A Book by Its Cover

If you've heard those rumors I started a couple of weeks ago, I'm here to tell you they are indeed true.

A new Meralda and Mug short will be out soon. Soon as in 'as soon as I can get it formatted, converted, uploaded, and out there.' It's written, so all it needs is the conversion into e-reader ready formats.

This one is a novella, which means it's about 11,000 words long. So it's not a full-blown novel. No, this is just a short piece as a sort of thank-you to the fans. Something to read and enjoy while I work on the next novel, which will be considerably longer than 11K.

Even novellas need covers, though. And since I've decided to just put this short piece out there myself, I'm acting as my own cover artist.

Now, given that I have the artistic skills of a mollusk, making a book cover represents quite a challenge. Let's face it -- you put a book out there with a lousy cover, and you might as well emblazon the words THIS BOOK BLOWS right below it, in flashing red letters.

I won't buy a book with an ugly or amateurish cover. Call me shallow, go ahead, but I figure if they can't make a good first impression with the art the words inside are even worse.

I suppose there have been a few times when I bought a book despite seeing what I thought was a lousy cover.  Thud, by the brilliant and infallible Terry Pratchett, leaps to mind. Here's the cover:

I hate that book cover. Love the book. But for reasons I can't even express, the cover absolutely makes my skin crawl, and that's no easy feat.

So, when I set out to design the cover for the new Meralda and Mug novella (still trying to decide if I'm going to reveal the title yet), I knew a couple of things I didn't want to do.

1) No depictions of clubs bearing the title of the work about to strike armed heads.

2) My name should probably not take up a fifth of the cover. Terry Pratchett can and should take up that much space. Frank Tuttle should not. Such is the way of the world..

With those points out of the way, I had to ask myself what elements I did want to include on the cover. Here's what I came up with:

1) Meralda. She's the heroine, so she needs to be the primary figure on the cover. 

2) Mug should probably be there two. Wait, did I really just write Mug as an enchanted houseplant with mobile, gripping vines and twenty-nine eyes of various colors? I did, didn't I? And now I'm supposed to draw that?

3) An airship. The story centers around the unlikely rescue of a stricken airship, so putting a dirigible-like craft up in the sky is a must.

4) The title, the author byline (that's me!), all that jazz.

So, armed with this list and the finest in modern drawing implements, I laid out my supplies, put some Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, naturally) on the turntable, and unleashed my Muse Artistic.

Minutes crept by. Hours. Then days. Victuals were brought to my garret, and hurled down in contempt, such was my fevered determination to bring forth Art.

I drew. I imagined. I erased, I crumpled, I despaired, I started anew. In a corner of the room, a passing wind blew the pages of a by-day calendar up and over. Calendar pages were ripped away, one at a time.  Seasons changed. My beard grew long, and housed a den of foxes.

In the end, I looked wearily down upon the hard-won fruits of my labor, and I cried out in a great voice, 'How much does Photoshop cost again?"

First, you'll notice two things about this image. One, I slipped and revealed the title of the new novella, which is Saving the Sammi.

Second, the cover really stinks. Although I think I really nailed the magical effluent around Meralda's wand. That is some Impressionist masterwork there, people. Each dot a masterpiece.

After long and careful consideration, I decided against drawing my own cover art. Which sent me scurrying back to the net, in hopes of finding legal, suitable images I could use.

It was the legal aspect of this I found most daunting, originally. I'm no Intellectual Property lawyer, but I know you can't just snag any old image that catches your eye and make your own book cover out of it. That would make me as bad a book pirate, and I hate those guys.

So I did a little research, and was glad to find a number of sites which sell royalty-free images that are licensed for use on book covers. And the prices aren't always the hundreds or thousands of dollars I was afraid of finding, either. Many were well within my budget.

The legal hurdle crossed, I settled on www.dreamstime.com and began my search for suitable cover images.

Now, I knew I wasn't going to find a ready-made image which depicted the scene I had in mind. But I have Corel Paint Shop Pro X4, which makes it easy to edit and combine multiple images and which offers a vast array of effects and graphics features. I've seen it called the 'poor man's Photoshop,' and at $75 I concur.

So what I was looking for turned out to be three images -- one of Meralda, one background image, and one of a steampunkish airship.

Searching on 'steampunk female' or the like inside Dreamstime pulled up a wealth of images. Some were drawn. Some were photos. Some were....

Well, let's just say that wardrobe malfunctions must be common among steampunk females. Not quite what I was looking for, since Meralda is adamant about remaining clothed. 

Finally, I found what I was looking for -- a young woman wearing flying goggles, black gloves, and a scarf. 

And she's got a smirk. I liked it, so into the cart it went. 

Now I needed a background. Something stormy and ominous. I found plenty of photos of storm-fronts, but they tended to include cityscapes, and modern-day Chicago doesn't really work for depicting steampunk Tirlin. 

But then I stumbled across this:

That had it all. Some clouds, an airship, a steampunk porthole and vintage maps.  

I was set.

All that remained was to resize and combine the two images. 

The optimum size for an Amazon catalog image is 1562 pixels wide by 2500 tall. So I resized my background -- no problem. Then I did a rough insert of Meralda, and quickly found she was facing the wrong way, which covered up the airship.

No big deal. Paint Shop let me mirror her, and also extract her from the dark background in her image. Then I resized her extracted image, over and over, until I found one that fit.

Then, just for fun, I added a title and a byline, and voila! A rough draft of a book cover, all done by a guy who has yet to manage stick figures on paper...

No, this isn't the final image. I'm still messing with a few things.  But I thought a few of you might be interested in a behind-the-scenes walkthrough  of how book covers are born here at Casa Tuttle.

Oh, and yeah, no Mug. I suppose the demand upon artists for depictions of many-eyed houseplants is still relatively small. I'd have drawn one myself, but -- you saw how that went.

So if you're a fan of All the Paths of Shadow, keep a lookout for the new Meralda & Mug novella, coming any day now. I'll announce it here, on Twitter, on Facebook, from my cell at the Lafayette County Detention Center, all my usual haunts.

And if you like the cover, now you know its story!

Snug Nugget Open for Business!

As a long-time resident (some would say nuisance) of the Amazon Kindle discussion boards, one of the complaints posted most frequently is that e-books cost too much.

I'm not one of the people posting these price complaints. E-books are almost always cheaper than their paper counterparts, and if they aren't, factors such as portability, accessibility, and zero-shelf-space more than make up for a few pennies in cost.

But if you do feel that e-books cost too much, I'm happy to announce you now have the chance to set your price! A new publishing venture opened this morning, which means when you buy from Snug Nugget, you pay whatever you feel is fair.

Better still, Snug Nugget sells e-books by the bundle, and a generous portion (nearly 15 percent) of each purchase price is donated to Book Aid International, which supports literacy, education, and development in sub-Saharan Africa.

So you get good books at a good price and you do good. Which is good. And a blatant over-use of the word 'good.'

If you're curious as to why I'm touting Snug Nugget's new business model and you decided Frank is enthused over this pay-as-you-want strategy because Frank is a forward-thinking philanthropist, well, I'm afraid you're dead wrong. Frank has a small role in this enterprise, in that the three Wistril stories included in Wistril Compleat are a part of the bundle.

So you get Wistril Besieged, Wistril Afloat, and Wistril Betrothed as part of the bundle.

The other four entries are novels in genres ranging from mystery to SF to fantasy, which allows you to visit the Mars of the future (Mankind's Worst Fear, by David L. Erickson), confront a saber-tooth cat on the loose in the present (Smilodon, by Alan Nayes), solve a mystery in Florence (Intrigue in Italics, by Gayle Wigglesworth), and visit an alternate Earth during a very different Renaissance (The Plight of Angels, by Ian Hodge).

All for the low, low price of whatever the heck you wish to pay.


So browse on over to snugnugget.com and grab a bunch of e-books. And remember a portion of the purchase price goes to some genuinely deserving people in a hard-hit part of Africa, so pat yourself on the back as you click that buy button.

http://www.snugnugget.com/

The Writing Olympics!

As everyone on the planet knows, the Summer Olympics are underway.

I didn't see the opening ceremonies. From what I've managed to piece together from assorted tweets and bits of Facebook postings, the Olympics opened with Doctor Who and Mary Poppins joining forces to defeat James Bond. Or the Queen. Frankly I'm a bit fuzzy on that bit, although I do think the same little old lady who stared Hitler down back in the day could probably shove Mary Poppins' umbrella in an entirely undignified spot.

You may have surmised that the Olympics hold little interest for me. And you'd be right, because at the risk of posting heresy, it all boils down to people running, people chasing balls, or people running while chasing balls. They don't have cheerleaders. I can't even pretend interest in any sporting event that lacks cheerleaders.

No, if the Olympic committee wants my viewership -- and let's face facts, they lie awake at night hatching plots to get it -- they'll have to include events that appeal to me, Frank the writer.

And that will have the happy benefit of attracting my surly circle of fellow writers, many of whom last saw the outdoors (or even an image of the outdoors) the last time they changed houses.

So here is my list of suggested Olympic Events for Writers. Olympic Committee Members may direct their checks and adoration to my email address.

OLYMPIC EVENTS FOR WRITERS

1) The Fifty-Yard Coffee and Sandwich Run -- Look, if we had time to prepare real food we'd be cookbook authors. But we've got people to kill, worlds to ravage, forgotten subplots to tie up. Check bread for mold, smear one slice with peanut butter (if any), smear the other with whatever we can scrape out of the jam jar, nuke seven-hour old coffee, balance the cup, saucer, and sandwich in one hand while running through a darkened room toward the dim glow of a flat panel display. That's our life. So make it an event -- with a timer, horns, and of course a couple of dogs running underfoot. Oh, and make the coffee an unstable, explosive fluid. We've got ratings to worry about.

2)  The Just A Quick Email Check Relay -- This one will be a hit. Put two computer workstations one hundred yards apart. One station is set up for word processing, no net, nothing else. The other station, one hundred yards distant, is equipped to check Twitter, Facebook, email, Fark, Cracked, and various other sites. Authletes (that's my word for 'author athletes', and I get $1500 PER WORD, Olympic Committee) must compose a brilliant paragraph of prose, race to the social media station, and return within an allotted and ever-shrinking time. Naturally a few authletes will die trying to beat the buzzer after a marathon session of defending their paragraphs from critics on Twitter, but hey, this is the big time.

3) Query Letter Hide N Seek -- Fiendishly simple, yet endlessly entertaining. A fit young runner is handed a blank sheet of paper in the middle of a circle of authors. When the pistol sounds, the runner chooses any author at random and dashes toward him or her. If the runner manages to touch the author with the blank paper, that author MUST sit down and, in one pass, create the perfect query letter, or be lampooned mercilessly by a panel of New York literary agents.

4) Rejection Selection -- A modern-day reboot of a gory Roman favorite. Authors are placed into the arena. Each author may defend themselves only with the printed copy of their current work in progress. From the stands high above, editors and first readers take aim with finely-honed harpoons, while Strunk & White's timeless classic 'The Elements of Style' is read aloud over loudspeakers. The last author standing is awarded a gift basket filled with moist towelettes and a complementary copy of the current 'Writer's Market.'

5) The Dangling Participle of Death -- Authors and their grammar skills are put to the ultimate test within this maze of boobytraps and deadly machines.  At every turn, authors must use state-of-the-art graphic displays to correctly diagram complex sentences. Once the sentence is diagrammed, a door opens -- but is it the door to freedom, or death? Was that a gerund? Was that a dependent clause? Do you feel lucky, punk?
Correct answers lead the way to the next sentence. Incorrect answers result in amusing but gruesome spectacles. Don't you wish you'd paid more attention to Mrs. Fitzgiggens now, Mister All Knowing Author?

Add some of those events, and I'll watch. Otherwise, I'll stick to reruns of South Park.

Data Stream Lost

What is the significance of the image above?

None. Sometimes a wooden skull superimposed against the sky is simply a wooden skull superimposed against the sky.

Hey, I never promised I'd start making sense.


It's been a busy week for me. Taught my last Summer Writing Course on Thursday evening. The Library has plans to start an adult writing course in January of 2013, so if you're in the Oxford area and you have an interest in listening to me babble for an hour and a half once a week for a month or two, hit me with an email and I'll keep you posted on dates and other specifics.

Since the new Markhat novel Brown River Queen sold a couple of weeks ago, I've started on the new Meralda and Mug novel, All the Turns of Light.  I'll keep posting here about my progress or lack thereof. I would welcome emails of encouragement, especially if they arrive as credible threats to my physical well being. I'm having a hard time writing these days, folks. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's my own innate slothful nature, combined with a complete and utter lack of any discernable work ethic.

Sure, I sit at the keyboard and pound away. Like I've done all afternoon, just now.

I deleted it. Every word. It was awful, and no amount of editing was going to fix it.

They say every writer has a million bad words inside they have to write down before the good ones start emerging. I thought I'd gotten rid of the bad ones already.

Guess not. You learn something new every day, which as far as I'm concerned is a compelling reason to stay in bed with the covers pulled over your head.

That's my pal Thor. We call him Thorazine sometimes because he's nuts. But in a good way. Like any German Shepherd dog, he's attentive and protective and always, always eager to please. He's at my feet right now, half-asleep, ready to get up and play should I do anything but type.

Thor's a rescue dog. All of our dogs are. He was a year old when we got him, and it took him about 15 minutes to fall utterly and completely in love with Karen and I. His former person gave him up because he stopped being a puppy. News flash, idiot former owner. That's what dogs do. Stop being puppies.

I hope Thor doesn't remember Former Idiot Owner. I bet he does. But he seems very happy here, and this is his home, forever.

Thor is the second GSD (German Shepherd Dog) I've had the pleasure of knowing. Maggie, bless her soul, was the first. She was twice Thor's size, and he's no dwarf. Honestly, Maggie was the size of a small horse. I'm not exaggerating. She frightened people from considerable distances, even though she was a gentle, kind giant.

And she loved me. As, perhaps, only a GSD can. Once upon a time -- I won't go into the details -- I found myself face to face with an angered redneck, of the gap-toothed and tattooed variety. The guy was puffed up and ready to fight.

Until Maggie, who never had a moment of formal training, squeezed her massive frame through a partially-opened pickup truck window and joined me, at my side.

Redneck lad went from furious to calm and submissive in a heartbeat.

Maggie never growled. She never bared her teeth. She never breathed hard. She sat, right by my side, but we all knew that if Redneck started trouble Maggie would be the one to end it.

I walked away unscathed. Maggie obeyed my 'girl, truck' command like she'd been trained by the Mossad.

Maggie is buried, along with seven others, here on the property. She died of sudden acute kidney failure. 

I think of her daily. As I do of the others. They were all amazing animals, all our friends. All rescues, all strays, all judged worthless by the wide, wide world.

Which just shows what the wide world knows.

You may have seen this pic before. It's a steampunk gun. Okay, truth time -- it's a Nerf gun I modified so that it appears to be a steampunk gun.

I like making things. It's relaxing. Throw some Pink Floyd on the stereo, grab the super glue, dump a bin of spare parts on the workbench, and get busy. It's therapy, people, for minds that don't respond well to any other kind of therapy.

It's a bit like the gun Markhat now carries. You know, the gun Evis and his pals created in the catacombs beneath Avalante. First they created gunpowder, which allowed them to create cannons. Then some bright tech thought 'You know what? Scaled down, a man could carry one of these!'

And thus the handcannon was born. Markhat first carried one in The Broken Bell. Haven't read it?

Then get thee here and grab a copy! Look, it's got magic. Gunplay. A film noir detective. Intrigue. Adventure. Love. Hate. Hope. Despair. 

It's five bucks. 

Give The Broken Bell a try!

That's my bike.

She's a Honda Rebel. 250 cc, so we're not talking hog here. She'll do an easy 85, though, so she's no scooter.

Karen has a similar bike a Suzuki GZ250. Both get around 68 MPG. We ride them to work when the weather is nice, and kick around in the country on the weekends. 

I'd never ridden a motorcycle before buying the Honda. I laid her down the very first day, when I learned the hard way that making a turn into gravel at speed is a good way to test your protective motorcycle gear. I walked away without a scratch; the Rebel has a tiny ding in her gas tank, and since I've learned to ride a bike.

The first thing a motorcycle teaches you is speed. More precisely, the significance thereof. 

You're in a car. You're doing 65. You're bored, you're listening to the radio, you're thinking about work and a thousand other things.

Get on a bike. Do 65.

Oh, boys and girls. You suddenly understand, down to your bones, that this speed can and will kill you.

There's no illusion of safety. There's no deceiving simulation of your comfy couch in your living room.

The wind is screaming past your helmet. It's grabbing at your jacket. It's pelting you with bugs and debris, the tiniest of which sting like bullets.

The bike is roaring and shaking. Every miniscule bump in the road causes you to jump and lurch. The seat slams your butt with every rise, every dip.

The cars you barely glance at, when you're one of them, are each driven by Death himself. Because -- and this is true, gentle readers -- NONE OF THEM SEE YOU. 

They don't. I don't know why. I see motorcyclists, when I am driving my car. I recognize them as vehicles, and act accordingly.

And if you do too, I salute you.

But most don't. They go right on texting, go right on changing their radio stations while they pull out four meters in front of you, or merge right into your lane.

Just to survive, motorcycle drivers have to be twice as good as car drivers. Three times as good. Four times faster.  

That's why you'll see bike drivers waving at each other, when we meet on the road. 

We share a common fear -- that of the old lady in the Cutlass Supreme, who will turn in front of us and tell the Highway Patrol she never saw that awful motorcycle, it just came out of nowhere.

Here's me at my last book signing.

Hold the Dark is old news. I've written and sold and published two more books since then (The Banshee's Walk and The Broken Bell). But I like that photo, since it proves I still have hair.

And now, for an audio segment!

Click here for a new segment of Out on the Patio!

Hope you enjoyed the audio segment. I promise that's the last installment of 'Big Dogs Howling.' 

My friend Elsye Salpeter, author of Flying to the Light, just sold the sequel to Cool Well Press. So congratulations, Elyse! Well done!

See you next week!

And the beat goes on . . .

Some afternoons you write.

Some afternoons you take old barn lumber and make wearable skull masks, complete with display stand.

No wonder people worry about my mental state.

Normally, when I build things, I spend a lot of time making scale drawings and building it in my head to make sure all the pieces will fit before I make any cuts.I measure and mark all my lumber carefully, and check everything twice before the first sawdust flies. On this piece, I just went nuts with a jigsaw. No measurements, no straightedges, no squares. I just laughed maniacally and cut.

Surprisingly, the pieces fit together. You can't see them in these photos, but I even made my own square-head nails.

Total construction time: less than three hours, including the stand. Cost: zero dollars.

I'm not done with it yet. The wood needs some aging. And a bit if subtle finishing, to get the look I'm after.

What does one do with a life-sized but anatomically inaccurate rendition of a human skull, you ask?

Wearing it to work is out. Ditto for trips to Kroger or the bookstore.

So I'll probably put this up on eBay in a week or two as 'folk art.' If it doesn't sell there, my truck needs a dash ornament, and just by adding a stiff spring I can have the world's largest folk art skull bobblehead!

If nothing else, it served to let me build something, no matter how ridiculous, which I need to do from time to time.

Maybe now I can get back to writing!

Markhat News!

And so a great hush fell over the land. Everywhere, creatures fell silent and still. Squirrels halted in mid-scamper. Wolves paused in their howling. Woodchucks stopped doing whatever it is that woodchucks do.

For there it was. The email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series, in the inbox that held the email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series (repetition emphasizes content).

The woodchucks grew restless, eager to resume their tireless efforts at establishing a stable fusion reaction (they're a lot smarter than they look, people). The wolves gave me the stink eye, fearful that Sarah Palin might be sighting in on them from a Stealth helicopter. The squirrels complained bitterly, because re-establishing a sustained scamper isn't nearly as easy as it looks.

So I opened the email, and . . .

. . . and . . .

BROWN RIVER QUEEN, the new Markhat novel, has been accepted!


Yes, that's right, the 7th Markhat title will be making its way to a bookstore near you soon.  This is another full-blown novel, not a novella or a collection of short stories. The old gang is back, with a new face or two as well.

At the moment, it looks like we're heading for a March 2013 release date. I will of course keep you posted here.

Thanks for all the support! Now let's all go hug an Ogre in celebration!

Belfast: Both Barrels

According to the latest news out of the sewage-encrusted wasteland that is Northern Ireland, the Belfast City Council put dog Lennox down after holding him hostage for two years of sham court hearings and clumsy lies.

Here's a quote from the official TheLennoxCampaign page --

Official Statement From Lennox's Family:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your messages of support. We are sorry to say at the present time Belfast city council seem to be intent on killing our boy. Despite previous assurances otherwise, we have been denied the opportunity to say goodbye. We have also been told that we cannot collect his body and bring Len home. We have been informed however that we will receive "some" ashes in the mail.


Keep in mind that poor Lennox was a service dog to a special needs little girl. Keep in mind the Belfast City Council (spelled 'Baby-stomping Nazi bastards') dragged this whole wretched mess out for two years, while they kept Lennox in a despicable little wire cage surrounded by his own feces (and yes, there are photos).


In the end, the Belfast City Council wouldn't even let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


I suppose the Belfast City Council's offhand promise to mail 'some' of Lennox's ashes to his grieving family counts as rare fine charity in merry old Belfast. I imagine each member of the Belfast City Council (I want to make sure Google remembers what the Council is destined to be most famous for, thus the repetition of the words Belfast City Council) was teary-eyed and filled with pride when they magnanimously offered to mail the innocent dog's remains to the grieving little girl.


I suspect they'll send the envelope postage due.


Send it postage due, and then levy charges against the Barnes family for 'storing illegal dog-breed ashes' or something equally inane.  This is, after all, the Belfast City Council we're talking about. 


Because that's the kind of cruel, sadistic, unfeeling, vindictive, unreasoning, cold-hearted, psychopathic, puppy-murdering, bloodthirsty, evil-minded, rotten, despicable, worthless, cowardly, vicious execrable foul vile depraved repugnant malodorous inhumane barbarous stinking hateful reprobate maleficent bags of crap that make up the Belfast City Council.

I'm not even doing them justice in the paragraph above. They snatched some kid's dog after showing up at the wrong address, they decided Lennox was a pit bull when his Belfast-issued license and a DNA test clearly showed he was a perfectly legal 7 year old bulldog/lab mix, and then they kept the poor dog in a cage until they murdered him, two years later, with an offhand note saying 'Nope, no goodbyes, we'll mail you some ashes, are we good now?'


How do you even convey the depth of such blatantly cruel behavior?


I suspect that Lennox either died in his deplorable confinement or was put down months ago. I suspect the Belfast City Council was afraid to reveal this, after the media firestorm surrounding Lennox became apparent to even their dim, ratlike little minds.


Internationally-renowned dog trainer Victoria Stilwell recently traveled to Belfast with an offer to take Lennox away to the US at no expense whatsoever to the Belfast City Council.


The Belfast City Council refused to even speak with Victoria Stilwell. Consider that for a moment -- fat-headed career politicians refused to cavort in front of cameras. With a celebrity. Does anyone else find that strange?


I suspect they refused for two reasons -- first, not one of the Belfast City Council members is capable of completing a sentence without lapsing into a violent alcoholic rage. And second, because they knew Lennox was already gone. Lennox's ill-treatment was apparent in the few photographs leaked from his pathetic quarters. I believe Lennox died through abuse and/or neglect, and that's why the Belfast City Council refused to meet with Miss Stilwell or let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


They'd already killed the dog.


Which makes them liars as well as heartless villains.


It's too late to help Lennox. Unless the legacy of his horrific mistreatment at the hands of the Belfast City Council, the ignoramus judges, and the truly incompetent 'dog experts' that made up the whole wretched tale causes some change in the dark heart of Belfast, Lennox will have died (badly) for nothing.


So, by all means, put Belfast at the top of your holiday destination list! Belfast, famous for its exports of boils and goiters, where the authorities are so friendly they'll quite possibly mail you the remains of your pets a couple of years after they murder them. 


Belfast, city of delights, if by delights you mean bloodthirsty dog wardens and a City Council bent on casual slaughter of all dogs, whether they are a prohibited breed or not. 


Belfast, where pride trumps reason, where compassion is something that happens elsewhere, where they'll mail you the ashes of the one you loved.


Belfast City Council, you people are rotten to the core.

Dragons, Books, and Something New!

Life is change. Or change is life. Or is it time is money?  Stitches in time save goats?

I can never keep all that eldritch wisdom straight.

Regardless of my lackluster grasp of homilies, I'm going to do two new things in today's blog.

First, I'm going to talk about someone else's book for a change. Hey, stop all that clapping and cheering, I can hear you, you know.

Next, I'm going to introduce a segment I call 'Out on the Patio.' This will be an audio segment, recorded out on my patio, in which I blabber on about whatever inane subject strikes my fancy. There will be a link below.

Why am I doing this?

Mainly because I wanted to give you guys a change of pace. You come here week after week and read my rants and raves, and if I keep doing the same old same old I'll wind up boring you.  That's the main reason.

Also, I went to great lengths to purchase this nifty chrome-plated Blue Snowball professional microphone, and aside from a few ill-fated sessions of singing along with musical legend Billy Idol the Snowball hasn't gotten any use. My plan was to start a podcast. I still plan to do that, but I have to first get over this stage fright, and the 'Out on the Patio' segments seem like a good way to do this.

Finally, you'll all get the chance to marvel at my thick Mississippi accent. Mock away. But I'd really appreciate it if, when you're done laughing, you'd zap me an email and let me know how the sound quality was.  Too soft? Too loud? Muffled? Distorted? Made your dogs bark and your ears bleed?

Let me know!

First, let's talk about a book I just finished, Dragons of Wendal by Maria Schneider.

Before starting Maria's book, I plowed through several zombie novels and a couple of 'extreme' horror anthologies. To say I was aghast at the poor quality of these books would be a vast understatement. Formatting problems? All over the place. Grammar errors? Right, left, and rife. Bad storytelling? Oh yeah.

Dragons of Wendal was, if you'll forgive the analogy, a breath of fresh air. Spot-on perfect formatting. Impeccable grammar. Engaging characters, skillfully drawn, in a story that was by turns funny, frightening, and even (gasp) romantic.

Zoe, the heroine, is smart and plucky and accomplished. Her world is filled with magic and peril, but it is not just another Standard High Fantasy knock-off complete with red-faced blustery innkeeps and wise old whiskery mages. I loved Zoe's world. It lived and breathed, and visiting it was great fun.

I don't do spoilers, so I'd better shut up. Look, if you like my stuff, or Pratchett, or classic high fantasy with a modern twist, grab Dragons of Wendal. It's only $2.99 at Amazon for the Kindle; there's also a paperback version there for just a few bucks more.

And now for my audio debut!

Out on the Patio

You guys are my guinea pigs -- er, valued pre-release focus group. Let me know what you think by emailing me franktuttle@franktuttle.com!

Thanks. And stay cool out there!

Even Legumes Get the Blues

Maybe it's the heat.

And it's heat we have, in spades. The outside temperature Friday reached four hundred and eleventy hundred billion degrees, in the shade, beneath a bag of ice, wearing a suit made of ice cream.

And that was before things really heated up in the afternoon.

Even the snakes aren't biting. Instead, they squint and promise to hide under your pillow sometime in November. Even the omnipresent Jehovah's Witnesses have curtailed their soul-saving operations, figuring, I suppose, that this weather is so close to Hell as to make them functionally indistinguishable.

Whatever the reason, I just can't get my aging aftermarket brain in gear lately. I sit down to write. My brain stares at the screen for a moment and then wanders away, leaving my fingers to tap out sentences such as "The gyro hast regretted a frigid assemblage of melodious corn, forsooth."

That's not exactly going to wow the editors at Cool Well Press.

So what, you and I both ask, is your problem, Frank?

Heck if I know. I'm eating. I'm sleeping. I'm getting plenty of exercise, if by 'plenty' you mean 'as little as humanly possible,' and if by exercise you mean 'not exercise.' But that's fine, because I HATE exercise. I'm not even keen on being corporeal. It was fun for the first fifteen or twenty years, but you get arthritis and let's see you wax rhapsodic about it.

Maybe it's the slow book sales this summer. I see a sales rank dip down below 200,000 on Amazon, and suddenly just vegging out in front of the TV while 'America's Got Talent' proves America has little if any talent seems like a perfectly valid use of my rapidly dwindling supply of time.

Too, we must not discount prevailing public opinion, which may be summed up as 'Frank is inherently lazy.' There is considerable evidence to bolster this assertion. In fact, if the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot was half as pervasive, we'd all be waving to him as we met him on the street, three or four times each day.

I've tried positive affirmations, but I can't help but snicker at the things even while I repeat them to myself. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING! SEE THE FUTURE YOU WANT AND IT WILL BE THE FUTURE YOU EXPERIENCE!

Really? I want to be a 1999 Chevy Camaro.

I don't see any tires. I have lungs and not a small-block V6.

Bah. So much for that.

I know the only way out of the doldrums is through them. I have to keep typing, even if sentences such as "Gimlet races only brace the luckless vapors of solitude" are the only ones I produce.

I'm just tired. Maybe the weather will break. Maybe I'll find my center. Maybe the peach tree out back will start sprouting money.

The corpulent echoes of upright men sashay past, flags at half-mast, hats bespoke, ornery knees clicking...

Fifty Shades of Mug

I am writing in the wrong genre.

The buzz these days is all about the book Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm told Fifty Shades sells eleven billion copies per second on Amazon alone, and total sales of the book by all markets combined exceed the number of sentient beings in the populated universe by a factor so large mathematicians have been known to explode just trying to describe it.

This is in direct contrast to my own titles, which sell at a rate we will charitably describe as 'slightly slower.'

I took to a mountaintop recently to ponder, among other things, the reasons and causes for this inequitable disparity in sales. Okay, it wasn't a mountaintop, but sitting on that extra couch cushion does give me a commanding view of the foyer.There I sat, in a position of deep thought, through two entire episodes of Lizard Lick Towing.


And then it came to me.

My books feature very little of the content that made the author of Fifty Shades so rich they are now picking out a new sun because our current one is simply 'too yellow.'

Look through all my books. Spankings? Nope. Salacious romps in luxurious Wall Street offices? Um, no.

Even Markhat, who is a wise-cracking world-weary private eye, never gets any naughtier than a kiss now and then. Or, if he does, there's no way he's going to talk about it.

So maybe I need to move with the times. Maybe Markhat's next adventure should be entitled Steamy Rannit Nights, or Naughty Mama Hog. I have to stick with the three-word title motif -- you had noticed that, right? Well, it's a thing. All Markhat titles have three words. If there's a reason for that, it escapes me.

Of course, I'll also need to rename the new Mug and Meralda book. It was going to be called All the Turns of Light, but now I'm trying to decide between Pants in the Wind or Mug's Curious Encounter With a Rather Un-inhibited Philodendron Named Honey LaLove. 


Why not jump straight aboard the gravy train, though, and go with Fifty Shades of Mug?

I might even release a new version of All the Paths of Shadow - -see below!

And here's a Markhat title, renewed for the adult market!

Yes, the sky's the limit now!

Or you could just buy one of my plain old un-sexy books, linked below:

Frank's Amazon titles!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to research dirigibles...