Balloon Juice - Authors In Our Midst Archives

Martha C. Franks – Conversing with the Middle Kingdom!

by WaterGirl| November 27, 20212:57 pm| 54 Comments

Our featured writer today is Martha C. Franks.

Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series or Authors in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Conversing with the Middle Kingdom

by Martha C. Franks

Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China tells the story of my two years teaching the liberal arts at a high school in Beijing from 2012 to 2014.

My time in China came at an exceptionally interesting moment in Chinese education. The decades-long Chinese nationwide educational obsession with STEM training was failing to produce the technological creativity that the Central Committee wanted to gain parity with the West. In response, some Chinse educational leaders began timidly to offer the idea that the way to produce such creativity was to encourage students to think and converse more freely, more broadly and more critically, in short, to adopt some form of “general” education. Some advocated return to teaching Confucian classics; others pressed for adapting Western liberal arts teaching to Chinese classrooms. It was a politically risky notion, but for just a few years, an experiment in teaching liberal arts was allowed. The Chinese authorities’ feelings of ambivalence about the liberal arts experiment hovered uncomfortably over my students’ conversations. At a more general level, there was a similar ambivalence hovering over the whole society. Life in China seemed to be unsure what it wanted. Songs of the Communist Revolution contended with exploding commercialism.

I came to China with the methods I had learned as a student and teacher in the
“Great Books” program at St. John’s College, which relies extensively on open, free-form discussion of classic texts, Eastern and Western. Recounting conversations as they occurred in my Chinese classroom, my book displays how the students got over their initial reluctance to speak in class and entered fiercely into passionate exchanges about the central ideas in great human writing—the questions of how our short human life is best lived, of how we can govern ourselves, of what part science plays in how we think and the heartfelt issue of meaning.

Xi Xinping came to power while I was teaching in Beijing, and since I left his hand has grown stronger. There has been a crackdown on the kind of education that I was able to offer to my Chinese students. Nevertheless, I like to think that what my students and I did together will find a way toward a growing global conversation that will allow all of us to speak and respond to each other, spurring a creativity that spills into the biggest possible ways of understanding.

Martha C. Franks, Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China (Respondeo Books 2019)

You can get the book at the Respondeo website or on Amazon.

About Me

I am a long-time lurker at Balloon Juice and feel pretty shy about coming out into the open. I love the place. I got started here just when John found Lily by the side of the road and was unsure whether adopting her would work. Listening to that uncertainty develop into such a giving and getting of love has made stronger my diffident but stubborn hope that we can all, human and non-human, learn to see each other. So, please keep writing, complaining, quarreling and questioning—you are having great effects on the world!

I am a part-time faculty member at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am also a lawyer, specializing in Southwestern water law (as I describe in the book, I taught a class on American law in China and did not find out until afterwards that the subjects I taught had been expressly forbidden by the Central Committee—sheer luck that no one noticed).

I write a little legal column for a magazine published through Respondeo Books. The magazine is called the Minimum Wager. https://respondeobooks.com/our-books/the-minimum-wager/

It’s Balloon Juice, so I have to send in a picture of an animal I care about. Humphrey, handsome though elongated, was with our family when I was a child. He has been gone for many years but I think he is a big part of teaching me what I like best. I miss him.

Martha C. Franks – Conversing with the Middle Kingdom!Post + Comments (54)

Kelly Price – Unconditional Love Under Extraordinary Circumstances

by WaterGirl| November 14, 20214:58 pm| 74 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

Our featured writer today is Kelly Price!

Let’s give her a warm welcome.

If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series or Authors in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

by Kelly Price

This is a story of unconditional love under extraordinary circumstances.

In the autumn of 2018 I took a transgender boy I had met only once out to lunch, anticipating becoming an adult friend and mentor to him as he worked his way through college and his transition. I ended up becoming his mother. He and I tell this tale together. “Somewhere Under the Rainbow” is our story. It’s got everything – intrigue, action, irreverent humor, romance, noodles, math… wait. Math?

Yup.

We try to approach serious topics – mental health issues, gender related healthcare, college concerns, dating, siblings, and so forth – with humor and candor. We explore the integration of an unexpected addition into a family from both points of view and we look at how being transgender colors everything Jayce does.

Allow me to introduce the authors. Yours truly is a fiftyish hippie type lady with too much hair, usually sporting a Pride shirt. Jayce is a cute college kid with a ready smile and a hell of a lot of energy. We often say that we share the same brain; we are eerily alike. This book has an unusual voice for the genre of books on LGBTQ parenthood. We have natural goofiness and vivid imaginations. My brain especially tends to send images and ideas from somewhere deep in the limbic system all the way to the cortex that are totally inappropriate for whatever the situation at hand might be. I am the sort of person who has to guard against giggling at solemn occasions because an irrelevant but funny image or story will occur to me. I have been known to literally wake up laughing.

75% of the kids in the Price household are somewhere under the Rainbow, meaning they fit under the LGBTQ umbrella. 100% of Price kids are glorious human beings with a wide array of talents and characteristics. Their father and I routinely look at them and shake our heads in astonishment that we’ve been granted a hand in raising these extraordinary people.

The book is an exploration of what it’s like to live under the Rainbow, what it’s like to parent kids who live their lives beneath those brilliant colors, and what we’d like the world to know. Parenting LGBTQ kids is very much like parenting every other sort of kids. They get lumped together because they share the characteristic of membership in a marginalized group. The statistics on these kids are sobering. 52% of trans kids have seriously considered suicide in the past year according to the Trevor Project’s annual survey. They make up 40% of kids in foster care. One in four loses their home when they come out. They’re more likely to engage in risky behaviors and self-harm. Most of this is because they’re discriminated against. They get bullied, forced into the wrong bathrooms, told they can’t possibly be who they know they are, the list goes on and on.

Transgender kids are not a tragedy! They’re just kids! Granted, they might require some specialized care, but every kid has something to contend with. The fact of their gender status really shouldn’t be any more relevant than it is for kids who feel aligned with the gender assignments they receive at birth.

We believe the voices of ordinary families who are on journeys that involve gender expansiveness need to be louder than the ignorant, hateful rhetoric that pervades our nation’s legislative chambers today. The only think tank that should get a say in the destinies of LGBTQ kids and their families is those same kids and families. Bigotry has no place here. We believe that when our kids tell us who they are, we are being given a privilege and a sacred trust that needs to be treated with care. We believe that all LGBTQ and gender expansive kids are kids first, and like any other kids they need to play sports and do chores and be loved and grow up.

We’re glad you’re here. Welcome. We hope you enjoy our story.

And we have video!

Kelly Price – Unconditional Love Under Extraordinary CircumstancesPost + Comments (74)

Dr. Daniel Price – Cryptic Crosswords!

by WaterGirl| October 16, 20212:40 pm| 125 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

Our featured writer today is Dr. Daniel Price! Let’s give him a warm welcome. If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! This is the final Artists post in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Cryptic crosswords are common in the UK, appearing daily in multiple newspapers and regularly in other periodicals. Publications in Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand feature daily or weekly cryptics, with a few US newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times) occasionally printing cryptic crosswords.

The popularity of cryptic crosswords (sometimes called ‘British-style crosswords’ in the United States) is attributed to the challenge in deciphering each clue. Traditional US crosswords rely on pure definitions to indicate the words or phrases to be entered, with many of those definitions recycled within and across publications (e.g. “Guido’s high note” is ridiculously common as a clue for ‘ELA’).

By contrast, “[c]ryptic crosswords comprise a compendium of different types of brain teaser, so you get a lot of variety within each puzzle – anagram clues, acronym, puns and riddles,” as described by Dr. Kathryn Friedlander, a researcher in psychology at the University of Buckingham, in a 2021 BBC.com article (‘Cryptic crosswords: A puzzling British obsession’). A solver will not achieve success by memorizing definitions and the associated words; although the clues of cryptic crosswords must include a definition of the word or phrase to be entered, said definition will not be obvious.

Cryptic clues are, by definition, designed to mislead, but also to indicate their solution. Apart from uncommon literal (‘&lit’) clues and punning ‘cryptic definitions’, clues must consist of the word or phrase’s definition and wordplay that encodes that word or phrase. The primary (denotative) definition can appear before or after—never within— the subsidiary definition (wordplay), and while linking words may be included, superfluous verbiage included merely to mislead are considered unfair to the solver: the primary and subsidiary definitions must be separate and sequential within the clue.

Katies-Puzzle-book-version-c Download

Expensive-Vocabulary-book-version-c Download

Acceptable clues are written in the form of sentences or headlines; most often, the clue’s ‘surface’ (apparent meaning) is unrelated to the word to be entered, adding another layer of misdirecting challenge. The human brain’s attempts to create meaning allows the solver to be fooled by the clue’s surface and requires them to ignore what is plainly visible in order to identify the word that is meant. “Detainee repatriated, hangs around every bash (6)” calls to mind a former captive being observed at all of the best parties. The six-letter word—its length indicated by the numeral in parentheses—thus described is ‘WALLOP’, a synonym of ‘bash’; the rest of the clue is the wordplay that forms ‘WALLOP’, namely “Detainee” (POW) “repatriated” (sent back, or reversed), “hangs around” (surrounds) “every” (= ALL).

In shorter terms, the reversed letters of POW, a sort of detainee, surround ALL, a synonym of ‘every’, and the result is ‘WALLOP’, synonymous with ‘bash’. [“Hangs around” may be considered to be an unsound indicator of ‘surrounding’ but it can be argued that the reversed letters of ‘POW’ are indeed suspended about the letters of ‘ALL.’] The goal of the ‘setter’—the cryptic crossword’s constructor—is to create clues that are fair but challenging: Dr. Friedlander states that “[s]olvers experience a powerful insight moment when they [realize] how the clue should actually be interpreted. It’s a highly pleasurable kick which rewards the solver.”

Musical composer Stephen Sondheim attempted to popularize cryptic crosswords in the United States (you can determine whether his efforts have been successful), writing in a 1968 New York magazine article that “[a] good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.” Famed British setter Jonathan Crowther, under the pen name of Azed, summarizes the rules succinctly:

A good cryptic clue contains three elements:

a precise definition
a fair subsidiary indication
nothing else

Standard crossword grids also tend to feature ‘crosswordese’—words found only in crosswords, often because the crossword’s constructor cannot complete the grid without including ‘STLO’, ‘ASTA’, ‘ERSE’, and the aforementioned ‘ELA’. Cryptic crosswords will include some rare words, but a vast vocabulary is unnecessary, as the wordplay can lead to the solution where the definition does not. ‘RHOMB’ is an uncommon term and may not spring to mind when one uses ‘diamond (shape)’ as its definition, but it can be identified from “Facets of rare, heavy, oval, magnificent blue diamond (5)”: the “facets”, or ‘faces’, of “rare heavy oval magnificent blue” spell out the word to be entered.

… I began composing cryptics in 2015 after many years as a consumer. With no hope of being hired as a full-time setter, the quest was either to be a vanity project—wherein I would share the few compositions with a few interested acquaintances—or to result in larger sets of cryptics to be published as print-on-demand collections. In addition to having no prior experience writing single clues, let alone entire puzzles, I decided to complicate the process further by creating only themed cryptics, viewing unthemed cryptics as a mere exercise in clue-writing.

In a themed puzzle, multiple entries are related; examples from my own creations reference include ‘one-word album titles released by a particular musical group’, ‘words that exist with a particular letter of the alphabet and also exist, as different words, without that letter’, and especially silly contrivances (intersections of BULLS with CAPES). [I hope that the themes are incorporated more elegantly than the descriptions provided above would suggest.] Some of the published puzzles are also ‘variety puzzles’, in which words—once identified from their clues—must be modified before entry according to rules stated in the puzzles’ introductions.

As an example, otherwise innocuous words that contain letter sequences that are viewed as ‘naughty words’ must be bowdlerized by replacing the offending letter sequence with an asterisk. Each member of the Price family has a dedicated cryptic that (with one exception) is related to a feature of her or his name. The Excruciverbiage^® series currently consists of four volumes of original cryptics, along with three compilations. Links to books, a sample cryptic, and a guide to identifying and solving cryptic clues, can be found at excruciverbiage.com. Should my works ever be published in magazines or newspapers, I would, in keeping with tradition, adopt a pseudonym (those of Spanish Inquisitors are popular); for now, I compose under my given name.

Dr. Daniel Price – Cryptic Crosswords!Post + Comments (125)

Peter H. Desmond – Poet in Our Midst!

by WaterGirl| October 2, 20216:00 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

Hi, it’s phdesmond, and I’m very pleased that John and WaterGirl have given me this opportunity to show some of my work from over the years. Both my parents had read the poetry classics and were able to write light verse for occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. It’s a family tradition I kept up. I’m hoping you will enjoy at least some of my work!

Peter Desmond – Poet in Our Midst! — Photo credit: Photo: Paula Savoy

In Memoriam

We don’t forget the unjustly slain.

Minneapolis Blues

On the streets of Minneapolis, we saw another life destroyed,
prone on the pavement. Four policemen killed George Floyd.

A brute’s knee on his neck, a mob of blue knees on his back —
he died of asphyxiation and a fatal heart attack.

They’ll hear their verdict standing. I really want to see
all four cops convicted of murder and felony.

While we march for justice, the world can’t understand,
in our civilized society, why legal strangling isn’t banned.

At the Museum Café

For lunch I order matzo ball soup
before I tour the museum.

“How was it?” asks the waitress
as she wipes the table.

“It was light,” I say, “Airy.
A dense matzo ball
is like a stone in your stomach.”

She smiles. “Some people ask me
why it doesn’t have noodles, or carrots.”

Halfway through the exhibit
I reach the hollow boxcar
stenciled “Karlsruhe” on its side:

Karlsruhe, Rhineland hometown
of my German ancestors,
car that rolled towards Mauthausen,

crammed with Jews
from one of the
four hundred ghettos,

each with its traditions,
its folk songs,
its recipes for soup.

Various Political Poems

The most recent of these, an invective, was first published in chat right here on Balloon-Juice, on the weekend it became clear Biden had just won! The others date back decades.

An Inauguration Tune

Trump is gone, and none too soon!
Angry, smug, grotesque buffoon,
stupid-suited Pantaloon,
Queens brat trying to play tycoon,
piccolo posing as bassoon.

No more poison-gas balloon,
orange-caked, pale-eyed raccoon,
whose nightly hissing at the moon
has made this country his spittoon —
on January twentieth, at noon!

Paradox

You who think the embryo
has a fully human soul,
you who call abortion sin —
hear the paradox of twins.

In the caverns of the loins
a sperm and egg have joined.
Soon the cell divides;
the cluster grows in size.

A future member of our race
drifts towards its nesting place.
What’s this? The cluster splits,
separates in equal bits.

Strange, but true —
what was one is two:
two tiny particles,
genetically identical.

You who claim to speak for God —
don’t you find it rather odd
one egg became two twins?
Tell me when the soul begins.

At the moment of conception,
before their separation,
was there one soul, or two?
Does this problem puzzle you?

Was this a miracle:
two souls in one particle?
Or did one soul split
and half go in each bit?

Or do you think that sperms have souls?
Will you banish birth control?
Does it make you squirm
when I mention sperm?

Monks chanted “Tibi Deo”
as the Church judged Galileo,
but the earth still revolves,
and humanity evolves.

Black Body Radiation

Brothers and sisters, it makes me mad
when they use the word “black” to mean it’s bad.
The stock market crashes, and they blame it on us.
They call it “Black Monday” in the front of the bus.
It wasn’t my fault; I didn’t lose them a cent.
I have enough trouble just paying my rent.
But not for long — I found my path:
I take courses at night; I study science and math.

I walk into the college. They think I’m a looter
until I sit down to use the computer.
The lab supervisor turns benevolent
as my fingers dance on my instrument.
I solve the problem; I’m proud as hell.
My high school teacher taught me well,
so I know physics and calculus.
I know more than those suckers in the front of the bus.

I read it in my physics text:
black absorbs and white reflects.
Black fills up with energy;
white just shines and lets it be.
I’m here to tell the United States
that absorbed energy radiates.
And here’s one meaning of what I learned —
if you lean on black you might get burned.

I don’t care if you like it or not,
it’s a scientific fact that black is hot.
Without black body (hear me now!) radiation
this land would be an iceberg nation.
Today is the day, and now is the hour —
the country needs the thermal power
of thirty-five million dynamos.
It’s time to let my people glow.

Parodies

I’ve always felt that a parody is sincere praise of the original poem, as well as an opportunity to say something new. The second one highlights my home town for the last fifty years, Cambridge, Mass.

La Belle Dame Sans Culottes

(After John Keats.) Read the original poem.

O, what can ail thee, macho man,
Alone and vainly swaggering;
The music’s stopped, the disco’s closed,
You ding-a-ling.

I met a lady at the bar.
We got to talking for a while.
Her hair was long, her skirt was short,
Her dancing wild.

As we salsa’ed in the crowd
I fell in love. She looked so fine.
And I observed beneath her dress
No panty line.

I took my little notebook out.
I asked “When can we meet again?”
But then she told me, “Sorry,
I’m Lesbian.”

Her girlfriend showed up on the floor
And said, “We’d like to be alone.”
The two of them began to dance
And make sweet moan.

I trudged despondent to the bar
And told my buddies of my pain.
They cry’d, “La belle Dame sans culottes
Has struck again!”

And that is why I loiter here
Alone and vainly swaggering.
I’d go home but I feel like such
A ding-a-ling.

The People’s Republic of Cambridge

(after W.B. Yeats) (read the original: https://poets.org/poem/lake-isle-innisfree)

I’ll rise and take the T now to Cambridge-on-the-Red-Line,
and wear a kaffiyeh, bomber jacket, and beret.
I’ll find an apartment, a rent-controlled one-bedroom
to house my bike, my print of Che.

And I shall work for peace there, though peace comes very slowly.
How long will it take till oppressors all are smashed?
I’ll read magazines that stand up for the lowly,
be gender neutral, recycle trash.

I’ll rise and take the T now — it causes less pollution —
and settle in a city whose leftist roots are deep,
whose citizens still argue the need for revolution.
We wake; the country lies asleep.

Peter H. Desmond – Poet in Our Midst!Post + Comments (70)

Chris Gerrib – Pirates Of Mars

by WaterGirl| September 19, 20213:00 pm| 55 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

Our author being featured today is cgerrib! Let’s give him a warm welcome.

If you would like your talents featured in the Artists in Our Midst series – or your work as an author featured in our Authors in Our Midst series – please send me an email message.

Greetings Balloon-Juicers!

My name is Chris Gerrib, and I’ve been reading Balloon Juice since John Cole was complaining about how we were in the process of hosing up the occupation of Iraq. Good times! I don’t find myself commenting much on the site anymore (I don’t think “you’re absolutely right” is a useful comment) but when I do, I comment as cgerrib. (I know, highly original.)

John and I were both in the military during the First Gulf War, but unlike John, my military claim to fame is that not one Iraqi MiG bombed Jacksonville, Florida. I actually listened to the first week of the Gulf War on the radio – everything at Naval Station Mayport had been sent out to sea to avoid Saddam Hussain’s legions of ninja terrorists who were going to car-bomb America in retaliation for our attack. Needless to say, said legions only existed in the minds of frustrated novelists working for US intelligence agencies.

Which is a nice segue into why I’m cluttering up the front page. I’ve written a novel – several in fact, but the one I want to talk about is PIRATES OF MARS.

This book was purchased as a stand-alone novel by a now-defunct publishing company. Via a series of events, I got the rights back and the snazzy cover you see here. PIRATES is set towards the end of this century, and the science of Mars travel is as plausible as I can make it. I assumed as well that at least some of the dreams of Branson, Musk and Bezos are possible, and so Mars has a lot of private settlements that are poorly supervised by the governments of Earth.

As I was writing this, I looked at the type of people who would volunteer to make a multimillion-mile one way journey. Frankly, a lot of the people who would make that trip are in the process of being kicked off of Earth. As a result, Mars is the Home for Wayward Humans. These wayward humans are at the wrong end of a long and expensive supply chain. Think of Mars orbit as the coast of Somalia.

The novel opens with pirates having taken a ship, but if they don’t do something soon, it will crash into Mars. They have the brilliant idea of calling the Volunteer Space Rescue Service and asking for help. Oh, and they think maybe they could make this outing a two-fer and grab Space Rescue’s ship. That’s when things get interesting.

There’s some salty language and the start of a sex scene which gets interrupted by other events. It’s not for little kids, but Juicers and high schoolers should be able to handle it. I hope the gang here finds it to their liking. You can visit my website to buy this book and my other books via Amazon or Indiebound. Also, you can read about some of the Big Ideas of the book at John Scalzi’s site.

Thanks to John Cole and Watergirl for this opportunity and keep up the faith!

Chris Gerrib – Pirates Of MarsPost + Comments (55)

Creature NYC – Writing DRAINED!

by WaterGirl| August 22, 202112:00 pm| 46 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

A couple of you have asked whether and how authors might ~~fight~~ fit (!) into the Artists in Our Midst series. The answers are sort of, not exactly, and yes. I hope that clears everything up!

If you’re an author and you want to talk about your writing or your books – or even focus on just one book as we are doing today – by all means please contact me about doing one of these posts.

They will be tagged as Authors in Our Midst, and we will be featuring those posts along with the Artists in Our Midst posts.

Hello, Balloon Juice readers!

My name is Marc (aka Creature_NYC) and, as this is the best community on the internets, it is my absolute honor to be speaking with you all directly. I have been lurking, and very occasionally commenting, here since right after John’s “conversion.” [Hi, John. I love you, man. Your compassion inspires!] For you real old timers, you may remember the name “Creature” from the liberal blog State of the Day.

Well, Creature wrote a book and I wanted to share it with you all.

The book is called DRAINED and it’s a young adult, dystopian thriller set in a near-future New York City. DRAINED follows the path of high school senior Casey Parker and her best friend, Jennifer, as they investigate why Jennifer’s boyfriend has gone missing. It’s got an oppressive political party in charge, it’s got brainwashing, some spy craft, a whole lot of thrills, and a great female friendship at its core. As a warning, there is some strong language (used more quippy than offensive) and a very tame sex scene. Thankfully, it’s gotten some good reviews.

As some background, I’ve been working on the book for many years and, without saying how long (for some reason it’s embarrassing), I’ll say the very first kernel of the idea that would become DRAINED came soon after the birth of the Tea Party as I tried to imagine them taking over NYC. But it wasn’t until after Hurricane Sandy hit that my setting and theme came into focus. Let’s just say that by 2048 climate change and the greedy politicians in charge have made a mess of my beloved downtown Manhattan.

I hope you all will give it a look and spread the word if you like it! My website is acrichewrites.com (with an Indie bookstore buy option there) and if you want to read a Q&A with yours truly, I just got written up by another old-school blog, EV Grieve.

Thanks, everyone, and special thanks to WaterGirl and John for making this possible.

Creature NYC – Writing DRAINED!Post + Comments (46)

Authors In Our Midst: Dorothy Winsor, The Trickster

by TaMara| April 25, 202111:58 am| 55 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

I feel terrible, I completely missed Dorothy’s publication date, even though I knew it was coming up! I blame raising ducklings. So delayed, but welcome, here’s Dorothy Winsor on her latest novel:

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Last weekend, Frankensteinbeck told us about how his new books spin off characters into books of their own. I did the same thing with the three-book series I just wrapped up. The Wind Reader was about a kid who was stuck in a city far from home and hanging out with two other street kids. The Wysman takes one of his friends, a kid with a crutch, and gives him his own story. The Trickster, which came out last month, is about Dilly, the pickpocket girl of the original trio.

Writing about Dilly was made easier because I knew some things about her ahead of time. As The Trickster opens, she’s gone home to Lac’s Holding and is a lady in waiting for the lord’s daughter. I knew Dilly had always admired this woman and was thrilled just to be near her. So obviously, I had a chance to spoil that. Yay!

Also I’d never set a story in Lac’s Holding, but I knew it was a port city and I’d always thought of it as being like New Orleans. So I set the story during a festival like Mardi Gras because story possibilities are built into people in masks amid drinking and chaos.

show full post on front page

I knew that in The Wind Reader, Dilly was on the streets of Rin City because a man took her and her mother there and abandoned them. From a scene in the The Wind Reader I knew the man had groped Dilly. So she’s a sexual assault survivor and that shaped her actions.

Reusing a character also meant I was stuck with some things that were hard to manage. In The Wind Reader, I’d given Dilly a dog named Tuc for the very BJ reason that I like dogs. In Trickster, Dilly is the central character, so she’s on the page much more, which meant Tuc was too. I had to write “DOG” at the top of each page so I’d remember to include things like “Tuc scratched his ear.” It was a pain, and I finally realized it was also boring. So I decided to make more of Tuc rather than leaving him as just Dilly’s companion. I don’t want to spoil the book by saying what that “more” was, but once I started working with it, writing about Tuc was a lot more fun.

Both The Wysman and The Trickster came out while we were locked down. All writers had trouble spreading the word about their books with no bookstores and no in-person events. I had an especially hard time because my publisher is tiny. I love them for a variety of reasons, including that they’re a registered social enterprise in the UK. That means they turn part of their profits back to the community. Right now, for instance, they donate a book to homeless shelters every time they sell ten books from their website. They usually pick out a book with an LGBTQ character. They’re awesome, but their promotion is limited.

So my timing was terrible. But The Trickster is out now. I’m proud of it, and I hope people enjoy reading it.

Finders Keepers (Zharmae 2015)
Deep as a Tomb (Loose Leaves 2016)
The Wind Reader (Inspired Quill 2018)
The Wysman (Inspired Quill, 2020)
The Trickster (Inspired Quill, March 2021)

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TaMara again – I’m in awe of this trilogy because Dorothy has created such rich and vibrant worlds that draw me in (note: I’ve only read the first two, Trickster is on my list). I highly recommend them. Dorothy should be around to field any questions in the thread, so ask away. Publishing, promoting, creating an entire world for your characters to frolic in, or how she became a writer would all be a good place to start a fun conversation.

I’ll try to stick around, but if things go as plan, the duckteens will not only spend the day outside, but the night in the coop for the first time, so I’m going to be cleaning the house from top to bottom because it looks like I had a down pillow explosion in every room…not to mention ducks are filthy creatures in general (lovely, but filthy, LOL). But I’ll keep popping in and out.

Let’s talk books!

Authors In Our Midst: Dorothy Winsor, The TricksterPost + Comments (55)