I’ve been a bad blogger…

…by not posting regularly this week as I did last, but although I was a bad little blogger, I was a good little writer. See, Twist of the Blade, the sequel to Song of the Sword, and the second book in my brand-new YA fantasy series Shards of Excalibur, is in the revision stage. And …

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Twist of the Blade synopsis

I don’t think I’ve posted this; maybe I have, but in that case, well…here it is again. It’s the description of Twist of the Blade, Book 2 of the Shards of Excalibur, as included in Song of the Sword. No time for more this morning since I’m desperately trying to finish revisions to, yes, Twist …

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Cloning a mammoth

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Cloning-the-Mammoth.mp3[/podcast] One of the more striking exhibits at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum is the woolly mammoth that looms over you, emerging from a forest, when you round one of the corners in the Earth Sciences Gallery. Twelve thousand years ago, you might have encountered exactly that scene while strolling through Saskatchewan: these days, the closest …

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Song of the Sword on McNally Robinson list of Aurora-eligible titles that “excited the staff”

Too busy working on revisions for Twist of the Blade, Book 2 of the Shards of Excalibur series, to write a long post this morning, so this little self-serving item will have to do. As the title says, Song of the Sword shows up on a list of titles that “excited the staff” at McNally …

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My ebook odyssey

All the cool kids are writing about their experiences with ebooks these days, and since I’ve long aspired to be cool (though, alas, I have yet to reach that exalted state) I thought I would give a brief account of my own experiences as writer and reader of same. I take you back to those …

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On Shovelling (a winter sonnet)

With apologies to Milton. When I consider how my morns are spent, Or half my days, in this world, dark and wide, With that snow shovel, frozen to my hide, That seems so useless, though its blade is bent To scrape so well the sidewalk, and present The bare concrete (lest postman, coming, chide, “I …

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I wish I were James Lileks

Who, you may ask? If so, well, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Go here, and explore. I’ll wait. <thumb-twiddling>Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.</thumb-twiddling> Back? OK, now I’ll explain. I discovered Lileks several years ago now, when someone pointed to the original Interior Desecrators portion of his website, where he made hilarious fun of the horrible …

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The world’s oldest winery

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/The-Worlds-Oldest-Winery.mp3[/podcast] My wife and I are wine enthusiasts. We belong to all the local wine societies, have written about wine for local magazines, occasionally conduct wine tastings and we’ve even got our own wine-related website, The Willetts on Wine (www.willettsonwine.com). That being the case, I keep an eye on wine news: and this past week …

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What’s in a name, continued

Well, the final bio for my alter ego, Lee Arthur Chane, is rather staid compared to the fanciful flights of fancy I could have indulged in. In fact, it’s my own bio, just tweaked a little to emphasize the fact that Chane is going to be known (hopefully) as a fantasy writer: Born in the …

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And now a word about Magebane…

…my first adult fantasy novel for DAW under the nom de plume Lee Arthur Chane. Here’s how DAW is describing it: The kingdom of Evrenfels is the last bastion of magic in the world, cut off from the outside by the Great Barrier through which magic cannot penetrate. For centuries, the Magelords have ruled their …

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What’s in a name?

It’s not exactly a secret, since I’ve been telling everyone everywhere for some time, but my next book from DAW, the fantasy novel Magebane, will not be appearing under the name Edward Willett, but under a pseudonym, Lee Arthur Chane. This is a first for me, though it’s pretty common; some writers have several pen …

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The conspiracy of inanimate objects

I have come to the inescapable conclusion, over my half-century of life, that there exists, within the world of inanimate objects, a conspiracy; a conspiracy to make my life as inconvenient as possible. Let is examine the evidence. Cables tangle when I’m around, and wrap themselves around other objects that fly off shelves or out …

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