Altivo

Today marks the start of National Novel Writing Month, infamous for its ability to turn would-be authors into snarling piles of stress as they try to draft a 50 thousand word novel in 30 days. I admit I've been through that several times, and have the [unfinished but at least 50K words each] manuscripts to prove it. I'm not doing it this year. Life is too short, and at my age, shorter yet most likely.

However, with the inspiration from singer-songwriter Charlie Monterey (Twitter: songdogmi) and furry friend Casey (Twitter: casey_382), I will attempt the NaBloPoMo this year. That's National Blog Posting Month (est. 2013 I think,) and an invention of Casey's that I had forgotten. We will attempt to post every day for thirty days. Here is day one before you. Wish us luck.

No promises as to content, other than mine will certainly be safe to read at work and boring to children if read to them.

I recently had the honor of recording an audio version of Mary E. Lowd's story, "A Sense of Clarity" for The Voice of Dog podcast. As with all of her writing, this one is clever and brilliantly done, with a promising conclusion. Please give it a listen. 🐴

https://www.thevoice.dog/episode/a-sense-of-clarity-by-mary-e-lowd-read-by-altivo-overo

The other part of that excerpt is now available on Khakidoggy's site: http://thevoice.dog/

The title of this episode is "All That Glitters."

Background: These two chapters are excerpted from a mystery novel entitled ARROW: A College Tail. I wrote most of it during National Novel Writing Month a few years back. The characters are as follow:

Francis - a raccoon, student, and a species dysphoric. He is gay, but not trans-sexual. Instead he identifies as a wolf trapped in a raccoon's body. In his composition class, he wrote an essay about that and had to read it aloud. You can imagine the derision (and sympathy) heaped upon him.

Jay - a wolf, a couple of years older than Francis. Also gay, but attracted to raccoons rather than his own species. You can see where this is heading. Jay invited Francis to join Alpha Eta Rho, a Greek letter society that is structured as a wolf pack (with Jay as alpha, of course.) Francis has accepted, taken a pledge, and received a brass token to carry as proof of membership.

Ernie - another raccoon, student, straight but open-minded, and Francis' room mate.

Win - a wolf, student, straight, and a friend (dare I say "wing-wolf") to Jay in his pursuit of Francis' attention and affection.

Also mentioned, Stefan Ulf, historic figure from the university, founder of the real Alpha Eta Rho group which had been a sort of speciesist organization that harassed deer and probably physically injured or killed several of them.

At the beginning of "Gibbous Moon Rising," Francis has had a nightmare in which he was visited by Stefan Ulf, a threatening black wolf, who directed him to go to a certain hollow tree and find an ugly claw like weapon concealed there. Francis was to use this to kill a deer in order to prove his loyalty to Alpha Eta Rho. Naturally, Francis awakens quite disturbed and tries to make sense of this nightmare. On his way to the library to look for information about Alpha Eta Rho and Ulf, he passes a police investigation of an apparent murder, and the victim's body is still lying there: a young buck deer. Now Francis fears that he himself has somehow committed this grisly deed, while hypnotized or sleepwalking. That's the point at which these excerpts begin.

The complete novel has never been released, but at Khakidoggy's urging, I am looking at the manuscript to see whether I can get it into shape and do something like that with it. Possibly an ebook, anyway.

Please enjoy the teasers. Comments or criticisms welcome.

I'm pleased to announce that my story, "Harvest Home," appears in the new anthology Fragments of Life's Heart which is now available from Amazon, Smashwords, Weasel Press, and Rabbit Valley.

I have been writing about my two characters Argos the wolf and Fennec the fox for several years now, but mostly in longer works that have yet to see print. "Harvest Home" is set near the ends of their lives and will actually be their first appearance in a print format.

This collection of short stories by furry authors has been in the works for more than a year, and editors Laura "Munchkin" Lewis and Stefano "Mando" Zocchi have done a masterful job of pulling it all together. The book is available in both traditional print and e-book formats (Kindle/mobi or epub.)

Quite a few more illustrious writers have contributed to the anthology, and you can see the list of contents at any of the links I've supplied above. If you read furry literature, I'm sure you will enjoy this.

Since I "helped" with editing for Civilized Beasts (poetry anthology due out next year,) I was asked to provide a brief biographical note in the form of a poem. Tempted by the suggestion of a limerick, but I settled on the quatrain in the style of Omar Khayyam/Edward FitzGerald.

Alas! Poor Altivo's lived long in the past.
Some people will tell you he's only half-assed.
    Dream-ridden, Shakespearean, equine is he:
Neither grey mule nor donkey but horse scholiast.

Once again I've taken too long a break from posting here. The winter has been made busy by several events, not the least of which is my planned retirement from full time library work. After June, I will be a greymuzzle pensioner, with more time for writing, music, gardening, and my pets. Of course that means helping to find and train my replacement. After twelve years in one job, there is a lot of stuff to organize and document and I've been kept very busy getting that done while keeping up with my regular responsibilities.

Meanwhile, my husband is getting near the end of his five year quest for the Ph.D. degree, which has also kept us pretty busy. Next week he will be presenting a paper at a conference, while I cover the animal care tasks he normally handles here at home.

Also some announcements on the writing front. First, I have two poems recently published. One gives a tortoise's view of history, and can be found at QuarterReads. The title is "Thoughts Chelonian." The second appears in a curated selection of furry poems at Adjective Species. The title is "Procyon Prowling" and the subject is a raccoon. I recommend the poems in that collection. They represent a wide variety of styles and formats, and an equally diverse viewpoints on furry subjects. Lunostophiles did a fine job of selecting them from the submitted works.

My story "Coyote's Voice" will appear in ROAR volume 6, to be released in July at Anthrocon if all goes according to plan. The publisher is Bad Dog Books, and the very competent editor for this issue is Mary E. Lowd, also known as Ryffnah.

I'm also currently engaged in writing the completing chapters of Oh, Ricky, the parody on Richard the Lion(heart) that some of you may remember from NanoWrimo 2011. I'm doing that in connection with this month's Camp NanoWrimo where I'm one of a dozen folks working together to prompt and encourage each other.

More as events develop. Thanks for reading.

Today's forecast called for possibly violent thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. However, those arrived mid-morning with significant sturm und drang and a heckuva lot of water. I think we got about an inch of rain in a two hour period. Then it cleared and the sun came out in time for lunch. By late afternoon there was nothing but a lot of puddles left here, and there were tornado warnings across the lake in Michigan. Timing, folks.

Subject heading discovery for the day: "WARLORDISM" — Apparently the Library of Congress sees this as a socio-political system somewhere between feudalism and tribalism, sharing elements of both. I thought it sounded like some sort of cultish religious practice.

Oh, and the progress? Finished the requested edits on the story "Beyond Mundane Boundaries" that is slated to appear in Allasso later this spring. Mostly I was asked about moving commas around, which I didn't dispute. There were about three changes in word choice or sentence structure that we had to negotiate. I hope we have them resolved now.

Things are soggy. The sump pump under the house foundation is running about once every 45 seconds. I hope they've got it right and the next couple of days will be warm and dry.

I hate doing these, and never like what I come up with. I found I had nine different versions from previous places and publications, but I didn't care for any of them. Now there will be a tenth that I'll probably dislike when I look at it later.

Big (BIG) solar storm in progress folks. If you're at a higher latitude in North America (Alaska, Canada, Maine, maybe even Minnesota or Wisconsin) and have anything like a clear sky, check it for aurora displays tonight.

This is probably already at its peak, but it's quite possible that another particle ejection from the sun could arrive before it settles, raising the energy to an even higher level.

Gary is fiddling with his embroidery machine. I asked him to do something for me and he hasn't used it in months so now it's out of adjustment. I feel bad about eating up his time on it now.

Not as cold as last night, but the stove is going again just the same. We get spoiled I guess and like warm hands and feet.

Very strange. It feels so odd to spend an evening reading instead of having to write for a deadline. Don't worry, though, I will be continuing to write on the story.

I bought 11 dollar coins out of the library bank deposit this morning. These were all from the current series of Presidential portraits. It was like the utterly worthless Presidents series. Six of them were Millard Fillmore. Millard who? Yeah, that one. Two were Andrew Johnson. One was Andrew Jackson, whose antics would have made any 21st century GOP moron proud, and the last one was Thomas Jefferson. I'll grant that Jefferson was a reasonably good president whose views often agreed with my own. But the matter of Sally Hemmings and the mind games that were played over it for so many years does cast a shadow over his personal ethics and responsibility. As for the rest of this lot, they rate in my pile of really worthless politicians from history.

Chance of snow tonight. Last year we had snow already, though the first big one didn't hit until December 4.

Roth trades information with Rory, and gets the train going toward Chatton. When he finds Brent Cutwood waiting for him aboard the train, he has to keep his promise and allow an interview. Then on arrival at Chatton, the stationmaster tweaks him for failing to report the track defect yet again, even though he had done so at Dermouth.

Installment 25 is here

Cumulative word count: 51385

The Nano is completed, the story is not. I do intend to finish the draft and then go back and do a lot of technical editing on it. This year I have set a goal for completion, and that is the end of March, 2012. I hope to release an e-book version in several formats sometime after that, possibly even with illustrations. A paper edition is a possibility provided that I receive enough expressions of interest. I've heard encouragement from a couple of readers, but the counters on Furrag.com tell me that I have somewhere between 30 and 40 who have followed me through the entire 50K words so far. Now is the time for you to speak up. Do you want to read the entire story, polished and assembled as a finished novella? It's up to you.

Please remember that what you see at Furrag.com right now is not anywhere near a finished text. It is an incomplete first draft that will be enhanced, expanded, and revised before final release. The climax of the story hasn't even been reached at this point. There may be a small cost for the finished book, but as an ebook it will be under $3 US. Paper copies, if I go that far, will inevitably be more expensive. Just how much depends on demand and the publishing route I eventually might find. Note that ebooks would be readable in multiple formats, for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Sony, and computer and tablet reading software. I definitely plan to use Smashwords as a distributor, but might be able to get it onto Amazon or other channels as well. Let me know what you think.