Erika Tracy's Blog

I have finally done it: put together my son's pictures and my own, written text to go with them, and written a short pamphlet-sized book to teach children how to take care of their chickens. Why? Because my son loves nonfiction, and it turned out that there's a huge gap between "The chicken goes cluck!" and the 4-H-aimed guides to producing superior plumage. When a writer sees a gap in the literature, what does a writer do? You got it.

So that exists. Now I have to get the word out, which will probably take the form of leafletting the local seed-feed store and asking friends to do likewise, quick before all the Easter chicks get sold. I also have to remember how to put it on Goodreads!

Well, look at that. I have a review by a dog-books reviewer, over at Canis Bonus:
http://canisbonus.com/book-review/hom...

And now I have something to keep in mind for a second edition, which is no bad thing, and a review written by someone being read by people I don't have access to otherwise, which is no bad thing either. I am, on balance, pretty happy.

I have a plotbunny, or perhaps a plotdoggy, inspired by discussions of The Zombie Apocalypse. There are certain facts about the world which are simply overlooked in most of the zombie movies and shows out there, observed by my husband and amplified by a biologist friend, namely that there are an awful lot of carnivores out there that are perfectly happy to eat decaying human.

Wish me luck!

... and why I think I stink at it.

Today I packed up a few copies of my book and went 'round to local potential sellers. Then I came home and emailed a manager, a corporate headquarters, and two "recommend a book here" pages, one of them the library, because nobody really wants to see an author carrying her own book walk into their store.

Tomorrow I try again. Having hit the places that officially have something to do with books, it is now time to try the grooming salon, the coffee shops (particularly the one that allows dogs on the patio), and other such places. In the evening, it goes to obedience class with me. In a couple of weeks, it goes to the dog-club meeting. I may have to visit some training clubs.

Then I have to explain to them my unique qualifications as a former SAR handler and current AKC competitor/enthusiast and general problem-analyzer and neuroscience/ethology/education geek to write this book. (Am I missing anything? No, I think that about covers it.)

I want a distribution manager for Christmas!

I gave in to the pleas of my son and my own desires, and we have four small chicks, now two weeks old. At first glance they are cute little fuzzballs, two little wild-looking Silver-Laced Wyandottes and two little yellow Buff Orpingtons.

At second glance, not all is simple in the world of chicks.

They tend to pair up by type, which interested me; they know whether they match or not. The Buffies are friendly little birds, who don't mind all that much about being caught and petted. The Wyandottes (and aren't chicken breed names wonderful? Even before you get into the fact that both Goodreads and Facebook are quite sure it ought to be Anecdotes and Wellingtons? There's a story there...)are wilder, more likely to run away from a hand and more likely to shrilly complain when caught. I thought about getting one each of the four varieties present, but that would have required me to catch a Barred Rock and an Americauna. If I can't when they're a week old, I don't want those, and I hear the latter is a naughty breed generally.

My son, internet handle Mowgli, named them Keenakurra, Kunaletta, Kunakootta, and Love of Mowgli. The first two are the Wyandottes. The other day all four were clamoring at the front of the cage for some explore-the-porch time, and seeing no harm in it, I opened their door. Once they actually could get out, they all thought better of it, and the two Buffies went for a snack. The Wyandottes stared over the edge for a moment, thinking it over, and then Keenakurra headed for the food as well. She pecked the Buffies away from it, drove them along the edge of the cage, found a good spot, and whalloped them over the edge.

If she'd tried with just one, she would have succeeded in her experiment; as it was, she didn't knock either very far, and after a moment of flapping and peeping on the sloped mesh of the door, they hustled back up and hurried back to the food. Even so, I'm impressed. It certainly looked as though she wanted them to go first so she could see if anything bad happened. It isn't bad planning for a two-week-old chicken.

Some people think that humor and animals are not appropriate matter for real writers. I like to think either, or both, are fair game for learning something, and isn't that what writing is really for?

I have put out a puppy-training book on Lulu. For some reason it's being a stinker about revisions, such as actually adding the ISBN I want and things like that, so right now it's only available through Lulu, which is okay since it's cheaper there and takes weeks to get onto other venues anyway. Now I have to remember how to add a book on here, or hope some other kind soul does it for me. (Hint, hint, gentle readers!) After battling with a few very odd computer problems for most of the past 24 hours, I just can't be bothered right this minute. Have a blog post! http://www.lulu.com/shop/erika-tracy/... is the location of the book at present.

When I build up the stamina, there will be a cheaper black-and-white wirebound that will stay open on the table while you train: the purely functional edition. This is the edition with the color photos of the cute Kimberlite shepherd puppies.

My in-laws warned that having chickens was like having your own abattoir, or some such phrasing. We made it from early March to this morning without losing a single one. And now we don't have a single one.

I woke to honking, which turned out to be the next-door neighbor running off some stray dogs in our yard by blasting up our driveway. He knew what they were up to. I thanked him, but it was much too late. The dogs weren't hungry, and didn't carry off any to eat. They just did what they would have done with toys. Unfortunately these toys were my son's pet hens.

I am displeased, and a little less fond of dogs in the abstract than I usually am. My own dogs? Still fine. Your dogs? Less so.

Will we get more? I don't know. They had become part of how I planned my day. "Let's have corn for dinner. We like it, and the chickens enjoy pecking the cobs around." "Hey, there's a weird kind of grub in the compost heap. I'll feed those to the chickens." It solves a lot of problems, having chickens: "What should I do with these mushy but not moldy berries? This one leftover pancake? This pile of watermelon seeds?" These questions no longer have the ready answer they did a day ago.

I've been wrestling with a novel for a long time. I like it, and the story has me pretty firmly in its claws, and it's damned well going to get done someday. The trick is getting it done in a reasonable order with a reasonable plot curve. Originally it was solidly in the perspective of a chap named Ichabod Howell, and that's the least of his worries.

And there were whopping huge holes in it, and the timeline was a mess.

Now it's turning out that the easiest way to fill in the holes is to add a few more points of view, which unfortunately means I have to climb into the skulls of the sort of unsavory people he spent most of his time around. It's basically a story about how someone could be convicted of a murder he emphatically committed without being what most of us would call "guilty." Too many people have too much influence over him, so part of the story is about the development of that influence and part is about escaping it.

I think what interests me about it is that nobody ever believes himself to be a bad person, so some of these people have to do some major intellectual gymnastics to be who they are. This has in turn led me to the fight for wizard rights, thoughts on the sort of government the chief villainess would set up if she ever did manage to become Prime Minister, and other odd places for an urban fantasy to go. At heart, it IS an urban fantasy, although that's something of a peculiar thing to call a book that takes place in primarily rural settings (when it's not inside a prison that used to be the nastier sort of sanitarium).

At any rate, it's still progressing. Very, very slowly. If you see peculiar things scrolling by on the to-reads and currently-readings, that's why. On good days I actually finish the books on terrorism and whatnot.

I've offered a free ebook of a short story with reverted rights, but there are others out there at the online periodicals which published them.

"Stella by Starlight" is a meteor story at http://eschatologyjournal.org/2011/11... Every now and then I dabble in science fiction.

"Little Hans" is a fairy-tale retelling at Enchanted Conversation: http://www.enchantedconvo.com/2010/11...
It has a wonderful review at http://mrpond47.wordpress.com/2010/11... As the reviewer observes, I was the mother of a baby when I wrote it. It was a lot of fun to write.

"Safety" is the first of the Ichabod Howell stories. If you want to get to know a character, follow him into the bedroom. http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/...

"Merlin's Dolphin" is in Ichabod's world, I think, but there's no character overlap. You can find that one at The Future Fire, http://futurefire.net/2010.20/fiction...

I have put an old short story on Lulu as a free e-book, in the hope that a freebie will pull in some interested parties. "The Bat and the Blitz" is in the same world as the two novellas, and there's even a small amount of character overlap, but it's a relatively light and short little romp, as much as that can be said of a story about an air raid. It had a couple of good reviews and one somewhat negative one--I've no idea how I was supposed to work in an explanation of why there were British witches but not German ones, but the long and the short of it was, Germany decided to expel what Britain decided to keep as an asset, starting a couple of centuries earlier. Hitler might want to use magic on his side, but that's tough cookies; there simply aren't any magic-users left in the territory he controls.

Didn't fit in the story, though.