Monthly Archives: October 2008

Down the Right Side of the Blog

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I intend that this blog will be my public face as a writer. Hopefully, as I see more of my books published, they will be displayed down the right side of the page. For now, I have the various versions of my one published work– Princess of Amathar, as well as some nifty little extras to fill the space. None of these is original, as they appear on many blogs, but I still think they’re neat.
I’m finding more and more blogs that I like to read on a regular basis. “From Other Great Blogs” lists links to some of the more interesting headlines that I have found.
As a History teacher, I’m pleased to have “This Day in History” on my page.
“Useless Knowledge” has some useless and some not so useless bits of information. I have noted a few that were incorrect bits of common mythology as well. The champagne glass was not based on Marie Antoinette’s breast.
“National Geographic Pictures” and “NASA Picture of the Day” are both very cool.
My favorite is probably the “Quotation of the Day”.

Staff Development

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Well, we’ve just had another staff development day, and since I teach at an N5 school (listed as needing improvement for five years under the federal NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND Act) we spent most of our time trying to figure out how to improve our students’ performance on the standardized tests. Unfortunately, we are spending a great deal of time trying to figure out how to fix a problem that we can’t even touch. The students have no motivation to pass the tests. Most of them don’t even try to answer the questions. They sit and randomly bubble answers. What happens to them if they don’t pass? Nothing. The school fails, but it doesn’t affect them at all.

The Steel Dragon – Tributes

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There are a number homages hidden within the text of The Steel Dragon. I think most of them are so well hidden that a reader wouldn’t notice them. Here are some of them.

Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias: I love this poem, so in the third book of the series, I had the characters come across an ancient monument with a very similar inscription.

The Lord of the Rings: There are several little tributes in the story, the most obvious is the title of the third book– The Two Dragons. Besides being obvious, because there are two dragons in the story, it is a tip of the hat to the second volume of The Lord of the Rings– The Two Towers.

Stephen King: I wanted a little Stephen King in my book, so I added him. Most of the characters are not patterened, at least physically, after any particular person. I used Stephen King’s picture as a reference for one character– a wizard.

Honor Harrington: I love the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. I had already created two characters named Hero and Hertzal, so when they needed a sister, Honor seemed a perfect name.

The Princess Bride: I added one word as a tribute to this great movie– Inconceivable!

Hamish Macbeth: This great British show was a source of inspiration for my characters who were police constables. Because of this, I added a little dog, like Wee Jock, to the story. I of course named him Hamish.

Nellie Bly: The girl reporter Nellie Bly is a hero of mine and I used her last name as the last name for my main character. If I write a fourth book in the series, I plan to have a character who is a girl reporter.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: There are dinosoaurs in the story. If that’s not enough, I had a character read a book that was very much like an ERB story.

Sherlock Holmes: There are a string of murders in the book. I set one on a foggy waterfront as a deliberate tribute to A. Conan Doyle’s hero and I gave the inspector a double-billed hat and a pipe.

E. Gary Gygax: I plotted out all three books together as one continuous story. I only added one chapter and that was a dungeon crawl. This was a tribute to the creator of D&D.

William Shakespeare: I have loved the name Hero for a woman ever since I watched Much Ado About Nothing. I had decided I would name a character Hero. The fact that she is a twin is also due to my love of the Bard and his penchant for twins.

Tom Swift: I used the Shopton as the name of the town where some of my characters lived before the story begins. Shopton, NY was the home of Tom Swift.

The Steel Dragon – Characters Part 3

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Telling the story of an entire colony required the creation of a large number of supporting characters. Many were just spear carriers– people who showed up because I needed someone there. Some of them had their own stories that played into the main plot. It was fun working with them and I came to love all my characters. Here are some of the minor supporting characters that appear in the book.

Eamon Shrubb: I needed another police constable to play off Saba Colbshallow, so I created Eamon. He is a typically British (or what I think of as typically British) cop. Serious about his job but a great guy under his stuffy exterior.

Dot Shrubb: Eamon needed a wife and for no reason what so ever, I decided that she was deaf. This added an interesting trait that I was able to play with later.

Evo & Femke Kane: The Kanes are an unusual couple. They are more like siblings that a married couple. This is primarily because Mrs. Kane is a lesbian and they probably have no sexual relations with each other. They are both mining engineers and like to dress alike.

Honor Hertling: She is the older sister of Hero and Hertzal (both major supporting characters) and she is patterned after those people who do so much more for others than for themselves. She is a member of the Colonial Council and is the primary voice for the poor and the repressed.

Lon Fonstan: Lon is my Otis the drunk. He shows up in the jail every so often for “drunk and disorderly” but otherwise seems like a nice guy.

Isaak Wissinger: I needed a writer and Isaak is it. I built up such a great back story for him in my mind– one that didn’t see print in the books– that I’m thinking about him as a primary character in a new book.