could it be the demographic of ereaders who browse in the underworld of the Hundreds-of-thousands from-the-top Best-sellers are looking for plain take me away entertainment, no heavy stuff?
Whatever the reason, the message is plain, write more Schlock (Holmes I mean).
I'd better get on that today, really, what with Nanowrimo coming fast. I hope to get out a Sherlock shortie, and then plunge into November writing frenzy, and emerge into a brilliant December buying frenzy on Amazon, while I edit and rewrite whatever might emerge from NanoWr.
Also, of course, I have to get in winter firewood, decobweb the house (grandaughter wont visit a House of Spiders), finish the basement in the London house now the tenant is moving out, while there's still money in the bank. Then another higher paying tenant or sell??

Fish Hoek shark attack

2011-09-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

My friend Chana Martens posted this video of the aftermath of a shark attack on Fish Hoek beach, Capetown, today, Wednesday 28th September.
This is actually the mouth of the Silvermine River, and in the background there is a row of houses against the mountain. We lived in a cottage next to the red roofed house, where there is now a larger building.
That was around the time of the events recorded in my short stories Sunbird & Finding the Eland. The second of those stories is also included in modified form in Eland Dances. Part of Ch 6 I think.
Click on the post title to watch the vid.
We didnt usually swim right in this area because of strong currents, and quicksand around the rivermouth.

Eland Dances

2011-09-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

Eland Dances by Philip van Wulven

To see the cover, click on the title of this post, which links to the book on smashwords.
I think because I wrote this, I am disqualified to review or rate it.
That is my response to the standard Goodreads request to review & rate every book you 'put on your shelf' on their site. I know others do actually rate their own stufff, but seriously, what is the point of that?

View all my reviews
Peter Fitt instinctively dislikes the power-hungry men who see others as ego-food or enemies. In San beliefs, passed down in his family, the eland opposes the selfish and destructive carnivores, the men with 'lion spirits.' Healing power is found in dance, in trance, and the strong should defend others, not prey on them.
When he uses a Soviet airplane in a development project the Russians use this opportunity to supply arms to both sides in the Rhodesian independence struggle. They intend to escalate the civil war so their cadres can climb into power. Shit rises to the top when stirred.
Now also available from amazon.com http://amzn.to/oMossa and amazon.co.uk

Eland Dances now published on smashwords

2011-09-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

I finally took the plunge and Published 'Eland Dances' on smashwords.
This book has been a lot of work, with a lot of learning. I began it back in 2004, so it has taken 7 years to come to this point.
There is still something not quite right with the formatting, because the epub version from their meatgrinder conversion software does not have the proper functional hyperlinked Table of Contents. The epub version done by the iPages software on my Mac works perfectly, as does the Mobi version from the Meatgrinder.
Which means at least one more re-formatting attempt from a clean copy.
The point is that it is published, and any changes from now will be minor, to fix errors.
With that much time invested in it I want the final version to have a seamlessly efficient Table of Contents, so some effort is going into the formatting for sure.
There is a coupon code, so I can give free copies to people who might offer opinions or reviews. If anybody actually reads this post, and wants a copy, contact me for now. I will post the code on this blog when I am happy with the formatting in all versions.
I am going to email a few people who might like to read the final version, having read parts at some point.
Ideally, it should be ready for distribution to all of smashwords' retail network, and on Amazon Kindle, by the end of this month.

New Covers

2011-09-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

Well now, almost halfway through the month. What have I achieved? Not much.
Fiddled with all my book covers, edited 'In the Valley' to add in a linked Table of Contents, so now you can click on a story in the list and whizz, you are on the first page of that story. Click on the story title/header inside the book and you go back to the Table of Contents.
I took 'Heavy and Light Tales'ebook version down from Amazon. None have sold. Maybe I should split the stories in that to try as freebie short stories, or perhaps simply try a better cover and some directed marketing. I dunno.
After the first week of September, 5 had sold of each of the Sherlock books in the USA,1 of Voodoo Dolls in Germany, and 1 in the UK. Then everything stopped. Just 1 copy of Voodoo Dolls has sold all this week, in the UK.
I don't know if this was because I changed the covers so Amazon froze sales for a day. I didn't think they'd do that, since the new cover was up on the site in a couple of hours. But now I'm thinking that has to be the reason all I have are dropping rankings. Once momentum is lost, it is simply gone, it seems.
Lastly, I tried a site which 'animates' gif images - or more precisely, they rotate a series of images you supply. I have added their code to this post. Curious to see if it works.

Sherlock Holmes Investigates. The Case of Lady Chatterley's Voodoo Dolls

2011-09-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I uploaded my latest Sherlock Holmes story to Amazon for kindle and Smashwords. Just over 10,000 words, set in 1890/91 in Hampshire; Winchester, the New Forest, and Portsmouth.
I had sorta fun writing it, and did a lot of historical & natural history research online.
This started out firmly placed in 1890, after horseless carriages were allowed to travel without a flagman in front, so that Dr Watson could emulate Toad (Wind in the Willows)with a Need for Speed. In search of details about events of the era in Portsmouth, I found that Queen Victoria was present to launch a ship in February 1891 by means of an electrical machine. She preesed a button, the champagne fell, and the ship slid into the water. A gala occasion, and very apt for Sherlock to Save the Day.
Now the timeline presents difficulties, because they go to the Winchester Cup racemeet first. This took place in August (historically), yet they must be at the ship launch within days, which actually happened in February.
In the end I exercised my almighty powers as a fiction writer and moved Victoria and everyone at the event in Portsmouth back a few months to August, when the weather was more congenial.
January 1891 was very cold, February fairly bleak, and I didnt want my guys to drive an open vehicle in nasty weather. So Victoria had to just suck it up, and schedule her do for August of the previous year.
Other than the time warp, I have kept fairly close to history as it actually happened.
As of writing this post, 3:30 pm, Sunday 4th September, just one copy of the story has sold, in Germany. Woohoo!

My Fishoek stories

2011-08-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

'Sunbird' - published in Joyful magazine.
The first of two stories I've written based in the time and place of my childhood - Fishoek, near Capetown, in the late 1950s.

The other, 'Eland' is included in Ch 6 of 'Eland Dances', my forthcoming novel.
Both of these stories are included in 'Heavy & Light Tales'
The very last paragraph of 'Eland' is relevant to some degree to everything I've written.
To me, the experience of finding the rare, the unique, and the unexpected became a much stronger possibility than it is for most people. Something leads me to suspend my disbelief quite readily.

They went up the mountain in the morning, when bright sun sparkled on the dewy twigs, the leaf
tips and spider webs, and mist rose from the grass and rested in the hollows. They were three together, barefoot boys. They slipped through the seaside bungalows and white fenced gardens to the wild slopes beyond. There was a rough dirt track that led up halfway, and then a footpath through the rocks and heath, the scent of wild geraniums strong as they brushed by. They had sticks in case of snakes and a bottle of tap water and three oranges, some marbles and a catapult, slingshot to you, made with carefully cut rubber from an old car inner tube. They took turns to carry the provisions, which they were all going to eat later, but only the two older ones carried the catapult in turn, because Rich couldn’t shoot properly with it, and what good would it do if he was carrying it and they met a leopard, say, in the middle of the path? Of course nobody had actually seen a leopard around here for a couple of hundred years, but you never knew.
When they got to the branch in the path, after the zig zag climb through the rock bluffs, they turned left, along the more used trail. They would take the fainter right branch on another longer day when they didn’t have to be back by lunchtime. They ate the oranges quite soon after they
were up onto the different terrain above the steepest slopes. Here the bushes were mostly heath, flowering pink and white, and proteas, with their big stiff blossoms.
There were insects and birds busy all around. They harvested pollen and nectar, and of course others were after the harvesters, spiders and lizards and a hawk who wheeled high above, against the sky. They watched him watch. Probably hopes we will scare something into the open that he can swoop down and grab, they decided. The lizards just duck into cracks in the rocks, and the small birds stay low among the bushes, so it must be difficult to get hold of something, even when you can see so much busy life all around.
They trotted and walked, stopped and watched, made their way towards the lookout station with the flagpole, where the watcher signalled to the fishing boats in the bay when shoals of fish came into view. There was only a bare pole today, the rope slapped in the wind, and the dark green door was padlocked. Blank windows in the whitewashed walls of the square concrete building overlooked the steep slope down to the sea.
You could see the mountains on the far side, blue in the distance across the bay. Cloud shadows, sunlight, and wind squalls shaded the water in shifting patterns, all shades of blue from almost black to the light blue-green along the beaches, where the surf showed as white lacy lines.
“Must’ve carried stuff here with a donkey,” Pete speculated, more interested in the building than the view.
“Maybe a whole lot of donkeys,” chimed in Rich, “then they wouldn’t have to stop building to go down and get more stuff, they could have just brought everything at once.”
After contemplating this image, of a whole train of donkeys strung along the rocky path, Pete objected, “But the fishermen don’t have lots of donkeys, they only have rowing boats and maybe a couple of donkeys. So they probably did it a bit at a time. Every time they came up to watch for the fish they would bring some stuff and build a bit.”
This seemed to be older brother John’s opinion too, because all he said was, “Probably they put a roof up first, after they put up the flagpole, so they could shelter from the rain.”
Although of course both the younger ones immediately thought that it would have been difficult to have a roof with no supporting walls, they left it at that.
They tried to spot a fish shoal, but couldn’t see anything that looked like a fish, or a whole lot of fish, so turned back to the mountain to look for other interesting stuff around.
Bright birds zipped through the bushes, hovered by flowers and darted off again. Iridescent blues and greens shimmered on their heads and backs, bright orange flamed below. “Those are sunbirds,” said eldest brother authoritatively.
There were brown little birds with them, which were the females. Other brown and yellow birds trailed long tail feathers. These John confidently identified as sugarbirds.
They tried a few flowers to see if you could get any of the nectar that the birds fed on, but the most they could do was to get their noses dusted with yellow pollen, which tasted faintly bitter if
anything. “What about if we find a bee’s nest, a hive ? There should be lots of honey.” Pete suggested.
“They’ll just sting us,” said John. “You need a fire and lots of smoke, then they don’t sting, but we don’t have any matches. Maybe we can find some of those black bees that don’t sting. Mum said there are black bees that don’t have stingers, remember?”
They wandered among the wind-tossed bushes, searched for the legendary black bees, and found bumble bees in several sizes, lots of ordinary bees, some creatures that looked like bees but didn’t act like them, and several kinds of wasps. No black bees.
“If we find a black bee, what are we going to do ?” asked Rich, “One bee won’t have much honey, will it ?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” came the answer, “if we follow, it will lead us to its hive, and we can get honey there.”
“Hey, here’s a nest, a bird’s nest,” Pete called. In the middle of quite a thick and sturdy protea bush there was a tiny cup, twigs and grass tightly woven onto a fork in the main stem. He parted the leaves and leant forwards, as he tried to see if there was anything in it.
A yellow branch moved, and revealed itself as a great snake, a cobra thicker than his arm. Its muscular length trailed from just below the nest down into the tangled grass. The mouth opened a little, showed fearsome teeth and a forked tongue as it turned to him, black blank eye locked to his from a distance of three feet.
The body rippled as it seemed to flow up into the bush, gathered into an S bend, and lifted the head free to sway back a little. Pete held his breath and slowly brought the catapult up with his left hand, stretched the rubber back with his right at the same time. His hands moved without volition, his attention was focused on it’s eyes. He hoped to be able to jump back and away if it began to strike, but he didn’t want to precipitate things.
Sunbird struck. Blue and orange blaze, a tiny bundle of feathers hurtled at the snake’s eye. Attached itself there.
As he shot and jumped back into the open, he saw the sinuous yellow column blossom into a crown of glorious feathers.
Shaken, Pete watched from a good distance as the whole bush seemed to fly apart, lashed by the body as it writhed in it’s final spasms. Snakes don’t die quickly, the body moves long after the brain is gone.
Not so with birds. This one was thrown clear in a few seconds. He was dead before he hit the ground. Pete picked him up, careful of the spatters of venom on his feathers, and marvelled at tiny perfection. The tip of the beak was broken off. Probably right inside the snake’s eye. There was the mark of a single tooth on his belly.
They came down from the mountain, three brothers, honeyless. One of them mortal now, he bore the memory of death through the garden gate, his bright saviour in his hand.

****

'Eland'

Flames and black smoke covered the upper slopes over Fishhoek. After it had burned for three
days across the wild mountain, the fire had now come perilously close to houses across a wide front. The fire engine had been there since the evening before, and this morning most of the men had gone up the track with sacks and axes and shovels.
Where else would three boys go on a Saturday morning, breakfast bolted down and pocket money already spent? Not that there was any prospect of actually participating, but all the action made the area interesting, especially from the house on the far side of the valley, where the flames were visible, way taller than the ant sized men who moved around in front of them.
As the boys got closer the flames were lost from view behind the houses and trees on the lower slopes. Firstly ash and black burnt grass and leaves, then hot and sometimes glowing bits began to drift down on everything. Smoke and hot air swirled around, so that it was quite unpleasant. The three brothers began to wonder if this was such a good idea, with the roar and noise of the flames louder as they got closer, when the wind dropped away suddenly, and the noise of the fire seemed to change.
There was an outburst of noise from the men up there, shouts thin with distance, and then the wind switched around just like that and began to blow from behind the boys. The men cheered and yelled now. Something had happened and they weren't there yet! They wanted to be a part of this adventure, the Great Fire. They hurried up the track past the last houses.
The fire engine was parked where a big rock blocked it from going any further uphill, and on any other day it would have rated a good close inspection, unattended as it was, but not now. They hurried past on the footpath through scrub and tall grass, where the air hummed with insects disturbed by the fire, and birds darted around with full beaks.
A great brown-mottled mantis came out of the smoke. It whizzed along and landed on Peter’s right shoulder, turned its head on the thin neck and waved its barbed front legs in an agitated way. Pete called to his brothers, “Hey look here, he’s trying to talk to me!”
“What’s he say then, is he telling you there’s a fire and lots of smoke?” joked John, and they all laughed.
“Probably, though now he’s just waving his one leg and pointing it thataway, off to the right a bit, which is the direction he came from. Maybe he wants us to rescue his eggs. Maybe he’s a she that is, and wants us to save her eggs,” answered Pete.
So of course, since they had heard somewhere that mantises were thought by the Bushmen, the San, to be messengers from their version of God, the boys kept a close watch on the grass and bushes on their right as they climbed the winding path. About a hundred yards further up, the mantis took to flight again, and flew into a clump of tall spindly wild geraniums.
The boys followed, and were startled by a lunging brown shape that erupted into visibility as they neared, an antelope that took off headlong, and crashed away across the slope, “Wow that’s an eland!” exclaimed John, “Must have been driven down from the Game Reserve by the fire.
Where’s that mantis though? It landed somewhere in here, lets see, maybe it does have eggs here or something.”
They fossicked around among the strong-scented plants for a bit, and John was just getting impatient and had started to move on, when Pete saw a flicker of movement. The mantis spread it’s yellow and orange underwings as it sat on something that looked like a rock, until he looked closely. “Hey! Here’s a baby buck! The mantis is sitting on it, come see.”
They watched as the animal struggled to stand up, then wobbled for a few seconds before it collapsed again with a sprawl of impossibly long legs.
“We should leave it here, then the mother will come back and it’ll be ok,” said John. Since this seemed like the best thing to do, they started back towards the nearby path, and waited quietly as two men crashed and stumbled past downhill. One with his arm all red and burnt, and the other one helped him.
“You boys shouldn’t be here, it’s dangerous,” called the burnt man.
“I’ll be back in a bit, as soon as I get Joe to the nurse,” said the other, “You better be gone by the time I get back.”
They looked at one another and shrugged. Just because that guy got himself burnt didn’t mean they would too.
Right at that moment the wind changed again, blew down the slope at them, carried choking black smoke and a rain of burning debris into the surrounding bush. Several minor fires started up where flaming leaves landed in dry grass, and in a few seconds their feelings of security and eagerness to see more action changed to unease and some apprehension.
“That mother eland won’t come back if it starts to burn here,” said John. “Let’s carry the baby down the hill a bit, where the fire won’t get it.”
They quickly went and picked the little animal up. John crouched down and they draped it over his shoulder with its legs dangling front and back. He said that was a “Fireman’s Lift.” His younger brothers were impressed, as they hadn’t known there was a special way to carry animals when you rescued them from a fire. They would have done it all wrong without their eldest brother.
The mantis came along too, seated comfortably on Peter’s shoulder, with quick side trips over to the baby eland every few minutes. On one of these check-up visits Rich noticed something that looked like a little wasp’s nest stuck to the hair under the buck’s neck, almost invisible in the hollow where the neck and chest merged, “Here’s the mantis’s babies too,” he cried. “Look here, that’s why it was so worried!”
They stopped for a bit and examined this for a few moments while John rested, then Pete picked up the load and they set off again. Soon they reached a smoke free area just uphill from the first houses and stopped again a few yards off the path, out of sight in case that man came back. Here they noticed a single bump in the middle of the baby’s forehead.
“That must be its horn,” said Rich.
“There should be two horns,” said John. “All animals have two horns, if they have horns.”
“Unicorns don’t, they have one horn,” said Pete. “That's what their name means. Uni means one and I suppose corn means horn.”
“So why don’t they just call them one horns, then?” asked Richie.
“Same reason lots of things have several names,” said John. “Men are guys and fellows too, and buck are also antelopes. So this is a baby buck, and an eland, and a unicorn.”
Nobody felt like arguing. It was quite hot and everyone had itchy eyes and throats from the smoke.
“His mother won’t find him here, the fire is coming down the mountain and it’ll burn where we found him, so what are we going to do with him?” Pete asked. John just shrugged, and Richie looked down and started to dig his toe into the ground with great concentration. “We could take him home, and ask mum if we can keep him,” said Pete. “Unicorns are special, more special than dogs and cats, and mum did say maybe we should get a dog soon, so she probably won’t mind.”
This seemed like a reasonable assumption to all three, so they set off home through the quiet Saturday morning streets, carrying the baby unicorn in the Fireman's Lift and the mantis anyhow she chose to ride.
About half way home, the baby began to struggle and bleat, so they stopped again and sat in the shade of someone’s tall wooden fence.
“Maybe we aren’t doing this right,” said John. “When they catch a Unicorn they have to have a Maiden, and then it’s tame and does whatever they want.
Well of course this sounded like important technical information, so they decided that probably baby sister Isabel qualified as a Maiden, and could actually help with a project for a change, instead of being an annoyance, as all kid sisters tended to be. Richie was volunteered to go home and bring her, and some orange squash and perhaps some apples, and not to get lost on the way, while the elder two waited.
The mantis seemed to approve of this arrangement. She nodded her head up and down vigourously in time with the movement of Pete’s head when he asked her opinion. “That’s a good idea, right mantis? Rich should go and fetch her and we’ll guard you guys here.”
The clincher came when Richey objected loudly. “Hey no fair, it’s just moving it’s head because you are.” The mantis turned to look at him and spread her wings and waved her front legs threateningly. He shut up right away then. He didn’t realise that his loud voice could have produced the same reaction without any understanding of his meaning.
When the two youngest arrived, all four sat and drank orange squash, and Issy was introduced to the Unicorn, which didn’t seem particularly impressed by her, but allowed her to stroke his nose and feel his horn-bump. He didn’t seem interested in the orange squash and just sniffed the apple they offered, so they decided he probably only wanted milk. Naturally Issy couldn’t carry him, so she walked behind where he could see her when they set off again, with his front legs dangling down the carrier’s back.
Soon after they got to the main road a grey car pulled up, and the driver, a tanned man with a black beard, asked, “Where are you going with that eland?”
So John explained about the fire on the mountain and the mother that ran off, and the one horn, but didn’t mention the mantis, until she flew over and perched on the car’s steering wheel.
Then Pete showed him the egg case, and he listened solemnly to the whole story before saying, “So do you live on a farm then, where an animal like this can live? Because you know it will grow quite big and it’ll need space, just like a cow or a horse. You won’t be able to keep him in a small garden. Why don’t you all climb in? I’ll give you a lift home and see about getting milk for this little guy. Best if I take him to my farm, up in Swaziland, when I go back next week.”
Riding in a car wasn’t something the children did every day, so that was pretty good, and they got home in a few minutes and ran in all talking at once to tell mum about it. She came out and looked in the open window at the young animal on the back seat and said, “Well, Mr. umm,”
“Riley,” he said. “Pleased to meet you ma’am.”
“Well Mr. Riley,” she said. “if you could take care of this little fellow, I’m sure that would be best. Thank you for helping, and I hope they weren’t too much trouble. They do get into all kinds of things, but they mean well, you know.”
Naturally these grown- up arrangements weren’t quite what the boys had hoped for. They had vague expectations of marvellous events, and fully expected to be proud Unicorn guardians for some indefinite time yet, before the baby could manage on it’s own and go out in the world and do, well, magical things. Trying his best to extend any protection he could, Pete said, “He can have my name, I don’t have anything else that he could use, and be sure and let the mantis stay with him and help him, I’m sure she’ll look after him and her eggs too, and that way he’ll have something from his home with him. That is a special kind of mantis you know, because she laid her eggs on him. My dad said there is a kind of mantis that always lives with grazing animals and eats the insects that fly up from their feet.”
Mr. Riley seemed to find it quite easy to talk to children, because he just smiled, and didn’t argue or laugh, he just quietly said, “Well, I will leave the egg case where it is, but the mantis can do as it wants, if it flies out the window I won’t stop it.”
That was that, he drove off with the baby in the back seat and the children went into the house, and then back outside to rinse off the worst of the black dust from the fire with the hose, before they washed their hands and faces for lunch.
After that day Pete always had a sort of low level, background belief, that there was some basis of fact behind many old myths and practices. It gave him a niggling feeling, when he heard some superstition or folk belief expressed, that it did seem like nonsense, but perhaps somewhere in the wide world the Little People still sang their songs, or other unicorns drifted across the mountain meadows.

New first chapter

2011-08-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

I took a good hard look at an aspect of my book that's worried me for a while, and decided to make some changes.
That old first chapter started where the story began for me, with the solution, since the 'problem'I saw was actually wider than just that in this book.
However, when considering the book itself, the problem was only presented after the solution. Not a good structure, and likely a boring read.
So now the Stonehenge episode begins in the second chapter. The new opening is a bit earlier in the protagonists' journey.
Ty and Jen encounter mindless violence and looting in an English town when they stop to draw money from an ATM.
With my dislike for direct confrontation, they are not personally attacked, but clearly are endangered.
Let's see if more readers are tempted to read further. Still quite mild for a thriller.

Stone Song
©Philip van Wulven 2011

Chapter 1
I was busy at the ATM, concentrating like you do, when a crash of breaking glass brought me to quivering alertness. I felt as violated as if someone’d kicked open the bathroom door while I was doing my thing.
I looked up, and saw Jen’s back view. Red hair spread across her freckled shoulders and flowed over her back as she turned towards the noise. Her right fist clenched around her water bottle, and then she shifted her grip to hold it like a club.
Across the road there was a confused swirl of hoodie-clad people around the shattered window of a jewellers. Some darted in, grabbed stuff, and slid out again, while others seemed to be venting a grudge against any unbroken glass or intact display. Mindless rage, not just a smash and grab.
The machine beeped for attention. So bloody annoying. I turned and kicked the wall, which hurt nothing but my foot.
“Dammit! I’m working out the exchange rates.” Machines don’t listen, but usually I feel better for a bit of release. Breathe deep, get the cash, and get out of here before we were roped in as witnesses, or something.
I punched in the numbers, the machine coughed up a bunch of notes, English Pounds, and I was outta there.
“Let’s go, Jen.”
She looked daggers, but kept her lips closed, and we hurried along, away from the trouble-spot. I hoped none of that lot would turn their attention our way. Never mind being tied up as witnesses, we could end up as victims here. There were at least ten of them. One or two wouldn’t be a problem, but no-one can fight off a swarm.
Jen grabbed my arm and hung on tight. She didn’t look up, just plunged on, head down. I tried not to go too fast, to act confident and not draw attention. If I’d noticed them earlier I’d never have gone near the ATM. Should have just left without the cash. Dumb. Dumb. Setting us up as targets like that. So much easier to rob cash from us than try to pawn rings or watches.
I felt better very quickly, as we moved out of the area. So did Jen. I could see her shoulders loosen up as we walked.
We’d parked next to a white van, with a logo of a black bird, a raven or a crow, on the side, and it was still there when we returned. As we walked up, I noticed something bright pink moving inside, visible through the small windows in the back doors.
“What’s that? Can’t be an animal, that colour, can it? Day-Glo pink, for gosh sakes.”
Jen didn’t answer, but pressed her nose to the glass and looked in. She burst out laughing, and waved me over, “You have to see this, Ty. Unbelievable! Look.”
I humoured her, and stood and looked through the window in the other door. Inside was a fairly orderly jumble of what you might expect in a tradesman’s van, an electrician or maybe a cable or alarm guy. Amongst the rolls of cable and boxes of screws and bits and pieces was an animal cage. Inside was a very active bright pink ferret.
“Hoy! Get outta there. Go on, beat it. If you’ve nicked something you’re done.” A large man in grey coveralls walked up. He had a two wheeled dolly loaded with wire and several cardboard boxes. Couldn’t help noticing, the backs of his hands were covered in faded blue tattoos. Crosses and some kind of writing.
“Sorry, we’re just looking at your pet there. He’s cute. What’s his name?” said Jen.
“Never you mind. That’s a working animal, and this is company property. Get out of here before I have you arrested.”
I took Jen by the elbow and pulled her away, against some resistance, the few feet to our rental Ford Fiesta. “Come on, Jen, climb in.”
She got in as soon as I opened the passenger door for her. “I suppose you’re right, Ty. Best to leave people like that alone, but he didn’t have to be so rude. I mean, he could see we don’t mean any harm.”
The guy opened the doors and started putting his gear away. One wide-swung door blocked our car in. I was about to climb out and make a big deal of it, but Jen’s hand on my shoulder changed my mind, with a squeeze. Her turn to keep me out of trouble. We were turning into a real team here.
Another man wearing the same coveralls arrived. “Hoy, Fred, this is the disc for the jewellers. Thought you said you’d put it in and start the broadcast?
“’Course I bloody said that, and I did. I put the bloody C.D in and got it going, packed up the gear, and collected the wire we left at that gift shop last week. All while you was swanning around buyin’ coffee.”
“You must have used the wrong disc, then. This is the one with the Teen-Annoyance frequencies. The only other one we had in the van is that experimental stuff Hancock wanted me to work up for him. I better go change them right away. That other one might cause a riot or something, instead of just annoying. It has some strong emotional enhancement frequencies.”
The van door swung closed, out of our way, so I reversed out, and we were off again.
“What was that all about, Ty? What were they doing? That must’ve been the shop they were working on, that had the window smashed.”
I had no more idea than she did, so I said, “Never mind what they were doing, who’d want to work with someone as bad tempered as the tattoo guy?”
I did wonder at the intensity of the mood changes we’d both gone through in such a short time. Probably jet-lag had a lot to do with it, I decided.
That bit about the disc ‘causing a riot’ was disturbing, when I thought of how those fools had behaved. Then too, he’d said something about ‘emotional enhancement’. Did that mean their C.D. somehow pumped up anger, or fear, or whatever?
Out in the traffic again, we made good progress, and moved at a fair clip despite the congestion.
“This is the right way, Ty. Now we’re off the Motorways and past Andover it should be easy. Just a bit further on this road and we’ll be there.”
“At least there’s enough traffic going the other way to remind me which side of the road to drive on.”
“Next stop, Stonehenge.”
Jen had the map on her lap already, so I just kept driving, and let her navigate.

Stone Song

2011-07-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

Stone Song is now available on kindle and Smashwords and will soon be at other outlets.
Here is a sample.

Chapter 1

Jen got out and held her arms up high and wide, like a dancer in Swan Lake. “We must go up there right away. We have to be inside the blue stones by sunrise.” She didn’t say anything about the fence, mind you. I knew it was there from some of the recent pictures, but maybe she hadn’t noticed. They often focused on the Stones close-up, used old pictures, or they just edited the nasty wire out.
Anyhoo, here we were. Couple of hours over in England and I was about to bust into a National Monument with a New Age Goddess freak. Okay, a twenty-something red headed Goddess freak who seemed to like me, had enough sense to read a map, and could do foreign exchange in her head quicker than I could count the coins out.
“Come on, Ty. Never mind all that mundane stuff on the road, they won’t bother us. The car’s parked well away from all the fuss, and we’re here! You have to think peace and joy, feel the magic in this sacred place. Hold my hand and just radiate good thoughts.”
I held her hand and radiated. Still couldn’t see much but wet dark. She pulled me onwards. Maybe she could see better in the dark than me, so I followed, sorta slid my feet forwards through the short grass, in case there were sudden bumps or holes or whatever. So far just quite smooth longish turf, though.
Lights flashed farther up the highway. Police and ambulance. One of each at least. Looked like a big transport had jackknifed and tipped across two lanes of traffic. The jam-up snaked away a couple of miles already. That must’ve happened a short while ago. I’d concentrated on my feet, on not falling in the rough grass of the slope up from the road to the fence around the great megaliths, so I didn’t notice until we stopped at the barrier
Well, this was supposed to be a real mystical place, right. Stonehenge. So far just a long slog through wet grass and sticky mud, with a nasty cold wind and drizzle. No stars or moon, just the stream of headlights and the snaking line of red on the other side of the road.
Couldn’t see much of this famous prehistoric site. Was that a moth? Something soft fluttered against my cheek, and disappeared on the wind, but something cold stuck right under my eye. I put my hand up and came away with a soggy piece of paper. Candy wrapper. Smelt like chocolate and that artificial cherry flavour. The sticky smear on my cheek transferred to my hand when I rubbed it. I almost licked my hand, in my jet-lagged state. Gross, even to think. I wiped my hand on my jeans and rubbed at my face again.
Almost morning. A few sleepy bird chirps and a fresh smell on the wind, almost covered by the hot rubber and burnt gas smells of the road behind us. I drifted into a dreamy, sleepy recap of just why I’d got myself into this. Walk up a hill in wet grass in the dark? Been there. Climb a fence? National monument? Okay, no spray paint in sight, or likelihood of anything ambitious in the excavation or ‘I wus here’ lines. Not that it seemed like a good idea, exactly, more interesting and harmless. Then too, she was going in whether I did or not.
Seat mates across the Atlantic, we’d eyed one another with a degree of, what? Mutual mistrust? Until we found we were both headed for the same little town. We’d sat next to each other on the plane for a couple of hours before I managed to get her to be more than distantly polite.
She’d eagerly agreed to swap my window seat for her aisle one. I’d paid extra, but my legs needed to stretch more than I needed to see the occasional light below. She smelt faintly of sandalwood incense and something floral, maybe rose water. Naturally the old hormones kicked in when she sat in the seat next to me.
I finally caught her attention when I told her, “I’m going to hire a car and drive down to Glastonbury. Always wanted to go to the Festival.” She frowned slightly, so I said, “I know, that was last week, but the place is still worth seeing, and I’ve got a buddy who lives near there. Chris persuaded me to come over even when I knew I’d miss the big do. Said there’s something going on he could use my help with.”
She turned in the narrow aeroplane seat and looked at me, really inspected me, and said, “You’re definitely going to drive to Glastonbury then?”
“Yep. I booked a rental car online, and the place will be open when we get in, so I want to drive there right away. I mean, London is really interesting and all, but big cities and me don’t mix too well. So I don’t want to spend much time there. Of course, before I go back I might go see some of the big sights, like the Tower, and buy something for my mum in Harrods. Well, she’d like something from there.”
She said, “You know, I want to go there too. Glastonbury, I mean. Not Harrods. I’ve on-line friends to meet, and I want to spend time there. I was going to get a bus from Victoria Coach Station, but if you’re going there by car, well,” she paused and chewed her lip. “I suppose it could be the Goddess,” she muttered. Then she looked me in the eye and smiled. “How would you feel about some company on the drive Ty?”
“You mean you want a ride to Glastonbury? Sure. I mean, definitely my pleasure.”
“Right then. So we are companions on the road, then.” She stuck her hand out and we shook on it. Her hand was soft but fairly firm, like I mean soft skin over a bit of muscle, not just a limp bag of bones like some girls.
She’d seen the sunset over the sea, with her nose pressed to the glass like a kid waiting for her dad to come home on her seventh birthday. I’d seen a lot past her shoulder too. Gold and rose pink, orange and bright, then silver moonlight on the tops of the clouds.
Coming down had been just that, a descent into a lower world in every sense. Dark, cold, drizzly, dirty. Pale people, dull clothes, narrow packed streets even long after the rush hour. Cars and buses threaded between lines of on-street parking. Most places had no garages, no other place to park. Built before cars.
My fingers ached from the chain link, and her heel had ground something into the base of my right thumb when I boosted her.
She ignored the mud on my hands. Barefoot, carried her sandals in her other hand, so her toes must be quite squidgy by now. What did they call that, way back? Grocking. Yeah, I watch old movies.
The sky glow, the lights reflected off the low clouds, was strange All that light, so much you couldn’tve seen stars even if it was clear, didn’t help much, just gave a dull yellowy hazy effect on the clouds’ bellies.
Something loomed up. Big, solid, black. Must be a stone, one of the much famed Sarsen stones, or perhaps a Blue Stone. I did my homework, read the tourist stuff while we were somewhere over Ireland. “Hey, we’re here. There’s a stone, see?”
“Of course there’s a stone, Ty. That’s the outer ring. Come on, let’s get into the power centre. I want to soak it all in. The peace and the healing this place radiates.”
She tugged my hand, and I felt a sharp twinge as she pressed on something still wedged into the flesh at the base of my thumb.
“Ow, hang on. Something’s digging into my hand.” I twisted my hand, she let go. I could feel her frown and try to think of something enlightened to say.
I felt with my awkward other hand. The second finger worked fine; just the tip gone from the index finger, and it didn’t bend all the way. There was a small chunk of stone bedded right into me, about like a bread crumb in size and shape, but of course much harder. I dug my nail in and got it between thumb and second finger. Came out quite easily, and then blood flowed. Not much, but it ran down my fingers and dripped off into the grass. I reached out and wiped my hand against the rough rock beside me, dropped the stone-crumb into my jacket pocket absentmindedly, then pressed the wound with my other thumb, to dull the sharp pain and give the blood a chance to clot.
“Okay, carry on. Here, grab my other hand.”
We carried on. She smooth, me a bit stumbly in my stiff hiking boots. They’d done better than I expected over the chain link, lucky the big cleats on the sole fitted the size of the mesh. Bit hard on the ankles and back. Don’t even think about what the wire did to fingers.
The ground shook like a buffalo stampede was headed over the hill.
“Hey! What’s that?”
We both turned back, and saw a black outline against the sky-glow. Tall as the fence. Big, and fast.
“Jump! Over here!” I leapt to get that big chunk of stone between us and the Thing.
Crash! Like a pile of scrap tipped off a truck, the fence went down.
With the squeal of a steam engine on a very bad day it tromped over the remains of the fence, then swept past us. We crouched against the stone, pressed against the rock as if it might protect us if we kept close enough.
“What the hell?”
She clapped her hand over my mouth. “Ssh. Shut up. Don’t say things like that, like that word. If you name anything here, you’re calling it. Please”
She was shaking. “Okay, okay Jesus girl, it’s just an animal. It’s not some supernatural being or whatever, you know.”
I knew it was as mundane as white bread, because a large dollop of evidence had flopped down. Generously covered my foot and a couple of square feet of turf, and lay there all warm and soggy. It smelt of fermented hay and methane gas.
“Look here, it pooped on me as it passed. Believe it or not, that’s an elephant. Somehow there’s an elephant loose in, where are we, Wiltshire is it? Maybe it was in that big pileup on the road over there, and got out of the wreck and ran off all panicked. Gotta be tame, you know, like maybe from a zoo or even a circus.”
“There are no coincidences Ty. Just as you and I were destined to meet and come here together tonight, so the Goddess has sent her great servant here too.”
“Whatever. Look you realise now we’re in shit. I mean, they’re gonna come here to catch Jumbo there, and we aren’t meant to be here, inside the fence and all, you know.”
“Oh don’t worry. Think about it, all we have to say is, we saw the elephant and followed her, and the fence was down when we got here. I mean, what are they gonna do, seriously?”
Buddy must’ve heard our voices, and came over for company right then, because suddenly we were between two big grey masses. One rooted, one restless. It shifted from one foot to the other, and I knew it was very interested in us, because hay breath blew into my face.
Jen scrambled away from it, hit hard against the standing stone, and fell over. Something metal clanked against stone, and resonated, like a struck tuning fork. Jen had a big copper and silver pendant around her neck, that swung between her tits as she bounced along, usually. Must have swung out against the stone as she scrambled onto hands and knees.
Something vibrated in a much deeper note, and a harmonic awoke in the stone. Then a third note began, so deep I could feel it through the soil I stood on and the rock against my back, but not hear it.
Jen stopped trembling. Her arm was pressed against my leg, is how I knew. Her pendant still swung, but I couldn’t hear it after the first couple of seconds. I mean it wasn’t like a bell or anything, more a “tinggg” noise. The other notes, the deeper tones, they were something else. As if the high note was a signal or a catalyst or something, you know? That starts something going.
We could both feel and hear the same, but she didn’t seem to notice anything.
Maybe I overreacted, looked for something special and different about the place, and paid more attention than most people do to slight sounds, like you do in the bush if you’re hunting, or even just in bear country.
Well, of course bears don’t make noises anything like the elephant rumbles I was picking up, but you know what I mean, right?
Jen stood up again. “Now just be quiet Ty, don’t say anything, and try to follow what I do, and be worshipful and properly reverent.” She brushed dust off her butt, and then wiped her hands quickly on my jacket. It was a tired old denim, so no problem.
She put her hands together and began to chant, “Great Mother give us of your wisdom. Ommmmmm” She nudged me with her elbow and hissed, “C’mon Ty, just say Ommmm.”
“Ommmmm,” I said. The elephant made a couple of rumbles like a big bellyache and flapped its ears, as it shuffled its feet.
I started to feel really good, deep down. Maybe this would turn out quite nicely. I’d been on a bit of a losing streak lately. You know me, the guy who got stuck in a ditch on the way to a friend’s beach cottage, so his best girl thought she’d been stood up, and went and got drunk and partied all weekend.
Come Monday early she dumped me, so I didn’t go to work all week. Had a long session of flexing the elbow, which I don’t remember, and ended up in Toronto with a winning lottery ticket in my pocket and a hangover like a wall had fallen on me. When I collected my winnings I decided to go somewhere far away, and there was an e-mail from Chris. He’d got this really great job on an island, and the photos looked so inviting, all peaceful sea and distant blue mountains, with birds nesting on the cliffs. Perfect refuge for heart healing.
All the way across the ocean I’d carried a burden of loss, a hole where there’d been an ‘us’ with a future not clear or in any detail, but definite and reassuringly inevitable. With the breakup I’d been left swinging in the wind, as they say. Now, over a minute or so, it was like light poured in to fill the hollow place.
When I looked up I saw light too. The big stone right by us had a flicker of blue radiation. Light flowed along in curling, changing lines. Now dimmer, now sparked to life again, like a fire in a gusty wind. As the last echoes of the resonant sound faded out, the way a bell chime goes, slowly so you can never quite be sure exactly when it’s gone, that blue glow went also.
Then I could see my shadow cast on the stone by something behind us.
There was a long, slightly diffused light beam reaching out from one of the cop cars several hundred yards away, on the road, and the beast was clearly visible in silhouette. Another panda car drove along the shoulder and swung up the side road towards the ticket office and official entrance.
“Shit,” muttered Jen, reverently.
Chapter 2
“Okay, now maybe we should just stay in the shadows here, out of sight. C’mon.” I took her hand again and pulled her along. We kept the big stone between us and the searchlight beam as we slipped farther into the complex. The stones are big, and easily hid us from view, especially in the dark, with just the one bright bar of light showing everything in its path, while it threw everything else into deeper obscurity. We followed a sort of spiral path, so that we had as much cover as possible from the light beam, as well as from the car approaching the gate.
“We’d better get down in cover and stay quiet until the excitement dies down.” I hunkered down behind a large chunk of rock, and pulled her hand. She resisted a bit, but settled beside me.
Someone dressed in coveralls and rubber boots walked into the enclosure, through the trampled gap in the fence. The two uniforms at the main gate (still locked, of course) shone their flashlights, and one shouted, “Hoy, stay away, this is a National Monument, no trespassing!”
“Oh don’t be silly, I have to calm Lakshmi down, and bring her out of there. Poor girl is frantic.” Came the reply.
“Here Lakshmi, here girl.” Sounded like calling a dog out of the bushes on a walk in the woods, or something.
The elephant responded much like a dog too, just turned and ambled over to the caller, and stood by him, just a bit restless but obviously familiar and comfortable with him.
The man turned and walked away again, with the great animal docile behind him. They walked over the swell of the earthworks towards the road, but didn’t appear out of the hollow again. I could see the top of her head and back as they stood in the bottom of the old boundary ditch. Nice quiet place to wait for someone else to sort out the traffic and get the rig back upright, I supposed.
The cops must’ve seen the sense of that, because they switched off their searchlight, and then you could hear the radios going back and forth for a bit in usual cops-at-the-scene style, before the doors slammed and the panda eased back away from the gates and drove back to the crash scene.
Darkness flowed in again, and the quiet. Lot of the tension drained out of me. It was so peaceful I started to doze a bit, I ‘spose.
“Don’t fall asleep! Haven’t you got any sense of the importance of this place?” hissed Jen.
She was still tense, then. “ Okay, okay, I’m with you. Yup, very mystical and umm, significant. Nice and peaceful now though. All that fuss and action down by the road just seems to be far away, somewhere else. Feels like a different place, just the wind and grass and the clouds closed over the stones and us.”
Jen had intended to do some kind of ceremony or chant or something, but she stayed hunched down beside me and shivered. The reality of almost being arrested, of cops in a strange country, hit her now. Trespassing could be serious stuff here.
“Let’s get out of here as soon as we can,” she whispered.
I laid on my back and cloud-watched for what seemed like a short time, but had to be at least an hour or so, because when I looked to the road they’d got the rig back on its wheels and the traffic moved freely again There was still lots of action, of course. Looked like they were loading Lakshmi into her trailer. We eased out of the enclosure, over the trampled chain-link, and back to the rental car, half a mile down the road from the accident scene. Fortunately we could just start up and drive on without going past the cops and all. We headed off towards our next stop. Avebury. More stones.
When we got there the day had blushed up brighter. I was bagged, but totally bagged, so I parked by the pub, and closed my eyes. “Go on then, if you want to see the sunrise from amongst the stones. I’m just gonna rest a bit, wait for someone to open up so I can get something to eat.”
Jen didn’t argue. She slipped out and crossed the road into the field where a whole bunch of stones were, like the guide book said. The wind was stronger, and brought some real rain, beyond just the mizzle that was falling earlier. Nasty. I closed my eyes.
The car door shut with a dull thunk. I looked blearily around. Daylight. A grey soft day, with rain in beads and trickles on the windscreen. Jen’s hair hung heavy, straggled and drippy, from under her knit cap. Wool didn’t keep the wet out very well. Smelt like a sheep.
“This is an incredible place, you know. You’re missing so much.”
“Right now my stomach tells me it’s past lunch time back home, even if it only just got light here. We haven’t eaten in a while, you know. When my stomach’s happy again I want to explore for sure, but just wait a bit. This pub has to open sometime soon. Or maybe we should go on to the next town and eat, then come back, you know?”
So we drove on up the A303, until we came to a little place with an open cafe, and had us an expensive breakfast. Awful coffee. Jen was smug about drinking tea. The prices would’ve been at the high end of normal if they were in dollars. The exchange rate really added a kick to the sticker shock.
There was a newspaper on the table with local news, “Jumbo invasion at Stonehenge.” Nothing about us; we hadn’t been spotted or anything, then.
The big story was about terrorists and some new plot to bomb trains, with backpack bombs and so on. The intent was to cause disruption and fear, more than physical damage. Right then I was somehow more indifferent to feelings of anxiety about the return flight in a couple of weeks than I normally would be.

Danger with a waning moon

2011-07-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

Research in Tanzania shows that lion attacks are most successful on dark nights. Lions hunt at these times, when darkness allows a greater chance of surprising prey. Moon phase particularly affects attacks on humans.
The moon sets early when in the growing phase, but provides light in those evening hours when people are still active. Danger is moderate at these times. Full moon brings an interval of relatively little danger, but leaves lions hungry, so that as the moon rises later and smaller the evenings are a dangerous time to be out and about.
Other prey is available all night of course, but humans rarely leave safe enclosed huts or bomas after 10pm.
This pattern must be very old, and extend worldwide wherever predators and humans lived together. Surely a lot of the mystique associated with the phases of the moon muststem from such observations.
Our ancestors must have dreaded the time of the shrinking moon, the darkness outside the firelight more intense and more dangerous than at any other time.

Stone Song published

2011-07-07T06:29:00.000-07:00

Big step around 2AM this morning. Finished one more edit/run through of Stone Song, tried out the hyper-linked Table of Contents, and uploaded it to Smashwords. So my first ever published novel is now available.
Priced it at $2.99, classified it as a scifi/adventure/thriller/romance. Let's see what happens.
Perhaps a little short for a traditional novel at 48,000 words. The trend for ereaders, and especially for those who read on their phones, is for shorter works.
I will hold off on Amazon for a few days, in case there is some sort of booboo I've missed, but it should be there by next week.
I do have a web-presence, lots of Twitter & Facebook contacts, as recommended. Many of them are also writers. Not sure how much weight those contacts may have in getting book sales, but can't harm anything.
I haven't done a buildup to a preplanned Launch, or sent review copies or anything similar. I shall possibly get a Smashwords Coupon, to give copies away.

Book Covers for ebooks

2011-07-06T10:32:00.000-07:00

Book covers for ebooks? Actually an image which draws possible readers to take look at the title, the blurb, and perhaps to read at least a sample of the writing.
When deciding on mine, so far I've tried to get distinctive, even evocative images. Bright clear colours with not too much clutter.
They are viewed onscreen as thumbnails, so writing has to be easily legible.
The other aspect which occurs to me is what happens on the ereader screen? Those colours are useless on a Kindle or Kobo or whatever, because everything is black and white. These images have be distinctive in grayscale.
Few indies seem to have realised this.
Readers looking for books on Kindle or Chapters etc do so with their ereaders. They can't see those fancy colours. Ok there are people browsing with their iphones, colour Nooks etc, but let us try to have images that work on all screens.

Stone Song

2011-07-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

Stone Song is complete at 47,000 words. Should it be longer? Should I get someone to edit it? Cost is an issue, for a doubtful return. Will people buy it, edited or as is ? No way to know beforehand.
I think there will be a few typos, and probably a good editor could improve things, but I am very wary of 'improvements' which just might not actually help the story. I'm tired of messing around with it. Once published I can get stuck into the next big project, which might be one more go at Eland Dances, or might be something completely new. Stone Song is not Great, I just hope it is entertaining.Then too, I must finish the next Sherlock story, S. Holmes and Lady Chatterley's Voodoo Dolls.
I have added a bit more motivation/tension by way of the death of a character; however we never actually meet the guy, everything is at a remove & hearsay. To be a real thriller all the action should be up close and happen in front of readers. Also, the protagonists need to be directly endangered, which is not the case. There is tension, but not really direct threat or danger. Should there be? Should i write in another couple of thousand words with Hancock, the Baddie, gunning for Ty, perhaps running the car off the road with his van?

Sunday, life details & hyperlinks

2011-06-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

The sky is cloudy, but at least it's warm. Been raining a lot the past few days, and cloudy when it's not. Lawn is half mowed, and that's the way it has been for the last four days. In a burst of energy I set out to mow my meadow, until rain stopped that enterprise. Since then either I've been busy or it has been raining, or the grass has been wet fron morning dew or rain. All the dew it gets means I never ever water the grass, and it stays green.
In other news, I had a Real Estate lady bring some possible buyers through the London house; she dropped a note saying she had people who want to buy, did I want to sell? So Saturday 2pm they duly went for a look. Asked me 'how much'and my reply was 'dunno, but municipal tax valuation gives a figure, how about that?
As for writing stuff, I have started adding more Thriller elements into 'Stone Song'- as with any such thing, every change has a snowball effect down the line, meaning more changes further on. Might get to a reasonable novel length ultimately.
Also, spent hours working out how to create a Table of Contents in Pages with active links. Exported to Word, and uploaded to Smashwords. Hopefully that will translate into a proper clickable TOC in the various formats. Hyperlinks, which i always thought just take you to some web-page, apparently are the means which link the Table to chapter headings. This is all in Heavy and Light Tales, by the way. If successful, I can do the same in Stone Song when that is finished & published.
My attitude with the short story book(s) is to use them as practice, finding out how to format properly, make covers, linkable TOC, build a web-presence and all that stuff.
Then the novels will have all the groundwork done when I get to them.

Heavy and Light Tales

2011-06-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

Okay. My new little short story collection is live on Smashwords, and will probably be uploaded to Amazon Kindle later today.

I'm experimenting with pricing. Since I don't expect much in the way of sales, this is priced at $2.99, to get that 70% return from Kindle sales (if any).

The other thing I must do is remember to include at least 'Addendum to Dog' in the 'shorts' listing for Kindle.

Going through my old stories I realized some of them are fairly good. Some small rewrites, an extra sentence or two in some, seemed to give just a bit extra zip, and of course some pruning too. One longish speech in 'the Shot'is gone without any loss.

I'd intended to use the same cover image as on the paperback edition, but couldn't find the digital version anywhere. Instead I used a photo of a very spiky plant.
Not too happy with the title font and placement, that should be a bit lower, further from the top edge. Will have another go at that also, later today

BunoWrimo, new short story collection, & new Sherlock

2011-06-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

I'm in BunoWrimo, which means I'm supposed to write a total of 50,000 words, an entire novel, in the month of June.
Didn't actually attempt that, but have directed that energy into finishing projects mostly, rather than start a big new one.
Mind you, there is 'Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Lady Chatterley's Voodoo Dolls', but that won't be traditional novel length. As a Graphic novel, the page count may reach 100, but the word count will be much lower. I have the plot roughed out, and it is perhaps half written.
The last couple of days I've been preparing to publish another short story collection, originally intended to be an ebook version of Heavy and Light Tales, my 2006 paperback short story collection. After some editing and pruning, I decided to add a couple of excerpts from my novels, both to raise interest in them, and because they're not half bad as stand-alone stories. This is especially true of bits from Eland Dances.
So, quite a productive month, and if you count editing, with bits altered, added, or slashed, I should have something like the target figure by month end.
As for 'Stone Song', one Beta reader has told me 'go ahead and publish it' Mind you, I think he only read the first half. Silence from the others, which likely means they find it heavy going. Oh well.
Click on the title of this post to see Heavy and Light Tales on Smashwords.

Latest projects

2011-06-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've been busy with several things at once - of course, the only way to be busy, since projects and 'things to do now' are like city buses when it rains, they travel in convoy.

So presently; roof shingles, next Sherlock Holmes story - going to be a graphic novel - wowsers, finishing Stone Song, keeping the garden going in the face of a marauding hungry ground hog. -

The next Sherlock Holmes story has become a graphic Novel in progress, in collaboration with a virtual friend in England.
Title is going to be 'Sherlock Holmes & the Case of Lady Chatterley's Voodoo Dolls'
So far a few more than 2,000 words written, the main characters decided on, and the skeleton of the plot outlined (mostly). Portraits of the main characters are being worked on, which will be used as the basis for the many smaller pictures needed.

We think something like a 100- 150 page minimum, with at least one small picture per page. Text may be alongside the illustrations, as Sherlock tends to be quite long-winded, and so those little dialogue-bubbles won't do.

Next:-

The roof needs new shingles. Not this roof, the one sheltering me as I write this, but the house in town, where my daughter and grandson live. Fine, how much, let's do it shall we?

Not so fast. This is a semi-detached and so anything like a roof repair involves the people in the other half.

They are Believers, in one of those Churches that tell them everyone else is Profane, & only True Believers will be Saved. Fair enough. Now with the roof repair, one of their Church Brothers has been picked by them to do the roof. Both sides.

Problem I have is the guy hasn't left me a written quotation or contacted me. His verbally passed on figure is high, I think. So I got a quote from a well known, very respectable, company. The sort of place you'd expect to be expensive for this sort of thing. Their figure, with written warranties & a few bells, is several hundred dollars lower.
Next I asked the guy doing several roofing jobs in our street for a quote, and his figure is $900 lower than the big company. No response whatsoever from neighbours, except that they have a Brother who will do the whole roof, theirs and mine.
So I am expected to pay over an extra $1000 because their Brother has been picked by them?

Stone Song has gone out to a few Beta readers. Waiting for feedback.

Groundhog has been stymied by a careful fence. Unfortunately all that's left are potatoes, tomatoes, a few beets sprouting again, and two tiny cucumber plants.

Wednesday already

2011-06-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

My gosh. Flying along. Lots of time so far this week doing the web-presence thing; now have 223 Twitter followers & 75 'likes' on my Facebook author page. If that is achievement, I'm making progress.
So far 9 copies of Sherlock Holmes & the Zombie Affair have sold this month/week on Amazon Kindle USA. One more and that'll equal the 10 sold in May, though it was live for just 12 days, from the evening on 18th so not a big leap.
Now, all that effort comes down to $7 in actual money earned. The only real justification could possibly lie with future earnings from Stone Song and other writing to come.
Drawback there is the totally different genres - the tiny 'Sherlock' niche as against the much larger and more competitive SF/Thriller/Adventure of Stone Song.
I have no idea how many have read the sample available to be read online fron Amz kindle. That would be useful to know, for sure. Have to assume some percentage of those who read the sample go on to spend $0.99 and buy the rest.
If web presence counts for anything, it should show in a fairly quick start to sales of Stone Song when I publish.
Which is going to be within weeks, certainly, even if I do some rewrites; Jury is out on that. I have a reasonable & coherent story as is. Do I want/need to juice up the tension & conflict?

Sunday sunshine

2011-06-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

Managed to do quite a bit of in-filling in Stone Song, 2 hours out in the sunshine, squinting at the laptop, back inside so it could charge again, while I went through and edited.
Paul Kater has been sending me emails about the chapters I sent him for his input, and I've been integrating his suggestions as I go. Then more new stuff again.
Not sure how many words total, but it feels like progress. Couple of important scenes sorted, and continuity and some minor motives/decisions written in several places.
Yesterday was a low achievement day, because I was in London from midday on. Supposed to meet a guy to see about the roof there - needs new shingles. He didn't turn up.
So I stayed, because my grandson's 9th birthday party was from 5pm on. More adults than kids, as it happened. Lots of food and conviviality, while kids surged around. Someone kindly gifted several mini marshmallow guns, which found eager testers. Expect the raccoons will enjoy the marshmallows all over the garden.
Ended up by toasting hot dogs on sticks, with Birthday Boy the last kid standing.We did Octopus Dogs. What you do is split the ends of a hot dog sausage into several parts, with the middle section left as is. Then jab a sharp pointy stick into that middle bit, and hold over hot coals. As it cooks the ends curl into twisty fingers. Fun to watch, and of course eat.

Sherlock Sales, book covers, Dead Road

2011-06-04T00:12:00.000-07:00

I have the cover with St.Materiana's Church seen through the lower gate, and the Dead Path, on the Smashwords version. The Litch Gate is the other name for this gate, because bodies were carried along this route. Traditionally, these Dead roads were left unobstructed so the souls of the dead could fly directly to hallowed ground. So very appropriate for a story involving a zombie. This is quite an eye-catching image, even if you don't know exactly what it shows.
Saint Materianas is in Tintagel, Cornwall, and is a very old church.
I have the anonymous cemetery on the Amazon version. Tumbled gravestones in hues of grey and green, fairly spooky.
Whether the cover influences sales (much) is very hard to judge.
I know, I know, big yawn, who cares about the miniscule sales of a very short ebook? Obviously I do, and so --
As of yesterday, Friday 3rd there'd been 6 sold by Amazon.com during June, which would be 2 per day. Since it went 'live'during the evening on May 18th, there were 10 sold on .com & 2 on .UK, so a bit less than 1 per day.
Forget about Smashwords, nobody goes there to buy, it seems. Fellow writers, certainly, and there've been 14 'sold' there, 13 with use of the coupon. Now, the other retailers they supply might be different, but it'll be a while before it gets out to them.

Espresso Book Machines

2011-06-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

I posted a couple of days ago, saying there were around 21 of these machines world-wide. Wrong. Click the link(ie click the title of this post) to see the current locations. University libraries are early adopters, in Canada and the USA, from Australia to Egypt, they are spreading very rapidly.
If you are an Indie Author there is a very direct interest here; you can list your books with them for any customer to get a real paper back copy anywhere there is a machine.
I'm in, as soon as I've posted this update.
Something definitely worth looking into is buying or leasing a machine, opening a bookshop.
Not sure of the cost, though someone mentioned 75,000 GB Poundsfor one. Not bad if you have a decent market to serve. One in the University of Toronto, another at Waterloo are the closest to me right now. Wondering about setting up in one of London's malls (Ontario's London)
Certainly going to try get my book(s) into their system.
This is absolutely the future of publishing and book retailing. Perfect combination of most of the advantages of ebooks and paperbooks.
For Indie bookstores this has to be the answer. Low storage and display costs, combined with a huge inventory.

June - summer's here at last, time to do stuff

2011-06-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

This spring has been mostly miserable, cool, if not downright cold, and wet. Farmers couldn't get into their fields to plant in areas where their soil doesn't drain very well. My own garden is almost bare still, just a few spuds sprouting, since the deer jumped the fence and ate my lettuce, beet tops and brussels sprouts.
But never mind meandering in the garden, this month is Buno-Wrimo month. As of today, a strict (hah) regimen of 1,800 words every day, or else. Else what? No beer, that's what! Wish I could see the bloody computer screen outside though, cos that's where I want to be, in the light and air.
If they bring out an e-ink screen device you can write as well as read on, I'm on it.
For the month I'm not going to try to write 50k words of a new novel, but rather finish Stone Song, including editing, and also do another Sherlock shortie + start a cook book, simple stuff for singles, aimed at carnivores who eat some veg but aren't into lots of ingredients,stuff that needs attention while cooking, and so on.
My daughter suggests wild/gathered foods eg fiddleheads with self caught trout, dandelion wine/ greens, daylily fried in bacon fat etc. Stuff I do, well I would if I ever caught a bloody trout anyway.

The future of Publishing.

2011-05-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

From an article in The Independent I learnt that there are 21 Espresso Book Machines in the world. These are capable of printing and binding a paperback book in less than four minutes. One of them is in a bookshop in Charing Cross Rd, London. The others, I believe, are in University libraries and other non-commercial locations.
They can print any book with a download from the internet.
I have speculated about these ever since I first heard of them. To me it seems obvious that any bookshop would do well to replace their shelves of multiple copies of in-stock books with displays of just a 'cover' image and a blurb, perhaps one copy only in stock for people who just have to handle a book before buying.
In my concept anyone could pay for a coded card which would enable them to either get a hardcopy immediately from the EBM or get an ebook copy downloaded onto their ereader or a thumb drive storage device. Those same cards could also be used in the same way as gift cards currently.
Combining the coded card concept with an Espresso machine in a display area would eliminate many of the costs borne by suffering publishers and retailers. No returns, no need to guesstimate the size of a needed print run, no shipping and storage costs (or much reduced) and much less retail floorspace required.
Drawbacks? For a start these machines are expensive. Secondly, so far they don't do hardcovers.
But this has to be the future of book retailing offline. Online is another story, as we know.

Sherlock Holmes and the Zombie Affair

2011-05-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Sherlock Holmes and the Zombie Affair is now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle sites. As of now - May 27th 12:12am - 2 have sold on Kindle UK, 6 on Kindle US, and 13 on smashwords - of those 12 were free with the coupon.
This is the first week. Should be distributed to Sony, Apple, Kobo etc soon, via smashwords.
This is a tiny niche in the publication world, so the good thing is not much competition. Fiction-Mystery-British-Detective

Sherlock Holmes and the Zombie Affair

2011-05-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Finally! Just finished my 2010 Nanowrimo effort, and it is now available from smashwords. After much procrastination it is now a complete work @ 13,000 words, which is barely Novella length. This would have needed vast padding to reach the Nano-novel length of 50,000 words, and i think it is fine at the length it now is.
Priced at $0.99cents, I have a coupon code available; if anyone reading this would like a free copy, use coupon code AL89Q.

Hindu concept of sound

2011-05-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

“Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu also confirmed that in this age of Kali, Krishna has descended in the form of sound vibration. Sound is one of the forms which the Lord takes. Therefore it is stated that there is no difference between Krishna and His name.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Elevation to Krishna Consciousness, Ch 6)

This is very close to Creation as in the Old Testament, with the Word as prime original manifestation of Being

Active noise cancellation in autos-as postulated in Stone Song

2011-02-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

"The use of active noise cancellation for fuel economy benefit on Terrain is among the first at GM," said Paul Beaker, program engineering manager for GMC Terrain. "It has strong potential for implementation on other four-cylinder vehicle programs."

When GM engineers set out to deliver segment-leading fuel economy on Terrain they chose to lower the 6-speed transmission's gear shift points to enable the Ecotec 2.4L four-cylinder engine to run at lower rpm torque. In this "Eco" mode, which the driver can activate with a click of a button on the console, the torque converter clutch engages at lower engine speeds to help save gas. While the engineering action improved fuel efficiency by up to one mpg, it also created an objectionable low-end frequency boom. To counteract that boom the engineers turned to active noise cancellation technology.

Terrain's noise cancellation system relies on two microphones embedded in the headliner to detect the hum and prompt an onboard frequency generator to create counteracting sound waves through the audio system's speakers and sub-woofer. The system also reduces higher rpm engine noise at highway cruising speeds to help keep the vehicle interior quiet.

Ancient shells meet high-tech: Stanford researchers study the sound of pre-Incan conches

2011-02-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

The sound is ancient and eerie. For a palpable sense of time, blow into the sawed-off spire of a conch. Feel the ache in your lungs and hear the oceanic roar as it vibrates the hefty shell in your hand.

In the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the warriors blew conches to announce battle. In Buddhism, the conch's deep and penetrating drone proclaims the far reach of the dharma. Tibetan monks still use them to summon devotees.

But in the Andean sierra of South America, what did it mean when, three millennia ago, the pre-Incan residents of Chavín de Huántar raised those ornately decorated conch shells to their lips in the underground corridors of their temple?

Nobody knows for certain. But a few Stanford researchers are determined to find out. The result has led to an unusual collaboration between archaeologists and acousticians, under the auspices of Peru's Ministry of Culture, leading into the rarified realms of psychoacoustics and archaeo-acoustics.

Seed funding for the project came from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, a featured program of The Stanford Challenge, a fundraising campaign launched in 2006 and now in its final year.

"Conches are attention-grabbers," said John Rick, associate professor of anthropology and part of the Chavín team. "They're rarely used trivially. People don't play them for entertainment. They're ceremonial – shiny, noisy, highly labor-intensive things.

"This is something that literally has an effect on the human being, even physiologically."

Conches figured prominently in the iconography of Chavín, a UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site about 150 miles north of Lima. "They were clearly important. They were carried in important processions," said Rick.
L.A. Cicero Professor John Rick holds a conch shell similar to the ones discovered at the Chavin site.

Professor John Rick holds a conch shell similar to the ones discovered at the Chavin site.

In July 2001, Stanford archaeologists working at Chavín's 3,000-year-old ceremonial center came across a conch buried in the dirt in one of the temple's underground galleries. To get a sense of the scale of the discovery, remember that only a couple of decorated conches had ever before been found in Peru.

But that wasn't all: "The first one we hit we knew exactly what it was, but we never had a clue that we'd be lucky enough to find 20 intact ones that were still playable," said Rick. The decorated shells, about 10 inches long and weighing 3 to 5 pounds each, had been used for centuries. Their thick pink shells were worn through.

"Once we started to find them, it was imperative to know more," said Rick.

In the unique acoustic landscape – stone-walled underground architecture, with twisting corridors, hidden alcoves and ventilation shafts – how did the conches sound? What role did they play in the ceremonial culture?

The questions weren't new. In the mid-1970s, Peruvian archaeologist Luís Lumbreras, director of the National Institute of Culture (now subsumed into the Ministry of Culture), described the interior structures at Chavín as a set of connected, resonant chambers. He called one of the structures an "acoustic canal" that would produce a loud applause or thunder-like sound when a barrel of water was poured into it.

In other places, conch shells might have created the disorienting impression of sounds coming from several different directions at once.

"We have evidence of the manipulation of light; we have acoustic spaces where it seems that they were playing around with sound. We've got evidence of the use of psycho-active drugs," said Rick. But what other effects were they using in this very early multimedia show, and why? Was it a kind of mind control using sensory manipulation exercised by the priestly elite?

Time for the acousticians to enter the picture, beginning with John Chowning, music professor emeritus, one of the fathers of computer music and the founding director of the renowned Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

The CCRMA team included consulting Professor Jonathan Abel and former CCRMA director Perry Cook.

"My chest was rattled, and I was nauseated for the rest of the day," said Abel, who first heard Rick play a conch as he was standing in a stairwell at CCRMA. "Serious subharmonics were involved." But he also was hooked.

As a result, "I was exposed to this incredible culture that seemed to be able to control the senses in a way through the architecture, through the features of Chavín, and, in particular, these Strombus shell trumpets," he said.
L.A. Cicero Jonathan Abel with a microphone array like the one used in the Chavin site

Professor Jonathan Abel with a microphone array like the one used in the Chavin site.

Since the archaeo-acoustic team's visit to Peru in 2008, CCRMA graduate student and Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship recipient Miriam Kolar, whose dissertation studies the psychoacoustics of Chavín, has been making on-site measurements in the temple complex. She is hoping to recreate "the aural experience of an ancient ceremonial center."

Using sprays of flexible microphones, amplifiers, low distortion speakers, analog-to-digital converters and computer audio interfaces, she measures "how the architecture of these spaces affects auditory perception, which can provide clues about the site's purpose."

In her experiments, "participants listen, in the real acoustic context, to sounds that could have been authentic in Chavín times," and then respond to questions about what they hear.

Supplying the support research back at Stanford, Abel explores the "auditory texture of the place" and tries to "quantify the gallery acoustics." He and the rest of the team are in a race against time: Chavín needs conservation work that will forever alter the mysterious acoustics in the sharply twisting passages and underground alcoves.

Were the priests using these techniques to draw people into the cult? Rick said that this period marks the emergence of an elite in the Andes, a class that could issue orders and command labor and fealty.

"We don't see the public here; this is for the elite. You don't see anything like, 'Thank you, St. Chavín, for saving my leg,'" said Rick. "If you're not an aspirant or not a member, you're probably not there."

Perhaps it marks an early kind of capitalism, as well: "The Chavín priests are in a business. This isn't a free cult, any more than the Mediterranean cults or anything else."

The conches were engraved with elaborate patterns. "But whose patterns were those?" Rick asked. "At first we thought those were all Chavín designs. We started to study those and realized that they were contemporary designs to Chavín culture, but they weren't of Chavín themselves."

Apparently, the shells had stopped at other sites in the central Andes, in their journey from the seas off what are now Panama, Costa Rica and Ecuador, and were converted to trumpets en route. The Chavín touch was the characteristic V-shaped notch carved into the opening of the shell, which allows for bendable notes. It also possibly enabled priests in the procession to see where they were walking as they blew into the shells.

So far, Abel said, the conches haven't lost their charm; one can make the shell sound like an animal, or the wind, or a whisper. "Let me make it sound like a jet engine," he said. "It's completely fun."

Abel praises the interdisciplinary side of the project as "the only way we can make certain kinds of advances."

"Archaeology, anthropology, electrical engineering, signal processing, acoustics, mechanical engineering, physics, music, art – it all comes together," he said. "It's completely fascinating. I'm learning a little bit about culture, and a lot about acoustics, actually."

Rick, in turn, praises the "acoustic magicians" of CCRMA: "The most important thing I've learned is that acoustics is not some sort of soft science. Acoustics is real science. I've had my eyes opened time and time again by the analytical work that I've watched.

"You could say the acoustics people are the new priests of Chavín," he said.

Stone Song's hypothesis strengthened by archaeology

2010-11-16T20:16:00.000-08:00

* Acoustic archaeology is an emerging field that melds acoustical analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting.
* Ancient people created fun house-like temples that featured scary sound effects.
* Some of the sites were likely built by people who took sensory-altering drugs.
The 3,000 year-old Chavin culture produced tunnels and mazes with eerie sound effects.

* Maya Teased Ears Through Architecture
* Stonehenge Acoustics Ideal for Trance-Like Tunes

Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.

The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is an new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.

Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways in which echoes don't sound like echoes.

"The structures could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world," Kolar said. Ancient drawings from the Chavin culture show a people who were fascinated with sensory experiences -- ancient hippies if you will.

"The iconography shows people mixed with animal features in altered states of being," said Kolar, who is presenting her recent work at a conference in Cancun, Mexico this week. "There is peyote and mucus trails out of the nose indicative of people using psychoactive plant substances. They were taking drugs and having a hallucinogenic experience."

If that wasn't enough, the mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze's human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells found in the maze in 2001 may have produced a frequency that actually rattled the eyeballs of those peyote-using ancients, Kolar said.

"We consider sound to be important," said Kolar. "We've gathered a lot of data and we're finally starting to publish it."

The Chavin de Huantar site in Peru isn't the only place where sound played an important role. The Mayan rulers at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan also figured out how to use sound for crowd control. David Lubman, an acoustic engineer who has spent the past 12 years studying the Mayan site, says a strange bird-like echo from the Kukulkan temple was actually constructed on purpose.

"It's sort of spooky," Lubman said from Irvine, Calif. "It's not an ordinary echo."

Lubman's analysis compared the acoustic soundprint of the quetzal bird, which was revered by Mayans, to the sound of the echo at Chichen Itza. They two sounds matched.

Lublin said the secret is in the acoustic properties of the steep staircase on the temple's front.

Other new research presented at this week's Acoustical Society of America conference in Cancun shows that Mayan rulers figured out how to build a public address system in the site's giant ball court. That allowed kings to address hundreds of warriors and subjects without screaming.

In England, British researchers are using modern tools of acoustics to figure out what drumming noises may have sounded like to ancient visitors to Stonehenge.

Another endorsement for novellas

2010-10-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Amazon called on writers and publishers on Tuesday to submit short works to a new section of the US online retail giant's electronic bookstore called "Kindle Singles.

Amazon said Kindle Singles will showcase works that are "twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book."

"Today's announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world," Amazon said.

The Seattle, Washington-based company said writers have traditionally been faced with a choice of "less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000."

"Works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the 'heft' required for book marketing and distribution," it said.

"But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated," Amazon said in a statement.

As examples, it cited a "business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event."

Kindle Singles will have their own section in the online Kindle Store and be "priced much less than a typical book," Amazon said.

"Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format," said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content.

"With Kindle Singles, we're reaching out to publishers and accomplished writers and we're excited to see what they create."

Word on the Street, Toronto

2010-09-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Went to Toronto on Sunday-by train-and spent several hours in Queens Park wandering around the Word on the Street literary festival.
Lots of books on show/sale, with quite a few small publishers and a few of the big boys represented. Tents with panel discussions/talks on things like cooking demos-cookbooks are a perennial best selling genre, -e-publishing/ebooks, various aspects of writing, authors reading their own work & talking about same. There was a big area for childrens books, several religous tents; Islam, Kabbalah, Buddhism, all had outreach efforts.
I met some other writers, one of whom I knew slightly online from the Authonomy website, and found a new small publisher which specialises in novellas. Great, I shall certainly see what I can send them. I find the novella length comfortable, but there seems no market for them except by self-publishing as an ebook. By that I mean few publishers accept submissions at that length, not that readers don't read them.
Quattro Books are Canadian, in a relatively untouched market area. I hope they do well. Certainly the novella length is suited for the ebook market.
Also found contacts with illustrators for a possible graphic novel effort. Recently I contacted another author who has several books on Amazon ideally suited for that genre and suggested he look into that; like me he is a wrinkly oldie with few contacts among the younger arty crowd where underemployed graphic artists are.
So in all definitely worth geting up at 5am to get the train to To. Back next year.

Marilyn Monroe

2010-08-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Right now I am attempting to write an 'interview' with Marilyn Monroe for a competition on Suzannah Burke's blog.
Poor Norma Jean had so many names in her lifetime - her mother misled her about who her father was, though of course it is quite possible her mother didn't actually know - she had a birth certificate in one name, but was brought up by foster parents, in an orphanage, all over the place. Never more than two years or so with any caregiver at a stretch before being moved again. No wonder her sense of identity was fragile, and her life one long attempt to be whatever she thought others wanted her to be.
Playing a part was what she did in every situation. With an IQ of 168 she was way over the intelligence of everybody around her, which can only have fed her sense of isolation.
Left school at 16, married, and divorced again by twenty, attended UCLA and studied Art and Literature, read widely, and projected the archetypal Ditzy Blonde image.
She modelled her appearance and public persona equally carefully. For instance, after working for several years(from age 9) in the orphanage kitchen, she famously scrubbed a lettuce leaf by leaf with detergent on being told by her roommate to 'wash the lettuce for a salad' This was widely publicised as an example of how impractical and incapable of 'normal' household tasks she was. Which of course is why she did it, to get that image firmly into the press and public's impression of her.

Marketing matters- Open Sky

2010-08-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

In New York apparently there is a thriving business which links every possible marketing opportunity onto e-books, same way as Disney does with movies.
If the book mentions a hotel and spa, sell the spa water; if it is located somewhere exotic, travel is obvious.
So the book becomes incidental to the Product, as far as the profit oriented marketers are concerned.
There is something similar going on with a South African writer who has a new book coming soon; in the world of her book everyone has 'companion animals' like sloths or ant-eaters or monkeys which they carry around everywhere. These seem to be there to provide a marketing opportunity for no doubt expensive 'licensed' stuffed toys of exotic and unusual species not often thought of as pets and so unlikely to be already produced by competing toy makers.
So I am sorta on a parallel track with 'Eland Dances'- same idea with an animal connection, but more realistic and less of the commercial possibilities.
The difference between say 'Lion King' and 'Born Free' perhaps.

Eland Dances first 400 words

2010-08-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Victorine Lieske has posted the first 400 words of Eland Dances on her blog http://victorinewrites.blogspot.com/ as part of her ongoing 'hook Victorine Challenge'. I am glad to report that she says she was 'hooked'

Published a single short story

2010-07-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

To see what happens, more than in expectation of lots of sales, I have put "An Addendum to the Affair of the Dog which Did Not Bark" up on smashwords and Amazon for Kindle, priced @ 99cents, the minimum allowed (except for free)
This is a bit less than 2,000 words, and is a Sherlock Holmes story.
On smashwords -- http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19953

Or Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/Addendum-Affair-Bark-Shortreads-ebook/dp/B003XRE52Q/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3

Now featured on Authors on Show Blog

2010-07-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Got a surprise message today, a personal message on Authonomy, to tell me my novel 'Eland Dances' is now featured on the Authors on Show blog (not the main site). I had been expecting to be featured on their main site in November, but exposure is good, regardless.
They have my author profile and a synopsis up, with a link to my Authonomy page, and another link to this blog. I was expecting the first chapter to be posted actually. Perhaps this is too long for their site.
I hope they will put a link to 'In the Valley stories' on smashwords & amazon kindle; certainly i am going to ask if this is possible.

Using ultrasound to control toxic algal blooms

2010-07-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Using ultrasound to control toxic algal blooms
July 7, 2010 Using ultrasound to control toxic algal blooms

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Adelaide researchers are investigating the use of ultrasound as an environmentally friendly and cheaper alternative to controlling blue-green algae in our fresh water supplies.

In collaboration with water industry organisations including SA Water, the researchers are starting a three-year project to find the best process for using ultrasound in large volumes of water to combat this significant world-wide water quality problem.

Chief Investigator Dr Carl Howard, from the University's School of Mechanical Engineering, says researchers will be testing different amplitudes and frequencies of ultrasound.

"We've already shown in laboratory tests that ultrasound is effective at neutralising blue-green algae," says Dr Howard.

"We know it works but we don't yet know the best frequencies, amplitudes and duration for the most effective, economic and efficient process."

Blue-green algae (or cyanobacteria) can affect health and causes other water quality and environmental problems when it accumulates and forms 'blooms' in fresh water. It is currently controlled by the application of chemical treatments.

Dr Howard says ultrasound - at high amplitudes - is used for treating sewage and in other chemical processes but hasn't been practical for fresh water treatment. Ultrasound at high amplitudes breaks down the cell walls of the blue-green algae, releasing toxins into the water.

"The novel part of our solution is that we will be using ultrasound at low amplitudes where it immobilises the blue-green algae without releasing its toxins into the water and with lower energy input," Dr Howard says.

The researchers propose mounting ultrasound generators inside large underwater columns containing mixers which will draw the water through for treatment as it flows past.

The main industry partner, SA Water, has been working with University of Adelaide researchers over the past 15 years on a range of chemical and water circulation techniques in reservoirs and the River Murray to help tackle this problem.

The project has been granted $400,000 under the latest round of the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Linkage Projects scheme.

"This project is an innovative and exciting development in this area of research which has the potential to provide many benefits to drinking water supplies both locally and nationally," says SA Water Biology Research Leader Associate Professor Mike Burch.

Provided by University of Adelaide (news : web)

Progress

2010-06-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Well,'In the Valley stories' has begun its swift inexorable climb to the top of Amazon's Best Seller list. Sold 1 today for a grand total of 2 - my cut is $1.40. Also, someone has posted that they will buy a copy 'soon' so I count that as 1/2 a sale.
What happened was J.A. Konrath/Jack Kilbourn put a new book up, and offered to buy a copy of their book from every author on Kindle boards who bought a copy of his book.
Well I splurged, spent $4.99 to buy a copy - it's a Horror/ Thriller selling for $2.99 to US customers.
He bought In the Valley stories, along with a whole lot of other books, and achieved his purpose, got into the Amazon top 100 sellers. Momentum pays off it looks like - he must have spent a fair bit, but will recoup that easily in the added sales he gets from the exposure.
A marketing lesson indeed.
Then, too, the person who bought the very first copy, Ann, will have her book up soon, and I shall probably buy a copy - keep the circle going.

Another Ad experiment

2010-06-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

My daughter, Penny, has put out a Facebook ad, this time targeted at UK, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, people who read and like adventure books. This one was based on a pay per click model, instead of simple pay per impression. Cost of $10.00

Results are 16 clicks from 20,000 exposures, so a much better ratio there; I think she just sent them to smashwords site, as she said the actual book address was too long. During the time it ran, 1 book was downloaded, as far as I can tell.
Total downloads from smashwords now 15, all free with use of the coupon(GR96T)which is good until Sunday 13th.
I have posted on several threads on Kindle Boards,got included in the free books thread run by knbr - this may have drawn several of the downloads on the 6th &7th, and of course on Facebook, Kindle, Authonomy, Slushpilereader and Authors on Show. Also signed up for a first page critique at http://yourfirstpage.blogspot.com/ and posted the first chapter of Eland Dances on http://nightreading.ning.com/ for critique/comments.

Slowly, slowly, catches?

2010-06-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

So far- Sunday night, 10 downloads from smashwords and 1 sale on Amazon. Have to believe in the snowball principle, things start slow and build momentum; still priced at $3.99 for Canadians & $1.99 for Americans, $ 2.34 for Irish, and so on.

That may be important, I don't know. There are so many free e-books available, perhaps I should join that list and use the short stories just to attract interest. My one solitary customer e-mailed me to say she wanted to know about anything else I write about Africa, so I have 1 sure sale for Eland Dances when it is published.

I've spent a lot of time online, reading kindle Boards, Twitting, Facebook, other writing blogs, and of course Authonomy. Done almost zero actual writing, which should be - finishing Stone Song, getting on with extending In the Valley to full book length, and going over Eland again.

There are a couple of factual glitches there - kapenta come from Lake Tanganyika, not Lake Malawi(I actually knew that)& rock art north of the Zambezi features elephants instead of eland, with the area between the Limpopo and Zambezi having both. So elephant are the Northern Power animals-close to what I have written at least.

I also really need to write Big Sid into a role in Rhodesia, perhaps integrate him into the Salisbury trip and later in the finale or penultimate chapter. Make that last scene more dramatic, more touch & go, with a couple of twists in who has the upper hand --

Amazon pricing

2010-06-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I put In the Valley stories up on Amazon for sale as a Kindle e-book, I priced it at $1.99 US. However when I searched for it on Amazon.com it came up with a price of $3.99; I contacted them to ask about this large price jump, and this morning received this reply

Hello Philip,

Your Kindle book is listed at a price of $1.99. Please note, all items available in the Kindle store are listed in U.S. dollars (USD), and the availability and pricing of titles from the Kindle Store varies by your home country or region.

If you're browsing in the Kindle store from a location outside of the US, you may see a price higher than what you listed on the DTP web site.

There are a number of reasons why prices for Kindle titles may vary from region to region, including taxes and other operating costs. We understand your concern about prices, and we share that concern -- we will continue our efforts to reduce costs and offer the best possible prices to customers in every region. We hope you will continue to use our platform for sales in the US and internationally. Also, note that the royalties will be based on the list price you provide on your DTP dashboard.

I hope this information is helpful. If you have any further question, please feel free to send an e-mail to dtp-support@amazon.com.

Thank you for using Amazon DTP.

Did I answer your question?

The question is answered, but I can't believe that with the Canadian Dollar almost equal to the US Dollar, a doubling in price can be legitimately explained as they have. Probably the answer is that they see an opportunity to make money on a very flimsy excuse - notice that 'royalties will be based on the list price you provide on your DTP dashboard.'
In other words, they will pay me 35% of $1.99, and keep the remaining $3.29 for themselves. Wow!

Amazon author page

2010-06-01T03:05:00.000-07:00

I have an author page on Amazon.com now, and have added an rss feed from this blog, so in fact this post should show up there soon.
No sales yet, and I don't expect many either, but so far this has been very useful in learning how things work there, and in going through all the hoops involved.
If I decide to put Eland Dances on Amazon then I will have already laid the groundwork, and will know the best way to do things.
I am considering editing Heavy and Light Tales, perhaps by removing the worst stories in it, adding some newer ones and looking at the ones worth keeping with a severe editorial eye. Then perhaps putting it out as a 2nd edition e-book only for Kindle & perhaps smashwords.

Trying direct sales too

2010-05-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

I have placed a button on my Books page which takes you to Paypal, where you have the option of paying me directly through their service for a copy of 'In the Valley'$1.99. same price, but this way I keep all the revenue, instead of 35% from Amazon or 50% from Smashwords.

I will have to do a test to see if this works, but should go
1) someone gives Paypal $1.99(CAD)
2)Paypal notifies me by e-mail
3)I send them a PDF copy by e-mail

I don't expect to sell many, or in fact any, this way, but I want to try the system. If everything works well, this could ramp up; with ISBN nos to use for other books, who knows?

Final ad stats

2010-05-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Facebook ad has finished its 24 hour run; stats are - 70,735 impressions, for a total of 13 clicks; @$1.08per click & total cost of $14.07
As an experiment, to see what happens,it worked; as really helpful to book downloads - nope.
Smashwords stats didn't budge, so I doubt if any clickers got further than the Facebook page.

Now published on Amazon

2010-05-27T21:32:00.000-07:00

Just finished uploading 'In the Valley Stories' to Amazon, for sale on their Kindle reader. Have also removed Amazon as a sales channel from Smashwords, so they will sell on all their other outlets and I will sell directly on Amazon. Same price -$1.99- just a slightly bigger cut this way.
It will take about 48 hrs for approval, and then it will be available there as well. Amazon has about 170 times as many customers as Smashwords apparently.
Have also registered with the Canadian authorities as a Publisher, and will be getting ISBNs to use - about 5 business days, so late next week.

The ad is still running on Face Book; at 12.40 am Friday they record 59,000 impressions, and 11 clicks, for a cost of $11.+

Update on Facebook ad 9pm

2010-05-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

Now over 40,000 impressions (or whatever the proper word is) and just 7 clicks, at a cost of $8 something. Quite a low percentage, but not zero, so structured and targeted better this may be a worthwhile thing to do again.
Most importantly one click has to take people directly to the book, not as with this, to my Facebook page where they have to click again to go to smashwords etc.
But some exposure, and more importantly an idea of how this all works.
Over $1 per click would be worth it perhaps, if they actually downloaded the book.

Facebook Ad update 1:15 pm Thursday

2010-05-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I had booked the ad to run from 6am Thursday to 6am Friday.
Didn't realise it had to be approved by an office run on Pacific time, so it only started to run around noon orso (not sure of exact time)
I checked a couple of minutes ago, and had one click recorded from almost 9,000 'showings', at a cost to then of $2.25.
Will check to see if they went on to the smashwords site.
Maybe a pay-per-click option would be better? At 47cents or so per click I want to have returns- come to that, that is still better than present option.

Facebook advert

2010-05-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

I'm stepping up the marketing/visibility drive with 2 Facebook initiatives; firstly I've put an ad on their classified ads section (free) giving the details of 'In the Valley stories' and the smashwords URL with the coupon code (GR96T)which can be used to get it free.
Secondly, I'm trying a 24 hour paid advert. from 6am Toronto time Thursday to 6am Toronto time Friday, targeted at USA residents who speak English and read books. They estimate reaching about 22,000 people per day with this, at a cost of 47cents per 1,000 people; for a total of around $10+ (0.47 x 22 = $10.34).
They have analysis software, counts % clicks- number of people who see it vs number who click and go to my page; then further stats, from smashwords number who go and download; see if there is a reasonable return for the $10 investment.
Would be better if I could direct traffic straight to either smashwords or my own sales page but they give very limited word allowance in the ad.
I will be monitoring this tomorrow for sure

Strong Scene Honourable mention

2010-05-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

My 'action' opening for 'Eland Dances' was entered in the May Strong Scenes competition. Didn't make it to finalist, but is one of the Honourable Mentions. Good, but not quite the best. Since that is a matter of individual preference/taste I'm happy.

Kindle Boards

2010-05-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

Joined Kindle boards this evening - another way to spend time not writing. Right now I am concentrating on building a web-presence with the idea of maybe actually generating interest in my writing.
So far quite a bit of effort for miniscule tangible returns.
Interesting though, virtually meeting people from all over, mosly fellow wannabe writers of course. Some interesting blogs out there, of course some of those are now on my Links page.

Twitter

2010-05-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

Signed up for Twitter yesterday, as people say it is worthwhile.
Maybe.
My handle there is philwrite
Spent some time chatting etc, finding how to Twit and so on. Then got ambitous and put a link to In the Valley along with a free ebook coupon code on several threads.
Went to Smashwords today to check the results.
Zero 'sales'(which includes free downloads) and as far as I can see, also zero samples downloaded.
However the stats show 150+ page looks, which is way up from about 4 or 5 daily.
So probably that means whoever was looking is the wrong demographic. Just not the market to aim for. What is though?
Will have to try and direct efforts at the likeliest readers - lit fic readers most likely.

Eland Dances - action opening

2010-05-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Jungle

The front edge of the wing looked wrong. I squinted against the reflected tropical sunlight and focused on the area where I’d seen something move. I hoped it wasn’t real. Maybe a hallucination, a flashback, like they said happened sometimes when you’d dropped acid. I looked away, squeezed my eyes tight shut, and then looked again.

No such luck. One of the aluminium plates vibrated up and down. Another rivet popped out, and a bigger section of the wing worked itself loose. If I hadn’t seen that rivet fly, it wouldn’t have been worth a second glance. The wings always flapped and bent around, and nothing ever happened, on these journeys from home in Zambia to school in England and back.

I grabbed one of the cabin crew by her arm as she passed. She turned quite sharply, but my face must have showed something, as she said, “There is a bag in the pocket here, if you want to be sick.”

“Oh, thanks no, I’m fine, but could you take a look out the window? I don’t think the wing is supposed to have loose pieces. I mean there're some rivets missing.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing. There is just some turbulence, that’s why the seat belt light is still on. The wings are made so they can bend, so the plane is more stable. I am sure they checked everything while we were refuelling in Brazzaville.”

“Well, I know, but this isn’t normal.”

As we watched, several more rivets gave up, and the loose plate started to move even more. She put her finger on her lips in a shushing motion, and walked away towards the front of the plane. She reappeared with a youngish man with gold braid on his shoulders. After he’d examined the view of the wing for a bit, he spoke quietly to her, and went back to the cockpit.

“Would you mind to change seats? There is nothing to worry about, of course, but we want to keep an eye on things, and this window is best for that,” she said. “Would you like a snack perhaps? We have chocolate ice cream and fresh strawberries in First Class.”

So of course I went and sat further towards the front of the plane, next to a tall lean man with a military haircut and a bristly brown moustache.

He turned in his seat and reached out his hand, “Lucien Versteeg. I am with the United Nations force in the Congo. Pleased to meet you.”

“Peter Fitt. Just going home to Zambia, from school. Well actually, I’m done with school now, so I’m going to work for the Agriculture Department for a while, and then I’m going on to University.” We shook hands, and then my promised ice cream arrived, together with a glass of whisky on ice for Lucien.

We watched as another of the cockpit crew strolled through the passenger cabin. He happened to stop and look casually out at the view by my old seat.

I explained what I'd seen out the window, and Lucien shrugged and waved a dismissive hand.

"Nothing to worry about then. So Peter, you live with your parents in Zambia? Your father is with the big mining company, or a farmer perhaps?"

"Not a farmer. He, well my stepfather actually, he works in the Ministry of Agriculture. My mother is dead now, so there's just him and my younger sister and brother. We have the same mother, had I mean, and Henry and mum married after dad died, when I was quite young."

I thought, ‘Babbling. Must be actually quite nervous. He couldn’t be interested in all that family history crap.’

"So that is why you have a job in the ministry. I see. Do you have other relatives in Zambia?"

‘This guy’s really making an effort to keep me talking. Maybe he wants to practice his English’ I thought.

"Well, Henry, my stepfather, has a sister in Salisbury, in Rhodesia, two hundred miles away. It seems further because that's another country, and they have those political problems. My real dad's family are all down in Capetown, in South Africa. That's a long way from Lusaka. I haven't seen them in a long time, but I expect we'll meet when I go down there after Christmas." I dug into the ice cream.

"Salisbury? That's where I am going. I've been offered a contract. Training their security people. Of course there are some problems lately with those insurgents. You know, typical communist trained troublemakers." He swirled the liquor in his glass and watched as the ice cubes twirled and settled.

"Red revolution is what the Russians and the Chinese want, you know. The colour of blood. The more heated a war becomes, with more turmoil and hardship, the easier it is for their people to get into top positions, into power."

He put his glass down on the tray and looked directly at me. "They don't care about the people, or if the place is called Zimbabwe or Rhodesia. Just about power, to push out the British and extend their own influence. Forget about freedom and everyone having equal rights and all that liberal stuff. Democracy does not work in Africa. Power comes from the gun. Believe me, I have seen things in the Congo. You know what they like. One man one vote, maybe. But only once."

I noticed Lucien was keeping an eye on the activity up and down to my old seat, as the crew all nonchalantly strolled through in turn, while he'd kept me busy talking. Worth worrying about, then.

I scraped up the last ice cream and licked the spoon. "I don't know about all that. Of course there are a few power freaks, but Zambia is doing just fine with the elected Parliament. I mean, there aren't many jobs or industries except the mines, but we are pushing ahead with modern farming methods, what they call the Green Revolution. That way no-one will go hungry. After all this is nineteen sixty seven you know, and it's time for people to realise peace and love are what everyone wants."

Lucien smiled with his lips pressed tight, and then concentrated on his glass.
The 'buckle seat belts' signs lit up, and the cabin crew bustled around collecting everything loose and checking everyone.

The blonde stewardess took my empty bowl and Lucien's glass, and folded my tray up. Lucien took care of his own tray, and then buckled his seat belt. I followed his example.

The plane banked into a steep turn, and the overhead speaker announced, “We are going to land again, as there are still some maintenance tasks which were not performed on our stopover in Republique du Congo. Nothing important, but our Air France safety people are particular about these things, and so we are going to land again at the nearest airport.”

Of course the same announcement was made in French, which produced quite a reaction from one passenger.

Sound tech summary for Stone Song.

2010-05-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

The premise of 'Stone Song' is that ultra and infra-sound can be used to influence people's moods and actions; this is fairly well established with the use of sound devices to keep teens from loitering in malls. Elephants use low frequency sound to communicate and may also influence predators' moods. This is the basis of 'In the Valley'
Combine those two with a crew of nasties, oppose them with a Wicca girl and a 'normal' guy. Then throw in the recent announcement that ultra sound can sterilise men; in the hands of Baddies that could lead to involuntary sterilisation of any population group - Moslems, Catholics, immigrants, anyone identifiable as a group they don't like. Coupled with the mood and action influencers,there's plenty to work on. I already have that, very simple to slip the sterilisation possibility in - wow Hitler would've loved that.

Writing more 'In the Valley'

2010-05-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

I intend to continue the story of Ndinga the poacher, just carrying on from where the short story left him. If I can produce 1 to 2,000 words a week with a reasonable development of plot and character etc, it might be possible to serialise it for anyone interested via kwikreads, where I've posted 'the story so far'.
Would be nice if that brand new site would start getting some traffic. If not, I will have lost very little by posting it there - I wrote the story more than two years ago, and I'm not going to shop it around anymore. Best New Writing did it for me, keeping it a full year and stringing me along with 'you have reached the next round' right up to 'finalist'and then just silence. Not even 'thanks for letting us have your story exclusively for a year but we aren't going to publish it.'

published on Smashwords

2010-05-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

I have put a 20,000 word short story collection on Smashwords; title 'In the Valley'; They convert works into all current e-reader formats, including for Kindle (Amazon) and for phones.
Priced at $1.99 which is the minimum Amazon will sell anything for.
All those stories have just been sitting in my computer, doing very little, not being read, so there's little to lose.

New Website for selling short stories

2010-05-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

I have put some short stories up on kwikreads, a brand new, still in construction site. The intention there is to supply reads to people for their phones, commuters stc. Using the fraxion payment system people can buy a few thousand words at a time.
This model works in Japan, where their best selling novels are sold as series, read on phones.
Hope it works.

Phones as reading devices

2010-05-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the next big market for fiction are all those people on their daily commutes with cell/mobile phones in their pockets and time on their hands.
In Japan currently there are several best-selling authors who write serials for people to read on their phones. The rest of us will likely follow those tech-leaders.
I have recently been in contact with people who are getting the technology and web-sites together to enable written words - stories, serial episodes etc.- to be bought for pennies and read a few thousand words at a time on phones or other mobile devices.
I am probably going to try out some short stories with them, see how it goes.
hopefully it will all come together in the next short while.

Stone Songs

2010-05-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

I have posted the first few chapters of my work-in-progress on Slushpilereader. Let's see what sort of reaction it gets. Needs editing, and is incomplete.

New Weapons Technology

2010-05-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

This looks like a formidable advance in hand weapons. An advantage for the US until someone sells it to their opponents.

Army to test XM25 'smart' grenade launcher rifle (w/ Video)
May 9, 2010 by Lisa Zyga XM25

(PhysOrg.com) -- The US Army has recently announced plans to test the high-tech XM25 airburst grenade launcher this summer in Afghanistan, unleashing a weapon that veterans predict could be a game-changing advantage in the war. The XM25 can fire 25mm rounds that explode at any distance set by a soldier, effective at a range of up to 700 m. Because the 14-pound, $25,000 gun can fire rounds in just seconds, it could replace the need to call in fire missions, artillery or airstrikes in some situations, which can take anywhere from several minutes to an hour to arrive.

Army officials say that the XM25 could be ideal in current situations in Afghanistan, where the enemy tends to hide behind barriers such as walls and trees or in underground trenches, often at distances of 300 m or more. Right now, such targets are difficult to hit even for skilled marksmen, since a bullet is only lethal if it hits the head or vital organs.

Since the blast radius of the XM25 is equivalent to a hand grenade, it could allow US soldiers to target and kill these hidden snipers. For example, if an enemy is hiding inside a distant building, a soldier can point the gun at the building’s façade, which measures the distance using lasers and sensors. The soldier can then add (or subtract) a smaller distance so that the round explodes at an estimated location close to the enemy. When the soldier fires, the microchip-embedded round tracks the distance it has traveled by the number of times it rotates. Upon exploding, the 25mm round spreads shrapnel in all directions, likely killing anyone nearby. Compared to a typical M4 carbine, the gun doesn’t require extreme precision to kill even at these long ranges, potentially making it one of the deadliest hand weapons in the Army's arsenal.

Vampires

2010-05-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Vampires carry an aura of elegance combined with dominance and a predatory nature; just those things which attract many women to 'Bad Boys'. Their attraction in stories relies on the possibility of their positive emotions being awoken, while the aura of mystery and danger adds spice to the mundane lives of afficionados/afficionadas.
Vampire tales seem to be a perennial, dying away and surging back into popularity again as each new generation discovers the attraction and reads, to thrill at a world of monsters lurking just maybe at the edge of the circle of firelight, beyond the lamp's glow, outside the window, in the hollow places beyond reach of the sun.

Other writers

2010-05-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

Some other writers have quite active websites and are very good at networking. I am lucky enough to have grabbed on to Jo Ellis' coat-tails in this respect; she has very kindly added this blog to her links list. There are a number of good writers links there, as well as Jo Ellis own site, with details of her books and so on.

Slushpilereader

2010-05-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Eland Dances is now on a website I just found out about; people post their writing to be read and rated as 'Publish' or 'Don't publish' and read and rate that of other people. The top rated works will get published, they say. But even if that doesn't happen, this is obviously more exposure to possible agents and editors.
The site is password protected, that is, you have to register before reading and voting.

Slushpilereader - this is the url for Eland Dances there;-

http://www.slushpilereader.com/index.php?option=com_manuscripts&view=book&id=262&Itemid=5&hashb=NDc1

book trailer

2010-04-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded a one minute video (actually stills in a slide-show with music/sounds)as a Book Trailer for 'Eland Dances'

try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQduFuI5qg; copy and paste

Book ideas percolating

2010-04-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

So now, recent news concerns several crucial brain manipulating technologies :-
1)Sound frequencies, for gross level mood influencing, or simply trophic-like responses.
2)Magnetic influence on specific parts of a brain can influence 'moral' judgement
3)Electrode arrays can now be implanted directly on the brain surface, and so can monitor and potentially influence activity. Currently this would be at the level of preventing epileptic seizures and perhaps overcoming nerve damage to receive and transmit messages to muscles. Could be much more though.

Very interesting, from a 'what if?' perspective.

Brain control advance- getting scary?

2010-04-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

A brain-recording device that melts into place
April 18, 2010

Neural electrode array wrapped onto a model of the brain. The wrapping process occurs spontaneously, driven by dissolution of a thin, supporting base of silk. Credit: Please credit C. Conway and J. Rogers, Beckman Institute
Scientists have developed a brain implant that essentially melts into place, snugly fitting to the brain's surface. The technology could pave the way for better devices to monitor and control seizures, and to transmit signals from the brain past damaged parts of the spinal "These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain. They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders," said Walter Koroshetz, M.D., deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
The study, published in Nature Materials, shows that the ultrathin flexible implants, made partly from silk, can record brain activity more faithfully than thicker implants embedded with similar electronics.
The simplest devices for recording from the brain are needle-like electrodes that can penetrate deep into brain tissue. More state-of-the-art devices, called micro-electrode arrays, consist of dozens of semi-flexible wire electrodes, usually fixed to rigid silicon grids that do not conform to the brain's shape.
In people with epilepsy, the arrays could be used to detect when seizures first begin, and deliver pulses to shut the seizures down. In people with spinal cord injuries, the technology has promise for reading complex signals in the brain that direct movement, and routing those signals to healthy muscles or prosthetic devices.
"The focus of our study was to make ultrathin arrays that conform to the complex shape of the brain, and limit the amount of tissue damage and inflammation," said Brian Litt, M.D., an author on the study and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. The silk-based implants developed by Dr. Litt and his colleagues can hug the brain like shrink wrap, collapsing into its grooves and stretching over its rounded surfaces.
The implants contain metal electrodes that are 500 microns thick, or about five times the thickness of a human hair. The absence of sharp electrodes and rigid surfaces should improve safety, with less damage to brain tissue. Also, the implants' ability to mold to the brain's surface could provide better stability; the brain sometimes shifts in the skull and the implant could move with it. Finally, by spreading across the brain, the implants have the potential to capture the activity of large networks of brain cells, Dr. Litt said.
Besides its flexibility, silk was chosen as the base material because it is durable enough to undergo patterning of thin metal traces for electrodes and other electronics. It can also be engineered to avoid inflammatory reactions, and to dissolve at controlled time points, from almost immediately after implantation to years later. The electrode arrays can be printed onto layers of polyimide (a type of plastic) and silk, which can then be positioned on the brain.
To make and test the silk-based implants, Dr. Litt collaborated with scientists at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and at Tufts University outside Boston. John Rogers, Ph.D., a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, invented the flexible electronics. David Kaplan, Ph.D., and Fiorenzo Omenetto, Ph.D., professors of biomedical engineering at Tufts, engineered the tissue-compatible silk. Dr. Litt used the electronics and silk technology to design the implants, which were fabricated at the University of Illinois.
Recently, the team described a flexible silicon device for recording from the heart and detecting an abnormal heartbeat.
In the current study, the researchers approached the design of a brain implant by first optimizing the mechanics of silk films and their ability to hug the brain. They tested electrode arrays of varying thickness on complex objects, brain models and ultimately in the brains of living, anesthetized animals.
The arrays consisted of 30 electrodes in a 5x6 pattern on an ultrathin layer of polyimide - with or without a silk base. These experiments led to the development of an array with a mesh base of polyimide and silk that dissolves once it makes contact with the brain - so that the array ends up tightly hugging the brain.
Next, they tested the ability of these implants to record the animals' brain activity. By recording signals from the brain's visual center in response to visual stimulation, they found that the ultrathin polyimide-silk arrays captured more robust signals compared to thicker implants.
In the future, the researchers hope to design implants that are more densely packed with electrodes to achieve higher resolution recordings.
"It may also be possible to compress the silk-based implants and deliver them to the brain, through a catheter, in forms that are instrumented with a range of high performance, active electronic components," Dr. Rogers said.

book trailer

2010-04-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

I've made a trailer for Eland Dances, with royalty free images I found online and some sounds and music that were in the Mac i-movie program. Problem is getting it online now, as my internet connection is a bit slow.
If possible I'd like to get it on this blog, but probably will load it to U-Tube and put a link on here.

Roseandthornjournal Spring edition

2010-04-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

Rose and Thorn Journal will publish their Spring 2010 edition on the 15th April. My story 'Have you Seen the Elephant' will be in it.
This is an adapted version of a chapter in 'Eland Dances'-- in the book this chapter is 'Bad Moon Rising'

Magnetic morality

2010-03-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

Now here's some meat for the next book, after I finish my 2009 Nano-novel, that is. That deals with the possible ramifications of using high and low frequency sound to influence the moods and actions of others. I have 50,00 words, but it needs a lot of work, and I've been busy with Authonomy.com,where 'Eland Dances' has been posted for 6 weeks now. Got to #380 out of about 5,000 on their site, so far.

Anyway, this news about the Moral Compass being vulnerable to magnetism has me going hmmm.

Turning off someone's moral compass is as easy as holding a magnet up to their head, new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests.

Rather than judging people based on their actions, most people tend to judge based on the intent of those actions, too.

If a man trips his girlfriend on the sidewalk, for example, we determine if he is morally wrong based on whether it was by accident or on purpose.

But when a small area of the brain just above the right ear, called the right temporo-parietal junction, is disabled, we lose that ability entirely.

Instead, we judge the morality of an action based solely on its outcome. In this case, whether the girlfriend was hurt. If she came out of the trip unharmed, then the boyfriend was, morally speaking, in the clear regardless of whether he meant to injure her.

In the research project, led by Liane Young at MIT, people were asked to evaluate different scenarios like the one above and grade the morality of each person in question. Then a magnet was applied to the outside of their head just above the temporo-parietal junction, disabling the subject's ability to interpret intent.

The results astounded the researchers.

"Subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for someone to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely," said Anne Trafton, a spokeswoman at MIT.

"In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm."

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour,” she continued. “To be able to apply [a magnetic field] to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.” Next, researchers want to examine perceptions of luck in moral judgment. A drunk driver, for example, may or may not kill someone as a result of their actions and whether they do is largely considered to be up to luck.

But the unlucky driver tends to be judged "more morally blameworthy,"

researchers suggest, even though both drivers did the same thing.

Young now hopes to discover if disabling the same part of the brain that determines intent has any effect on peoples' perceptions of luck.

Environment

Short story to be published

2010-03-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

Just got an e-mail from Rose and Thorn Journal that they will be publishing my 2000 word story 'Have you Seen the Elephant?'in their spring 2010 issue. www.roseandthornejournal.com
This will be an unpaid publication, but every little bit helps.

One year later, here we are again

2010-03-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

Time to get doing again. I have recently uploaded the latest version of 'Eland Dances' on Authonomy.com. There are quite a few other aspiring writers, together with some published authors, who frequent the site.
The carrot is the long-shot possibility of some browsing agent or editor noticing your work and perhaps signing a contract. There is the even more unlikely possibility of Harper Collins, who run the site, liking something they see. The top five books in any given month get a review by Harper Collins editors.
Oh yes, everyone reads and 'backs' work they like. Each backing earns points, and these accumulate. The top five have each been backed by at least 1,200 others. After 2 weeks, mine has been backed by 97.
I don't expect to reach the top rating, but have had feedback from some, either praise or minor critique. Essentially if someone just plain doesn't like your stuff, you don't hear of it, because they simply pass over to something else.
I have been sending out short stories, with some success, and have sent queries to a couple of agents, and the manuscript to one publisher, with no success.
during November i did the NanoWrimo thing again, and now have something over 50,000 words, the bones of another book. Before I get into completing that, I would like to get 'Eland' going again, perhaps published. If there's nothing doing from conventional routes, I shall self-publish, and let Amazon sell it for Kindle.

Eland Dance

2009-01-04T21:43:00.001-08:00

During the last couple of weeks I have sorted out chapter titles, mostly derived from Sixties song titles. Otherwise I have rewritten a few short sections and added a little here and there to link chapters better, and remove references to earlier events which have now been taken out of this version. All in there are just under 67,000 words now. This will probably be close to the final length, though I expect changes will be called for when it finally gets to a publisher.
Next time should be easier. Should have a better idea of what to aim for, and I think my techniques have improved, so less rewriting at least.
I need Beta Readers, though. People who read fiction and can give some sort of objective opinion on the book. With this in mind, I have sent my daughter a PDF and a Word version,to send on to any of her contacts who might fit that bill. Doing it at arms length,through her, might help in getting honesty. Anyone I know would probably have difficulty giving a clear unbiased opinion. Those in my writers group have seen it piecemeal over the past several years, and having had it under the microscope,see it differently to fresh readers.

Eland Dance will be the title

2008-12-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a synopsis of the novel
Peter Fitt is forced to face the realities of the Sixties in Central Africa. In the Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe greed and corruption fuel the growing turmoil. “Make Love not War” and “Peace and Love” are mantras often spoken, but rarely practised. Major forces are self-interest and each individual’s ideology. Red Communists, the Green agrarian Revolution, and the pervasive White Man’s way all have their partisans.
Old African beliefs about healing medicine and spirit powers come to the fore. A medicinal concoction should have three major parts, red, green, and white, to be fully effective, he learns.
Pete identifies with the spiritual herbivores of the world, the eland in San tradition, or unicorn in European mythology, against the predators, the exploiters, the lions. He is a defender, not an aggressor.
He helps with a development project in Zambia. In this he uses a Soviet aeroplane to transport fish to a lake straddling the southern border. The Russians take this opportunity to supply arms to the Rhodesian regime. While they claim to be peace lovers, in fact the Communists try to escalate the civil war, in order to assist their cadres into positions of power in the future Zimbabwe. Shit rises to the top when stirred. Thus they supply arms to both sides.
Pete shoots his girlfriend’s brother when he tries to prevent a gunfight between now well armed Rhodesian and Zimbabwean forces. Pete realises his culpability in this and other events. He can’t stop the war, or corruption and selfish power seeking, he can only look around for opportunities to assist others against these, and to influence the outcome of the war.
He helps to expose a Revolutionary, Bad Boy, who illicitly sells arms and ivory. This man is forced to go into Rhodesia on active service, which he has avoided. He is captured and jailed. Pete meets Marjorie’s mother and brother, and must try to explain and apologise
Later, Pete realises that those sitting out the war in captivity may become a large part of any new regime, while idealists who continue to fight on the front lines suffer high mortality. He helps with an amnesty/surrender deal between the Rhodesians and the Freedom Fighters. Pete is able to persuade some leaders that this is a good idea
Pete meets his spiritual other half, a one horned eland he had rescued from a fire years before, and is reunited with Marjorie. Despite the intervention of Bad Boy, the amnesty is a success.

Facebook

2008-12-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

I have joined Facebook and also begun a Fan Page there. This is to build a Web Presence, which apparently is good for prospective book or ebook sales - readers and publishers can find your stuff more easily.

Short Story

2008-12-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

Things are rolling. This morning I got an e-mail from "Joyful" magazine telling me they like Sunbird, and it will appear in their March 09 issue. They will pay, I think very little, since they asked for my Paypal details.
I have been sending stuff out quite busily the past couple of weeks, in the hope that a publishing history with any type of online or print magazine will help convince publishers to take my novel. Some accept reprints, which means I can submit stories from Heavy and Light Tales.
The other thing I have been busy with is investigating E-book readers and download sales for them. Kindle is only available from Amazon USA, and to sell downloads for it you need a US address, bank account and IRS tax number. Not just yet.

Poet

2008-12-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

Yup, it is official. I am now a Published Poet. Sent in something I wrote way back in 06, to Willows Wept Review, and they like it.
I have sent stories out to several magazines, but the best response so far has been an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train, for my entry to their Fiction Open competition. In the Valley is 9,000+ words, which is an awkward length, a long short story but not yet a novella.
Perhaps that will be the start of my second novel. Oh yes, the first is pretty much complete, but it would be better to send it out to publishers with some kind of publishing history, hence the push to get stories out there.
The title is Eland Dances-- you will have to read it to see why.

getting published

2007-08-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Wow I never thought getting published was so difficult. There are lots of wanna-be writers, and only a limited number of magazines for short stories, and as for books, well they want a history of publication. So the whole thing is like the job market for new immigrants, where they ask for Canadian Experience, and discount totally anything from elsewhere.
Right now I am plugging away at one story, my Hunting Elephant theme, trying to get it to a point where it is irresistable to editors(as if). I have about 8 versions, of various lengths. Part of the difficulty is presenting the scientific rationale behind the infra-sound concept in a readable and engaging way. At least now a mainstream scientist has done a Scientific Study that proves elephants communicate in this way. Inevitably this is presented as a brand new Discovery, all prior knowledge of this not acknowledged at all. Ah well

book

2007-04-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

For the past while i have been working on a novel, which is now around the 70,000 word mark, and some days i think it is complete, and of course some days, well, not yet. Having a small group of other aspirant authors read and critique my work has helped a lot, as has seeing their works develop. Tomorrow we meet again, as we have once every month for a while now. Right now I am looking for a (new) title for the book, and then a publisher, or perhaps an agent.
Doubt it will a big seller, it doesnt fit any particular Genre. But once it it out there in the world, perhaps I can start something else.
Before I begin the next, I shall be sure to narrow down my target field, my audience, into some definable category.

book

2006-08-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

Heavy and Light Tales is now available from Amazon in Canada, USA and UK, and can be ordered from any bookstore worldwide, the ISBN number is 978-1-84728-890-5 (thats what is on the cover of the copy I have anyway). Prices vary, even allowing for currency differences. For some strange reason Amazon UK lists it as a used book at about twice the cost of a new book. Perhaps they get a copy printed, pay someone to look at it, then sell it as used?
Anyway, it would be nice if someone could read it and post a few comments, either here or on Amazon, or directly to me ; philvan@tcc.on.ca.
Doesnt have to be a full Review, just some feedback.

book now published

2006-07-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

I have self-published a book of short stories through Lulu.com. This is largely out of curiosity, to see just what is involved in self-publishing, and also learn about marketing I suppose. So with that in mind, here is a link for you to have a look at the merchandise --

Some weeks from now it should be available through booksellers in USA and UK, everything takes time; for now it is only available from Lulu as either a Print-On-Demand hardcopy(paperback) or as an E-book, downloadable, which you could print out if you like of course.

back again

2006-06-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

OK I think it will be alright if I post only exerpts from short stories, or partial chapters from any longer works. This would serve any publisher by perhaps drawing interest without actually giving the stuff away free, which is what they dont like. So then, any avid readers who might stumble across this site, here is a bit from a story I have submitted to Glimmer Train;

Hunting Elephant

Rich worked for the Zambian Game Department, doing an elephant count. He liked to joke, “You get to sleep much more heavily that way than by counting sheep.”
He didn't get too many laughs, unless the joke was helped by a toke, though most people couldn’t help but grin along with him, since his enthusiasm was infectious. That was a really good thing, at the Department’s Main Camp in the Luangwa Valley.
There were a lot of poachers around, heavily armed and always prepared to shoot, while the rangers just had a few old rifles. Things were so bad that the poachers sometimes fought among themselves for valuable ivory. In fact today all the regular Department men were busy, as they cleaned up after a particularly nasty incident. They had heard gunfire in the night, and when they investigated this morning, had found the aftermath of a vicious gun battle. There were six corpses around a hidden campsite, all shot at close range, apparently in some kind of quarrel. There seemed to be no survivors.
“Hey man, how was your day?” Rich said to John Adams, the visiting biologist, “I got the full count on three big herds today, from yesterday’s flight. We made sure we covered every bit of that map grid, so every elephant in that area is on those films.”
“Well, I think I’ve really got something today,” said John, “I’m quite excited about this. When I played back those tapes we recorded here in the camp, at high speed, there were all kinds of noises that you can’t hear otherwise. Those elephants make low frequency sounds back and forth all the time. Even more interesting, we recorded right after you had gone up in the plane, so we know there were only those two young bulls in this neighbourhood. However, there are sounds from at least five different animals on the tape.”
“Slow down, have a beer,” said Rich, “So you tell me elephants can hear each other across a distance of miles, and we can be close by and not hear anything?”
John took a cold Castle, opened it with the opener that hung on a string beside the fridge, and took a nice long swallow, “Ah, that’s good,” he said, “We can say they hear one another, but that’s not proven yet, with scientific accuracy. They certainly seem to communicate, because it sounds like only one makes sounds at any one time, while the others are quiet, and then another will start, so they seem to respond to one another at least.”
Rich grabbed another beer from the fridge and opened it, but had to gulp it quickly as he stood when foam started to spill out, “Damn, I hate it when that happens!” he said.
“Slow down a bit yourself then, you grabbed that bottle like you were dying of thirst, and then you swung around and opened it so fast it looked like you were in a beer opening race, or something,” said John, “I actually fast-forwarded the tape, not really to listen, you know, when I noticed what had to be low frequency sounds. Then I slowed it a bit, to about twice normal speed, and there it was, a whole new set of noises we didn't even know was there.”
“So hang on a bit,” said Rich, “Didn’t I read somewhere that low frequency sound can affect people and animals,

Eland

2005-12-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

Eland

Flames and black smoke covered the upper slopes of the mountain over Fishhoek, the fire engine had been there since the evening before, and this morning most of the men had gone up the track carrying sacks and axes and shovels. Where else would three boys go, on a Saturday morning, breakfast bolted down and pocket money already spent? Not that there was any prospect of actually participating, but all the action made the area interesting, especially from the house on the far side of the valley, where the flames were visible, way taller than the ant sized men moving around in front of them.
As they got closer the flames were lost from view behind the houses and trees on the lower slopes, and firstly ash and black burnt grass and leaves, then hot and sometimes glowing bits, began to drift down on everything. They were beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea, with the roar and noise of the flames louder as they got closer, when the wind dropped away suddenly and the noise of the fire seemed to change. There was an outburst of shouting from the men up there, thin with distance, and then the wind switched around just like that and began to blow from behind them. The men were cheering and yelling now, something had happened and they weren't there yet! Wanting to be a part of this adventure, The Great Fire, they hurried up the track past the last houses
The fire engine was parked where a big rock blocked it from going any further uphill, and on any other day would have rated a good close inspection, unattended as it was, but not now. They hurried past on the footpath through scrub and tall grass, the air humming with insects disturbed by the fire and birds darting around with full beaks.
A great brown mottled mantis came whizzing along and landed on Peter’s right shoulder, turning its head on the thin neck and waving it’s barbed front legs in an agitated way. He called to his brothers, “Hey look here, he’s trying to talk to me.”

-----------------

To read more, youll have to wait til someone decides the story is worth publishing, or else read the book I shall be self-publishing through Lulu fairly soon. I have about 25,000 words in short story form, around 100 oages in a paper back, so I hope to put together a book of short stories during this summer.

He aint heavy, hes my brother

2005-11-16T16:10:00.000-08:00

Heavy guys doing the Ton

John had a Mark V Jaguar, 1952 vintage, equipped with a 12 cylinder Rolls Royce engine that drank like a tinker and flew like an arrow, too fast and heavy for the windy narrow roads but able to do The Ton with ease on any straight open road you could find. Hence the visits to the Busy Bee, which was right at the end of the M1 Motorway, frequented by truckers and rockers, bikers and bad boys. Somehow they would end up there most weekend nights, to sit and drink sweet tea and eat egg and chips or fried egg sandwiches, or even sausage egg and chips if someone felt like spending a bit. It was mostly guys, Pete felt awkward bringing girls along when the others were solo, though Brenda went along a few times. She was cool, confident and friendly, at ease with the boys and enjoyed the speed as much as they. She was a Meter Maid, bobbed blond hair and nice legs in her black uniform, gave parking tickets and politeness up and down High Street all week and hung out with the guys in pubs and cars on weekends. That all ended when she decided to try for a career, and joined up as a police trainee in London, moved away to somewhere in Hounslow and pretty soon found herself

going South

2005-11-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

Another early start, heading south from Lusaka in the cool dim morning, this time staying on the main road all the way to Salisbury. They were going to Aunt --'s for the weekend, Henry's sister. They lived in the closed housing compound of a big fertiliser company, an oasis of lawns and flowerbeds in the middle of an African shanty town (quite invisible from inside the high fence)
Crossing the border was pretty easy and casual, no line-up and just a few lines on a form to fill in. On the road again into the boabab and thorn tree bush country of the Zambezi valley,with a huge soft moth with startling great eyes on its wings that had been lying just outside the door on the Rhodesian side..
Soon after the start of the climb out of the valley, where the road began to wind uphill, there was an army roadblock, guys in camo with guns ready. They were alert and aggressive, -------

nothing

2005-11-10T13:11:00.001-08:00

Have deleted a lot of stuff, as I have been told that by posting here, it is actually published, and so publishers wont pay for that right.

early story

2005-11-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

Blaze of Glory

They went up the mountain in the morning, when bright sun sparkled on the dewy spider webs, mist rose from the grass and rested in the hollows. They were three together, barefoot boys, they slipped through the seaside bungalows and white fenced gardens to the wild slopes beyond. There was a rough dirt track halfway, and then a footpath through the rocks and heath, the scent of wild geraniums strong as they brushed by. They had sticks in case of snakes and a bottle of tap water and three oranges, some marbles and a catapult, slingshot to you, made with carefully cut rubber from an old car inner tube. They took turns with the provisions, which they were all going to eat later, but only the two older ones carried the catapult in turn, because Rich couldn’t shoot properly with it, and what good would it do if he had it when they met a leopard, say,in the middle of the path? Of course nobody had actually seen a leopard around here for a couple of hundred years, but you never knew
When they got to the branch in the path after the zig zag climb through the rock bluffs, they turned left along the more used trail.

cleansing

2005-09-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

Cleansing

Tuli was suddenly beside Pete as he stood and stared up the hill after the departing Movers and Shakers of the District, "Come on,” she said, “let’s go sit in the shade, away from all this dust and smell around here.“ She carried a radio tuned to Radio Zambia, she wore a mahia, the traditional patterned cloth wrap of country women, instead of the khaki pants or jeans which he had seen her wear previously.
Pete realised now that she had been one of the waitresses he had seen busy in the open sided bar near the jetty. “I help out in many of my father’s businesses.” she said, “But I think that place will be pretty quiet for a while now, those Zimbabwe guys have all left for their big camp inland, so they don’t need me there this afternoon. The regular barman will be back this evening, and he can look after our local customers.”
They strolled over to where the boat was tied up, and settled on a convenient log beside a big rock. A slight breeze off the lake stirred the trees enough to shift the leaf shadows into dancing patterns on the red earth, and a dove cooed gently and insistently somewhere close by. The radio played a mix of Beatles and Stones, the latest from London, with Mbaqanga music, bright jolting rhythms and metallic guitars with lyrics in Bemba or Chinyanja from up by the Congo.
She had brought several bottles of Castle Lager, and so they sat companionably and sipped, taking things slowly. “You know.” she said,“I love it here, this is my place, here in the bush by the old river valley, but really there isn’t a future here for me. When I was a child I thought we would live by the river forever, but then they came to build the dam, and I was sent to boarding school, and every time I came back, things were changed.

Plotting the Revolution

2005-08-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Mrs. C. waited until the boys had eaten their fish fingers and chips before making her offer, “Well now, boys, I know you are both good hearted and want to help your fellow man, to help everyone achieve true freedom in an egalitarian society, we’ve had fruitful discussions along those lines. This evening we have an opportunity to make a real contribution to world freedom and the struggle against oppression.”
The response was as soggy as the meal,“Aw, Mum what now, more flyers to hand out, or what? There’s no election going on, and anyway you only got two votes last time, yours and Fred Naylor’s, and you said you wouldn’t try again.” from William, and just a glassy stare from Pete, who kept his head and opinions low every time she got political.
“No, no, it’s not a campaign for votes this time, it’s actually more like direct action. We have a chance to be in at the beginning of great changes. I can’t tell you more unless you promise absolute secrecy and discretion. Who wants rice pudding ?”
“Please,” and “I do thanks,” they muttered, as she plunked down a glass bowl half full of rice and milk with a few raisins sunk in it.
The contents slid tepidly down hungry young gullets to mix in a properly egalitarian way with the rest of the meal before she spoke again, “William, you will come along with me I know, and Peter, you have expressed your dislike of injustice many times, now is a chance to do something.”
“Wait a minute Mum, don’t tell me we’re going to dig holes again! That’s just crazy, how does going out in the middle of the night and digging holes all over the country side help anything? Especially how does that fight injustice?” asked Billy -William.
“Now, now, I’ve warned you before, don’t mention certain things inside the house, please be careful what you say.“ she replied.
“What, do you think MI5 is listening, or what? Good luck to them, if they’ve got time to listen to what goes on around here they must be pretty bored. I bet they got a microphone and a camera in the kitchen to get your rice pudding recipe. The Queen wants to try it at the palace I expect.” said Bill.
“Well, now I know it’s much better with cinnamon and maybe a bit of honey, but that last election was very expensive and I’m still paying the printer’s bills and for the meeting hall and everything. We just have to make sacrifices for the cause, you know.” said Mrs. C.

A trip to the Lake

2005-08-18T16:59:00.000-07:00

They set out South at first light, leaving the outskirts of the city before the sky in the East lightened past bright oranges and pinks, while the streets were still empty of vehicles except for a few buses and minivans with early commuters. The Vauxhall was packed with Henry and the three teenagers and all their stuff, light on clothes but heavy on consumables
When they stopped, there was no river or other surface water anywhere closer than perhaps twenty miles away, so the bush was quiet and still under the sun, only cicadas and doves sang in the dusty thorn scrub along the road, and shade was rare and sparse. Henry pulled up under a tree just off the road that was covered with pods like three foot grey sausages and thick dark foliage, that gave an impression of shelter from the sun if not the heat.
They sat and ate a sandwich each, drank Fanta out of plastic cups and Rich got out his camera and took shots of everyone else in the car with the doors open, and of the sausage tree and its fruit, carefully fiddling with his settings and writing the figures down so he could look at them when the films got developed .
They were about to set off again when something moved over beside a great bare baobab tree a couple of hundred yards away. There stood an elephant, ----

apologies, an early version of this chapter

2005-08-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

Half a dozen camo clad guys walked up to the wooden jetty and checked us over, with a scornful air, before they walked back to the shade of one of the nearby wood and corrugated iron shelters, where they settled in with beer and cigarettes, and carelessly leant their AKs against the rough table. Their arrival coincided with the sudden disappearance of everyone who usually worked, mended and dryed fishing nets, or sold vegetables, dried fish or bush meat by the dusty road. Except for the waitresses in their chosen watering hole, who didn’t look too happy about all the new business.
Japhet and I looked at each other wordlessly, and he reached to start the diesel engine, while I stepped over onto the rough planks, cast off the nylon mooring lines, and stepped back aboard. “We can tie up to that tree by the big rocks over there, it's close enough that the other guys will find us easily when they get back with the soil samples, and should be out of the direct line if anything starts.” -------

Eland

2005-08-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

Flames and black smoke covered the upper slopes of the mountain over Fishhook , the fire engine had been there since the evening before and this morning most of the men had gone up the track carrying sacks and axes and shovels . Where else would three boys go, on a Saturday morning, breakfast bolted down and pocket money already spent? Not that there was any prospect of actually participating, but all the action made the area interesting, especially from the house on the far side of the valley, where the flames were visible , way taller than the ant sized men moving around in front of them. Only as they got closer, the flames were lost from view behind the houses and trees on the lower slopes, and firstly ash and black burnt bits of grass and leaves, then hot and sometimes glowing bits, began to drift down on everything. They were beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea , with the roar and noise of the flames growing louder as they got closer, when the wind dropped away suddenly and the noise of the fire seemed to change. There was an outburst of shouting from the distant men up there, thin with distance, and then the wind switched around just like that and began to blow from behind them. The men were cheering and yelling now, something had happened and they werent there yet! Wanting to be a part of this adventure, The Great Fire, they hurried up the track past the last houses
The fire engine was parked where a big rock blocked it from going any further uphill, and on any other day would have rated a good close inspection, unattended as it was, but not now. They hurried past on the footpath through scrub and tall grass, the air humming with insects disturbed by the fire and birds darting around with full beaks.
A great brown mottled mantis came whizzing along and landed on Phil’s right shoulder, turning its head on the thin neck and waving it’s barbed front legs in an agitated way. He called to his brothers “ Hey look here, he’s trying to talk to me.”
“What’s he saying then, telling you there’s a fire and lots of smoke ?”joked Paul , and they all laughed.
“Probably, though now he’s just waving his one leg and pointing it thataway, off to the right a bit, which is the direction he came from .Maybe he wants us to rescue his eggs. Maybe he’s a she that is , and wants us to save her eggs. “ answered Phil.
So of course, since they had heard somewhere that mantises were thought by the Bushmen, the San, to be messengers from their version of God, they kept a close watch on the grass and bushes on their right as they climbed the winding path. About a hundred yards further up , the mantis took to flight again, and flew into a clump of tall spindly wild geraniums. The boys followed, and were startled by a great brown shape that erupted into visibility as they neared, an antelope that took off headlong , crashing away across the slope. “ Wow that’s an eland.” said Paul, “Must have been driven down from the Game Reserve by the fire. Where’s that mantis though? It landed somewhere in here, lets see, maybe it does have eggs here or something.”
They fossicked around among the strong-scented plants for a bit, and Paul was just getting impatient and starting to move on, when Phil saw a flick of movement, the mantis spreading it’s yellow and orange underwings as it sat on something that looked like a rock, until you looked closely. “Hey here’s a baby buck, the mantis is sitting on it, come see. “ They stood silently and watched as the animal struggled to stand up, and stood wobbling for a few seconds before collapsing again with a sprawl of impossibly long legs. “ We should leave it here, then the mother will come back and it’ll be ok. “ said Paul. Since this seemed like the best thing to do, they started back towards the nearby path, waiting quietly as two men came crashing and stumbling past downhill, one with his arm all red and burnt, and the other one helping him. “ You boys shouldn’t be here, it’s dangerous” called the burnt man
“ I’m coming back in a bit, as soon as I get Joe to the nurse.” said the other “You better be gone by the time I come back.”
They looked at one another and shrugged. Just because that guy got himself burnt didn’t mean they would too. Right at that moment the wind changed again, coming down the slope at them, carrying choking black smoke and a rain of burning debris into the surrounding bush. Several minor fires started up where flaming leaves landed in dry grass and in a few seconds their feelings of security and eagerness to see more action changed to unease and some apprehension. “ She won’t come back if it starts to burn here.” said Paul “Let’s carry that baby down the hill a bit , where the fire won’t get it .”
They duly went and picked the little animal up , Paul crouched down and they draped it over his shoulder with it’s legs dangling front and back, He said that was a “Fireman’s Lift.” His younger brothers were impressed, as they had not known there was a special way to carry animals when you rescued them from a fire. They would hacve done it all wrong without their eldest brother.
The mantis came along too, sitting comfortably on Philip’s shoulder , with quick side trips over to the baby eland every few minutes. On one of these check-up visits Cliffy noticed something that looked like a little wasp’s nest stuck to the hair under the buck’s neck, almost invisible in the hollow where the neck and chest merged.. “ Here’s the mantises babies too” he cried “see here, that’s why it was so worried. “
They stopped for a bit and examined this for a few moments while Paul rested, then Phil picked up the load and they set off again. Soon they reached a smoke free area just uphill from the first houses and stopped again a few yards off the path and out of sight , in case that man came back. Here they noticed a single bump in the middle of the baby’s forehead “That must be it’s horn “ said Cliff.
“There should be two horns.” said Paul, “all animals have two horns, if they have horns.”
“ Unicorns dont , they have one horn .”said Phil, thats what their name means, uni means one and I suppose corn means horn. “
“ So why don’t they just call them one horns, then ? asked Cliff
“ Same reason lots of things have several names” said Paul “ Men are guys and fellows too, and buck are also antelopes , so this is a baby buck and an eland and a unicorn.”
Nobody felt like arguing, it was quite hot and everyone had itchy eyes and throats from the smoke. “His mother won’t find him here, the fire is coming down the mountain and it’ll burn where we found him, so what are we going to do with him?We could take him home, and ask mum if we can keep him.” said Phil. “ Unicorns are special, more special than dogs and cats, and mum did say maybe we should get a dog soon, so she probably won’t mind.” This seemed like a reasonable assumption to all three, so they set off home through the quiet Saturday morning streets, carrying the baby unicorn in the Firemans Lift and the mantis anyhow she chose to ride.
About half way home, the baby began to struggle and bleat, so they stopped again and sat in the shade of someone’s tall wooden fence, “ Maybe we aren’t doing this right.” said Paul “When they catch a Unicorn they have to have a Maiden, and then it’s tame and does whatever they want. “ Well of course this sounded like important technical information , so they decided that probably baby sister Judy qualified as a Maiden, and could actually help with a project for a change, instead of being an annoyance, as all kid sisters tended to be. Cliff was volunteered to go home and bring her, and some orange squash and perhaps some apples, and not to get lost on the way, while the elder two waited.
The mantis seemed to approve of this arrangement, nodding her head up and down vigorously in time with the movement of Phil’s head when he asked her opinion “ That’s a good idea , right mantis ?Cliff should go and fetch her and we will guard you guys here. “
The clincher came when Cliffy objected loudly “ Hey no fair, it’s just moving it’s head because you are. “ and the mantis turned to look at him and spread her wings and waved her front legs threateningly. He shut up right away then, not realising that his loud voice could have produced the same reaction without any understanding of his meaning.
When the two youngest arrived, they all sat and drank orange squash and Judy was introduced to the Unicorn, which didn’t seem particularly impressed by her, but allowed her to stroke his nose and feel his horn-bump.He didn’t seem interested in the orange squash and just sniffed the apple they offered, so they decided he probably only wanted milk.Naturally Judy couldn’t carry him, so she walked behind where he could see her when they set off again, with his front legs dangling down the carrier’s back.
Soon after they got to the main road, a grey Morris Minor pulled up and the driver , a tanned man with a black beard, asked “ Where are you going with that eland?” So they explained about the fire on the mountain and the mother running off and the one horn, but didn’t mention the mantis until she flew over and perched on the car’s steering wheel. Then they showed him the egg case , and he listened solemnly to the whole story before saying “ So do you live on a farm then, where an animal like this can live ? Because you know it will grow quite big and it will need space , just like a cow or a horse. You won’t be able to keep him in a small garden. Why don’t you all climb in and I’ll give you a lift home and take this little guy to my farm.”
Riding in a car wasn’t something they did every day, so that was pretty good, and they got home in a few minutes and ran in all talking at once to tell mum all about it. She came out and looked in the open window at the young animal on the back seat and said “ Well , Mr. umm “ and hesitated “ Thorn ,” he said,” pleased to meet you ma’am “
“ Well Mr.Thorn” she said “ if you could take care of this little fellow I’m sure that would be best. Thank you for helping , and I hope they weren’t too much trouble, they do get into all kinds of things, but they mean well, you know. “
That was that, he drove off with the baby in the back seat and the children went into the house and then back outside to rinse off the worst of the black dust from the fire with the hose before washing their hands and faces for lunch.

Sunbird

2005-08-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

We went up the mountain in the morning, bright sun on the dew and spiderwebs sparkling, mist rising from the grass and resting in the hollows. We were three together, barefoot boys slipping through the seaside bungalows and white fenced gardens to the wild slopes beyond. There was a rough dirt track leading up halfway, and then a footpath through the rocks and heath, the scent of wild geraniums strong as we brushed by . We had sticks in case of snakes and a bottle of tap water and three oranges, some marbles and a catapult, slingshot to you, made with carefully cut rubber from an old car inner tube. We took turns carrying the provisions, which we were all going to eat later, but only the two older ones carried the catapult in turn, because Cliffy couldn’t shoot properly with it and what good would it do us if he was carrying it and we met a leopard, say , standing in the middle of the path ? Of course nobody had actually seen a leopard around here for a couple of hundred years, but you never knew .
When we got to the branch in the path after the zig zag climb through the rock bluffs , we turned left along the more used trail . We would take the fainter right branch on another longer day when we didn’t have to be back by lunchtime. We ate the oranges quite soon after getting up onto the different terrain above the steepest slopes. Here the bushes were mostly heather , flowering pink and white , and proteas, with their big stiff blossoms . There were insects and birds busy all around, harvesting pollen and nectar, and of course others after the harvesters, spiders and lizards and a hawk wheeling high above against the sky. We watched him watch us, probably hopes we will scare something into the open that he can swoop down and grab , we decided. The lizards just duck into cracks in the rocks, and the small birds stay low among the bushes, so it must be difficult to get hold of something even when you can see so much busy life all around.
We trotted and walked , stopped and watched, making our way towards the lookout station with the flagpole where they signaled to the fishing boats in the bay when shoals of fish came into view. There was only a bare pole today, rope slapping in the wind and the dark green door padlocked, the windows blank in the whitewashed walls of the square concrete building.” Must have carried stuff here with a donkey,” I speculated.
“Maybe a whole lot of donkeys,” chimed in Cliffy, “then they wouldn’t have to stop building to go down and get more stuff , they could have just brought everything at once.” After contemplating this image, of a whole train of donkeys winding along the rocky path, I objected “ But the fishermen don’t have lots of donkeys, they only have rowing boats and maybe a couple of donkeys, so they probably did it a bit at a time, every time they came up to watch for the fish they would bring some stuff and build a bit .”
This seemed to be our older brother’s opinion too, because all he said was “ Probably they put a roof up first, after they put up the flagpole, so they could shelter from the rain.”
Although of course both of us younger ones immediately thought that it would have been difficult to have a roof with no supporting walls, we left it at that and looked for other interesting stuff around. Bright birds were zipping through the bushes, hovering by flowers and darting off again, iridescent blues and greens shimmering on their heads and backs , bright orange below.” Those are sunbirds,” said eldest brother authoritatively. There were brown little birds with them, which were the females, but at the time we didn’t realise they were a single species, and other brown and yellow birds with long trailing tail feathers , which Paul confidently identified as sugarbirds. We tried a few flowers to see if we could get any of the nectar they were all feeding on, but the most we could do was to get our noses dusted with yellow pollen, which tasted faintly bitter if anything. “ What about finding a bee’s nest, a hive ? There should be lots of honey “ I suggested.
“ They’ll just sting us, “ answered Paul, “ You have to have a fire and lots of smoke, then they don’t sting, but we don’t have any matches.”
“ Maybe we can find some of those black bees that don’t sting, Mum said there are black bees that don’t have stingers, remember ? “
Wandering among the wind-tossed bushes, we searched for the legendary black bees , and found bumble bees in several sizes, lots of ordinary bees, some creatures that looked like bees but didn’t act like them, and several kinds of wasps. No black bees .
“ If we find a black bee, what are we going to do ?” asked Cliff,” One bee won’t have much honey, will it ?”
“ Oh, that’s easy,” came the answer, “ if we follow it , it will lead us to it’s hive and we can get honey there. “
“ Hey , here’s a nest, a bird’s nest, “ I called. In the middle of quite a thick and sturdy protea bush there was a tiny cup, twigs and grass tightly woven onto a fork in the main stem. Parting the leaves and leaning forwards, I tried to see if there was anything in it.
A yellow branch moved and revealed itself as a great snake, a cobra thicker than my arm, it’s muscular length trailing from just below the nest down into the tangled grass , The mouth opened a little, showing fearsome teeth and a flickering forked tongue as it turned to me, black expressionless eye locked to mine from a distance of three feet. The body rippled as it seemed to flow up into the bush, gathering into an S bend and lifting the head free to sway back a little. I held my breath and slowly brought the catapult up with my left hand, stretching the rubber back with the right at the same time. My hands were moving somehow without volition, my attention was focused on watching it’s eyes, hoping to be able to jump back and away if it began to strike , but not wanting to precipitate things.
Sunbird struck. Blazing blue and orange , a tiny bundle of feathers hurtled through the branches at the snake’s eye and seemed to attach itself there, so that as I shot and jumped back and out into the open, I saw the sinuous yellow column blossom into a crown of glorious feathers.
Shaking, I watched from a good distance as the whole bush seemed to fly apart , lashed by the body writhing in it’s prolonged final spasms. Snakes don’t seem to die quickly, the body keeps moving long after the brain is gone. Not so with birds, this one was thrown clear in a few seconds and was dead before he hit the ground. I picked him up, careful of the spatters of venom on his feathers, and marveled at tiny perfection. The tip of the beak was broken off, probably right inside the snake’s eye, and there was the mark of a single tooth on his belly where feathers were missing.
We came down from the mountain three brothers , one of us mortal now, honeyless and bearing a small death. Carried in a shirt pocket he died like Ajax or Achilles, remembered in glory, battle winner. We thought he had been protecting his nest , but Dad said “No, just his territory, sunbirds’ nests are closed , with just a small hole to go in and out, if the nest was cup -shaped it was probably a sugar-bird’s nest , so that bird won the war and lived.” Optimistically , Dad took to calling me Sugarbird soon after that day, and it took me a long time to understand why he picked such a wussy nickname for me.

Witch Finder

2005-07-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

Robert and I took one of the Toyota pick- ups from work and drove two hours and quite a long way from the forest that Sunday. We were supposed to be scouting for wild mushrooms, which people in Europe paid big money to eat in upscale restaurants, but he had begged me to help him . He was in an agony of fear and horror, his sister had phoned to tell him his three year old niece had gone missing. The family feared the worst, that she had been kidnapped and was probably dead by now, or soon would be.
There had been several people around their district who had vanished over the past five or six years. Each one had been found several days later mutilated , with certain body parts hacked off, lips and genitals, tongues , ears and eyes usually, though sometimes internal organs had been taken. All had bled to death and then were dumped , still tied hand and foot, wrapped in newspaper and old plastic fertilizer bags.
Everybody knew it was the old Muti murder horror , using human body parts for potions and charms to give powerful people an edge over their rivals, for promotion in Government or business, financial success or luck in ( it’s just a word ) Love. Everybody knew who was involved too, there were often big shiny cars parked at a certain isolated homestead, where the cattle were fat from grazing other people’s crops, and the old man had a surprising number of young wives. Ten years ago he had been an object of scorn, ragged and shiftless, perennially drunk and his children always hungry, often in trouble for fighting or petty theft, a seller of weak medicines and doubtful spells, whose customers usually couldn’t afford the bus fare to the Government hospital or else didn’t want their husbands to know they were trying to abort their eighth child, or who were quarrelling with a co-wife and hoped to have her burn herself at the cooking fire.
We talked during the drive, of course, and he told me all this, though no names or other identifying information, at my request. I was going to try and get some sort of objective proof somehow, something that could justify certain low-ranking police going over the heads of their Station Commander and the District Commissioner to make arrests and do more than a token investigation. My reputation as some kind of crime investigator and communer with the spirits was rather flimsily based on the luck I had finding wild mushrooms in commercially viable concentrations and keeping track of the misdeeds of several rambunctious drivers and about a hundred young co-ed mushroom pickers out in the forest. Oh yeah, plus I had long hair and a raggedy beard, which proved the craziness required of any worthy Witch-finder.
Traditionally, I knew , the process used iin these parts involved getting suspects and innocents together and working the atmosphere up into a sort of humming tension of expectation and fear, then sorting out putative culprits from the gathered crowd by use of the sense of smell. Chaka, the great Zulu leader, had a favourite Witch-finder , an old woman, who was probably more feared than he was. She was said to have “smelt out “ hundreds of evil men and women , conveniently often people that Chaka wanted to dispose of , simply by moving among an assembled crowd with her eyes closed, sniffing at people’s bodies.
We drove off the main road through the hills for several hot and bumpy miles along tracks more often used by oxen and tractors than by anything without low range gears and four wheel drive. We went slowly with the windows open , enjoying the vista of green hills dotted with grazing cattle and dark clumps of trees , corn tall and lush on the flatter land near each of the widely separated homesteads. We passed a few people walking in groups of four or five together and then one old man striding along alone , carrying a plastic supermarket bag . As we eased carefully past him, a stench of rotting meat wafted in the window,. “ Hey that guy’s lunch is a little past its “best by” date “ I joked. Robert just stared solemnly back and responded “ Mr. Dube eats some strange things.”
Today the neighbours were all gathering again at Robert’s sister’s place, after searching the countryside over the past three days. She lived as second wife of the eldest son of the extended family. The missing girl, Emilia , was her third child, and had been playing with other toddlers of the family under the care of her eldest sister, who was nine, while the adults and older children hoed weeds in the nearby corn field. When Zanele, her mother, came to eat lunch with the kids, she found Emilia gone and her sister shaking and crying , while the other little ones wept in sympathy. She told me this while seated at her mother-in -law’s table in the thatch roofed house at the centre of the compound. I had the privilege of sitting at ease sipping tea , playing the role of a mysterious and powerful investigator while the gathering waited silently outside. We three, Constable Simelane, Henrietta Zuma ( Emilia’s grandmother), and I were trying to find some detail that might have been overlooked in the first panic and turmoil of the disappearance.
All that Grace could say was “ She’s gone, I don’t know what happened, i went to Elphas, he fell and hurt his knee and it was bleeding and he was crying, so I washed his knee and told him to sit there by the tree in the shade and then I came back and she was gone . But I looked and looked and I dont see.” She was speaking English to me, quite fluently and with a slight American accent, probably her English teacher was a Peace Corps worker, and somehow that last sentence had an odd ring. I said, “ Pardon Grace, do you mean you didn’t see where she went ? “ She promptly burst into loud sobs and hiccupped “ No, no I can’t say , I can’t say . Oh my poor sister .” Her mother hugged her tightly and patted her back while glaring at me. “ What do you think, of course that’s what she meant, are you trying to torture her ? Whats the matter with you ?”
I swallowed a sip of tea to help my suddenly dry mouth and throat to articulate my next words gently “ Please ma’am, can you let us talk with her a little more, we have to get every detail we can , she might have seen someone nearby before the child, before Emilia that is, went missing .” Grandmother Henrietta suddenly frowned and spoke “ Zanele, let her sit here a while, I will see that she answers properly. You go and see to the other guests, there is beer for the men, everyone should be here by now. “ she turned to me “ Ask. I will see that she answers “
Grandmother was evidently ruler in this homestead, because the sobbing child gathered herself with an effort and whispered to me “ I saw him , he said he would help to find her , but I musn’t say that I saw him or she will die .” The adults leaned forward listening intently “ We can only help your sister if you tell us everything “ I said, “ Can you trust the person who told you to be quiet ? Is this a person who could lie to you ? ”
“ No, no , I musn’t think bad things about people, the minister at church told me I musn’t , I must be a good girl and pray to Lord Jesus and everything will be fine , he said.”
“ Well you know , Grace, sometimes people are bad and say things that just aren’t true and break their promises. You should trust your family and be polite , but don’t always believe everything people say “ said Grandmother “ Now tell us, child, who was there, who did you see that day ? “
“ But he said he could only help to save her if no-one knew he was nearby If I told anyone he wouldn’t be able to help and she would die, and it would be my fault . “ She wailed. Grandmother waited grimly until she quieted again and then spoke , “ Tell us. Who .Was . There . “
“ Johannes Dube “ she whispered. “ When I didnt see her I looked by the gate, and there were some people running away, carrying a sack, then Mr Dube was standing there ,and he said he would help to find my sister when I asked if he’d seen her”
With that name I suddenly realised what we had to do. “ Listen Grace, you can help us, you know. I want you to go out among the people and help your mother to look after the guests, take them food and drink . While you are doing that, I want you to use your nose. If you smell bad meat , I want you to try and find where the smell is coming from, without anybody noticing what you are doing. Come back here and tell us if you think somebody is carrying anything that smells like that, perhaps something in their pocket or on a string around their neck . “ She nodded solemly and looked at her grandmother for approval.
In a few minutes she was back , and whispered to her grandmother, who wrote on a piece of paper and passed it to me. Johannes Dube . Plastic bag and something on a string around his neck. Mandla Zwane , something in his right pants pocket, Dorothy Hlope, something smelly in her purse. We looked at one another silently. “ Right then, lets call in Dube first “ I said . ”See what he has to say. If these guys believe their magic will protect them , they have to carry the Muti they’ve made with them to get the benefit. Which means if we get a look at what they are carrying we will probably find all the evidence we need for the Constable to arrest them.”
The old man swaggered in and sat down, taking the teapot and pouring himself a cup , which he proceeded to slurp noisily. “So what do you want, Henrietta? I told you, if you pay me two cows I can use my magic powers to find your granddaughter. Send this fool away first though, before I do anything .” He spoke SiSwati, not realising I understood him, then turned to me and spoke English “ How do you do , very good of you to come help our poor people .”
I played along “ Mr. Dube, if we all work together we will learn from one another and I’m sure we can accomplish a lot . I am so happy to be able to help the great people of your beautiful country . I am so curious about your customs you know, tell me, what are you carrying there, is it your lunch ?”
“ Oh you know, just some of our traditional food that it is our custom I must eat you know , to make myself strong . “ He replied casually.
“ I just love to try your traditional food you know .” Before he could react I grabbed the bag from his hand and dumped the contents on the table.
Two ears and some other body parts , covered in red ochre and bits of plant matter , and pierced by thongs , ready to be strung around someone’s neck, but still plainly and unmistakably enough to tie him to the missing girl. Constable Simelane rose grimly to his full 5ft 6 and took him firmly by the arm. “ Well now, what do we have here ? “ he intoned, in his best British Bobby style . “ I think you had better come along to the station so that we can pursue our enquiries. Who is in it with you then ?”
“ No, no, you dont understand, it’s Zwane, him and that Hlope woman and Esther Dlamini, they did it, they threatened me , but I was going to tell you anyway .” whined Dube.
I didn’t hear any more , as I bolted outside to the fresh air and heaved my guts up , to the mute astonishment of the gathering. This actually was just the right thing to do, as vomiting and extreme agitation are regarded as signs of spirit possession . As believers in magic powers and the influence of spirits on the mundane, our targets were likely to believe that I was picking out suspects with this kind of help . Shakily, I went back in and we called in each person “smelt out “ by Grace or implicated by others , and questioned them, and each blamed others, each was carrying some sort of charm with human body parts as one of its components, and each in turn was formally arrested and locked in a separate room , pending the arrival of reinforcements and transport from the police station in town.
Eventually six people were convicted of ritual murder and sentenced to death. Since Swaziland did not have an executioner, they waited in prison quite a while and for all I know they are still there.

The first line

2005-07-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

This last piece, Only Angel Saw, was written for The First Line, which is a magazine/website that provides a first line and asks writers to do stories using this.

only Angel saw

2005-07-20T04:50:00.000-07:00

Having little to his name when he died, the reading of Henry Fromm’s will went quickly. Angel had tied her hair back and put on a jacket, borrowed from Dave, in an attempt to be sympathetic to the occasion ; both formal and official and of course quite sad. She had been surprised by the letter, with her name properly spelled and all neatly laid out on a really lovely thick and creamy sheet of paper, definitely worth keeping to use the other side, perhaps a memory portrait of Henry in a happy mood, eating of course, something that might capture his essential purity and simplicity.
So now she owned everything in Henry’s room , all his clothes, his bed and blankets and books, his hotplate and cooking stuff, his clocks and everything except his money. His sister from Liverpool got whatever money there was, which was all she was interested in , so there was no need for the sniffy attitude and stares at her bare feet. Dave would be happy too, they could move into Henry’s room with its big window and space to move around. Of course they’d have to get rid of all that stuff somehow, maybe just put it all on Jen’s stall at the market.
“ One more thing Miss Davidson , “. said the lawyer “there is a receipt here for rent paid for his room in Congreve Street for the next 10 months and a similar receipt for rental fees on a storage facility , Browns Storage and Cartage of Brook Lane, in Bushey. Both the contents of his room and whatever may be in storage are yours, constituting as they do all his worldly goods other than monetary assets . Here is an abstract of the relevant passage of the will, which you may show to establish actual possession of the articles in question. “
“ Thank you “ she answered with a bright smile , and took the offered pieces of paper, more of that thick creamy stuff, and put it all neatly folded as it was into the jacket’s inside pocket .
Dave was enthusiastic about the stuff in Brown’s, speculating endlessly about what could be there, so next day they went to see.They had no problems , no-one asked to see any bits of paper or anything, they just used the key with the big plastic tag “Browns S & C” which was hanging on a nail beside the door in Henry’s room. Brown’s didn't believe in being nosey it seemed, they walked in the gate and found door #7 , matching the number on the back of the tag, and tugged it open through the dead leaves and cigarette butts lying in a soggy mess all along that side of the yard.
Inside they found several cardboard boxes tied with string, which looked as if they hadn't been opened since the end of the War, more than twenty years before. The first one was filled with Army stuff, khaki uniforms and boots neatly wrapped in thick brown paper that looked as if it had come from a butcher’s shop,which was, as Dave pointed out , appropriate for what it represented. Henry had been in the Army in the War , he had been with something he called the South African Irish, which didn't exist according to Angel’s friend Jane’s boyfriend, who worked in the Home Office in London. Well at least there were neat little harps on the uniforms, so they were something to do with Irish, anyway. Henry was always talking about fighting in Africa, in Abyssinia against the Italians and then in the Desert, and he would always get blind drunk when he started on about someplace he called Sidi Rezegh and not say much after he got that far.
In the second box they found old papers, yellow looking newspapers and bundles of letters written in neat feminine longhand in light blue ink and tied with string, typewritten official looking papers in big stiff brown envelopes and a few books, all of it smelling of mould and damp and mice. Angel tried to read the title on the fattest book , which actually looked like it was written in gold leaf, but it seemed to be some weird foreign writing with strange shapes , so she asked Dave “What’s this Dave, is it Hebrew ? You can read that cant you?” Dave took a quick look and frowned “ No way, this isn’t Hebrew or anything like that, I should know, after all I am a Cohen , you know . My Dad made sure I learnt all that stuff. This must be that Abyssinian writing , what do they call it, Geez. “
Of course they dug right down to the bottom of the box, to see what good stuff might be under everything else, and were rewarded by the contents of a bundle wrapped carefully in oiled paper and silk. Some kind of costume with great bright stones decorating the chest area, which Dave grabbed and put on over his t shirt while she was admiring the pattern in the silk wrappings. There was also a very ornate crucifix right at the bottom of the box, which Angel held up to admire in the weak light from the open door.
Dave was already ripping the last box open as she turned to him “ Wow look at this, isn't it beautiful ? Look how it shines in the light, it must be gold “ crowed Angel . That caught his attention enough to turn his head to her as he opened the lid on the box. Which emitted light of its own in dazzling intensity , blazing bright in the dim room, but seen only by Angel. By the time Dave turned again to look, that first coruscation had dimmed to a bearable level, enough to puzzle him as to its source but no longer blinding. What he saw was another wooden box carefully protected inside the cardboard, with what looked like carrying poles packed beside it, light shining gently from every crack in the seemingly normal wood. “ Hey wow that has to be worth something .” said Dave “ There’s something in this box shining the same way, the old guy had a whole stash of gold stuff mouldering here while he got by on his Army pension or whatever .” He tried to pull one of the planks off the box, but found it too much for bare hands. “ Lets go to the pub and celebrate “
They locked up again and Angel slipped the key into her back pocket, with the tag dangling like a plastic tail, and the crucifix hung neatly from the leather thong around her neck, next to the glass trade beads from Morocco that Dave had given her . She also took a photo of a smiling young man in army uniform, slim and mustached, primed for the battles of life, Henry around 1940 or so, a long road and fifty pounds away from the Henry she knew in the Sixties.
They stayed in the Rose and Crown until Last Call, then piled in someone’s van and went to a really cool party in a huge bare country house that someone who was someone else’s boyfriend had just bought , something to do with Pinewood Studios and a movie called 2001 . Anyway when they got back to town it was Monday afternoon and Dave had to go into College to write an exam, so Angel took the photo and started her portrait of Henry on that nice paper, young and smiling.
When Dave came in carrying fish and chips he had news “ That was a breeze, I just knew everything , the answers just came easy. I did great, Baby, just great “ he grabbed her and tickled her until she thumped him with the fist holding the watercolour brush, spraying yellow paint over his face and hair - Henry had been blond of course - and then they ate while sitting on the bed, side by side. “ Oh , by the way, we can forget about whatever was in that last box , Brown’ s burned down yesterday “ he said through a mouthful of cod.

Lion and Unicorn

2005-07-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

“Come here, beautiful “ crooned the great beast in a playful singsong grumbling voice that echoed among the rocks and trees to rebound from all sides at once. She froze in mid - stride, right there in the open dusty ground next to the great granite swell of the hill slope at the head of the valley.
This valley had been their home for the past year , the children's laughter bouncing happily around as they played, the adults a little busier with the concerns and complications of life. They had fled the old place to escape the tyranny and oppression of an autocrat’s rule; a self-proclaimed king whose only virtue was strength, whose only concerns were his own advantage , his numerous offspring and the security of his rule.
The result had been the disappearances in the night, the whispering morning conferences when everyone tried to account for the latest mysterious disappearance,optimistically trying to assign some blame to the victims in order to reassure themselves of their own safety.
Finally, when even the noon sun seemed unable to lift the gloom and mothers kept their brghtest toddlers tightly by them, the band had set out from the only home they knew. They had found this fold in the hills on the fourth day of their journey, bright with bird song and green as a dream , and had settled in like ducks into a pond.
She stood at full alert, heart speeding up to a frantic gallop while her legs seemed made of quivering mud, almost collapsing under her . Where was he lurking ? - she scanned the dappled shifting shade of the white -thorn tree , the deeper shade of the rock beside it -- all that moved was a wren bobbing about its business in tiny self- importance.
She knew that voice, the threat his presence here in the valley brought to all her family and friends - the image of those hairy paws on her daughter’s shoulders, that foul breath --she breathed out suddenly in disgust, clearing the very thought from her nostrils.
With the snort came resolve. No more. No more running, someone had to make a stand or this would never end, living in fear of that beast, never knowing where or when he would strike, no peaceful playtimes free of worry. Innocent young ones just tender meat in his eyes.Time to fight him face to face.
With studied nonchalance she stepped forward, head held high - “ Come see what I have for you big guy “ - she answered in a voice somewhat higher pitched than she had hoped.
All around an uneasy silence spread , only the hot breeze rustled the grass standing in clumps here and there among the trees. If things went as usual, there would be no witnesses until after it was all over, and no retribution. The thought fanned her into restrained rage, her breath began to whistle in and out as the adrenaline surged through every part of her.
Suddenly he stepped into view, seeming to glow brightly against the dark rock behind him. How had she missed seeing him until this moment ? -- he was so big, so menacing it seemed impossible that he had been hidden until now .
He swaggered confidently forward, arrogant and sway-bellied, in control of everything he knew - his rivals run off or dead , his prey his for the taking .
He paused for a moment in faint puzzlement - why was she making it so easy ? Looked like he wouldn't have to run to catch her - who cares why - he could save his breath , though hed grab her from in front instead of behind like usual. Good enough. He grunted deep in his chest as he swung into practiced action. As he reared onto his haunches to grab her by the neck - his favourite opening move - she lowered her head and stepped sharply forwards, driving her single spiral horn into his exposed belly.
For once the unicorn had won, the lion lay bleeding in the primordial dust.
Turning away from the spreading dark puddle of blood in the dust , she walked to the stream and dipped her head into the cool water, waggling it from side to side to rinse the blood off her horn while it was still wet. It was hard enough to be born as different as she and a few others were, without being shunned by the herd because of a smell of blood . She would show her grand - daughter the body and demonstrate her successful moves to her, at least there was one bright child amongst the herd to pass a few lessons on to. Most of their herd mates and relatives were just ordinary eland, born with two horns and no ability to learn language. In every generation a few were born like herself, one - horned and able to understand and learn the spoken language beyond the few simple grunts and whickers of the main herd. If they could only live in peace for a while, perhaps they could increase their numbers to the point where they could safely breed only with other speaking ones, instead of having to mix in with the ordinary herd and have some children born to the bright pain of intelligence and some to the dull certainty of a placid animal life. That lion had been really quite frightening, a predator with a rudimentary grasp of language and the ability to think . A truly terrifying prospect if he had bred intelligent cubs, but as far as she knew he had not. He had been conciously targetting the brigfht ones of the herd in their previous home, which had reduced their numbers to a frighteningly low count before they had moved here.
The great flat top of the mountain with its ever present clouds and mist had been their haven , their home for many generations until that animal had caused their recent move. Perhaps now they should move back there and resume their old life, after all the relationship they had built up with the small men there, the users of poison arrows , had been quite interesting. The men had sent their wise ones up the mountain to spend time with the herd, and the learning had gone both ways. Here in the lower country the men were herders of sheep and cattle and not quite as ready to accept an intelligent herbivore as an equal.

Sylvia

2005-07-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

The first great snowstorm of winter brought fierce winds and a chill that pierced to the bone. When I went out to bring in some firewood early in the evening, a calico cat came running out of the swirling , stinging whiteness, miaowing desperately . She headed right for the door and slipped in as soon as I opened it for her, obviously quite used to people and confident of her welcome despite the hard life she must have been leading recently. She was thin and slightly ragged looking, very hungry and quite vocal until I gave her some cold chicken, which she ate while purring loudly. She settled comfortably in front of the stove, with her paws neatly folded under her chest and a definite air of permanence about her. My thoughts were that she was probably a town cat brought out by someone and dumped in the countryside to fend for herself, as seems to happen fairly often.
Within an hour she had earned her keep by catching one of the mice which had been running all over the house, nibbling any food left open and leaving their droppings everywhere. She ate all of it, no fuss, no mess, and I decided she could definitely stay.
Late that same night when I opened the kitchen door to marvel at how high the snow had drifted in a few hours, there was a half-grown black and white kitten crouched there. Quiet and still except for shivering, she passively allowed me to pick her up and bring her inside, where she eagerly accepted the last of that cold chicken. The two cats knew each other , and the younger one tried to nurse, but was sharply rebuffed, so the relationship was obvious. Naturally I slogged around in the snow for a while, trying to see if there were any others around, but found nothing but bare snow and dark shadows.
Both cats spent the winter inside, using the litter box , catching mice and keeping me company. Neither wanted to venture outside for any reason, it seemed, until the snow melted and the muddy ground dried out a little, when both sat and enjoyed the spring sun with me.
The younger cat was long and lean , with big paws , and markings that reminded me of Sylvester, the comic book enemy of Tweety Bird, so she was Sylvia. Her mother was more compactly built, with tiny neat paws and a much more restrained manner,. I named her Rose, but mostly she was known as Sylvia’s Mother . Sylvia climbed everywhere and got into everything, knocking sugar bowls and chess pieces to the floor, crouching on top of the fish tank with one paw hanging hopefully down into the water until I put a cover over it, and finding mice in the most unlikely places.
One day when the birds were busy everywhere and the grass was sprouting new and green, Rose went for a walk somewhere and never came back , though I left a window open for her for weeks. Sylvia stayed with me, pregnant with her first litter before I ‘d realised she was old enough. She had six , all of whom went to homes happy to receive them, and was pregnant again before her second visit to the vet, when of course I had intended to get her “ fixed “. She had by now matured into quite a large and athletic cat, sleek and soft furred, prone to sudden outbursts of unsolicited purring and addicted to tummy rubs. She was also quite an ambitous hunter , and several times brought back rabbits for her kittens.
One evening that fall I was bumbling around in the kitchen with the four babies of her second litter tumbling and wrestling around my feet. Suddenly there was a loud pained squeal as I stepped on a tiny tail, and instantly Sylvia was there in bristling fury. Her yellow eyes glared into every corner , searching for the threat, ready to rip apart anything that dared touch her children, radiating pure fury and aggression as every hair stood on end and her claws dug into the floor. Quickly she checked to see if everyone was present and unharmed, first one kitten got a sniff and a lick, then the next, then me and then the fifth of her charges, the fourth kitten. I felt in rapid succesion, fear of this feral beast, then relief that she discounted me as a threat, and finally honour and gratitude that she counted me as a kitten

Revised green corn

2005-07-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

Just added a bit to this piece, if you actually read it over the past few days, which not many have done by now. Some at the end and a few words in the middle.