God willing (especially in regard to my transportation), I plan to be at Viking Fest Minnesota this weekend and next, Oct. 4-5 and 11-12, at the Dakota County Fairgrounds in Farmington, Minn.
I will be in the vendors’ area, selling and signing my books.
Thanks to the Viking Age Club and Society of the Sons of Norway for making my presence possible.
Tomorrow I’m off, as is my custom, to Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota. I’m told we Vikings will once again be right across the street from the main entrance. The weather is supposed to be unseasonably warm. The festival runs Thursday through Saturday.
If you’re in the area, I’ll be there (God willing), and have the complete Erling series to sign and sell, along with Viking Legacy.
Note to burglars — my home will not be empty. My heavily armed renter will be in residence. And he never sleeps.
No book review tonight. Instead, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Or to put it another way, whatever comes into my head.
I read a good article about the semicolon today in Writer’s Digest. The author courageously defended the old s-c, and I applaud him. I myself love the semicolon. Aside from its delightful precision as a punctuation mark, when wielded skillfully, I have a happy memory of it.
The memory is fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. I was writing some kind of an essay or report in school – elementary school, I think. The “new” pale brick building on the south side of town.
I was composing, as I recall, some kind of a complex sentence. I had a complicated thought I was trying to express. I wanted to tie it all together, but it had a lot of working parts going, some of them more important than others. “What I need,” I thought to myself, “is a punctuation mark that indicates a major division in in my train of thought, but also retains a connection to the previous thought.” (Or words to that effect.)
And it occurred to me – “Hey! That’s what semicolons are for!” And I triumphantly put down a semicolon, intentionally for the first time in my life. The semicolon belonged to me now. I was its master. I had summoned it; it had not been forced on me by my teacher.
It was a moment in my evolution as a writer, though I didn’t understand it yet.
Jumping to the present, I haven’t been feeling well lately. My plan was to be doing a lot of stuff to promote the audiobook of Troll Valley right now, but I haven’t been up to the effort.
I’m embarrassed to say it’s just a cold. I see friends on Basefook and Xwitter talking about their mothers dying, or themselves being diagnosed with cancer or breaking a limb or something. And here I am, bellyaching about a common cold. So let me stipulate that I’m not competing for your sympathy. If you have only compassion enough to spare for one person today, it shouldn’t be me.
But I haven’t had a cold in years. I used to get them regularly, when I ran the bookstore at the schools. All that human contact – couldn’t avoid it. And for a while there, it seemed like every time I got that annual cold, it would settle into my chest and in the end require antibiotics.
But I don’t think I’ve had a serious cold since I retired, which is a few years now. And this one has knocked me over. Sunday was the worst day – I spent it mostly in bed, and didn’t even make popcorn for supper, which is my sacred Sunday custom. Since then I’ve been feeling a little better each day, and right now I’m actually eyeing my work load again.
I was delighted to discover I have an old stock of zinc tablets that I’d forgotten about, on a shelf. Hate the aftertaste, but they seem to help. And my ribs don’t hurt as much from coughing today.
To sum up – buy the audiobook of Troll Valley. My Norwegian accent alone is worth the price.
(And you can admire the cover – designed by Phil Wade – in both versions! Collect the whole set!)
Years in the making, with a cast of one, the audio version of Troll Valley is now available on Amazon ACX. It went live today.
If you’ve ever felt a void in your life, because you hadn’t had the opportunity to hear my voice for 9 1/2 hours, this is your lucky day.
I think it’s pretty good. Tell us what you think.
HOT TIP: Hurry out and buy paper manufacturing stocks now! Because my acclaimed novel, Troll Valley, was released today in paperback, and surely those presses will be running till their gears smoke, turning out copies for a hungry public.
[NOTE: This is the paperback version I’m talking about. The audiobook, about which I’ve written so much, is still in the pipeline. The instructions at Amazon ACX say the approval process may take as long as ten days – but a look around in online forums tells me six weeks isn’t uncommon, and it can take months. So your patience is appreciated.]
I’m planning to accompany the audiobook release, if I’m still alive when it happens, with a five-minute video short, to promote it. I’m intrigued by these short videos I see all over (on Facebook and YouTube; I do not visit Tiktok). Just as I taught myself book recording on Audible, I’m now teaching myself video editing. The result, when I have accomplished it, will be posted here.
In personal news, I got word of a recent death that made me thoughtful. It was that of a man who had been one of my schoolteachers. He never liked me, and at one point he singled me out for a humiliating punishment, in front of my classmates.
I forgave him, formally in my heart, years ago. As a matter of spiritual obligation. But I couldn’t help recalling one of C. S. Lewis’ letters (or it might have been a journal entry, but I think it was a letter, perhaps to his brother). He wrote it as a young man, recalling the sadistic, insane headmaster he had endured at one of the boarding schools he attended as a boy. But now he was a young man, and enjoying life and freedom, while his old tormenter was long dead “and in hell.” (This, I should mention, was before his conversion). I must admit that I had anticipated this teacher’s death with… what shall I call it? Interest. But he lived quite a long life. I may not outlast him by much.
Loni Anderson died too. She was a native of St. Paul, and a lot of people around here (not me, I must admit) remembered some local commercials she did here (as a brunette) before she upped stakes for Hollywood.
Like most people, I remember her best for the brilliant comedy series, “WKRP In Cincinnati.” I remember my astonishment as I found myself increasingly drawn to her as the series went on. I was always a firm Jan Smithers supporter – her character, Bailey Quarters, was the girl of my dreams – drop dead gorgeous, but so insecure I could imagine her going out with a dork like me. But Anderson’s brainy glamor grew on me, in spite of myself.
I’m already on record as being in favor of commercialized glamor. Loni Anderson carried it off well. R.I.P.
In case you’re in the general area this weekend, I will be making a not-so-rare public appearance, Saturday and Sunday, at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom Minnesota. This will be my first time at this event; they claim to be family friendly. (Though I sometimes pretend to be too good for Renaissance Festivals, I am in fact a lowly fantasy writer, after all.)
This will also be my first opportunity to offer my entire Erling Saga for sale in paperback form. For many years only The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea have been incarnate, and I’ve given away promotional bookmarks for the e-books of the rest of the series. When people asked if they were available in paper too, I’ve mumbled something about “maybe someday.” Well, someday is now. I assume after this I’ll have to answer questions about whether there are e-book versions.
There’ll be questions about audiobooks too, of course, so I’ll still get to practice my “someday” responses. (Troll Valley is coming, though. I’m about a third of the way through it. Didn’t get much done this morning; Friday mornings are rough because the garbage trucks rattle by.)
Pray for me. I’ll be dealing with human beings, and that’s always a trial.
Well, there they are. I finally got my paper copies of The Baldur Game yesterday, so at last I can take a family portrait. My magnum opus, for all the world to see.
I hope there are people out there who’ve been burned by George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, who have vowed never to start reading an unfinished fantasy series again, who will now descend like seagulls on a bag of potato chips (but with better manners, I hope).
I got a fair start, in terms of sales. The book climbed as high as number 20 on the Amazon Christian Fantasy list (after Hunter Baker’s Basefook post). It’s sagged now, of course, inevitably. This is where I’m hoping that people are using the time reading, so they can post their rave reviews in multitudes after a few days.
I’m not a man to toot his own horn, as I think you know. But I went through the whole series last year, shaping each book up for paperback release, and I can’t deny I liked them very well. I believe that if somebody else had written them, I’d be promoting them with enthusiasm.
For all who’ve bought them, thank you. If you’d post an Amazon review, or at least a rating, I’d be grateful.
I’d like to think this is a significant day in literary history. It’s certainly significant in my literary history. The Baldur Game, the final volume in my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, has gone live on Amazon today.
It’s only the ebook at this point — the paperback is ready to go, but I hit a small glitch in getting the cover together. I hope that’ll be straightened out very soon.
An era in my life is finished. These are the books I dreamed of writing as a boy. Whatever I accomplish or fail to accomplish in my little life, I’ll be able to say that I fulfilled that dream. I set my books before the world; let it judge them as it will .
I hope you enjoy it.
Sarah A. Hoyt, who blogs at According to Hoyt and who frequents the juggernaut that is Instapundit, was kind enough to include my novel The Year of the Warrior in her final post in her Liberty Book Promo, promoting authors who support freedom. Here’s the link. There are other books there that might interest you too.
Today is a stellar day, a frabjous day – a day I shall much note and long remember.
My endless book translation job is done, done, done. Barring touch-up requests, assuming there are any, it’s over. All but the invoicing. The book was more than 500 pages long, and it wasn’t large print. Footnotes were involved as well.
I once compared translating a book to demolishing a piano, passing each piece through a suspended iron ring, and then reassembling the instrument on the other side. My piano has been reconstituted (Norwegian to English, of course) and I like to think it’s still relatively in tune.
I am limited in what I can tell you about the book (I’ve said this before, but you may have missed it. It’s mathematically possible you might even be interested). It’s a literary biography. I’m doing the work for a scholar in another state. I believe my translation is only for the scholar’s use in a larger project, so I have no expectations of ever seeing it published.
Anyway, it’s done. I am working hard at the moment getting used to the now-alien concept of having free time.
Also, I wanted to mention that I finally (there was a delay) got some copies of the Amazon paperback edition of The Year of the Warrior. This enables me to share the picture above, a family photo of the whole series, except for the baby on the way.
