Tag: Blood & Bond

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Why The Shard of Elan owes its existence to trained chickens

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Okay, I didn’t realize the full extent of how hilarious that title was until I came back to it. But it’s accurate.

In August of 2004, I checked into a tiny motel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Each of the dozen rooms was decorated with a different theme, and mine was Coca-Cola.

I was in Hot Springs for three weeks of Bailey & Bailey chicken training workshops. (This is a sort of litmus test — if you work in modern animal training, you probably responded with, “Oh! Wow, cool, what an opportunity!” If you don’t, you probably responded with, “…Wut?” Because this is the author blog and not the training blog, I’ll keep it short and say that Bob Bailey and his late wife Marian were, with Keller Breland and B.F. Skinner, some of the most important researchers and practical administrators of modern behavior science. The chicken training workshops were legendary, and I owe a huge debt of training success to their teaching.)

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Villains Gallery

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Tonight some friends from church held a “decompression night” and invited a bunch of us over to blow off steam. We had stress balls to squeeze, bubbles to blow, putty, over-sized Jenga, punching bags, wrapping paper swords, cornhole, video games, and a Nerf shooting range (with paint for the darts to mark your shots).

They’d set up a villains gallery for target shooting, with four rogues to take fire. There was the demogorgon from Stranger Things, Harry Potter’s Delores Umbridge, and–

…Oh, wow.

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Area 51: Aliens & Exercise

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After I left When Words Collide in Calgary, I drove south and followed the Extraterrestrial Highway (NV SR 375) to tiny Rachel, Nevada (population 54).

I’d signed up for the ET Marathon — the half, actually, because I’m not cool enough to do a full marathon. I’d booked the race and my room long before #StormArea51 was born. I arrived early and holed up in a mobile home to work on Blood & Bond.

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Of Names and Nuance

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Sometimes writers are clever. Really, really clever.

There’s a character named Frangit in the Shard of Elan series, because his purpose is to break. In one scene Shianan argues fiercely that something has never, ever happened, and he believes it, but the careful reader will note that in his emotion he’s deceived himself, as we often do. I take great pride in slipping absolutely-true-but-also-misleading statements into the mouths of kitsune and Fae.

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Make Like A Tree and Stay Right Here

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It has been an absolute whirlwind of a month or so. I celebrated the release of Shard & Shield, I attended the Realm Makers writing conference in St. Louis, I attended and taught at Gen Con in Indianapolis, I was home approximately 24 hours and then took off to attend and teach at When Words Collide in Calgary, then drove south to tiny Rachel, Nevada where I holed up for several days at the Little A’le’Inn (just outside Area 51) to work on Blood & Bond and hit the road for the ET Full Moon Marathon (I did the half), and then I drove home. (More on much of these to come.)

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