The Next Book

News: The new book I am working on is not a Howard Carter book. There will be more Howard Carter stories, of course. They seem to occur randomly in my head and I can't contain them so those who enjoy them will find more to enjoy in the future. But the next novel will be something else entirely.

I hope you're willing to go with me on this journey because I find that I cannot live by farce alone.

One of the things that interests me about writing is how books and writing facilitate the nearly-magical transmission of ideas from my head to yours. I've worked in every aspect of this industry from the pressroom to the author's desk and there are no bits of it that I am not passionately intrigued about, even if I don't want to earn my living doing them every day.

During NaNoWriMo this year, I took the opportunity to explore that a little and I think I'm on to something, a story which will allow me to fuse my passion for history with my love of the written word.

My passion for the written word has taken me down some very strange roads and into some wonderful friendships. I've been in rare book archives and breathed the air of previous millennia and held the weight of cuneiform tablets.

All this gave rise to a desire to write about it and breathed life into a character who is a paleographer, someone who studies ancient writings. Jordan Elias is her name and her adventures will preoccupy most of my writing time this year, and this blog will track some of the research I'm doing to breathe life into her character and her world.

Speaking of Jordan, the characters I'll be using aren't new to me. They've been around awhile and I've tried at various times to get them into print. The closest I ever came to getting an agent was with these characters and only the imposition of Howard "Very Silly Book" Carter sidetracked me from pursuing their story. I've had a lot of fun with Howard and, as I said, he's neither gone nor forgotten, but I very much want these stories which predate his escapades to see the light of day.

The setting this time will be modern-day Seattle and London. There will be libraries. There will be books. There will be intrigue. I'm looking at what I wrote during NaNoWriMo as well as the various drafts the original stories trying to find the story I want to focus on finishing and selling this year.

I have a feeling this one will come together fairly quickly.

In the meantime, I commend to your attention this talk Neil Gaiman gave at the Long Now Foundation (via Brainpicker) to be well and truly worth an hour and 43 minutes of your time. If you have any interest at all in how the stories live and breathe in our midst and the methods of how they are conveyed across the years.

The Stories We Tell

Last month, the Engineer and I were sitting at our local pub waiting for dinner. She was knitting something infinitely complex out of silk and glass beads and I was reading aloud to her from Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. If you haven't read it (and I honestly think that you should) it begins with a runaway horse, loose on the streets of New York City near the turn of the last century. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I quite enjoyed reading it aloud to really experience the poetry of the piece.

Then our food arrived and I put the book down because books and burgers don't mix.

Putting it down on the table, I noticed that the couple at the next table had been listening to me read. Not because I was reading loudly -- I was barely audible above the basketball game playing on the TV nearby -- but I like to think it was because people instinctively like being told stories.

That moment touched me in a way that made me pause despite the meal getting cold in front of me to take stock of this thing that we do.  Telling stories is a vital part of who I am. I've often been told that I seem to think in anecdotes, and it's not far off. I use stories as a way for me to absorb and understand the world. I look for the beginnings, middles, and ends and attempt as best I can to celebrate the stories unfolding all around me.

Sharing them -- mine or anyone else's -- is a tradition that goes back to the handprints on the cave wall and probably further even than that. And reading aloud to my wife is something I don't do as often as I used to (we shared the entire Harry Potter series this way) and it's something I should do more often.

Yesterday Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and SciShow announced a new convention entirely devoted to the power and magic of stories. That's the actual copy from their Facebook page, by the way: "created to celebrate the power and magic of story-telling."

I bought my ticket immediately because efforts like this a true and noble causes. I won't be a presenter, though I offered myself as a volunteer. Which is nice in a way, because when you're a presenter at conventions you often get just a keyhole view of the convention and I really love the idea of spending a chilly fall weekend in a crowd who is excited about celebrating storytelling. I mean, just imagine it: an entire convention center filled to the rafters with devotees of the vehicle we use for passing on our culture and the empathy that comes from imagining ourselves into other lives, that which in the end most makes us human. 

Who doesn't want to walk among that crowd? How does it get better than that? 

Anyway, I hope to see you there.

Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of Rituals and Writers

This is going to be a bit long. I apologize in advance.

I noticed recently that my coffee ritual has become rather sloppy of late. Rather than carefully monitoring the temperature of the water and the exactitude of my scoops of ground coffee, I've been sort of winging it -- phoning it in. Thankfully, the quality of your beans will save you to a point, but only just.

I've essentially perfected the mediocre cup of great coffee.

For those who think I might've sold out with that coffee cup logo, fear not. My favorite cafe has long since closed its doors and faded into local memory.

And whither goes the coffee shop, thither followed my writing ritual...

There just aren't enough writer-friendly coffee shops in the world any more. Speak not to me of the sundrenched sterility of the Starbucks lobby. I seek a dim place of creaky chairs and enthusiastically nerdy conversations. A place of fair-to-middlin' coffee and poor lighting. Lots of places to plug in a laptop are nice, but not required. Sketchy wifi is a plus because I get more done when Facebook's siren song is muted and unreliable.

How did I get so reliant on rituals? When did I teach myself that I can only fly while clutching a feather in my trunk? And why is there a mouse wearing a drum major getup in my hat anyway?

You'll note that this is one of those posts where I laboriously link back to previous posts where I told all of you not to do the very things I'm complaining about. That's because I call out hypocrisy wherever I find it, especially in myself. And I have to remind myself that I should practice as I preach.

And no, for the record, it doesn't help. Not one bit.

Why is my coffee so pathetically mediocre and why am I not writing regularly?

It would be easy to blame my current Big Crazy Project™ which is quite a bit more physical than my usual projects. I'm supposed to be making neat things and writing about them. I've made a lot of sawdust this year, and even knitted a stocking cap, but not much with knitting together the words. I don't really know why.

Speaking of big crazy, I just built a kitchen full of cabinets from scratch. My home is in a bit of an uproar as only a kitchen remodel can make it. Blame that!

It's not the kitchen's fault. It's not because I can't really get in there to make a decent cuppa; done right, all you really need is a clean sock, a kettle and some patience.

Yes, a sock. Not that I regularly use a sock, but you can. (And many aficionados swear by it.)  But you don't find me at the bathroom sink with my socks in the coffee pot any more than you find me at the computer studiously applying words to pages.

I could blame work.

In January, after a lengthy stint of under-employment, I began working full time at the writing center, taking on additional duties of marketing and graphic design atop my usual stints of database management and other jack-of-all-trades job duties.

It's taken some getting used to, this working full-time thing. But I can't really blame that. I work a solid 40 hours a week and then I'm required by union rules and state law to knock it off. I wrote three novels working 50+ hours a week (at all hours of day or night) for Borders.

The truth is, I just haven't felt like it.  It's a stupid and simple as that.

I haven't been feeling like putting that much effort into perfect coffee or perfect prose. Hell, even mediocre prose has been a bit out of reach of late. It's not writer's block -- as you know, I don't actually believe in writer's block.

So what is it? Depression? Lack of ambition? Stress? Too much sleep? Uninspired?

Sometimes in the dark watches of the night as I lay staring at the ceiling I seriously ask myself: Am I out of ideas?  Then I get up and jot ten or eleven ideas in the notebook I keep next to my bed just to prove to myself that I can and go back to sleep.

At the end of the day, I'm stuck with the uncomfortable truth: I've just gotten sloppy. With my coffee, with my writing process. Sloppy. I allowed myself to become over-reliant on a space and defined period of time set aside to do it. Too reliant on ritual and not enough on the simple steps of getting stories from brain to page.

I've long been an advocate of approaching writing from the standpoint that amateurs wait for inspiration while the professional puts their butt in the chair and puts words on the page.

So I'm flipping my advice on rituals on its head a bit. I'm going to have to accept at some point that there's a certain amount of ritual that I require in my life. It starts with coffee this morning. And from there, I opened this blog and actually typed out a blog post. Something I've been regretfully neglecting this year.

This afternoon, over a cold sandwich, I will update the Renaissance Artisan project on my progress in that project.

Later tonight, (after the counter tops are installed and I've put up a few dozen linear feet of bead board) I will sit down to my novel-in- progress and begin the first-half rewrite. Wifi disabled, I will write until my fingers seize up and I realize it's time for bed.

And let that be my new feather and my new mouse-in-a-silly hat.

I'll let you know how it goes.

The perils of non-fiction...

For some reason, I find that non-fiction is harder to write about than fiction.

At this point in my writing life, it's strange and exciting to be doing something entirely new. To slake my appetite for words with some new flavor and test my tools on new materials.

My apologies for not posting more often. If you are following my non-fiction project blog "School of the Renaissance Artisan" you'll know that I haven't died or gotten lost in the woods. It's just that I haven't as much experience writing nonfiction, so I don't feel authoritative enough to really give good tips or even talk about it much.

For one thing, the "characters" I'm writing about are real rather than figments of my imagination, so I must be more careful with them. And they certainly won't do as I tell them or go where I want them to go at the whim of making a good story. And I can't just write them out of the narrative if they're being recalcitrant.

I can see why memoirists have been so notoriously prone to making stuff up.

And then there's the constant distraction of my drug-of-choice: research.

I've written before, at length, about the dangers of too much research. Often it becomes an excuse for procrastinating the beginning of a project. One more book and I'll be ready. I must constantly fight the impulse to get so lost in the minutia of a project that I never actually get around to beginning it.

The internet is especially good at sucking me down the research rabbit hole, yet this project would be next to impossible without it. Though I honestly profess to a Luddite streak a mile wide and a preference for the thousands of physical printed books on the shelves around me, without my e-Reader and computer, I would not have access to many of the reserves of the great libraries of the world. The Internet Archive alone is a font of knowledge that just keeps flowing and refilling like the oil can in the Hanukkah story. The historical works of Roubo and Moxon would be out of reach without a lengthy trip to the libraries that still hold copies behind glass and subsequent negotiations with their caretakers for access.

Without this font of distraction that is the internet, I would not have access to the consistently generous of masters of their crafts Chris Schwartz and Peter Follansbee; I would never have met virtually with historical cordwainer Francis Classe; nor would I have had the unpublished pin research of Rachel Jardine drop unannounced into my email inbox.  The curator emeritus of the Museum of London's medieval collections would likely never have sent me a parcel of research books as he did electronically at the outset of this project.

Technology is, as ever, both angel and demon, giving with one hand as it takes with the other.

As strange as it sounds, the hardest part of this project has been to remember to write about it. As dangerous a drug as research can be, more perilous by far is the lure of Making Neat Things. And I did not anticipate the high I get from discussing Making Neat Things with other makers online and in person. It's akin to the feeling of stepping from the workaday world into a writer's conference and for the first time finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of people who live the best parts of their lives internally. The conversations are different, the kinship you feel with almost everyone you encounted is intoxicating... and if you're not careful you'll spend so much time talking you forget to do.

As I and other writers have often said: writers aren't writers unless they write something. The same can be said of makers and any other of hundreds of trades such as these.

So I have been making a concerted effort to do more than I talk, which is sort of against the blogging aesthetic. Hence my lengthy absences for which I apologize.

Now if you will kindly excuse me, the sun is out and I've some doing to do.

~ Scott

The School of the Renaissance Artisan is a yearlong project to unlock the histories of the renaissance craft guilds and reunite the author with his craftsmen heritage. One man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks. Join the fun at http://renaissanceartisan.blogspot.com/

Cover Story: King's Raven by Maggie Secara

If you aren't busy waiting for the Mayans to destroy the planet on 21 December 2012, may I suggest an alternative event? King's Raven, the sequel to The Dragon Ring and second in the Harpers Errant series by Maggie Secara, will be released.

When last we left the Harpers Errant series, I had just completed a cover for The Dragon Ring, based on a sketch by folklorist and amazing author in his own right, Ari Berk. (You can read more about that here.)   This time around, though, Ari was working on the release of his own beautiful and magical book 'Nightsong' so I was on my own with the new cover.

Maggie wanted something based on a greenman with a raven or two worked in somehow. In the last book, she had been shooting for a green cover but it didn't work out, so I really wanted to get her a properly green solution for this one.

With some ravens worked in.

Thanks for the most part to my wife the textile artist, my home library has a number of historical embroidery and design books, including this one (below) from a 1532 book of "voidwork" embroidery.

For the timehopping urban fantasy/historical fiction story like this, it was an excellent place to begin. In other words, it was exactly what I needed and yet nothing like what Maggie wanted, so into the Photoshop it went...

The 16th century green man looks like a bit of gloomy Gus. Look how long his face is! I wanted something livelier and a bit brighter in the eyes, certainly the King of Faery should be a bit more well fed, not to mention leafier.

In keeping with the 'woodcut' style of the cover illustration Ari and I collaborated on for the first book, I re-drew the green man from the original sketch, adding detail and taking nearly as much away.  Several layers of texture and a title block later, we had this:

 "While Oberon, immortal king of Faerie, lies under a terrible curse, the artistic spirit in the world is slipping away. The king's Raven would do anything to lift the spell, if only it hadn't also stripped him of his magic and flung him into an iron-bound past with a damaged memory. The only thing that can save them both is sealed inside a riddle wrapped in a puzzle that spans the centuries. Even with the help of an Elizabethan magus, a Victorian spinster, and a mad reporter, can mortal musician Ben Harper find Raven in time to solve the riddle, stop a witch, and restore the creative heart of the world? First he has to find the key."  - by Maggie Secara

I

Too Much Blood In My Coffee System:: Where I've been and where I'm going...

Lots of things have been happening recently, not least of all a two-month experiment into whether or not cutting off all caffeine would improve my body's ability to sleep through the night. 

It did not work.

Coffee doesn't cause my insomnia. Anyone who still thinks so is welcome to shut up about it. And while I'm not saying that there's definitive proof that the decaffeination had anything to do with my inability to blog; your conclusions are yours to draw. 

Because it totally had everything to do with my inability to get as much writing done during my still-extended days.  It's bad enough to be awake for 20-22 hours a day; being decaffeinated the whole time is intolerable.

Now that I am once again properly caffeinated, I feel it is time to announce my new project...

The Renaissance Artisan

This month, I launched a new project that has been eating up all of my limited attention span: School of the Renaissance Artisan is a non-fiction blogging/video/book project that unites my love of history with my love of making neat things.

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."   

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

That quote popped out at me as I was recently re-reading Bourdain's book.  The recent rise of the Maker Movement has revived the ethos of working with your hands, of -- as the name implies -- making the things that you use.  It has revived the aesthetic of craft and elevated it beyond Aunt Susie's pom-pom animals and building forts with Popsicle sticks.

Man, I miss building forts out of Popsicle sticks.

Bourdain is right.  The quote above comes in the middle of a paean for a workmanlike approach to food, a lengthy rant against the American and European idea that everyone who works in food or paint or wood should be an artist or they are somehow inadequate.

I am an artist. I went to art school just to be sure. But I come from a long line of craftsmen and I wanted to take a moment to turn the clock back to a time when the maker movement wasn't a curious spike in pop culture, but The Way Things Are.  The high point of this was, of course, the renaissance. 

I think we forget that the renaissance wasn't just artists and soldiers and kings and popes, but a groundswell of normal, ordinary people advancing their lot generation by generation, building themselves up through the sweat of their own brows and the callouses of their own hands and, for better or worse, creating the modern world.

School of the Renaissance Artisan will be an in-depth exploration of the trades and crafts of the 16th century. A close look by someone who is not an historian at what it really mean to be an actual 'renaissance man'. Not a Davinci or a Michelangelo, but a 'Bill, the man who fixes the roof when it rains' or 'Jack, the guy that bakes the bread at the market'. 

For one year (January - December 2013), I'm going to use the framework of the 54 livery companies that had royal charters in 16th century England to explore the crafts and lives of the men who made the renaissance.

I'm going to do this by making the most of my contacts in the renaissance faire and reenactment communities, drawing out of the shadows the people who are keeping alive the arts and crafts of the 16th century.People keeping alive crafts and skills that would die out completely were it not for them. And if by failing miserably at my attempts to learn these crafts brings attention to their superior craftsmanship, so much the better.


So I invite you to please join me here as I take you with me back to school in a possibly impossible attempt to become an honest-to-God renaissance man.


As I go I will blog my efforts (I've already started, actually) and share with you the resources I'm using, the things that inspire me, and the people who are helping me. Along the way, we will build a sort of virtual library of historical source material and present-day experts that will aid and abet reenactors and "makers" who want to learn a new craft and, of course, any writer who wants to write an historical novel set in this time period.

If nothing else, I invite you to watch me fail in a spectacular and possibly amusing manner.

This will be a multi-media enterprise, including the blog, a YouTube channel called The Rest of the Renaissance and possibly tapping into other venues for sharing information as well with the hope of eventually turning it all into a book. Possibly even a hypertext eBook with embedded links to the videos and other interactive materials.

This is going to be fun. I hope you will come and play along.

The Research Phase :: The limits of memory and the joys of learning something anew.

I'm fond of quoting Werner von Braun: "When I don't know what I'm doing, it's research."  It's a great quote and often gets me out of a jam when someone is pressing me to tell them what I'm up to ("Staring out the window" is a bad answer, especially when the inquisitor is ones spouse. Just trust me on that.)  

To be brutally honest, though, research is generally a process of reminding myself how many things I used to know and re-teaching myself how to do things I once knew. When I decided that I wanted to write a character who was a mathematician, for instance, I found myself at wits end when I dug below the surface of my math skills to discover some of the more basic portions of my education had escaped under dark of night.

Generating Ideas :: Something from Nothing, Part One

As I near the end of the first draft of Howard Carter, I'm already noodling with the next idea in the back of my mind.  I've been jotting down new character and story ideas for the past week or so and preparing a reading list for the next novel as well as preparing myself mentally to begin revisions on the one that's been maturing in the desk drawer.

Which might explain why though I talk a lot about how ideas germinate and how to avoid writer's block and how to get unstuck if you can't, I spend precious little time talking about how to get started in the first place.

Getting started isn't something that I find difficult; usually stopping is the hard part.  

So I don't tend to think about it much.

However, since this blog is about what's on my mind, it might be worthwhile to think about it a bit more than I usually do.  Not only what am I going to do next, but why I chose that idea and how I went from abit of ink on a coffee stained napkin to the beginnings of a story...

Though I have some chapters of Howard Carter to get on the page before I can really focus on the next novel, so here are some past thoughts on the subject, hand-picked for Your Reading Pleasure:

10 Ways To Get Started On Your Novel (A List)

Writer's Block Redux  (Or: I get by with a little help from my monsters)

Writer's Block (The Illustrated Website Edition)

A Miscellany: The Ides of March, Looking for the Next Story, Keep An Eye Out for Characters and Practical Filekeeping... et al

It's March 15th. If your name is Julius, you might want to hide for awhile. And watch that Cassius, he's a skinny fella and skinny people tend to know a good deal about knives.  I don't know why that is, but Mister Shakespeare is not to be second-guessed.

I've said several times in recent days that I was looking for the next novel to write, but in all honesty, I generally have several projects in various stages of completion at any given moment.  The real question isn't "what book do I write next" but rather "which book shall receive the brunt of my attentions?"

Since I pronounced the book I'd been working on "Done" (but never finished) I've been shifting the piles of notes and character concepts and sundry whatnot trying to find the next story to receive my concentrated efforts.  I've spoken before of my habit of squirreling away every idea that springs to mind in one of two computer files.  Nascent story ideas are "Seedlings" and characters go into the "Cocktail Party" to mingle with other character ideas in hopes that they'll naturally form alliances, hook up, etcetera.

As you know if you've been following this blog for any length of time, I subjected myself to the insanity of NaNoWriMo and came out of it with fifty thousand words of a proto-novel.  By itself, this isn't really a great novel and the story I created that November by itself isn't a novel.  So I tossed it into the garden with the other seedlings and it got trampled on by the attendees of my character cocktail party and... well, I think I've found my next project.

Today's writing tip is as old as Julius Caesar's very bad day: Save every idea you have.  Write them down so you won't forget them.  File them away, let them mingle, grow, mutate, and do the things that are best done out of the sight of decent society.

I know I keep repeating that, but it's worth repeating.  I'm always amazed at how often they come out of the files stronger for having spent their time there.

And in case you doubt that talking to the people you come across every day has value, today I sat down next to an archaeologist who knew and acted as a sort of general factotum to Thor Heyerdahl.  I would never take his stories because that would be rude and I rarely turn people I know into characters wholesale.  But if there's not a story seedling or two there, I don't know where else to find them.

I won!

I officially "won" NaNoWriMo and I am enjoying my nice PDF certificate. I think the runners-up get a copy of the home game. Pages to Type returns soon. For the moment, I have to rest my weary fingers.

Kerouac is a verb?

Note: I had to write a new bio for the NaNoWriMo site and decided that playing it straight wasn't any fun...

---

Two years of journalism school taught me primarily that it wasn't the kind of writing I wanted to do. I ended up in art school for awhile before dropping out to climb mountains and Kerouac my way across the country.

I wrote some poetry until I had my poetic license pulled for trying to smuggle bootleg limericks across the border. After I got out of the Writers Bloc, I dabbled in political blogging and techwriting. The love of a good woman rescued me and now I help run a local writing center while I sell my first novel.

I placed 18th overall (out of over 10,000 entrants) in the 6th Annual Writer's Digest Short-Short Story Contest (published by Trafford Press) with the story "Armageddon Interruptus". This is a humorous romp through the difficulties of staging a proper apocalypse, the difficulty in finding a properly pale horse, practical accountancy and daylight savings time.

(An appalling amount of that is actually true.)

Once upon a time in a fool's paradise...

There once was a little cottage on a little island in Puget Sound. It sounds more posh than it is, this little house was a fixer-upper. Some poor fool at some distant remove painted it battleship grey, the better to fade into the morning fog that sometimes rolled across the island and hid the houses and trees from view. One day a writer and artist (in short, a fool) and his lovely bride moved in and said "What a sad little house tucked away in a forgotten corner of a foggy island. I shall make this house cheerful, surround it with gardens and fill it with books and create a happy home." And so it was. And so it continues, this work of making a fool's paradise among the fog-shrouded trees. The house is a curmudgeonly old thing and it has resisted. It once dropped a ceiling on the fool's head, but he shrugged and turned the room into a library, and as everyone knows, this simple act imbues a house with a soul. Over the years, the house and the fool have mellowed. Gardens have sprouted and books have found shelves. New windows have given the home a bright-eyed look and insulation has made her warm as the old grey shingles have turned a cheerful yellow. So if you wonder where I go when I'm not here, don't worry. I might be stuck under a pile of cats and unable to reach the computer. Or I might be writing or puttering in the garden. But I'm probably just taking a weekend to cheer up my house, my fool's paradise...

Cross-Pollination

I've written novels, news stories, weddings, plays, speeches, op-eds, short stories, one-act farces, puppet shows... the list seems endless. In my book, describing one's self as a writer requires a nimble pen and a willingness to take on something new.

Sometimes I throw my words out there and they fall to the ground unheard. Plays get written but don't get performed. Blogs go unread. Op-Eds get cut or cut-down. From the wedding that three dozen people hear to the play that never got performed, from the short story that wins an award to the novel you've all been hearing about, one thing unifies them all... I learned and moved on to the next project.

And I'd wager that my writing was better for the experience.

A screenplay is not a novel. A play is not a short story. A wedding is not any of those things. Yet they all play well together and inspire one another all the time. The wedding drew heavy inspiration from Shakespeare's sonnets. Many successful movies are adapted from novels, short stories and plays. Writers talk about adapting what they learned writing literature, genre fiction and poetry to other modes all the time. But rarely do I hear about how writing other forms and modes inform and improve fiction writing.

Novel covers may describe the writing as "poetic" or "theatrical" to get across elements of plot and pacing before you crack the spine, but how often does the writer talk about how it got that way? Does writing poetry improve your fiction? Does writing for the stage improve your dialogue? It should and I would wager it does on both counts. It certainly did for me.

Even if I don't put my poems out there, or if the plays are performed in a children's theater, or on the dirt at a festival, there are lessons to learn. "Aha!" moments where the poetry constrains description and word-painting or the actor turns to you and says "This sounds wierd, let's say this instead..." The poet is creating images within metrical constraints and the playwright is hearing other people speak the character's words aloud. This changes our perception as we view other moments of description or dialogue. Also there are pacing elements, characterization, meter, word and time constraints that teach you innumerable lessons applicable to other forms of writing.

Movie novelizations aside, too often we view the novel or short story or poem or play as the station that all trains leave from. The novel inspires the movie. The short story inspires the play. The poem inspires the wedding. The play inspires the film. While each form or mode requires an understanding of the constraints and expectations of the audience, none stand alone. We should not think of our mode as the station with all travelers leaving for other climes but as Rome, the destination of all roads.

The next few posts on Pages to Type will be on this theme. These are things I apply no matter where I point my pen. And I submit that these things are something that any writer or reader in any mode would do well to keep in mind. As always, I would like to hear from you as we go along. How does the theater inform the novel? Take it as far afield as you like. How does culinary arts influence the stage? How do the paintings of Rembrandt influence the direction of your blog? How do other arts inform everything else that passes across your page?

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Information Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com Blog: Pages to Type Before I Sleep

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A Clear Morning's Cold Dawning... ('Mummer's Masque' snippet)

Chapter One
Seattle, WA

The second week of October brought an unexpected arctic front down from Canada and with it the first frost of the season. Leaves and pine needles scattered before it, bowing and swirling like courtiers in the wake of a courtesan. The residents of Washington State hunkered in front of their fireplaces and woodstoves and waited it out, knowing that the cold couldn’t last. Even with the onset of global climate shifts, their state still had only two seasons: rainy and not; the cold snap was an aberration.

The breeze shredded the column of steam rising from AJ MacLeod’s coffee mug as he stepped out of the Mercedes. The bitter wind cut to the bone, reminding him of winters he had endured during college on the East Coast. He stemmed the memories by focusing on the cup in his hand. The warmth radiating into his palm balanced out the cold seeping into his knuckles from the outside. The sensation centered him, allowed him to shake off the dark memories that clamored at the gates…