God Shuffle Available in Kindle Format
My first novel in the God Shuffle series landed early this morning in e-reader format. I’ll be wrestling with paperback formatting this week. I hope you’ll check it out.
The God Shuffle is just one year away and the Nation of Hesterwind is in an uproar. The Gods are not happy to be working for humanity and none of them like having their jobs changed. Will this be the year that they bring humanity back under their thumb or will the great peace abide?
An event that happens only once in fifty years can make or break the careers of everybody involved. A grisly murder could destroy this anniversary and five hundred years of peace. If the Watch doesn’t solve this crime soon, the Gods themselves will be looking for blood.
Happy Father’s Day #FathersDay
Some of my favorite stories are about my parents. I have ten siblings and life was anything but normal most of the time. My dad and mom would go to such lengths to try to bring little pieces of normal into our lives. If my dad wanted to play catch with me, he’d have to play catch with five of us. If we wanted to see a movie, it was a major budget item and logistical issue. Sometimes just getting to and from church involved more coordination than many military maneuvers. They never stopped trying though and I love them for the efforts they made far more than the results they got.
My Dad was the eternal optimist. He believed that we could fit a tenth person into Volkswagon Bug because there was a person walking that needed a ride. He believed that we could find a house that was perfect for our huge family, that was close enough to being condemned that we could afford it. He believed that if you played fair, the world would reward that and play fair back. He believed me every time I told him I would do my homework from now on or keep up with my chores. An astonishing number of times, his optimism was rewarded (not with my homework and chores though).
My Dad put everybody else in the family first. When you have twelve other people in the family, there isn’t a lot left when it gets to be your turn. His life was an endless series of “Dad, look at this, Dad, pick me up, Read me a book, Dad.” He got up early to help my mom get us to school. He got home and went to sports practices, recitals, concerts, and meetings. He did chores around the house, covered for people who didn’t do their chores and then started the whole staggered process to get us to bed. That involved stories of different levels (everybody wasn’t old enough for Lord of the Rings), listening to the stories of our days, baths, laundry, prayers for all of us and hugs and kisses. When he finally got finished putting us down and rounding up the stragglers who kept getting up, he would be lucky to get enough time with my mom to hear about her day and maybe tell her something about his before they had to start talking about finances and discipline for the kids (often me). They went to bed exhausted and started it all over again in the morning. (or would have, but you know they got woken up a dozen times every night by us)
I didn’t always appreciate the decisions my father made or his parenting style, but I’m fortunate to have always known he loved me. Even at our worst, we both knew that we were loved. I’ve raised two boys of my own and I can only wonder at the stamina and sheer perseverance it must have taken to do this with eleven kids.
I salute you Dad and I’m glad that you are still around to read this and for me to tell you how very much you had to do with shaping the person I became. You set a very tough standard to live up to and I don’t think I can. I appreciate that no matter how good I get at this, I’ll always be able to see the course you laid before me.
Life Essays – Candy
I come from a very large family and at an early age, I became aware that we were poor. We were not poor in the sense of having to settle for the older version of the new gaming system. We were poor in the “mom knows you took a dime of the grocery change to buy a bubble gum ball” sense. That was a problem because I was a kid who loved candy.
I would do about anything to get it and I knew that my parents would never buy it for me. Halloween was the greatest holiday ever, but you can’t live on Halloween candy all year long. I knew I had to earn my own money.
I was eight when I convinced my parents to let me get a job delivering newspapers. That was a few years too young to get a traditional paper route. It was not too young for “Grit, America’s Good News Newspaper”. I mailed away a coupon in the back of a comic book and they sent me my first papers. I practiced my sales pitch for a week with my dad. Then I traipsed around the neighborhood extolling the virtues of a newspaper with only good news in it.
When I finally got a paycheck, I went right to the penny candy store. It was a little place called Cacchiachuties and because I was a boy I always used to say girls couldn’t go there because they would catch the cooties. This store was heaven to me. There were dozens of types of candy and most of them could be had for a penny.
I arrived with my dollar and seven cents. It was more money than I had ever spent on candy before. With tax, I could buy 100 pieces of candy. I stared at the bounty that could be had and started doing math that would have made astronauts jealous.
It was the same kind of math you can see when kids turn in their tickets at an arcade and chose prizes. I could buy 25 of the sour patch kids, and 28 Swedish fish and 23 wafer saucers and 24 squirrels, or I could drop the fish by 8 and split the difference in sour cherries or I could buy the wax lips for a dime since they would last so long and were so big. I always got tricked by the wax lips. It was like they had some kind of pheromone that made you buy them and then regret it but buy them again next time.
I finished my purchase, convinced I had chosen the absolute perfect combination of one hundred candies. I knew I had reached a new level of affluence because the shopkeeper, Pat Cacchiachutie himself, had to use a medium sized brown paper bag for my purchases. I’d never gotten a medium sized bag before.
As I walked home I felt like everybody passing on the street or in a car was looking at my bag in admiration. “There goes a boy who can afford his candy”, they must have been saying. I didn’t save much money that summer, but I got what I wanted. I had a supply of candy that was mine, that I earned with my own money. I couldn’t eat it in front of anybody for fear of my mom making me share with my brothers and sisters. I would hide in the closet, take it out from my hiding place and eat it in the dark. I knew I was successful.
I never got over the sweet tooth. Years later I was able to get a real paper route for the local paper. The first time I collected money on this new paper route, I headed to Cacchiachuties. I had a dream and it was about to come true.
I had always wondered what it would feel like to buy an entire box of candy. I had watched as the storekeeper had rooted around in the boxes before and when he emptied them out. There were five hundred pieces in a box, plus tax of thirty-four cents.
I walked into that store like the Godfather. I watched patiently while he waited on a few small kids. They were carefully choosing how to spend their dimes and he scraped pieces out of the candy boxes for them.
Then it was my turn. The kids seemed to know that something big was going to happen. They stuck around waiting to see what kind of candy the older boy would choose.
“I’ll take the sour patch kids I said”.
He asked how many I wanted and I said.
“I’ll take the box.”
The kids were paying attention now and I was feeling like a banker.
“You want the rest of the sour patch kids in the box,” he said?
I think he worried that he would have to count out several hundred pieces for me.
“No”, I said. “I want a whole box.”
He looked surprised, the kids looked shocked, and I felt like I was going to explode with the tension. I placed four wrinkled dollars on the counter and four quarters, then counted out three dimes and four pennies. He smiled at me and reached under to counter to bring out a fresh box. He packed it in a large bag, a large brown paper bag. I walked out of that store and my feet didn’t hit the ground until I got home.
I went right to the closet and separated the serrated edges of my box. I opened it like they did in the store. I had always conserved my candy to make it last, but now I had the supply. I had the whole box and I wasn’t sure what to do.
I smelled them and they made the whole closet fruity. I threw four of them in my mouth and then a handful more after that. I licked the sour coating off the next few and then I took little bites and tried to find new ways to eat them.
I wasn’t a third of the way through the box before my tongue got swollen, bumpy and painful. I wasn’t worried though. Candy doesn’t make you sick. It had always been a constant in my life, a dependable source of joy and how could that be bad. The only thing you had to worry about with candy was cavities, everybody knew that.
I came down with hives an hour later. I was called to supper and my mom took one look at my face and nearly lost her Irish Stoicism. She had me open my mouth and saw my multi-colored tongue. It was abraded to shreds by little gummy sugars and somehow she knew. She didn’t make me tell her though or get rid of my stash. She did smile knowingly when I choked down supper. I didn’t taste a thing for a week.
Those sour patch kids lasted me a month. I ended up sharing them with my brothers and sisters. I could never eat more than a few of them again without my tongue swelling up.
I learned you really could fly too close to the sun. I had learned my lesson though, sugar coated things were not for me. A couple of months later I got a box of Swedish fish instead.
Getting To Know Your Author
Get To Know Your Author
I’m a fairly open person and I think putting myself out there is a good way to let people see the person behind the author. In that spirit, I present ten things you might not know about Dan Desilets, Author.
- I have 11 siblings.
- I jumped out of airplanes for a living in the army.
- I am afraid of heights.
- I once ran a successful Renaissance Faire.
- I live in my dream house.
- I scuba dived with Barracuda
- I once ran a successful LARP.
- One of my dreams is to be a public speaker.
- I was hit by an airplane in midair and had a parachute malfunction.
- I once was involved in a Karate Kid situation.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle, but the other half is picking up a weapon and murdering people, so, there’s that.
I know I struggle with compelling blurbs
I know I struggle with compelling blurbs. http://ow.ly/8YE130ciku8
Beta Reading Fun
I’ve had a few beta readers look at parts of God Shuffle and they’ve had some good feedback for me along with an overall positive vibe for the story, dialogue, and the characters. Today I gave it to my wife to look at and hilarity ensued.
“Did you purposefully make your city name sound like Trash?”
“No, that never occurred to me, I was just trying to keep it from being Tar and Ash.”
“Does your main character have something against kids?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“He keeps beating up kids, is it because he’s not really tough so he has to pick on juveniles?”
“He doesn’t beat up any kids. What made you think he did.”
“The first person he arrests is one of the Fireside Boys.”
“So you thought they were all kids?”
“Well, you didn’t say they weren’t. Hey, why is it called Fireside anyway, you don’t seem to get into that.”
“The structures are super temporary and it gets burnt to the ground every year or so.”
Hilarious laughter
“Trash Fires, oh God….”
“You focus on smells a lot you know.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice.”
More laughter
“She couldn’t wash the smell of Trash off of her.”
“That’s not the name of the city.”
“It is for me, this book is so funny.”
I’m pretty sure Murphy has a law about your wife finding all of the most interesting mistakes you make.
I guess whatever it takes to keep her motivated to read the book, right?
Editing Purgatory
I finished this book in December and here it is May and I am still editing it. I am looking with no small amount of jealousy at my wife who wrote her book in a month and it was mostly ready to go when she finished it. We wrote very different books, in very different styles, but in the end, she made far fewer mistakes than I did.
I made some whoppers. I just let the words pour out of me and yes, I found some gems, but there was a whole lot of detritus to sort through. On edit pass one, I realized that the story was broken pretty severely and needed a bunch more scenes to fix, a complete rewrite of the ending and some pretty consistent modifications along the way. On pass four I had to trim about a fifth of the story to make it more focused. I’ve recently gotten some pretty consistent beta read feedback about some style issues that I’m fixing now.
This story started at 125K words and I’ve read it so many times that I’m considering editing backward just for a change of scenery. My wife believes that this is a case of loving my book too much and not wanting to let it go. I agree that I do care how it turns out, regardless of whether it sells or not, but I’ve killed a lot of darlings. (or more correctly, I’ve put them aside for one of the other books in this world.)
I am eager to hit the publish button and I’m working exclusively to that end. It’s driving me crazy not to be writing the next book in this series and the series I’m co-writing with Jess. I’m trying to get this done by June 15 and if I can stand to read my own words one more time, I think I can meet that deadline and earn the right to move on to another project.
I hope the story is worthy of the time I’ve put into it.
#MondayBlogs
Bill Gates Summer Reading Recommendation
Bill Gates Summer Reading Recommendations
http://time.com/4786592/bill-gates-summer-reading-list-2017/
Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn
#MondayBlogs
My wife introduced me to this one shortly after we met. I think it might have been a litmus test and thankfully I passed. This has become one of my favorite books and series. So much so that when my wife and I bought our dream home, we named the property Sunrunner’s Rest.
One of my favorite things about the story was the complex relationship between Rohan and Sioned (Great name). I enjoyed how they balanced their personal responsibilities with their relationship. I loved that Sioned was a queen who was determined to have it all, even though the costs were sometimes very high.
Melanie really makes her secondary characters come alive. I often related more to Chay and Tobin, but I felt like all of the characters could have had their own books where Rohan and Sioned were just supporting characters and it would have been just as rewarding.
Dragon Prince is the kind of book that makes me want to learn my craft better and gives me targets to shoot for. I want to write scenes that evoke the emotional responses that her’s do. I want to portray a family that feels as genuine as Chay and Tobin. I want to write a relationship that is as real as any in this book. Melanie makes me want to keep writing so that someday I can give back something as powerful as I have received.
Dan Desilets - Author 