A Letter To Momma

The sleek black Mercedes turned off of the narrow rural road, its freshly-shined tires crunching along the gravel that led up to the unpretentious wooden home.  The house's lone occupant opened the front door as the car rolled to a stop.  The driver, a tall man in pressed suit and dark shades, rose from the car and entered the house silently, the woman equally silently pressing the front door to behind him.  The neighbors would be discussing the visit, she knew.  The visits happened nearly every other week now, and each time it was a different gentleman in a different rented luxury sedan, always dressed impeccably.  The neighborhood hummed with rumors.

The woman didn't mind.  It amused her.  In fact, she relished the part she was able to play in giving the neighborhood a touch of fresh intrigue to stir the otherwise-bored Southern souls. She made a game of it, timing the relaxation of the window curtains up and down the street while the expensive car left her driveway and headed home after the visits.

This time was different, though.  The tall, handsome stranger handed her the usual envelope, but instead of accepting her exchange of letters and leaving immediately as all the rest had done, he stood, waiting.  He nodded toward the packet he'd just delivered and, in a clean British accent, said, "My Lady, I was instructed to hold while you read the contents of the letter, which will explain the follow-on errand I must ask your assistance with."

She grinned.  Nobody called her "My Lady."  Nobody ever called anybody that, as far as she knew, in down-home rural Mississippi.  There were still a host of "Sir" and "Ma'am" politenesses floating about, but the sharp British honorific struck her as especially wonderful.

The woman turned the envelope over in her hands, reading the outside.  She recognized her daughter's handwriting immediately, knowing the neat parallel lines Alyssa had practiced as a child.  On the front, it was addressed simply "To Momma" with a much larger "FOR HER EYES ONLY" printed in block letters underneath.  She grinned again.  Alyssa always filled her writing with little details that mothers cherish but others surrounding her daughter, the new crown princess, might find offensive.

She tore her eyes away from the handwriting on the outside, remembering that the elf had to stand and wait for her to read what was in the envelope.  It was so beautiful, though; she loved receiving the letters, and she usually slowed down while reading them just so that she could enjoy it longer.

"I'm sorry.  Can I offer you a cup of tea while I read this?" she asked as she gently worked the flap open and removed the parchment inside.

"Much appreciated, my lady, but no."

Dearest Momma, she read in Alyssa's neat cursive, the phrase bringing a gentle sigh.  She'd spent every day since her daughter's birth with the beautiful young girl, and she missed her dearly.

I hope everything is going well there.  I miss you like the dickens, I hope you know that I do and I always will.  I still have your picture by my bed and hold it close to me every night. 

I assume the royal courier is still standing there watching you read this.  I asked him to do me a favor and bring me back some comfort food.  He said he'd be happy to go shopping for me there on Earth, but the cooks here told me that he wouldn't have any way of knowing what I was after unless you either showed him or just went with him. 

I want to make my absolute favorite dishes that you always do so well -- fried okra and catfish.  There isn't a word in elf for okra, though, and when I got to asking around I learned that the plant apparently doesn't grow in Kiirajanna.  Then, when I asked Seph about catfish, I had to describe what they look like.  She just turned her nose up and said eww.  I guess those do grow here, but apparently nobody wants to think about eating them. 

They also don't deep fry a whole lot here.  By not a whole lot, I really mean nothing.  Grease that I can use for frying, they have plenty of, and they also have a weird-tasting flour that is made from ground root, but I need some real flour and some corn meal.  I'm sure the courier will have no idea what I'm talking about, too, so would you mind showing him?

Everything else is just fine, Momma.  Since I got back from the library and went through all that coronation hoopla, it's gotten a lot quieter.  They keep saying that I need to travel around the realm to win each of the four major clan leaders' approval, but I figure they're probably going to wait through the winter since they've already put me through so much this year.  My trainers, including old High Priestess Sternyface, are still working me over on history and geography, but I rarely see the queen's kids any more.  The two girls I don't mind not running into, but Keion -- well, I'm trying to convince myself I don't mind not running into him either.  Oh, Prince Charming is around.  I catch him watching me every so often when I'm doing my morning archery practice.  

Speaking of that -- you oughtta see what an archer your daughter has become!  I didn't believe him at first, but Keion's requirement of 100 arrows a day really has made a difference.  Not only can I thwack the arrows pretty much anywhere I want them to be thwacked, now, but I'm even feeling stronger in the pulls.  

Dad says hi, and that he misses you.  I suppose he probably sends his own love letters, doesn't he? 

The woman stopped reading to look toward the master bedroom, imagining as she did that she could see through the wall to the box she still kept hidden away.  It contained years worth of letters from her husband, the King of Kiirajanna, and Alyssa had only caught the royal courier once, or maybe twice, delivering them while she was growing up.

He's a really cool guy, Momma.  I mean, besides being King and all.  I can see how you and he belong together.  He makes a point of spending a little of every day with me.  Sometimes we talk about governing, and sometimes about how much he loves the elves.  Sometimes he tells me stories of the years with you, and how much he misses them and can't wait to be back there with you again.  

Speaking of that, have you ever tried to cross over into Kiirajanna?  I know it's fixed to where humans without elf blood can't cross, but here's the thing, Momma.  I ran across your picture in a history book.  I mean, it wasn't you; it was an ancient elf queen.  She looked just like you, though.  She was also the one who created the pendant you gave me -- did you know it's got a name?  It's called Draignerthol here.  I mean, maybe it's a long shot, but there was such a strong resemblance.  

Maybe you could come over here and the three of us could all be together?

That's probably too much to ask for, isn't it?  Anyway, I hope this letter finds you well, Momma, and I can't wait to read your next letter to me!

Love,

Alyssa

The woman sighed again and looked up, her eyes meeting the courier's.  He smiled tenderly in return, guessing the meaning behind her emotional expression.

Silently she rose and stepped to the refrigerator.  As it happened, she'd just gone shopping, and on a whim she'd bought Alyssa's favorites.  Then when she'd gotten them home she'd sobbed over the bags before tossing them into the darkest recesses of the shelves. 

"Here, take these," she offered the courier, handing him the ingredients.  She'd never cook them again.

"Thank you, madam," he replied, holding three crisp hundred dollar bills out.  She took them, knowing it would do no good to try to explain pricing and value to a native of Kiirajanna, which had no currency.  The Earth-bound side of the elves' holdings was massively wealthy, built up over millennia, according to how he'd explained it to her.  It handsomely covered the elf king's bride's expenses, he'd said, and then, later, suitably managed to provide a nice retirement income for the former king and his wife. 

She would want for nothing for the rest of her life.  Except, of course, for her daughter's company.

She found herself in no mood to watch the dance of the window coverings this time as the courier pulled out of the drive and headed back toward the portal to Kiirajanna.

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

Hope you enjoyed this little bit of fiction!  Those who haven't read Dragon Queen yet--this occurs after the first book -- and hey, why haven't you read it yet, hmm? 

Those who have read it, thank you!  Please keep your reviews coming, and know that I'm always interested in your feedback on how I can make the stories better to read.

- TOSK

Origins Part 2: Literary Trios

Three's company, right?  Everybody loves Los Tres Amigos?

And then, don't forget Harry, Hermione, and Ron.  That's the most recent literary trio I've read, but there have been plenty over the years. 

Let's face it, I spent a lot of time writing Return of the Gods to be a fairly linear, solo Hero's Journey.  Yes, I left some of the elements out, more or less on purpose, but that book series tells a story in which Crystal learns and grows and pulls teachers to her side so she can learn some more, and she ends up--well, where she ends up.  Part of the journey is taken with others, but that's just part of the journey, and they're just secondary characters. 

(as a quick side note: that's also why I've had the fourth novel of that series on the back burner for so long.  Crystal learned what she needed to and got to where she got at the end of the third book.  It took a while to come up with a compelling story line to push beyond that, though I've got it now and you can expect to be able to read it sometime, for certain, in 2015, and this time it'll be dedicated to the real-life Phoenix and Birch, who have both unexpectedly passed away in the past extremely sorrowful year.  But that's another story.)

That writing experience then led me into the Elf Queen series wondering who the cast should be.  Alyssa, of course, who must bravely face her fate as the beloved and despised Dragon Queen of prophecy.  Her father, and her mother, and of course the queen.  But who else?

As my beloved bride Heide and I discussed it, a plan germinated and took hold and built the story that you will now read in Prophecy.  It wasn't me, to be honest; Heide deserves this credit.  She's the one who pointed out that Harry Potter had been so captivating in large part because we got to watch not one, and not two, but three characters grow up, each within the others' shadows.  Of course, Harry is the star of the show; heck, his name is on the book covers.  But ask any group of readers who their favorite character was, and you're just as likely to hear the name Ron or Hermione as you are to hear Harry. 

Besides, writing three coming of age stories at the same time, intertwined as one, is a challenge.  I like challenges.

So who to include in the trio?  One, of course, was Alyssa, who I'd already characterized out.  I'd run a contest early on, and a dear friend of mine had won the right to name a character in my coming book.  Sue, my friend, had asked me to name the character Sephaline, after a D&D character she'd played in our tabletop games.  To tell the truth I took some pretty dramatic artistic liberties, pulling some of her character Sephaline into the role and adding some of another couple of characters she'd created.  I wanted this character to be the equivalent of Ronald Weasley, after all, which meant there had to be a significant amount of charming, bumbling humor there, but Seph also had to have an inner core of competence.

Anybody who compares Prince Charming--Keion, First Prince of the Realm--to Hermione is getting my original intent dead on.  He's supposed to be perfect at everything the elves consider important, at least in his own mind, just as Hermione is perfect at everything the wizarding world considers important.  Granted, this is playing out in a male figure instead of a female one, and so I've had to work hard at making him princely arrogant instead of just a jackass. 

And then there's the romantic thing.

Just like most coming of age stories, nobody in this story really knows how to deal with the whole business of romantic interest.  Nobody, that is, except for the Adults in Charge, who in this case are in quite interesting (and fun to write) positions regarding that bit.  And trust me, it's only getting started; I have so many plans for interesting things to happen in the future episodes.  The cool thing for my position as the author is that I have a trio to play with.  The--well, the other cool thing is that it's not the primary plot line; it's got nothing to do with what the Cult of the Wyrm has planned for Alyssa and her reign.  It's just a whole lot of fun.

Anyway, so that's how the trio in Prophecy was invented.  If you haven't read that book yet, you'll probably want to get it and read it.  Northern Lights, the second part of the story, is coming out very, very soon!

Enjoy!

- TOSK

Origins - Kiirajanna

I'm occasionally asked where I come up with stuff, and I often answer sarcastically just because a) it's funny (to me) and b) I like saying the word "Schenectady."  But the truth is, as so many of us know, ideas are all around us.  The problem, really, is to pick the one we wish to write about.  Then we write about it, and as the story line is clicking along we make other decisions based on the silly stuff our characters are doing.  In the end, what looks like a single plot arc was really a series of more or less considered decisions.

So all that said, I want to go through a little bit of why I've done what I've done and published in a sort of "Origins" type of series.  This first?  Why Kiirajanna.

I've already kind of touched on the overall reasoning behind the Dragon Queen series in several interviews I've been in.  The short version is this: we (my family) were at Disney World a few years ago.  The kids were off doing something far more energetic than Heide and I had the ability to do, and so we sat and consumed a couple of adult beverages while talking about the future of my writing efforts.  We both wanted to see an elf story, because we hadn't read many good ones lately.  So--what kind of an elf story?

I'd already written an alternate history storyline in Return of the Gods, and as much as I enjoyed (and still am enjoying) writing on that line, I wanted something else.  As we discussed it, I looked around marveling at what goes into a single day at the Magical Kingdom.  It's no secret that there are miles and miles of tunnels underneath, along which the "cast members" travel in order to pop out into public view when/where needed.  That got me to thinking about a world behind the world--a shadow place, similar to the Earth but not exactly like it, a world where magic exists.  A world, to go further, that is run by elves.

Now, that's all well and good, but the problem with any story is that you need compelling conflict.  That's where I came up with the succession plan the elves have, where half of the new royalty has to come from Earth stock.  Genetically it's a brilliant idea, but emotionally and sociologically it would be problematic, as Alyssa rapidly finds out.

You can't just have one conflict, though, which is why the Cult of the Wyrm was inserted into the story.  I won't ruin the plot for any who haven't yet read Prophecy, so I'll just leave it there.  The interesting thing about that insertion, though, is that I started at the end.  There is a definite, central "villain" in the story, believe me.  You don't see him in the first book, nor will you see him in the second book despite seeing significantly more of the conflict he is creating.

Thus was the primary plot line for Prophecy: Dragon Queen born.  In future episodes of this Origins series I plan to discuss other things, like where the characterization ideas came from and why certain things are the way they are.  Hey, I find it fun to talk about, and hopefully you find it interesting to read.

Till then, enjoy!

- TOSK

Dumb Questions--or, What it Means to Be a Creator

What does it mean to be a creator?

I've been a more or less lurking participant in one of the best-known writer resource groups on Facebook for a few years now.  To give credit where it's due, that group is Indie Author Group, which upon this writing time is nearly 9K members strong, and it's the first group I always recommend my friends join when they ask me about writing, whether or not they actually plan to become Indies. Simply put, it's an awesome group of awesomeness.

That said, I've seen dumb questions there for years.

I know, I know.  I've been a teacher, and now a teacher's teacher, for nigh on two decades now.  "There's no such thing as a dumb question!" we thunder at the beginning of every class, in the hopes that our students will be brave enough to venture into that realm we call engagement.  It's an important thing to say, even if it's not really, necessarily, technically, always, um, true.

Yikes.

So to be perfectly honest, yes, there are indeed dumb questions.  And yes, they're much more frequently asked by teachers than by students.  So no, if you're a student, don't worry about asking one, just ask what's on your mind.

But back to the IAG and dumb questions.  Yes, there are.  I'll be happy to add, though, that the questions are only dumb when taken from the position of experience.  In other words, when the new folks ask them, they're really not dumb questions.

One of those came (back) up the other day.  Somebody elsewhere posted a blog about how writers can only consider themselves authors if they meet certain (higher, of course) conditions.  Yes, this is complete hokum, because if you actually look up the meaning of the words, they're perfect synonyms.  It's just somebody's way of feeling all elite and shiny and stuff.

Then, more recently, somebody else posted a question that is in the category I was referring to.  I'll not name names, nor will I repeat the question, but it was another of the fairly standard breed of "is it acceptable to..." questions about writing.  Now, let me be clear: the group wouldn't exist without those questions.  We get a lot of them regularly thanks to the number of new authors who join our ranks.  To them, they're absolutely not dumb questions.

To those of us who've done this a while, though --?

Generally speaking, the answer to any "is it acceptable to violate such-and-such rule" question, for those of us who've done this a while, is that if you have to ask, it's not.  Now, I really didn't get that when I started, and so I don't expect new folks now to get it, either.  Regardless, no.  Just -- no.  The rules are there for a reason.

But wait! you'll exclaim.  There are tons of writers who've become famous while breaking the rules of writing.  Many of them became famous specifically for breaking the rules, right?

Yes!  Yes, that's right.  But they didn't have to ask.

Look, writing is a craft, an art form.  It's something that you learn the basics of, the rules of, early on, and then as you do it, and you read more, and then you write more, and then you read more, and all along you're accepting criticism on what you've written, eventually you might get pretty good at it.  At that point, you'll be a craftsman -- er, person.  Whatever.  You'll be an artist.  You'll be a creator.

The thing is, artists and creators don't ask if it's okay to break a rule.  They just do it, because they know when it needs to be done.  They know when it needs to be done because they've gone through and followed the rules for long enough to achieve a certain level of mastery, of craftsmanship. 

So, again--if you have to ask whether it's okay for you to break a particular rule, the answer should always be no.

Enjoy!

- TOSK

Army Training, Sir!

General Barnicke: Where have you been, soldier?
John Winger: Training, sir.
Soldiers: Training, sir.
General Barnicke: What kind of training?
John Winger: Army training, Sir.
Soldiers: Army training, Sir.

- from the motion picture Stripes

You know, when I entered the Active Duty military as a young second lieutenant, I figured that it was all business, all good soldiering, and there wasn't any of that joking around silly stuff of fiction to be had anywhere, anytime.

Boy, was I wrong.

My second day on actual Active Duty, in fact, is a day I'll remember for a long, long time.  See, I'd shown up the day before, dropped off of the back of a 5-ton truck in the middle of what most Seattle area residents were enjoying as a nice, relaxed snow day, to take charge of a platoon-leaderless platoon of motorized infantrymen doing light infantry maneuvers.  Yes, that all works out to mean that guys who were used to putting their rucksacks in the back seat of a Hummer and driving to the battlefield were ordered, on a day of inclement weather, to put those rucks on their backs, move on foot through thick woods, and close with and destroy enemy forces.

In retrospect, just that last sentence is comical as crap.  Shouldn't be, but it is.

For our first enemy contact, we were crossing a narrow but rapidly-flowing stream that had been covered in snow when an opfor (opposing forces--our own troops playing against us in war games) machine gun (firing blanks) opened up on us.  We closed with and destroyed the position in a suitable timeframe, granted, but not before one of my soldiers slipped and fell directly and completely into the 12-inch-deep stream, causing instant hypothermia followed by a quick Medevac.  *sigh*

Oh, he ended up being just fine, but I wasn't just worried about his welfare.  We'd been told over and over at West Point that a platoon leader whose troops had to be removed due to heat or cold injuries was liable to be removed of leadership on the spot. So there I was, first day on the job, liable for--yeah.  Dang. 

They didn't, though.  Relieve me, that is.  I stayed in charge, and we kept pushing forward to the next objective.  There, we assaulted a hill, again firing blanks, and we successfully took the hill and dug into defensive positions.  Only, then my platoon sergeant needed medical attention, and not due to cold injury. No, he'd consumed too many Cokes in a heated Hummer, and he was dehydrated. 

Double dang.  Crap, even.  Any chance I ever had of becoming a general officer, I saw slipping through the cracks down the mudslide that was the hill we'd taken through the warming snow, and all that on my first day.

The next day dawned cold and crappy, but that is the kind of weather that makes most infantrymen happy.  We rose and left behind the comfort of--um, holes in the dirt--and continued in a southwestward direction toward what was marked as the Final Objective.  I, the newbie platoon leader, was in the middle, the second most senior platoon leader to my left, and the senior PL, the guy ready for another post soon, to my right, all moving steadily through the damp and chilly forest.

It didn't take too long to get there--which I must admit I found a little suspicious at the time.  "Alpha Six," the company radio called out for the my commander, "enemy position spotted to our front.  Sending scout, over," the senior platoon leader to my right said, and wow, I thought--smart man, apparently--I'd had us as not quite there yet according to my own map readings.

Then again, you know what they say about second lieutenants with a map.  If you don't, then go to any web site where there's a lot of derogatory cursing going on, and you'll get the gist.  Despite the weekends I'd spent as a kid with my dad roaming the Tombigbee Forest with a map and a compass, I was supposed to have no idea where I was, as evidenced by the golden bar upon my lapel, and I was fine with that as I waited for instructions to attack from the company commander.


"Alpha Six," an embarrassed voice finally came across the line, "We scouted the enemy position, and found that it is our position from last night."

They'd left our side and land-navigated into a full circle.

*sigh*

I giggled a lot that day, thanks to the confirmation that others were as prone to errors as I was.  More so, even, when it came to land navigation.  In fact, I still giggle about that, today, many years after I left the active duty infantry behind me for good.

A year, ish, later, I had my own Senior Lieutenant moment.  This time we were at Yakima, our major training ground for motorized Fort Lewis troops.  We were playing against an opfor again, and to be honest I was really looking forward to being relieved as a platoon leader by some young butterbar so that I could move up to battalion staff. 

"I see troop movement to the front," one of my squad leaders called, and I relayed that information up to Alpha Six.  I didn't see anything, granted, but I was hunkered down in a Command & Control position near the middle, and the squad leaders, all experienced sergeants, were looking out over the killing field we hoped to command with their night vision sights.

"Keep me informed," my company commander radioed back. 

Some time later--I don't know; it was well into the nighttime hours, and I wasn't watching a clock--the same squad leader reported more troop movement to his front.  I relayed it up, and the company commander radioed back, "Keep me informed."

The third time the squad leader reported movement, it was well into the early morning hours, and so I was tired of the lack of progression.  I raised the platoon radio handset in preparation to order one of the forward troops to get out of their vehicle and check out the movement to the front when another, somewhat more senior, squad leader radioed in.

"You idiot, those are cows," the rebuke came clearly across the platoon's frequency.

Dutifully, I reported the cows up to the company commander.  After all, I wanted him to get whatever rest--and, um, giggles--he could, right?

In the morning I asked him whether he'd relayed the cows report to battalion.  "Nope, didn't have the courage," he said, and that made me laugh.

Hey, at least I had the courage to report the cows.

The strange, writer-centric part of this?  If I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't believe the incredible humor that was part of the service lifestyle.  Too often we writers get drawn into ideas about how things should be instead of how things are, and we forget that real life is way, way stranger than any fiction we can create.

Enjoy!

- TOSK

The Absence of Noise

"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers." - Doug Larson

How strange our language is, to define certain things as the absence of other things.

I'm specifically thinking of the word quiet, which is defined by Ye Olde Dictionary as the absence of noise.  Noise--yes, that can be defined, and pointed to; we all know noise when we hear it.  Right?  But quiet?  It's--well, um, it's the lack of, um, well, it's, I guess, it's the lack of noise.

See what I mean?

There are any number of sonic physical definitions we could come up with.  After all, sound is merely a vibration in the air around us, and that is easily measured in terms of decibels.  I suppose one could--and, now that I think on it, someone probably already did--specify "quiet" as a certain number of dBs.  Still, that seems a waste, since few of us carry dB-meters around with us.

That said, we all know what quiet sounds like, right?

Quiet's certainly not the only word that's defined like that.  Take my own pastime, writing.  It's got an entire category of genres--and here I refer to non-fiction--that is defined by what it is not.  Fiction is fairly well defined; it is prose that's imaginary, made up, false.  Romance, for example, is fiction (take that for what it's worth).  The same is true of science fiction, but I suppose that one was too obvious.

So the antonym, or opposite meaning word, of fiction is truth, right?  Problem is, that space in the bookstore contains far too many books by folks like Rush Limbaugh to be called "The Truth Section."  Thus, I imagine its title is the result of a bookseller of old nodding at it and saying, "Forsooth, verily, I supposeth that yon volumes be not entirely made up."  Not Entirely Made Up is too long a title for that area, though.

Hence, the non in non-fiction.

But I digress.

I've written about quiet before.  Then, it wasn't completely quiet; I was actually surrounded by the beautiful crescendo of a natural wooded environment awakening for a splendid fall morning.  This morning, on the other hand, the lack of noise was pretty much complete.

I awoke to a power outage.

I didn't realize it at first.  Upon my eyes fluttering to their open position, I noticed a couple of things in rapid succession.  The first was that it seemed quiet--but then again, it was morning in our new Mobile, Alabama, home, a solidly brick house with a decent quantity of sound-proofing.  Second, my bladder was full, full, full.  The second sensation rapidly overwhelmed the first, and so I staggered toward the bathroom along a path I'd already walked a few times that was luckily rather well back-lit by the morning sun streaming through the open window shade.

As usual, I closed the bathroom door first so as to not disturb my beautiful wife's slumber, and only when the door latch caught did I flip the light switch to its on position.

Nothing happened.

Now, I wasn't entirely awake yet.  That, and my mind was occupied in dealing with the screaming sensation coming from my bladder.

Slowly it dawned on me that what should've happened--a bathroom appearing before my very eyes--hadn't, and that could only mean one of two things: either the bathroom had been taken away in the middle of the night, or the light switch was broken.  So I did the only thing any sane person would do: I reached over, flipped the light switch back off, and then moved it back up again.

Again I was shocked by the amount of nothingness that happened.

By this point I was coming out of my morning stupor enough to wonder if it could be a power thing--I didn't take those electrical engineering classes at West Point for nothing, after all--but also by this point my bladder was starting to wrap itself around my entire abdominal cavity and do its best boa constrictor impersonation.  Luckily I knew pretty much where the toilet was, and I'd learned a secret trick long ago that drastically improves my aim first thing in the morning, especially in the dark. 

(don't tell anyone, but I'll share it with you--the secret trick is called sitting down.  I manage to avoid hitting the seat and the floor 100% of the time when I do that little amazing trick--just, never in public.  I am, after all, a manly man)

Bladder finally satisfied, I sallied forth to discover the extent of the not-noise.  Our bedroom ceiling fan was off, I noticed for the first time.  It's almost always on, and though it's not a noisy one, its soft shwoop-shwoop is noticeable in its absence, once you--um, notice it.  The main bathroom similarly didn't have any light no matter how many times the switch was flicked.  Every appliance in the kitchen was dark, and even the little guy in the refrigerator refused to turn that light on when I opened the door.

Definitely, the power was out, I realized as I closed the refrigerator door.  See how much good that excellent EE education I received was doing for me?

I tried using the spiffy cell phone app the power company has to check it.  Problem is, Mississippi Power and Alabama Power are so close together--literally--that they use the same system, apparently, and so when I signed in I got a "well, of course your power is out; your account was closed five years ago," message.  No, no, no--not that account in Biloxi, this one here in Mobile, I told my cell phone, which for once didn't prove itself smarter than me.

Finally I called the actual phone number, and right away they told me that there was, in fact,a power outage, and that crews were working on it, and that power was expected to be restored within a couple of hours.

Ahhhhh, I was finally able to say.  Coming up: a couple hours of--well, of quiet, and today I'm working the late shift and don't have to be in till afternoon, which meant that I could enjoy the entirety of it.

What was I to do?

Sleep, was the obvious answer, and so I did the only sane thing I could think of.  I went back to bed.

Have a great day, and--oh, by the way, have a great 2015!

- TOSK

Oh Facebook! My Facebook!

Well, hell's bells.

Crap.

I mean, it was just getting safe to come right out in public and opine that maybe a certain large retail web site isn't gonna to punch us authors in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport, what after all the uber-sales authors got in the middle of what was essentially a contract negotiation between them and a major publisher, which finally ended after the giant retailer embarrassed the snot out of the other side by happily coming to terms with someone else, which made the other publisher whimper up to the table and the mega-sales authors run a full-page ad asking the DoJ for--um, something--and everybody finally SHUT UP about it and then finally the whole angry, disastrous mess came to an end just like this overly long run-on sentence is doing.

Now it's Facebook's turn to poke the bear, apparently.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the big evil giant of a bad-man corporation is out to punch entrepreneurs in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport (sound familiar?).  Or, at least, take our advertising money for, um, revenue.

Yes, Facebook!  My Facebook has announced that commercial operations have to pay to play, now.  Or will, then, in the near future, anyway.  Which means, I assume (they haven't, near as I can tell, released a description of their actual algorithm yet, nor are they likely to), that people are far less likely to see what I put on my author FB page unless I pay to Boost the post, in which case they're actually more likely to see it.  Which is, um, how advertising is supposed to work, by the way.

Which, I think, ain't all that bad of a thing.

Look, here's how I see it.  If you want to see what's on my author page, go look.  Please; I'd love for more people to do that.  In fact, I'm about to start putting even more stuff up there, considering the tremendous success I had through NaNoWriMo with activity.  To tell the truth, I'm'a gonna start havin' some fun. But that said, if you don't want to see what's on my author page, then you must be insane you shouldn't have it stuck in your timeline.  Shouldn't, that is, unless you've identified yourself as someone who likes the kind of stuff that's on my author page, and I've paid Facebook to run a targeted ad in the hopes of getting your attention. Which is, again I say, how advertising is supposed to work.

Yes, I'm an author--an authorpreneur, as I've been referring to myself since--well, quite some time ago.  I'm also a Facebook user, though, and to be perfectly honest, the number of times I interact with authorly stuff  on FB is pretty minimal.  Oh, I've bought a couple of books thanks to interactions on FB, but usually I'm on there just trying to convince my friends of the opposite political persuasion that I'm right and they're wrong, or posting pretty little pictures of my Chihuahua, or stuff like that. 

And the thing is, I bet you are, too.

The part of FB's message that is being forgotten, or ignored, by so many folks right now is that "Facebook’s paid-advertising options have become more effective recently," a claim that I, personally, have seen.  My Thanksgiving promotion was wildly successful, in fact, in large part thanks to a simple and fairly cheap Facebook ad. 

A friend of mine wrote (in a massively-popular Facebook post about, of all things, Facebook's new policy) something to the effect of "I'm sure, if you complain loudly enough, Facebook will refund every penny you've ever paid for your free advertising."  Zing.  That's a tad snarky, perhaps, but the core is something I agree with wholeheartedly.  Facebook created for us a social media platform, somewhere we could go for free and post pictures of weddings and weedings and kittens and puppies and everything in between.  Yay, them!  That some were able to tap into it for a free advertising platform is good for them, but there's no reason to expect the practice to continue.

Anyway, there's an awful lot of opinion flowing around out there.  Assuming you made it this far, then you've now read mine.  Feel free to share yours in the comments; I love hearing from you! 


Peace,

- TOSK