When it comes to naming things sometimes the name is fairly obvious. If you are writing a historical fiction you really don't wonder why it is named a 'broadsword'. It is a sword. It is significantly broader than the majority of the other swords in use at that time. If you are writing a story set in a western forest it makes sense that the Lodgepole Pine is a pine three that was used to make the center poles of the lodges both historically and in modern times. 
One does wonder why something that looks rather like a half dead banana was named a Chocolate Lilly however. 

Today I saw a bear. It was fairly large for a black bear and had an odd iridescent shine to it's jet black fur. At first that didn't phase me. I didn't really think about it. Bears eat a lot of fish in the fall and the fall bears on the Alaskan Coast often have that oily shine to their coats when the salmon run. 
Then I remembered that no salmon run come this high up a mountain. 
Then I remembered that there is no food source around that bear that it could possibly eat to get that greasy. 
When I brought this up to my housemate she smiled and nodded. 
"Oh, that must be Sewer Bob. He likes to swim in the sewage ponds and eat all the frogs."

...

​"I see." 

You can't argue with his success.
If ever an author chose an appropriate name to put on his covers it was Stephen King. The author is the number one best  single seller in any category. According to some raking in half of all the money spent on books worldwide. With over seventy published novels you cannot be literate in English and not be aware of at least one of his books. 
That said. 
This author has never read the entirety of one of his books. Nor do I ever plan to.
Once, alone in the attic I put out my eight year old hand and picked up one off of the shelf. It was a two inch thick paperback; white with black flecks all over it. It was not forbidden in the house, our parents forbade very little, but they looked on it with mild irritation. My older sister, the fearless one, had stacks of his books. When she read them her sky-blue eyes glittered with delight. I had been capable of reading since I was five by only during the last year had my reading skill increased to the point that I had discovered the joy of reading. I was ready for one of the big sister books. I can't remember how many pages I read, I can't remember what my emotions were while I read them, I can't remember when I put it back in its haphazard place on the shelf, I don't even remember what conclusion I came too those near three decades ago now. But I do remember that though I read voraciously in ever genre, I never again picked up one of those thick paperbacks that littered our house.
Later I would come to understand that I was very sensitive to dark mental images. That I had a sort of mental allergy to the horror genre that extended to movies, books, and the spoken word. It was no wonder that I shied away from its King. 
So here is my question. If I pretended for a moment that I might be convinced to read King, is there anyone out there who would want to convince me? 
What arguments could you make to sell the master of the darkness?  

Nothing is quite so inspiring as an approaching deadline. 

Deadlines

I got a job
To write a thing
It's coming really good
The juices flow 
The plot is sound
I'd send it if I could
But it's not done
The ink's still wet
And  I haven't finished edits
I'll get it done
Don't you fret 
*But first I look at Reddit* 

​

So this November will probably be spent editing the book I rough drafted last year. Will any of you authors out there in cyberspace be doing the full 50,000 word NaNoWriMo challenge this year?
I think my goal will be to edit three chapters a day. 
​Any suggestions? 

Sometimes your body just does not want you to go into work. Best to stay home with blankets and lots of fluids. 

Humans are Weird – Packing Snow
“Do you hear that?”
Quilx’tch clicked his mandibles in confirmation and adjusted his warming stone underneath his thorax.
“What do you think the humans are up to now?” his younger companion asked, poking her eyes out of her blanket cocoon.
“I don’t know,” Quilx’tch said, carefully stretching out one leg after another, being careful not to stick his paws out of the ‘fleece’ the humans had provided him with.
He had his apprentice were sitting facing the data kiosk in the middle of their common room. Both were wrapped closely in the bright red blankets gifted them from the other exploratory species on the planet.  The color contrasted with the various dust colored shelves and containers they held.
“Should we go check on it?” She asked eagerly.
“Do as you wish,” Quilx’tch said amiably. “I for one, will be waiting here, under my blanket, until the base temperature reaches acceptable levels for the day.”
Tas’ka started to shrug off her blanket but shuddered as the air hit her mass and quickly pulled the fleece back over her head. “I can wait,” she said.
The odd double beat of approaching human feet heralded the arrival of one of the younger, more eager humans.    His bright red face nearly filled their low door as it opened at his signal.
“Hey Task! Do you want to come out with me?” The human called.
“Out in the cold?” Tas’ka asked.
“Yeah, it snowed last night!” The human said.
“Frozen precipitation has fallen every night for the past forty night cycles,” Tas’ka pointed out, adjusting the blanket around her mandibles and eyes.
“Yeah, but this is packing snow!” The human insisted. “First time that has happened.”
“I am staying under this lovely blanket until the base reaches optimum temperature,” Tas’ka said firmly. “No matter what type of frozen precipitation has fallen.”
“Fair enough,” the human said with a grin. “I will give you the play by play when we get back in.”
The door closed and the human’s footsteps receded.
“Packing snow,” Tas’ka mulled over the word. “I wonder what that means…”
“They will tell us,” Quilx’tch said, sinking down onto his warming stone with a sigh. “They will not doubt tell us.”
 

Zombie rottweilers were not what his friend promised when they went out for a night of adventure, but that is what Will got. Like many of his generation Will Blackwood finds himself deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life. A part-time job as a theatric jouster isn’t enough to keep his older brother from worrying about him, nor is it enough to keep him from worrying about their younger brother. But dead end jobs, a sad dearth of romance, and a general ennui take the back seat when their father’s oldest friend appears to arm them for a mystic battle, just before getting kidnapped by something that should not exist in the twenty-first century.
Layton Green has created a complex and enjoyable fantasy world and has set his modern characters in it while skillfully balancing their twenty-first century ethos with their surroundings. The main characters are all well developed and engaging. The storytelling flows well and the writing is technically good. His merging of the fantastic world the titular brothers have to face and the mundane world they come from is smooth and doesn’t distract from the story over all. He has an especial talent for remembering the more mundane details of the fantasy world; from the taste of the bread to tired muscles after unexpected exercise.
The story frequently becomes formulaic in the telling and there are few true surprises and plot twists. The author does have a tendency to “tell and not show” especially when developing the main characters personalities and some of the secondary characters can feel two-dimensional.
The story is aimed at a slightly older audience with plenty of sexual (though not explicit) interaction and parents will probably want to give the book a once over before letting younger readers pick it up. There is also the usual sword and sorcery violence to consider.
All in all it was an enjoyable fantasy romp with the promise of more to come in later books. Enjoy and read at your own discretion. 

The folk music tradition in the Pacific Northwest (for those of you who don’t know that is the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska) is rich and varied. Despite some of the trite and common themes there are usually some deeply ironic twists that gives it its own special flavor. Some times looking back over the tunes you hummed as a child can be … interesting.

• -Good gosh and golly aren’t our rivers GREAT! I mean they are dangerous and people die in them all the time but still.
• -A detailed explanation of a forest animals life that only slightly anthropomorphizes the animal.
• -I totally rebelled against the moral rules of my parents but now that I am an adult THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING and I will totally raise my kids the same way.
• -The prettiest girl in the area lives up that hill and I am going to go up there to court her even though her Daddy is ex-special forces and has trained all the birds on the mountain to spy for him and will probably kill me for trying.
• -PLOT TWIST, the pretty girl’s Daddy actually is a great guy and likes me but said pretty girl didn’t want to marry no stinking coward and told him to keep any out. Now we have five kids and he’s the best grandpa. (I am slightly afraid of my wife though)
•  -I never shave or do anything to look attractive but my significant other loves me anyway. We plan on moving out to the country and living like hermits.
• -I went to Alaska to get rich and died of cold. My family down south will cry over my body.
• -I know all of my friends are worried about my hedonistic lifestyle but I don’t care, I don’t plan on living past 35 anyway.
• -I sure wish I had appreciated how much Daddy loved us all before he worked himself to death feeding us.
• -Did I mention how great our rivers are? Well our lakes are nice too.
• -Holey Moley isn’t that one specific river the BEST! It literally carried us from hunter/gatherer villages into the space age. (Please forget all the controversy over the giant dam.)
• -Mama loved us all deeply and expressed that love through rigid discipline. I still can feel that willow switch on my bottom.
• -To praise the merits of farm life I will mimic the sound of several dozen animals.
• -There used to be a LOT more salmon in the river, I bet it is the fault of whoever is in political power now and I will singe a thinly veiled metaphor for it that can be taken several ways so my song will sell no matter who is in power.
• -Grandma's house was a near magical place in the forest with all sorts of weird homemade food and we had great times there, sometimes she’d cry about missing Grandpa but she could probably kill a pig with her bare hands.
• -I went to the Alaska gold fields to get rich and escape my dull job. I got rich and came back south. Life as a rich man is pointless and dull. I deliberately let questionable women swindle me out of my money so I can go back to Alaska.
• -The forest is thick, the animals are dangerous, my best friend was killed by a cougar, still beats that horrible city job.