Done with the A to Z Blogfest

This April I participated in the A to Z Challenge, in which more than a thousand bloggers wrote posts related to every letter in the alphabet. I kept to my usual themes of the Civil War, Wild West, and adventure travel, with a bit of high strangeness thrown in for kicks.

I did every letter except X. My excuse? I went on this caving expedition and I couldn't think of anything anyway.

Of course, the point of the blogfest isn't really to do all the letters, it's to meet other bloggers and have fun. Mission accomplished. Check out my blogger profile if you want to see some of the blogs I like to read. While many are related to the subjects I write about, some are completely different, and that's fun too.

Indie Life: How I use social media in my writing career

Today I'm participating in the Indelibles Indie Life blog hop. On the second Wednesday of every month we talk about various aspects of being an indie author, and luckily the A to Z blogfest is dedicated to the letter I today.

Social media is part of my life as a writer. I blog, both here and for Gadling, the leading travel blog on the web. I also have a Twitter feed and a public Facebook page.

I do set up certain limits to my social media presence, however, because I recognize that it can only do so much for my career and can easily become a waste of time. If you look at my feeds you'll notice that I don't use them as often as some people, and have fewer followers than most.

The main reason for this is that I don't play the "follow me and I'll follow you" game. I don't see a point to that. I want followers who are actually interested in my writing, and I only follow feeds that I'm genuinely interested in. Even then I don't read them on a daily basis. I simply don't have the time. And even when I do read them I only comment when I have something to add to the conversation.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm trying to get beyond the indie author's echo chamber. While I love my fellow indies, our community runs the danger of being a closed one. That's one of the reasons I'm also getting more into Goodreads. I like the conversations on there and I think it offers a great way to connect with readers.

You might also want to look at my post on Twitter for writers.

Ten things I learned from Lousy Book Covers

Welcome to this month's Indie Life post, where indie writers talk about life in the cold, harsh world of independent publishing.

I have no talent in the visual arts, so when it came time to publish A Fine Likeness and The Night the Nazis Came to Dinner I got someone who knew what they were doing to design my covers. It's important to know your limitations.

Not everyone does, however, and there's a site dedicated to them. Lousy Book Covers is a daily dose of the worst covers out there today. If you haven't seen this site before, go check it out. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you might even spit blood. Besides the comedic value, the site is an educational one. Here are ten things I've learned from it. I knew most of them before, but they bear repeating.

1. Just because you CAN design your own cover doesn't mean you SHOULD. This is the site's motto. Words to live by.

2. Be honest with yourself about your talent. See above.

3. Make your fonts readable. See here for an example of what not to do.

4. If you draw like a high schooler, don't design your cover. If you are a high schooler, get an adult to help you. See here for an example of what not to do.

5. Comic sans never makes a good cover font. See here for an example of what not to do.

6. The cover should actually be related to the content. See here for an example of what not to do.

7. Layering isn't always your friend. See here for an example of what not to do.

8. For the love of all that is holy, check your damn spelling. See here for an example of what not to do.

9. Know what an aspect ratio is. See here for an example of what not to do.

10. Don't make your cover too busy. See here for an example of what not to do

I'm not saying I can do any better. Quite to opposite. The important thing is I know I can't do any better. These folks obviously don't, and are cursed with overly supportive friends and family who don't tell them the truth. As indie authors, we should seek honest feedback, not back scratching. Otherwise we may end up with lousy book covers.

I thought of illustrating this post with examples, but the guy over at Lousy Book Covers has been threatened by angry authors, even though posting covers for the sake of criticism comes under fair use. I don't have time to deal with that sort of inanity.

Please allow me to reintroduce myself

Today I'm participating in the Please Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself blogfest. This is a chance for bloggers to tell a little about themselves.

Hmm. . .where to start? I'm a Canadian who hasn't lived in Canada for decades. Instead I've lived in the U.S., Denmark, Bulgaria, England, and most presently Santander in the north of Spain. I spent ten years working as an archaeologist before becoming a full-time writer. Coolest thing excavated: the city gate at Tel Gezer, Israel, commissioned by King Solomon.

Besides writing and archaeology, I love to travel, and one of my writing jobs is for the Gadling travel blog. Scroll all the way to the bottom of this blog to see a map of where I've been. This photo, courtesy Leo Stolpe, shows yours truly atop a burnt out tank in Somaliland.

Other interests: silent films, B-movies, hiking, and caving. I'm also happily married and the proud father of a seven-year-old boy. It's a school holiday today in Santander so most of the people in this blogfest are going to have to wait until tomorrow for comments. The parents among you will understand!

Reader News for January 10

My readers are busy folks. Here's the latest from some of the creative people who read this blog.

Aiden Potts, an artist friend, has come out with a new app in the itunes store. Called d-pixing!, it's a words and pictures game based on the rebus puzzle, where a word is represented by one or more images. It's truly unique because there are thousands of words and hundreds of illustrations by Aiden, challenging you with the sounds of English and testing your visual vocabulary against the clock!

Language is transformed into illustrated symbols, a strangely satisfying return to the root of all writing which began as a series of pictograms. There are unusual words, amusing contemporary visuals and entertaining, surreal juxtapositions. Good fun if you are learning or practicing English. The music and SFX is provided by the French DJ Mr Claude.

D-pixing! is $1.99 and there's a free version for the moochers.

Nick Wilford over at Scattergun Scribblings is hosting the Overcoming Adversity Blogfest on February 4-5. Entries will be compiled into a book and the proceeds will go to funding college for his stepson, Andrew, who has cerebral palsy. Check out the link for why this is more difficult than it should be in Scotland. He's looking for entries of 500 words or less, prose or poetry, on overcoming adversity for something you believe in.

Do you have any news you'd like to share here? It can be about writing, history, archaeology, adventure travel, etc. You know what I cover in this blog, so if it's at all related, send it along to the email on the sidebar to the left.

How will the world end?

How will the world end?

Slowly.

Despite what the wide-eyed True Believers would like, the world is not going to end today or any other single day. No civilization has ended in a day. The real destruction of the world as we know it will come around a lot more slowly.

And that's going to make it a lot more painful.

This Choose Your Own Apocalypse blogfest came along at just the right time. While I'm busy with my next Civil War novel, I'm thinking of what I'll do next. One possibility is a series of loosely connected post-apocalyptic novellas. That got me to thinking how are world could fall apart.

First would come the Lean Years as the current worldwide economic meltdown worsens. This leads to various wars and civil unrest that stir the pot even more. Environmental degradation picks up pace and soon coastal areas are flooded by rising sea levels. This causes large-scale migration and that, compounded with a cash-strapped governments not being able to control the outbreak of diseases, leads to the Plague Years.

Now the world governments are really backed into a corner, and they do what they always do in such a situation--they start a war, actually The Wars, several major conflicts between groups of constantly shifting alliances. Thinks 17th century Europe with 21st century weapons. Not pretty. A few places will get nuked, biochemical weapons spread more disease, and the breakdown of civilization begins in earnest.

Then comes the World Revolution. This isn't one revolution but several. The people have had enough and a bewildering array of political and religious groups try to take over. The weakened governments fall after taking out large numbers of their own citizens. Countries fragment and the revolutionary groups end up with little patches of territory. Having widely different belief systems, they start fighting against one another, ushering in the Feudal Times.

But we're not done yet! In a world left with virtually no infrastructure or reliable long-distance trade, things like electricity and gasoline become rarities to be fought over. The new feudal states begin to collapse because of their own infighting, local revolutions, or simple starvation. A vastly depleted population is left living in fortified villages or scavenging the remains of the civilization they destroyed through their own ignorance.

And that leaves us at page one of my first book. . .

Now I just have to write it!

This photo of the Namibian ghost town Kolmanskop is courtesy Harald Süpfle via Wikimedia Commons. To learn more about this eerie ghost town and to see more photos, check out an article I did on Kolmanskop.

The Cheers, Cavanaugh Blogfest!

Today I and a whole bunch of my online friends are participating in the Cheers, Cavanaugh Blogfest. If you don't know Alex Cavanaugh, he's a bestselling science fiction writer who has made a name for himself in the blogosphere by helping others. His positive outlook is an inspiration and we want to thank him.

The rules of this blogfest are to answer the following four questions:

What does Alex look like?
No idea. We all get mental pictures of people we don't know, though. I imagine a middle-aged guy, slightly receding hairline, bit of a paunch (sorry Alex, but there it is), and a smile permanently fixed on his face. I know I have the smile part right.

Who could play Alex in a documentary? (Living or dead.)
For a living Alex it could be just about any male actor, since we don't know what he looks like. For a dead Alex, any of the male zombies from 28 Days Later. Can you imagine Alex with the Rage Virus? Weird, huh?

Who does Alex remind you of?
That cheerful kid in high school who we all knew. Everyone liked him and he skated through adolescence with no damage. "Whatever happened to that guy?" "Oh, he became a science fiction writer." "Figures."

Write flash fiction using all these prompts: Cavanaugh, Ninja, IWSG, Cosbolt, Guitar.
Mrs. Cavanaugh took her red pen and marked a word on the manuscript that lay on the dining room table. She looked up to where a man in a ninja costume clung to the ceiling.
"Replaced that light bulb yet, honey?" she asked.
"Just getting to it now," the ninja replied as he scuttled upside down towards the chandelier.
"You misspelled Cosbolt again," she said. "This time you have it as 'Cosbot'. Makes it sound like some kind of droid."
The ninja detached himself from the ceiling, did a triple back flip, and landed soundlessly on the floor.
"Thanks, honey, I don't know what I'd do without you."
Mrs. Cavanaugh put her pen aside and studied the ninja for a moment.
"Now that you've completed the third book, what are you going to do?" she asked.
The ninja shrugged.
"I don't know," he replied. "Maybe take up my guitar again and start a band. Rap is still big, how about I do that?"
The ninja struck a gangsta pose, or at least a computer programmer's approximation of a gangsta pose, and rapped out, "I'm down with IWSG, yeah you know me!"
Mrs. Cavanaugh folded her hands on her lap, let out a sigh, and said, "Honey, I think it's best if you write another novel."

Bonus Points: Leave a comment for Mrs. Cavanaugh - thanking her for sharing.
Included above. Thanks Mrs. Ninja!

Origins blogfest: How I started writing

Today I'm participating in the Origins blogfest, where we all discuss how we started writing.

I actually don't remember when I started. The first short story I remember writing was when I lost my first baby tooth. To honor the occasion I wrote a story called The Ghost with One Tooth, complete with illustration! That story is at the bottom of a Toronto landfill now. Oh well.

As a kid I was more of a cartoonist than a short story writer. I did cartoons about time travel, a car race around the world, and a revolution where kids overthrow the adults and take over the world. Ah, every child's dream! My drawings were never very good and the cartoons got more and more text driven, with the words gradually edging out the illustrations. The same thing happened to the famous comic book writer Harvey Pekar of American Splendor fame. I never met him, but I'm in a writers group with Lance Tooks, one of his illustrators.

From about age 12 until my late twenties I stopped writing. I was briefly involved in the zine boom of the late Nineties, writing and publishing a zine called Ichthyoelectroanalgesia about archaeology and travel. I also had stuff published in other zines.

I didn't consider writing as a career until after I got my Masters in archaeology and had worked for a while in the field. It was then I realized that academia wasn't for me and got a second Masters at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. After a brief stint at the New Delhi bureau of Reuters and a couple of small newspapers, I went freelance. Two guidebooks, seven history books, a novel, and a short story collection later, I'm still loving it!

Deja-vu Blogfest: The Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome

Today I'm participating in the Deja-vu blogfest, where bloggers are reposting their favorite old post. I first published this one back in 2009 on my blog Grizzled Old Traveler. It's a travel blog that I don't update anymore now that I blog professionally for Gadling. There are still some good posts on there, though. This is my favorite. My second favorite is Ten Reasons the Moon Landing Conspiracy theory is Stupid.

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer about a book she's writing on legendary beasts. One of my favorites is the Thunderbird, a giant dinosaur-like winged creature that haunts the American Southwest, and the conversation turned to the strange role I've played in the story of this mysterious creature.


Let me say at the outset that I don't think the Thunderbird is real. With all the aviation, birdwatchers, and development in the United States in the past century, no giant flying monster could have remained undetected. My skepticism, however, makes this story all the more interesting.

The Thunderbird is part of Native American religious belief, but that creature is like a giant bird with feathers. The more modern Thunderbird is always described as reptilian, which makes some cryptozoologoists (people who study unknown animals) think it's a pterosaur. Supposedly there was an article in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph, about two cowboys shooting a creature with leathery wings like a bat and a head like an alligator. They dragged it back to town and nailed it up to a barn, its wingspan covering the barn's entire length. I haven't seen this article myself, but I know that frontier journalism often played with the truth. Mark Twain got started on fiction while working on his brother's newspaper in the Nevada Territory!

Some photos have turned up over the years. The most famous one shows a giant Thunderbird nailed to a barn with some cowboys standing nearby. I can't show it to you because it doesn't seem to exist, at least not anymore. Many investigators claim to have seen it or even owned a copy, but nobody has one now

This is where it gets weird. I remember seeing that photo. My memory is of a fairly clear black and white image of a Thunderbird nailed to the roof of a barn, its wingspan almost equal to the barn's length. Men in old western costume are lined up on the roof and in front of the barn. I remember it looked like a rather poor cut-and-paste job. It was common for frontier people to pose next to and on a barn after a barn raising, so perhaps someone added the Thunderbird to a real photo. I even remember where I saw it, in a paranormal magazine at Bookman's, a used bookstore I used to work at in Tucson, Arizona. For some reason I didn't buy the magazine.

This must be a false memory. If the picture existed in a paranormal magazine, it would have been located by dedicated cryptozoologists by now. My experience is just like other people's, in that I have a very clear memory of the event and I no longer have the photo. Some people claim to have seen it in the possession of someone else. Others had a copy and lost it. In my case, I saw it in a magazine I didn't buy. I have unwittingly become part of an urban legend.

Weird, huh? What's going on here? Paranormal investigator Jerome Clark theorizes that the idea of the image is evocative enough to implant a false memory. Perhaps I read about the photo and created the memory? I wonder if ten years from now my writer friend will be writing another book on monsters and will be pulling her hair out trying to find that image of the Thunderbird she remembers seeing.

Oh, and not all memories of this photo are alike. This article includes the memory of a different image of the Thunderbird, and other reports say the creature was nailed to the wall of the barn, not the roof.

While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure these are. If they are really as old as they appear to be, then they are in the public domain. They could simply be old fakes. If they are modern fakes, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

Welcome all new followers!

Participating in the Pay it Forward blogfest was lots of fun. I got a bunch of new followers and found some cool blogs I'd never heard of. It also turns out that one of the bloggers I picked, David over at Guerrilla Explorer, has just published his novel, a thriller filled with conspiracies and cryptids. So hit the link and check it out.

In a further attempt to make this blog more visible, I'm registering with Technorati, which explains the claim code that follows. T44E5PJRF3PX

That means nothing to my readers. Back with some more Civil War tomorrow!

Pay it forward blogfest: my three picks

Today I'm skipping my usual Civil War Photo Friday to participate in the Pay it Forward Blogfest. We're all supposed to pick three blogs that deserve more attention. So here we go. . .

A daily dose of the Civil War
The Civil War Daily Gazette tells you all the latest news, 150 years after it happened. That's right, this tireless blogger is going the distance and posting every day until 1865, um, I mean 2015. I found this blog a couple of months ago and quickly got addicted. It's one of the few blogs I visit daily.

Grumpy writer tells all
Dean Wesley Smith may already be known to you. He is a hardworking midlister like yours truly and has decided to mix traditional publishing with self-publishing via Kindle. Because he's chosen a similar career path, I read his regular rants about the publishing industry and where it's headed. I do find him overly negative about publishers and agents and don't agree with his analysis all the time. That's a good thing. There would be no point in reading him if I always agreed with him!

Lost Treasure! Mysteries of History! Cryptids! Conspiracies!
Guerrilla Explorer takes on the shadowy areas of the world and history. Did Hitler fake his death? Probably not, but there's some intriguing evidence that makes this less silly than it sounds. I'm not convinced those Russian scientists will find anything on their Yeti hunt though. Oh, and the post on the Student Loan Conspiracy was downright depressing.

Head on over to these blogs and see if you like them. If you do, give them some love and leave a comment. tell them I sent you!