I’m very happy, and very pleased to be able to show you all the cover of my new book
Here Be Dragons Cover
Cudos to Blue Harvest Creative who do all the formatting and graphic work for my books. They have created another miracle.
What do you think? Leave a comment!
PS: Official release date is June 26th 2014.
Writing
This is the equivalent of an old-fashioned chain letter – but in a really good way. You see, we writers get to show you some behind the scenes stuff that happens when we write. And you get to find out about more authors who may be unknown to you. Amazing authors. Funny authors. Young authors and old authors.
I was graciously invited by , one of the amazing authors. Her books are intense thrillers with a spiritual touch. You can find her blog over here: Ramblings of a Mad Southern Woman.
We all answer the same four questions. And then we’re supposed to show you three more authors – sadly, I could only connect to one. But one is better than none, right? So read all the way through, and find a great author who created a wonderful and magical world for her tales.
Oh, and feel free to link to this post and others in The Writer’s Process Blog Tour. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, G+ and where else you meet your friends. Thanks!
Anyway, here’s my behind the scenes stuff:
1) What am I working on? Continue reading
Bad Guy
Everyone knows the Bad Guys. They wear a black hat or helmet. Or gory make-up. Or masks. Or they are ugly. And of course, they are mad, or sadistic, or aliens, or ruthless killers or all of the above. It’s easy, isn’t it?
Actually, it’s not.
Because those bad guys drive your story, at least for a while. They are the ones pushing the hero, setting things in motion and finally, forcing the hero to transform. They are important. They matter.
Makes sense? Not really? Okay, let’s look at some of them. (And cut me some slack. I’m not that much of movie gal, so if you have better examples, please share them in the comments.) Continue reading
Dragon
Quietly, I’ve been working on a short story to usher in a full novel featuring dragons.
I’ve been partial to dragons for a long time, admittedly. It all started when I was an exchange student in California, in the senior year of Senior High. (Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, for those who are interested. And no, my fellow students didn’t know me as Hannah Steenbock.) The school library drew me magically, since my afternoons and evenings in a family with children clearly younger than me were not very eventful. And there, I found the Pern novels. I was an instant fan. In fact, I spent quite a bunch of my time translating “Dragonflight” into German. Nothing ever came out of that, however.
Anyway, I started a dragon novel about a year ago when an Idea hit me. Girl meets dragon, then some other characters appeared and started to weave into three story lines. And stalled. Continue reading
Bookstores are doomed, they say. They are disappearing at an alarming rate, they say. All over the world, big book seller chains are in trouble.
They blame Amazon.
And it’s true that a lot of book buying has shifted online. Ebooks are only part of that phenomenon, even physical books are bought online more and more.
It makes sense to me. It’s so much easier to find books online, to find recommendations – and last but not least, ebooks take almost no time for delivery. It’s also a rather comfortable way of getting new reading fodder.
In fact, I have to admit that I have stayed away from big bookstores in the last years or so. I have walked through some small ones and left without buying. These days, I feel overwhelmed by looking at thousands of books that don’t interest me while those fields that do interest me are not stocked. So I go online.
And yet, for some reason, I kept thinking about a weird question:
What would a bookstore have to look like so I would enjoy going there? Continue reading
Writer
They say to never apologize after a long break in blogging. They say to just pick up the pieces and continue as if nothing ever went wrong… lah di dah.
Well, that doesn’t feel right. You deserve to know what really happened:
The afternoon after I published the post with swords (in October), the school horse I usually ride decided to play rodeo, right at the end of the lesson. He pitched me off right over his neck and head, after bucking several times first.
I managed to turn the fall slightly and slammed down on my right shoulder. My right collar bone took the full brunt of the impact. In fact, it splintered quite impressively. I ended up in ER, got some painkillers, was sent home with a special clavicle bandage and an appointment for surgery a few days later. Continue reading
Manuskript *
The other day, a friend called me and asked for help. She had been given an assignment: Write a short story.
If you ask me, that’s a pretty tall assignment – and it was given in a foreign language class, on top. But then, I was often asked in school to write a tale, without getting guidelines. Teachers rarely write stories, so maybe they assume that creating a little short story is a snap, precisely because they are short.
Well, it isn’t.
And here’s what I told my friend – she needed simple guidelines:
A short story is about an extraordinary experience of the Main Character.
That’s the foundation. And yet what exactly that extraordinary experience is completely depends on the character and on what kind of story you want to tell. Continue reading
Seax
I found myself grinning wickedly when I discovered another archaeology article this morning. This one is about an Etruscan grave. When it was opened for the first time, it contained the remains of two people, a lance, a vase and some jewelry.
Yes, they thought. Classic. An Etruscan prince on his own, wide slab with the lance, and his wife on the second, narrower slab. How romatic to have the two of them in a single grave, with all the goods in place. And news of a great Etruscan Prince made the rounds.
Exept it wasn’t. Continue reading
Hand print
Imagine the Stone Age. What do you see? Well, the usual picture is men as hunters, inventors, protectors and artists. Because most of the scenes in the cave paintings show animals and hunting, it was thought that the artists were men, as well.
Of course.
And all those handprints found on the walls were made by men, too. And the small ones among them must have belonged to boys being introduced to the art. Makes sense, right? You can probably even see them in your imagination, sitting or standing in the flickering torch light, mixing paint, drawing those animals, being creative. Male heads, shaggy beards, possibly even chanting hunting magic in low, deep voices.
Guess what? Wrong image. Continue reading
Signal of the 52-hertz whale
I’m quite excited about finding an article about this whale on Wikipedia. Because this fellow is the inspiration for Pu’ukani’s Song. I don’t remember where I first read about him.
Basically, they call him the loneliest whale in the world. That’s because he sings at a frequency that no other whale uses. He’s unique. And possibly lonely. And still alive, they have found his song under the sea every year.
He lives in the Pacific, travelling as far north as Alaska. And that’s about all we know about him. He might be a fin whale – blue whale hybrid, or have a malformation. Even so, he has grown and matured, and the voice has lowered slightly. So much for the science.
For me, just the idea of such a giant singing every year, possibly hoping to attract a mate or maybe at least some company is quite inspiring. Letting my mind wander, it goes into imagining a culture of whales, a society with rules, traditions, good people and possibly bad people. All of it under water, dominated by the environment, floating, with sounds that echo through the vast blue.
That’s what reading Wikipedia can do for me. What inspiration did you find on Wikipedia?
