StanleyWheeler

   I started off the weekend by traveling across the state. I knew I would get hungry along the way, and refuse to compromise when it comes to nutrition. I walked out of the gas station with the priceless gems pictured below. Actually, they were priced at a little over five dollars -- which I thought was a good deal when compared with the package of six of these beauties for which they were asking almost three dollars.     Of course, I already had a bottle of pop in the car to keep myself properly hydrated. The traffic got worse as the day wore on, but I completed the journey without notable incident. Mowing and replacing a check valve broke the monotony of packing stuff. Fortunately, a good friend was able to give me a hand with one of those tasks.  I did get two welcome breaks. First, Les Freres Corses  came to pick up the feline from which Le Chateau au Chat Gris  derives its nomenclature--our place in Byzantium isn't appropriate for her wild natur...

  Interview with Nick Nethery Author of Relics of the Fallen   Please tell me a little about your new book published by Raconteur Press.             Relics of the Fallen .   Dan Kelly, an Army bomb technician getting close to retirement, is recruited into a secret unit dealing with highly advanced, dangerous artifacts and devices scattered around Earth by…who?   Aliens?   A human civilization that predated our known history?   We find out as Dan finds out.             I think of Relics of the Fallen as military science fiction, but it could also be called military fantasy or military thriller.             I wrote most of it on lunch breaks when I was stationed in the Netherlands working for NATO.   My boss knew I was retiring soon and was gracious enough to let me shut my office do...

  Drown Melancholy By STANLEY WHEELER An old sea shanty, a reminder of a curse, drives a pirate captain to the brink of madness… Can the crew make their final score, or will the curse destroy them all?! It's in Cirsova issue 24 which you can pre-order now.    I taught Sunday School again today. It happens twice a month and I try not to miss it. It's a good gig that provides a lot of satisfaction both in trying to learn enough to be prepared to lead a discussion and then actually discussing the material with the class. Today's material was totally awesome, but rather than try to expound on the awesomeness, elaborate on the mind-expanding connections, and share all the cool stuff I experienced in studying myself and getting insights from others with more expertise than myself, I divided the material into chunks and asked volunteers to talk about something from each chunk that appealed to them. It turned out pretty well. One constant seems to be that great things happen w...

  We had a manifold mission for the weekend that took us to Le Chateau au Chat Gris and to the home of olden days. 99 and I loaded the compact white whale and began our voyage. On our arrival au chateau, we immediately commenced the festivities, beginning with celebratory weed-pulling. We harvested three wagon loads or more of the cursed crop, both getting pricked multiple times by the dried stickers that congregated at the base of the foul flora. On the plus side, we had arrived in time to execute our vile vegetation eviction revelry during the hottest part of the day. After we had disposed of the verdant corpses, I analyzed the next scheduled event in our carnival of fun. There had been a storm and the old maple tree, exuberantly cavorting like a featured performer in Cirque du Soleil, became apprised of the fact that her limbs were no longer suited for the gymnastics of a sapling and thus broke a hip. The said fracture was over 20 feet off the ground. The limb had not broken cle...

I think I captured the photo above from Jay Barnson's presentation on writing pulp. I attended another presentation he did on monsters from North American myths. I let him know that I was already using some of them in my Tomahawks and Dragon Fire Series. However, I get ahead of myself. Let me back up. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was Writers Cantina time and my third consecutive weekend on the road. Things got interesting when I discovered that the hotel I had booked was not the pleasant place at which I had stayed the two previous years. That could be because I waited so long to make the reservation, not being certain whether I would be able to attend the cantina this year. There was no signage on the hotel and men in lift worked on a big blank space over the entrance. Once inside, a young man with ties to India greeted me at the counter and assigned me a room on the third floor. It took a couple trips for me to get my stuff to the room and I decided I s...

  Interview with Fred Phillips Author of The Gold and Fire Series and more Please tell me a little about your current work in progress. I have two projects that I hope to get across the finish line before the end of the year. One is the second book in the "Gold and Fire" series, which will be launching with "Dreams of Gold and Fire" from Raconteur Press on July 30. I think I have the title for the sequel in my head, but I'm not quite ready to commit yet. Things are always subject to change in the writing process, but I can say for sure that it will involve gold and fire. I plan to write the third book in 2026, and I'm pretty certain that it will be titled "Knight of Gold and Fire." That's as far as I have things planned, and that plan is only loose at this point. After that, we'll see where the story goes. Of course, it will be up to Raconteur when or if the others will be published. The second project is a western fantasy for adults ti...