alfreda89 | Comments? Questions? Discussion?

hey babe! been stressing about some travel. will catch up with you soon!!

I get to stress about travel, today, too. Hang in there!

I've wondered about the child Sheel saw in his vision in the last book ... was that the child that Daramae lost, or a fortelling that she would have more children?
I loved the feel of the scenes in the mine in that book. With the news about those miners in Chile, those scenes have been in my minds eye.

How to answer this without giving away too much? Always the eternal question. The child was not the one lost elsewhere, it is a future child of Darame and Sheel's. What he saw was a group of children, and not all of them were their children. The red-headed boy was Ardal -- remember that Darame mentioned her father's red beard. That trait showed up tangentially in my family!

I do remember visiting the mines, when I hear stories about mine cave-ins. At the AMAX mine -- even with the spine of the drift being so tall, for heavy machinery, you still are very aware of being someplace humans usually don't go. Maybe the lack of breeze, the weird silence -- no bird or animal noises? Something tells you that you are NOT in Kansas anymore.

It didn't bother me very much -- what bothered me was a place elsewhere in the mining operation where I would have had to walk across a metal, open weave floor ten stories in the air. I simply could not face it, and asked our guide if there was another way around. He said sure and did not make a big deal of it -- said everyone had something that made their back crawl, and why force it when it wasn't necessary?

I have trouble in big cities, too -- I don't like walking across those open weave gate doors set in the sidewalks. I know the odds of one collapsing the other direction are small, but they bother me. Probably I got a high heel caught once or something....

I always have an apprehension that my keys will leap out of my pocket and disappear through the grating!

I have things spilling out all over these days. If I've accidentally parked over a grate, I stop and check all purse zippers before climbing out! The sweat and yoga pants don't have pockets.

There is a troll who lives in them. Picks pockets and grabs heels.

There is a troll who lives in them. Picks pockets and grabs heels.

I KNEW it!

I'm now having wisps of 'The three New Yorkers Gruff' drifting around my hind brain. The trolls obviously emigrated with the Norwiegans and decided that NY was much better then waiting for stray goats over a gorge. They had also done some research and discovered that the midwest was somewhat short of suitable ravines. They may have had trouble with Brooklyn and Bronx accents though.

If ever a large, hairy hand reaches out of a grate in one of my stories, only you will know that it really started while researching an SF novel! ;^)

I wait with great anticipation. (Jumps up and down with glee)

I love the sound of the fire sticks and fire disks. So much nicer than coal.

What is the rest of Nuala like? You made a brief mention of another continent in the last book - and some mention of a possible project to grow Kona there.
Not that I don't want to see lots and lots more of Sheels story. The Cederlan also are such a fascinating element.

My mind doesn't tell me things it doesn't need me to know yet. That is worse (or better -- it keeps me from worrying about losing important plot points) since I got ill. So I can tell you that Nuala is in the approximate location of Earth in its revolution around Kee, its star. There are several other planets in the system that are capable of sustaining life, with a little terraforming.

It's a young world, constantly churning things up with volcanoes, earthquakes, and what not. I can tell you that coffee and tea both grow best at higher elevations in warm, moist climates. Which is why they grow in a certain belt around the planet. The Nualans do not waste time trying to grow things where they won't grow, although they are as tempted as we are by "almost" -- we don't have to take the food from farther away if we can get it to grow HERE.

The characters in HIDDEN talking about growing tea do go to the southern continent (immediate one due south -- there is more than one continent in the southern hemisphere.) It is a lush sort of place, lots of animals filling the various niches. I think part of a subplot takes place down there, but right now, that part of the story hasn't given me anything to add notes about! I'm getting to know someone new who I think will be POV.

If I write the thing. Right now, Allie and I have an appointment today!

The date on your post just changed to Dec! Time warp?

You post date something when you want it to stay at the top of the journal. Laura Anne Gilman does it to keep a semi-accurate bibliography at the front of her Live Journal. This way, people who don't come to the blog on a free section day of FIRES can find comments.

Can we ask about Allie here, too?? :)

I'm wondering if this tale, from the Old Land, in 1815 is set vaguely same timeperiod as Allie?

http://beachcombing.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/fairy-death-in-ilkley/

Sure. We just don't have a cover icon for Allie!

Kindred Rites ends in late winter of 1810, in the Indiana territory (what was known in our world, and theirs, as the Northwest Territory.) Although the fae folk are still alive and well in Allie's time. They just don't have a lot of use for us....

Edited 2011-01-18 02:08 (UTC)

I just bought both Nuala books for my Kindle. One problem Amazon has in in its indexing for wireless, direct to Kindle purchases. If one types in your name - no books come up! The books have to be requested by their individual titles. This is not the first time that I have had this happen.

I have complained about this. They tell me that it takes about a week for the wireless version to link to the non-wireless version. I found that I **could not** even click on my name at one Kindle book, and be lead to a list of other Kindle books!

They claim I can fix it so that all versions of my name go to me. We'll see -- I suspect this will only work for the Kindle editions. I'd like all my stuff to come up together, trusting that I will finish a new book and sell it. Thanks for getting the Kindle editions!

The Kindle 'Fires of Nuala' lacks a table of contents, map and the table of the Nualan times and calendar.

Starting a reread, I was wondering about how Halsey and Daramae connected up when she was a child. Was Halsey on the same planet at the time, or did her relatives put her into freeze and ship her off?

Is there a table of contents in the end of the book? That's what looked like happened with the Hidden Fires Kindle, when I looked at the conversion. Can you believe they do not give you a copy of the e-book to proof?

So the maps, calendar and time conversion did not come through at all? No one has mentioned that. Drat! I wish I could convince people to go with the BVC mobi -- all the stuff if there, including the thieves' cant that was not in the print copy, because Warner and I both goofed.

From Darame's vague comments on it (you know Free Traders -- they avoid giving out information) I think she and Halsey were on the same planet at the time -- maybe her father was even working with Halsey at the time. But which planet that was, she hasn't said.

I know that sounds silly, but it's the easiest way to explain the writing process...she'll tell me if I need to know. (I hate being out of the loop!)

I managed to get to the 'back' of the kindle edition - no tableof contents, but the rest of the stuff is there - including a reference to getting books at the book view cafe!

I'm sorry the convenience of the ToC isn't there, but at least the other stuff made it. And an ad for BVC, how amusing.

But now you can blow up the text to whatever size you want! Sweet!

On close examination(Maps on the Kindle do not enlarge drat it) the maps in 'Fires' are the two from Fire Sanctuary and each one is duplicated! Amazon fails yet again!
I will be buying the BVC editions. Is it permissible to put them on disc and get a personal copy printed up with an expresso machine? I do really prefer physical copies and my old paperbacks are now in the handful of pages stage!

Good luck with the Allie project - looking forward to seeing it!

Look closely at the maps -- remember that Fires of Nuala did not have maps, when it was printed. I did a new map of the lands to the east, and modified the map from Fire Sanctuary for the western side of the continent. (Hand-drawn -- now you know what I worked from! And with my eyes in flux, it's a funny story how I re-drew that eastern map. Wish I had a picture of the set-up.) Are they really identical? Because that's a big mistake!

My Calibre format-er is trying to get the ToC hassle fixed, and also fixing errors that were missed in the translating from many formats into the new one. If the maps did not go through correctly, she'll have to look at that. If there are four maps, that's wrong, too! (In Hidden Fires there will be an elevation map of the mine, too.)

Here's the FAQ from Book View Cafe -- http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/FAQs. When you buy a subscription, you can have it in all formats, if you want, and you may also print for your own use. The BVC versions are not DRM. No one has asked about the Espresso machines specifically, but I would say that you can make a copy for yourself to read. But you can't sell it, or print multiple copies of it. Does that make sense?

Thank you for telling me about the Kindle burps! I will upload a new Kindle version as soon as we can get the problems hammered out. I still haven't found out how to download a copy to review -- they give you a glance at it, real useful -- so I need to ask a friend if he's found that feature yet.

I like your touch with religion. You never spell out what the specifics of belief on Nuala are - let alone exactly what the schisms are, but it feels real. Mendulay does make my brain skip to Kipling though - the Road to Mandulay. What inspired the name?

Took some long thinking, around other commitments, to piece this together! I think it came from a couple of areas. One thing was, I did not want the religion to be too specific. That allowed me to play with it, depending on where I was in the timeline. I did want a mixture of concepts -- elements that might have grown out of both western and eastern religions, but made sense to the scientists/colonists in a totally new place. I agree with Campbell that religions generally have a place they are rooted and grow. When you transplant them, they don't always continue to make sense.

The other thing I loved to play with was language. There is both the exotic city, and the word for the mandala. It's an image that repeats -- the Atares use Celtic knots in their crests -- yet I wanted it to change slightly. The Germanic "u" plays its part in a lot of Nualan words, so having the word change in the vowel seemed a logical shift.

probably not much news in this, but Alfreda came to mind anyway :)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/05/952914/-Indians-101:-Wild-Foods-in-the-Great-Lakes-Area-

Very interesting, thanks for the link. I don't know what happened to LJ, but I never received notification on it.

I've lost the link, but you came to mind for another similar dealie recently. apparently pine nuts were a HUGE Native American cash crop when the Pioneers were invading ... and prior to European arrival, a key food crop. But the weird part, or at least the part that makes it not annually reliable is that various pine trees only put out nuts every 3 or 7 years (I think depending on the species of pine) ..

just wanted to share!

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I found my hard copy of BLIND TIGER! Now, all I need is to print one missing page, and you're in business.

Have had an exhausting week. I think we need to go soak for about a month....

Just started on Sanctuary and got curious about the edifice game. What was your inspiration for that. All that comes to my mind is the tree solitaire game.

Believe it or not, there was a game that could be played, once upon a time. I worked out the rules to it. It was part of my "this far away, there would be some things that are distant relations if not unintelligible to us" thinking.

I was working with using simple games of chance (both basic poker and 21 are quite simple, but the number of possible card combinations improves house odds.) Remember that casinos use a new deck every hand, when dealing 21! Computers as dealers makes more sense, since card counting would be difficult if not useless. I combined it with games that are king-of-the-mountain, like War, Solitaire, and Spades, and came up with Edifice. I don't think I've ever played Tree solitaire.

It's a game for gamblers who want fast hands. The people who win at it, like Lyte, are actually doing more reading of players than the cards themselves. Like contract bridge, it's an advantage if you can remember and then forget odds of a card turning up in each hand.

Comments? Questions? Discussion?

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Snapshots from Nuala --

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Split difference --

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