Mt. Sneffels Press, a Colorado Micropress » Fantasy

Sacrifices! What we do for art! More archery research

dave — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:15:01 +0000

I figured if I'm going to write about longbows I ought to shoot one. Well, there's a right way and a wrong way.

They say (whoever ‘they’ are) that one should write about what one knows about. Okay, fair enough. My new fantasy novel, The Unexpected Traveler, involves longbows. I’d never shot a longbow. As can be seen in another post (here) I borrowed a modern compound bow and shot it off a few times. But a compound bow is a precision machine. The parts being flexed are made of modern materials. There’s a front sight and a rear sight to help with repeatability. The draw weight is precise.

In other words, a compound bow is nothing like a traditional longbow.

PSE Legacy Bow, click image to go to PSE site

It was good to shoot the compound bow as it gave me a feel for a few things like aiming, draw weight, arrows, etc. But a longbow is essentially a stick with a string. No sights. No fancy arrow holders. No controlled draw weight.

I was in Denver this past week and grabbed the chance to stop at Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, a huge affair in the Northfield shopping area just north of I-70 at the Quebec off ramp. The folks in the archery department listened to my story and were quite inquisitive about my fantasy novels and the research I was doing. They handed me a PSE Archery Products Heritage Series Legacy Bow—not an inexpensive item! The Legacy features real wood (although they do throw in some fiberglass) and looks and feels how I thought longbows ought to look and feel. Longbows are just that: long bows. The thing stands from the floor to my nose.

They have an indoor range and soon I was shooting it. There’s no sight, so it’s by-guess and by-golly—experience counts. Further, unlike a compound bow, the more you draw a longbow the harder it is to pull. There’s no pulling and holding—one pulls and shoots.

I did hit the target a couple times, much to my delight. After awhile my shots started going wild. They told me that’s the time to quit, otherwise I’d develop bad habits.

The longbow is not actually held straight up and down, but rather canted to the right (presuming a right-handed bow) so gravity holds the arrow in place. And one cannot sight down the arrow because the hand is in the way. Unlike a compound bow, which is shot with a trigger mechanism, I had to use my fingers on the bowstring—one above the nock and two below.

There’s a reason you see all those actors in Robin Hood movies wearing leather forearm protection. Unless the bow is held out just so, the bowstring will scrape the left inside forearm. The bruise you see is from just one such hit—that’s all it took! Ouch! It was operator error of course, but next time I will wear arm protection.

I suppose that’s the whole point of writing about what you know about—or else do research—because it’s the little things (like bruised forearms) that make the story believable.

Archery Research for The Unexpected Traveler

dave — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:29:37 +0000

It’s hard to write about something I’ve never tried. The Unexpected Traveler, my new fantasy, uses archery and swordplay as primary weapons of war. Not having fired a bow before, I borrowed this one and got 30 minutes of instruction. Randy Cassingham, of This is True fame, handled the camera.

Yes, this is the one shot that hit the target! We managed to break the nocks off three arrows, and given this is borrowed equipment, we thought we ought to stop while we were ahead!

Diehard Fan Loves Flying Broomstick Series

dave — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:02:14 +0000

Reader Chelsey, shown here in a Facebook photo, loves the American Flying Broomstick series

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!

The Unexpected Traveler is Underway

dave — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:45:22 +0000

Elvish script

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!

Font Fun Galore!

dave — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:42:24 +0000

Fonts made using Scanahand's cool font-making software

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 characters on it in the appropriate squares. This I scanned (hence the name of the software). The software converts this to a font file and installs it on the computer. What you see is what Word looks like when that font is selected.

The third line is a bit more interesting. A scan is an image, after all, so I scanned a page from an old book I found at an antique store. As near as I can tell, the font is something called “Church Slavonic.” I used image editing software to copy characters from the high-resolution page scan over to the Scanahand template. No scanning was needed this time–Scanahand takes the image as input. Mind you, I have no idea what these characters are, so I assigned them to keyboard letters quite randomly.

The fourth line and fifth lines represent my first attempt at a glyph font. I learned quickly that using a mostly-dry marker to create characters results in stuff that’s pretty ragged, but when ragged glyphs are called for, they’re available.

The last three lines were a more serious attempt at an elvish alphabetic glyph font. If you remember the Sherlock Holmes story of the dancing men, it should be easy to decipher into English text (and Word thinks it’s English text, hence the wavy-green underline questioning my grammar). I created different glyphs for upper and lower case letters, plus new glyphs for punctuation. That may make it harder to decipher.

In my mind that last font seems pretty “practical” as opposed to “beautiful.” For Tolkien, the elves had beautiful everything. My elves are more practical, but I think they still deserve a more flowing script.

Oh, and there are the dwarves and dragons and fairies. The possibilities are endless.

You can read more about Scanahand here.