So, the other day I did a thing: Breyer/Reeves, maker of model horses, asked if there were horses they should know about. And I gave them Valadan.

"Valadan is a horse Breyer should know about. The Warhorse of Esdragon, appearing in 7 books by Susan Dexter and mentioned in an 8th. Sired by the storm wind on a mortal mare, he runs with his sire’s speed. Ageless, he has served a succession of masters: a prince, a farmer’s widow who whistles the wind, a would-be knight, a duke, and a wizard’s apprentice tasked with a world-saving quest. His coat is black without a single white hair, his mane and tail are long and silky—and his eyes fill with sparks of adamant, saffron and emeraude. He’s not an Arabian, thought he resembles one. He’s not an Andalusian or a Fresian. He’s close to a Spanish Barb, but what he actually is: a PTC Carousel horse sculpted by John Zalar, because a girl with no horse (me) could still ride a carousel and dream. And so Valadan is introduced imprisoned on a merry-go-round in The Ring of Allaire. (Del Rey Books, 1981.) My first book—I began writing it in 1977.

I have been known to take a model horse, paint it black and glitter the eyes. But there’s never been one that was a perfect fit. A horse that was “Bred by magic…had battled chimerae and trampled tygers, cried fierce challenges to armed hosts, carried his Dukes to battles and perilous midnight trysts.” surely that horse ought to be a Breyer!"

The image above is that very Philadelphia Toboggan Company horse that inspired me--reproduced as a music box. I also told Breyer that my Valadan had a race horse named for him. That Valadan, a chestnut gelding, raced at Philadelphia Park. Maybe not as fast as the wind, but a cool namesake all the same.

UPDATE:Well, first it's a series of e-mails claiming Moonshine is "not getting enough attention..." Then it's The Wind-Witch, pulling quotes from a review on Amazon and offering all sorts of promotional tips. Next, it's garbled message from an unknown person on my land-line wanting to add Take Up the Quest to "their digital library." Now it's comments on this blog offering me promotional opportunities.
Well, here we go--Moonshine was one of the very early Print On Demand books, and it is available from Wildside Press, has been for years. John Betancourt has a lot of great books there! The Wind-Witch enjoyed at least 5 printings in Mass Market from Del Rey Books, and is now available on Amazon as an e-book, a trade paperback, and an audio book. Take up the Quest is available on Amazon as a trade paperback and an e-books and I will have physical copies at Confluence, the Pittsburgh Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference, July 24-26--in just a couple of weeks.
And here's the darnedest thing--as my former co-worker Wanda would often say--I've got a whole stable of books here! 3 Wizard's Destiny, 4 Warhorse of Esdragon, and four that aren't part of a series, one of them Mythos, out on Amazon as an e-book and audio book. Does the AI find them unworthy of attention? :)
​UPDATE: No, the artificial intelligences have begun to spam this blog with unrelated book posts. Knock it off, HAL 9000!

Take Up the Quest is now live on Amazon in trade paperback and e-book. Yes, it's posts from this blog--and a good deal more, including tidbits that have never appeared in print before! Want to know what characters were doing between books? Want to hear ore about my early days with Del Rey Books? Want to read contest entries all in one place without hunting through blog archives? Then this book is for you!

Wow! I posted nothing at all in 2025!
But, here we go for a new year, new visitors, new delights!

I just had to buy a new Kindle. And no complaints, I believe I bought my first one in 2011, and put 460 books on it! It was not as old as my friend’s—which had a tiny physical keyboard on the bottom—but I remember it came with “special features”: consisting of its ability to shop in the Kindle store. Then it was no longer supported and it was a process to put new books on it—but I conquered that! I mean 460 books! Now I am back to the ability to buy on a fleeting whim, but I will try to show restraint.

Something else I have been doing is taking advantage of KDP’s beta program to produce audio books using their AI narrators. Not putting any actual humans out of work, because my audio book sales would never pay for a real human narrator. I’ve got too many books out! Only a few of my e-books work for the beta program, but I brought out The Prince of Ill Luck and The Wind-Witch using a female American virtual voice, and it was kind of fun—the voice reads with a fair amount of expression ( never expected it would capture Kess' snark!), and some of the edits for pronunciation worked.

So the way the Virtual Voice Studio works, it reads the book to you. And it takes a lot of listening. After doing two books, I got curious about the other voices offered. So I brought out Mythos, a collection of Arthurian short stories which only exists as an e-book, and used a male, British voice. That one, I could have listened to forever! Even pronounced Samhain properly, no adjustment necessary. I liked that so much, I decided to explore an Aussie voice when I started The True Knight. And I am loving it. Titch sounds great as an Aussie--it's a perfect voice for a wannabe knight!
I have 3 chapters to go, so The True Knight should be available very soon!
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So, here’s the cool thing—the audio book may cost you $9.99—but it's set up so that if you’re buying the e-book, you can add the audio book for 99 cents!

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Lots of discussion going on about scene-specific covers, characters not looking as the author describes them…so here’s my take on covers.
A cover is a selling tool. Its job is to make the potential customer notice the book. And done. Covers run in cycles & trends, not to mention genres. A woman in a diaphanous gown running along a clifftop, with a scary mansion in the background? You’re looking at a gothic novel, and there will be peril, and some sort of mansion—but not necessarily a cliff. A bloody knife? Probably a Mystery. Maybe Horror. Man and woman embracing? A Romance. He’s wearing a kilt? A Highland Romance! Covers give potential readers an idea of what sort of book they’re holding.
If you have the bucks of a major publisher, you can hire an illustrator. The illustrator will paint something that represents the book. Might or might not be scene-specific. Might or might not follow what the author wrote, how characters were described. If you are a small press or an indie author, you hire a cover designer. A cover designer will take stock images, either public domain or licensed for the project, and make a cover that represents the book. It can be magic. It won’t be a scene-specific illustration—unless you’re in a genre that has tons of affordable images available. If you write in an invented world like I do, those images do not exist, sorry.
Two covers, here, both for the same book: Moonlight, Wildside Press, 2001; Moonshine, Wildside Press, 2014.
Wildside was one of the early Print-On-Demand presses, and the 2001 cover is an Arthur Rackham public domain piece that has a really cool moon, and a spooky wood, both of which figure in the story. The kid in the tree is wearing a kilt, and there’s no sign of Thomas, the cat. Tristan’s not described as wearing a kilt, and Thomas is probably the most important character after Tristan, but the cover is attractive and interesting. It functions, but it’s not exactly exciting.
By 2014, Teddi Black was designing my covers, and I was ready to take the book back to its original title. (An internet search revealed loads of “Moonlights” but no “Moonshine” fiction.) When she showed me that title in the font “Rat Infested Mailbox”, we were on our way! I wanted a real big, full moon. Teddi found that, and stock images of a boy and a cat sitting by water. Is the boy dressed exactly the way I described Tristan? No, but it’s nothing he wouldn’t wear. Does Thomas have a big white marking on his chest? No, but he is a brown long haired tabby cat, and he is sitting there right beside Tristan. And this is the story of their first adventure together! So the cover represents the book much better than the 2001 cover. It’s a compelling cover, and one of my favorites. I love the way those sparkles Tristan is tossing suggest magic, and fantasy!

This image is a piece of fabric I purchased from Carol Law Conklin of Amity Farm Batik of Fort Ann, New York, through her Etsy shop. To me, it looks like Valadan, and I've framed it to keep near for inspiration.
I tend to forget abut Etsy--even though I have a shop there myself. (Endlessthread, not real active with it, though.) Shame on me! September 22nd, I ordered this batik, and it shipped out on September 29th.  Also  on September 22nd, I ordered some things from Amazon. The next evening, I ordered warp for my carpet loom from Leesburg Looms in Van Wert, Ohio, and some new heddles. I got a head's up the next day via phone message that the heddles were unavailable, but they were enclosing a refund with my order. Back to Etsy, and ordered similar heddles (the metal pieces the warp threads run through on my loom) from Ability Weavers in Michigan.
The carpet warp arrived, and the heddles arrived. Just like the fabric, all are perfect and arrived promptly. Fabulous Customer Service! The Amazon order--which by the way is a birthday present for a family member, a package of Stress Sheep and 3 boxes of Yorkshire Tea--has still not even shipped. It's October 4th, and I see the Zon trucks zipping all over, but the small businesses and the US Post Office beat you all hollow! I'm in Western PA, so those small businesses are on the same end of the US, but there was never any indication that the Amazon order had to ship from Outer Mongolia, either!

​I’d been passing up free kittens all summer of 2003. I wanted a cat, but none of them was the right kitten. I wanted a cat like Thomas, the kitten from maybe 1970, still remembered, the one Thomas in The Ring of Allaire was based on. And I’m never in Wal Mart on a Friday night right before Christmas. But I was. And there, on the Humane Society Pet Board, was…my cat. I knew it at once.
I had two dogs and a rescue staying till my brother was ready to take him. I went to see the cat at the shelter the next day—the last day they were open before the holiday. They told me she had walked into the shelter under her own power, lured by the food they put out to keep drop-offs around. No one claimed her, her time was almost up, and they didn’t want to put her down, but they weren’t a no-kill shelter. Someone had applied for her, but they had not shown up, and the shelter was closing in 15 minutes, so I could apply. (I knew she was my cat!) I picked Kira up the day after Christmas. Kira Nerys. A Maine Coon mix, with extra toes. Double thumbs on the front, thumbs on the back. (Most cats have NO thumbs on the back feet.) A long tabby coat, like Thomas. She fit in seamlessly. When the dogs ran to answer the door, she ran along the top of the couch and stood just behind—and above—them. (“Hi. I am the cat.”) When the dogs had their portraits done at Clark Studios in return for pet food donations, Kira did too. (She even explored the studio!)
I didn’t know if she hunted when she came to me—but she did. She was an indoor cat, but she got a lot of mice, two fully grown rats and a wild rabbit that somehow got into the basement. She slipped out a couple of times to explore the woods behind the house. I’d have to leave the patio door open a crack so she could slip back in. Then she got out in the winter and I didn’t realize it—and there weren’t any tracks in the fresh snow. Turns out that’s because she spent the whole time hiding in my neighbor’s bushes watching for a chance to slip back in, and I was out walking the neighborhood, putting up posters and crying.
She was good with all the dogs, even Misty who chased her and pulled her tail, and George, who stole the cool floor in her room his first night with us and then ate her food. And when I found myself dogless, she stepped up and tried to be a dog. Twice in her last five years.
Age got her. She was in her twenty-first year, down to her last 3 teeth, thin, and I wasn’t too sure she could see. She couldn’t get into her bed in the Morris chair, and she only navigated in circles, so she struggled to come to me—but I could always come to her, since her room was the bathroom. Still, I knew it was time. I made her final vet appointment. Got her some canned salmon, because she loved the broth on it, and she would drink if I held the dish for her. She had some that Sunday morning, and when I came home after church she was stretched out peacefully. She went on her own terms, the same way she came into the shelter all those years ago. She was the BEST cat!

I stopped by last Sunday just to confirm that I will be there Saturday demonstrating hand-spinning on my Scottish drop spindle. One of my favorite places to spin--and I will be next to Linda Szmara, who paints sheep--and other creatures--on river rocks. Saturday, November 25, 2023. Event runs 11:00 am to 4:00 pm--and remember, it's Small Business Saturday! I'm not selling anything this year, but there will be plenty of crafters to support! 

Saturday, November 18, 2023--here I am with Cathy Hester Seckman, selling our books at the Holy Spirit Parish Christmas Festival. Also there: several other writers, including Fr. Aaron J. Kriss, author of Spiritual Inspirations. Children's books, local history books--more kinds of books than they had kinds of pierogies!