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Welcome to the Mt. Sneffels Press home page. Check out our Mt. Sneffels Press catalog to see our current offerings. Also see our Extended Catalog, listing non-MSP authors for whom we do web fulfillment. You can order from our catalogs using PayPal, a highly secure way to accept your credit card. To learn more about Mt. Sneffels Press, read our About page. To contact us, see our Contact page. You can also subscribe to this blog via e-mail.

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Here’s a fun one for you to play with. It’s a little utility called Wordle, and it’s available at www.wordle.net. You feed it text and it spits back these cool maps, much like tag clouds. The most common words get the biggest font; it goes down from there. Options abound, including fonts, color scheme, and shape. The main photo is what happened when I pointed Wordle at this site. I find it rather interesting that I can tell a lot about the site simply by looking at the map.

Well, of course, there’s more. I couldn’t help myself, in fact. Next comes a Wordle word cloud from a section of the first Broom book, The Story of the Great American Flying Broomstick Book 1: Genesis. Here it is: Read more…

Fonts

This is an experiment. Randy Cassingham made a very nice video introduction for me to put on the www.americanflyingbroomstick.com home page. And he did a great job! But I did it on a day that my bipolar illness had taken me way, way down. So, I thought I’d try something a little different:

The production values stink, but I would like some feedback on the concept. The video is much shorter and hopefully more entertaining. So, compare it with the old one here: Read more…

American Flying Broomstick

It’s nice to get fan mail. I guess it’s the best part of being an author—learning that other people get as much fun out of the books as I had writing them. Here’s a comment from Chelsey, a young man who lives in Denver:

“Bravo again! I just finished book 2 and can’t wait to snag book 3! I just can’t put them down once I start reading! The books not only make me wish I could fly a broomstick, but as a life-long resident of Ridgway that has since moved away, it is like taking a trip home. It is especially enjoyable to personally know the characters; it often makes all the laughs that much more enjoyable! I spent a large amount of my reading time laughing or chuckling. I think my girlfriend thought I was a little nuts at first because I would just randomly break the silence of the room in tear-jerking laughter! Thanks for all the hard work Dave! Great books! Now its on to book 3! Any plans for a book 4? Best Regards, and Safe Brooming, Chelsey”

I remember Chelsey when he was in high school several years back. He led the team from our tiny little high school that entered a solar-powered car in a national race. He’s a ham radio operator, too. Sharp guy!

Well, regarding Book 4, I have the idea—see the chapters in Book 3 that take place in Manchester, England and you’ll see what it’ll involve. But right now I’ve decided to try my hand at a full-blown fantasy with the working title of The Unexpected Traveler, so Book 4 will be put off a bit.

Find out what Chelsey’s enjoying so much—buy your copy of The Story of the Great American Flying Broomstick today!

American Flying Broomstick, Fantasy, Reader Comments

It’s overdue, but it’s here! Up until now, all the items in our catalog were intended to be ordered one item at a time. The “Buy Now” button takes you directly to PayPal’s checkout feature. If you want to buy several different books, up until now you had to pay shipping for each on an individual basis.

No more! I thrust my way through the tangled thicket on PayPal’s website and figured out how to use the shopping cart feature. So, you can add an item to the cart, continue to peruse the site and add more items, and when you’re done you just click on any “View Cart” button and you’re whisked to your shopping cart, where you can finalize your order. Of course, you can remove items or change quantities at any time, simply via the “View Cart” button. All “View Cart” buttons take you to the same place: your shopping cart.

The cool thing is that the shipping is calculated on the weight of the total order. That can represent significant savings. The starting point for shipping is $2.75, but if you order, say, the Railroad book plus Mary Ann Dismant’s memoirs, the total shipping is just $3.00. What a cool way to save money!

I’ve got the cart up for the Mt. Sneffels Press catalog and will update the extended catalog soon so that it has this feature also.

UPDATE Jan 22, 2010: The Extended Catalog has been upgraded to add the shopping cart feature.

Mt. Sneffels Press

Reader Norm Delucchi sent this comment:

“Reading my copy of Narrow Gauge Railroading in the San Juan Triangle – I questioned an item – going to my reference library I found that the SS Otto Mears (Hull # 2157) was built by Permanente Metals Corporation, Richmond #2 Yard, Richmond, CA, not Matson Navigation of San Francisco as stated on page 90.”

Norm is correct. I might also note that in researching this, Wikipedia states that 2710 of these handy, easy-to-build cargo ships were built during the war years, not quite measuring up to the “over 3000″ on page 90. That still a lot of ships! Out of all these ships, only two are still seaworthy, the SS John W. Brown (pictured) and the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, the latter being preserved as a memorial in San Francisco with occasional trips at sea. The SS Otto Mears itself was launched in 1943, sold private in 1947, and wrecked and scrapped in 1967.

How’s that for information in a book about railroads! Check out Narrow Gauge Railroading in the San Juan Triangle: The Rio Grande Southern, the Ouray Branch of the D&RG and Otto Mears’ Silverton RR, in our catalog for $19.95 + shipping. You can be assured that Otto Mears was a railroad guy; it’s interesting to learn of the ship built twelve years after his death that was finally scrapped when Mears would have been 128 years old.

Railroad, Reader Comments

One would think, given that Broom 3 has been out for awhile, that I’d have the American Flying Broomstick site up to date. Well, it is now, only three and a half months after I announced it here on this site. At least I can say that I’ve been updating things on the website. (I’m devoting most of my free time to my all-new fantasy book, The Unexpected Traveler.) So click on the image or click here to see the updated American Flying Broomstick website. Oh, rats, I’ve got to do a video too!

American Flying Broomstick

Greetings from Geekland here. I’ve spent the last couple hours upgrading the blog software that underpins this site, WordPress. The auto upgrade feature doesn’t work for me (I must have a configuration file set wrong somewhere), so that means transferring hundreds of files to my hosting provider. They make it fairly easy, but I did run into a snag here and there. I like WordPress because 1) I’ve been able to make it work, 2) it’s pretty easy to post things and add shopping buttons and whatnot, and 3) it’s well supported. Oh, and 4) it’s free! If you want to experiment, Wordpress allows you to create your own blog on their site. Mt. Sneffels Press isn’t hosted there, but rather at Digital Space.

I’ve been putting off this upgrade for awhile now, but it pays to be current, as the latest version has all the bug patches and security fixes. I decided to devote this evening to getting my Internet house in order, although I hope to spend a little time working on the first draft of The Unexpected Traveler!

Mt. Sneffels Press

At last! After months of planning and pondering, my new fantasy book is underway. Under the working title The Unexpected Traveler, the story follows Rainier, an elf who doesn’t want to become king. The unexpected traveler is photographer Peter Wright, a human who thought he was completing one last photo shoot when he runs into Rainier. The first chapter, “The Curious Little Man,” sweeps both our elf and Peter into the land of Orgon and into a heap of trouble. Things have changed while Rainier was away.

As a five senses exercise, think through walking along a deep mine drift (tunnel). It’s a “wet” mine, meaning water drips from the ceiling and down the walls, creating a small stream underfoot. The drift inclines sharply. It’s lit by electric lights every ten feet. What does it look like? Drippy. Light reflected in the water. Shadows. Wood beams laying helter-skelter. What does it smell like? Damp. Dirty. Rotting wood. The plastic smell of your waterproof jacket and pants. What does it feel like? Wet. Cold. Rough rock that leaves bits of sand on your fingertips. Your own sweat. The hardhat pressing into your forehead. Cramped. Claustrophobic. No breeze. What do you hear? Water drops and splashes. Loose rock crunching underfoot. Your breath. The waterproof gear rubbing against itself. Machinery running in the distance. What does it taste like? Well, don’t taste this water–it’s too full of toxic minerals to be healthy!

Fantasy, Writing: Style

Instead of writing a fourth book in the flying broomstick series, I’m redirecting my thoughts to a “full-blown” fantasy novel, complete with a fantasy world. The working title is The Unexpected Traveler and it will have the usual elves, dwarves, dragons, and occasional talking animals. I think I’ve got some cool twists and I’ll be blogging about it as I write.

But…

One cannot write of elves and such unless there is some special language in which they write. Now my elves are not Tolkien’s elves and don’t have nearly as pretty a script, but surely elves don’t use roman characters! I looked around the Internet for runic and other interesting fonts, but nothing comes up other than various attempts to duplicate what Tolkien and others have already done. And given they own those fonts, I can’t use them.

What to do?

What to do turns out to be simple. Why not design my own font? Is there software that makes that easy? Yes. The one I found is called Scanahand (as in ’scan a [sample of your] hand[writing]‘). Mind you, so far I’ve only been playing with it. But the image shows some things Scanahand can do. The first two lines are simple. I printed out the template that Scanahand provides, then I printed Read more…

Fantasy, Fonts

(NOTE: There’s an update at the end of this post.)

Our thanks to Office Depot for being the model of customer service! Our three-year-old, much-used Okidata war-horse-quality color laser printer was pretty worn out and insisted it needed some expensive new drums, so we replaced it with a Lexmark 540n from our local Office Depot. The difference in printer generations was immediately apparent; the Lexmark print quality was superior and the photographs much better. We quickly went through the toner in the “introductory” cartridges and paid a king’s ransom for another set (which is to be expected), and had just installed them—about $280’s worth!

Alas, there was one difficulty. Just 14 days after we purchased the printer (today) I was printing our Christmas letter when the red light came on with a message saying there was a jam and I should open the paper tray. I did so and to my surprise, sitting in the paper tray were a little wheel and a couple ball bearings. Oops! Close inspection with a flashlight revealed that indeed it was not just parts coming loose; a little retaining mechanism had in fact broken. Read more…

Writing: Business