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Several entries have come in for the Warding Contest, but in the interest of preserving my sanity (and making progress on The Daylight War), I have been limiting my blog posts a bit. So let’s take a trip around the world.

First off, let’s visit the UK for a delicious entry from Melanie:

Hi Peat,
So I was baking cupcakes yesterday and came onto your site whilst they were in the oven. I was looking at some of the other entries and came up with the idea of warding them. So after battling with the icing a little bit, I finally managed to get 6 wards which are (hopefully) recognisable – warding with icing is not easy! Anyway, my cupcakes are now safe from corelings which is all that really matters.

Melanie

And a really impressive pair of entries that probably stung a bit from Carol:

Hi,

I have an entry for your warding contest. Sorry its a bit of an obvious choice but I love tattoo’s so I had to ward myself. These photo’s were taken just after (Saturday 5th June) so they still look a little “sore”.

I had always intended to put Japanese writing against the dragon down my spine but was worried about translation, your ward symbols were perfect. I chose the palm symbol because of its lovely shape and wind, flame, water and rock to represent the four elements. I also had the palm ward done in colour on my shoulder, I was so impressed with it and have booked in to have the other side done next Sunday.

I read The Painted Man a couple of weeks ago and loved it. The story was fantastic and the characters really came alive. I’m so looking forward to The Desert Spear – just waiting for the Postman to deliver it.

Thanks for writing such a fantastic book and allowing the symbols to be used.

From Carol

Then a great one from Bill who forgot to include his address, but I’m pretty sure he’s an Aussie. I love his warded dream catcher:

Peat and  Lauren,

My warding needs some work but this idea got stuck in my head after reading TDS and and getting a taste of the mind demons. I couldn’t shake the idea of a mind demon invading someones sleep to create some havoc! Granted mostly people hiding at night are at risk but why give the corespawned even an inch! So I made this “Mind Catcher”. I’m a huge fan and waiting for more!

Bill

And not to be outdone, the USA has a slice of the awesome pie with this kickass entry from Vinny in OH:

Hello Peat,

When I heard about the warding contest I knew that I absolutely had to enter. Not only was it a chance to win an epic prize, but it also gave me a chance to do something totally fun involving one of my favorite books. At first I was unsure what I was going to ward. I was thinking of maybe making a giant warding circle in my backyard, but that seemed to be overdoing it. Then, I re-read The Desert Spear and an amazing idea hit me. I thought about Renna and how much I loved how her character evolved. When I got to the part where she was warding her knife, I decided that I too wanted a warded knife. I’m a weapons enthusiast, so this fit in perfectly with my interests. What’s better than making a weapon deadlier

So, after buying a fixed bladed knife, grabbing a sharpy and some industrial strength solvent, I set to work for roughly an hour warding my knife(slicing my thumb once in the process). I used the wards on your website and the description given in The Desert Spear as my guide. Since you didn’t have a piercing ward on your list, I decided to use one of the miscellanious wards, it seems to fit pretty well. I’m no artist, which is why the warding is far from beautiful, but I think the wards will still be effective against the corelings tonight.

Your friendly amateur Warder,

Vinny K

Posted on June 12, 2010 at 1:19 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
Comments Off on Warders of the World

When I first put up the RISK Map on my News page, it was totally just a joke. I love playing RISK, and since I had just sold my books in like 3-4 countries, I thought it would be clever to post an homage to the game with a global domination map, color coded to show which countries I had “conquered” in red:

Three years later, it’s starting to not be such a joke anymore. With recent deals in Italy with Newton Compton and today’s accepted offer from Serbian publisher Laguna, The Painted/Warded Man is now licensed in 19 markets and 18 languages. I’ve literally lost count of how many countries it’s available in. It’s mind-boggling to think that my work is touching people all over the world, sometimes in languages I’d never even heard of a couple of years ago. I am incredibly fortunate.

I love all my children equally, of course, and do whatever I can to make the release of each translation special in some way, even if it’s just shouting out my affection here on the blog.

For instance, Pustynna Wlócznia will be the first foreign translation of The Desert Spear to hit shelves, released on June 18, 2010 from Polish publisher Fabryka Slow.

As with Malowany czlowiek, translation into Polish added considerable length to the text, so the book will be split into two parts. The second installment will be released in August 2010.

Pustynna Wlócznia will be followed in relative short order by the German translation, Das Flustern der Nacht in August from publisher Heyne, and the French translation, La Lance du Désert in October from the Milady imprint of French publisher Bragelonne.

Translators from all three countries (Poland, Germany, and France) have been in regular contact with me while working on The Desert Spear, which my English readers know is a pretty big book at 240,000 words. I would like to personally thank Marcin Mortka, Ingrid Herrmann-Nykto, and Laurent Queyssi respectively for all their hard work. Translation is an incredibly tough job in any event, and I certainly didn’t make it easy for them.

Posted on June 11, 2010 at 1:25 pm by PeatB
Filed under Poland, Sales, Warded Man, World Traveler, Writing
6 Comments »

It looks like French Jess isn’t the only one to try and use a little hora magic to win the Warding Contest (details here, all entries must be submitted by July 1, 2010). Rowell from the UK comes in with a second entry that is just spectacular:

Hi Peat and Lauren,

I’m back AGAIN with another entry… I have made some alagai hora from some unknown coreling bones, Arlen must have left them for me. As the bones proved to be really hard I decided to paint them with tar. They tell me something… I think I can just see the paths that Jardir and Arlen will take… I can’t tell you though . These alagai hora actually glow with power, so powerful that they seem to resist a bit of sunlight. See for yourselves, alagai hora working FULL TIME!

Hope you love ’em.
Rowell

1) 1/2 second exposure:

2) 6 seconds exposure:

3) 8 seconds exposure:

Posted on June 9, 2010 at 2:39 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
3 Comments »

So I’ve been out writing twice more with the iPad, trying to push past the resistance every new device presents. If you missed my first post on this topic, you can see it here. I did maybe an hour of writing yesterday on the train, and came out at almost 900 words. Not too shabby. I’ve gotten better with the virtual keyboard, typing at a fair clip in both portrait and landscape mode, though there are still some serious hangups that I don’t think are going to go away until Apple updates Pages and/or the iPad OS.

First off, while Pages will maintain paragraph formatting already present in a document, it cannot seem to CREATE said formatting it with any flexibility. If I want to indent every line and don’t have that formatting already present in the document, I need to call down the top menu (which I normally hide as it eats up too much of the screen), hit the tab button, and select the tab type I want. That’s three extra touches for something that I can tell MSWord (or even word mobile on my phone) to do at the touch of the enter key. It also leaves sloppy formatting in the meta-document, which can cause problems when exporting it to other formats for print or whatever. If there’s an easier way to do this, it wasn’t in the Pages tutorial.

The virtual keyboard itself continues to pose problems. Knowing I can hold down the comma to create an apostrophe helps a bit, but the 3 seconds needed to hold it are an eternity when trying to type at speed. Of course, this is nothing compared to the nightmare of switching keyboards to access quotation marks. Do you know how often fiction writers need to use quotes? Obviously the folks at iWork do not. (Answer: A lot). Breaking my stride TWICE (opening and closing quotation marks) for every piece of dialogue is maddening.

While the spell check in Pages is nice, there needs to be a function to build a custom dictionary. I have a lot of made-up words/names in my stories, and I like to just be able to tell the damn program that they are correct, rather than having all those red eyesores on the page. Also, Pages uses straight quotes instead of smart quotes. It’s like writing in caveman times.

I think all of this continues to point to the fact that no matter what Apple says, the iPad was not designed with doing actual work (i.e. content creation) in mind. It is a content viewer that allows some limited creation. This will likely change as new software/firmware versions are released, but for now, it is what it is. More fun than functional.

I recently added the Stanza app, which is great, and uploaded a ton of .PDFs to the iPad to read. The Stanza interface is fantastic, great for both comics and prose, but if you try to add too many .PDFs at once, it crashes the iPad, so you have to do them piecemeal. Also, the iPad backs them all up every time you sync, which has made syncing go from 5 minutes to like 40. Not sure it’s worth the trade off, and I will likely be removing a lot of the files I added for this reason.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love my iPad and think we’re going to be very happy together, but the honeymoon seems to be coming to an end.

Update: I spent about 20 minutes experimenting in pages, and figured out how to create a basic indented paragraph style and then apply it to blocks of text, which I do frequently as I convert bullet points to prose. Like every thing else, it involves a bunch of unnecessarily complicated steps. You have to adjust the tab bar on the top ruler, copy the style, select the unstyled text and then paste the style. I don’t see a way to save the style for future use or set it as a default…

Posted on June 8, 2010 at 11:37 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, My Reviews, Tech, Writing
4 Comments »

Another entry in the Warding Contest, this one from my buddy Ari, who drove a long way to meet me at Lunacon back in March:

Peat,
I decided to ward my laptop.  Demon or no, I won’t let anything get its claws on the Alienware.  Corelings can raze the house, but I guarantee the computer will remain untouched.  Good luck with the contest, and I hope people come up with some neat ideas!-

Ari

Three weeks left to enter, and then we start picking winners and giving away prizes! If you’re planning to enter, don’t put it off till the last minute.

Posted on June 5, 2010 at 2:00 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
Comments Off on Remember to Ward Your Electronic Data