The Gryphon's Boy has been unleashed!

He's finally here! Dzywllym, the young bird-boy first seen in The Glasschanger's Child, is back with his own amazing adventure in The Gryphon's Boy! Discover how Dzywllym's parents were killed, leaving him an orphan wandering around aimlessly until one day when he spies the magnificent ship Orpheus and meets his true love, the ship's navigator and budding opera composer Quinn. Quinn is a young gryphon who fled the cold gryphon homeland of Okrakktyr to find adventure of his own and found the devoted Dzywllym as well. But things are about to get a lot more adventurous for both the gryphon and his beloved boy!

The winged Vylloizõ boy Dzywllym is tired of adventures and simply wants to love his gryphon boyfriend, Quinn. When Quinn is called back to the gryphon homeland Okrakktyr and imprisoned there, Dzywllym sets out from Klyrrok with the cheerful and valiant mytho-magic Fledglings to rescue him. But wizard Flyntn Castefurvus, who murdered Dzywllym’s parents, takes over Okrakktyr in his pursuit of Klyrrok’s throne. Chaos erupts when Flyntn and his sadistic henchmen steal a battleship from Earth. The fates of Earth and Myrohtrae hang in the balance as gryphons, dragons, wizards, werewolves, the goat-god Pan, his prankish, sexually rapacious and deadly cousin Pwcca, a cranky, well-armed guardian angel, and the magnificent triple-hulled flying ship Orpheus wage war with Flyntn in the skies over both worlds. Amidst intense episodes of erotic passion and ferocious violence, young Dzywllym must learn to vanquish his fears and focus his rage to save Quinn and exact revenge for his parents’ savage deaths.

Join Dzywllym for his greatest adventure in The Gryphon's Boy, now available in print and on Kindle, and available soon in other e-book formats.

The Gryphon's Boy (print)

The Gryphon's Boy (Kindle)

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The Gryphon's Boy is almost ready!

He's almost ready! I'm putting the last touches on the text of The Gryphon's Boy and fiddling a bit with the formatting. The Gryphon's Boy is a sequel to The Glasschanger's Child. I already have ideas for another novel in this series. The books each stand alone, so you can start with whichever one you prefer. Adventure awaits!

The winged Vylloizõ boy Dzywllym is tired of adventures and simply wants to love his gryphon boyfriend, Quinn. When Quinn is called back to the gryphon homeland Okrakktyr and imprisoned there, Dzywllym sets out from Klyrrok with the cheerful and valiant mytho-magic Fledglings to rescue him. But wizard Flyntn Castefurvus, who murdered Dzywllym’s parents, takes over Okrakktyr in his pursuit of Klyrrok’s throne. Chaos erupts when Flyntn and his sadistic henchmen steal a battleship from Earth. The fates of Earth and Myrohtrae hang in the balance as gryphons, dragons, wizards, werewolves, the goat-god Pan, his prankish, sexually rapacious and deadly cousin Pwcca, a cranky, well-armed guardian angel, and the magnificent triple-hulled flying ship Orpheus wage war with Flyntn in the skies over both worlds. Amidst intense episodes of erotic passion and ferocious violence, young Dzywllym must learn to vanquish his fears and focus his rage to save Quinn and exact revenge for his parents’ savage deaths.

And isn't that a great cover? Thanks once again to April Danaher for her great work!

Dzywllym and Quinn will be flying your way soon! Thanks for being patient; perfection takes time. :D

The Glasschanger's Child

April Danaher's Photobucket Page

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The Gryphon's Boy is going to have an amazing cover!

Just look at this awesome and amazing cover art being created by April Danaher for my upcoming novel, The Gryphon's Boy (a sequel to The Glasschanger's Child). I love the vitality of this preliminary drawing so much that, instead of finishing it off with a fully-colored version, I'm going to try leaving it as is and have April add just minimal color touches similar to what she's already added. Any opinions? I think this drawing is lovely.

The Glasschanger's Child

April Danaher's Photobucket Page

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The Gryphon's Boy is getting ready!

Look at these lovely sketches that the wonderful April Danaher has made for the cover of my upcoming novel, The Gryphon's Boy. I particularly like the one in the lower right corner, but each one of these images is just delightful! :D

The Gryphon's Boy is a sequel to The Glasschanger's Child, and focuses on the bird-boy Dzywllym and his boyfriend, the magnificent gryphon Quinn. It's tender, tragic, emotional, and beautiful, with lots of story twists and intense scenes of love and violence. Many familiar characters from the first novel return, including the Fledglings and their tremendous, three-hulled flying ship, the Orpheus. I'm still polishing up the manuscript, but I'll be publishing The Gryphon's Boy sometime this summer.

The Glasschanger's Child

April Danaher's Photobucket Page

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An American Classic

I first read this book many years ago on a business trip, one of those things you have to endure where you want some sort of engrossing novel to carry you away from the bullshit of a job you hate (and traveling with the company owner, too) and one of those nerve-wracking times when you have to be “on” all the time because you’re surrounded by clients who are all morons anyway, and you have to be nice to them. I was on board a plane reading the opening scenes of American Gods that take place on a plane. Not that it had anything to do with the novel, but I remember watching what was almost a mugging on a Baltimore street from my hotel room late one night while I read this book. Fascinating, as if the world had become weirdly in-tune and out-of-order from the normal and usual, as if tendrils of the novel wormed their way out of the pages and into the ether.

I finished American Gods well after that trip ended, and when I closed its pages I was startled by an unbidden thought: “That was one of the most satisfying books I have ever read.” And I meant it. Every moment spent reading American Gods had been worth it, every hour with it an hour much more than well-spent. How often can you say that about any book? The works of Shakespeare and Homer; the utterly perfect characters and situations of Stephen King’s masterpiece, The Shining; the overwhelming too-muchness and diamond-flaw perfection of my favorite novel, Les Misérables. Not many others. Not many others at all.

The edition of American Gods I read years ago was the “standard edition,” I guess we could say. I started reading it again recently in the above pictured, Tenth Anniversary edition, with text restored by the brilliant Neil Gaiman. I’m already hooked again. Read this. It’s worth every minute of your time. Very little written today is this goddamned excellent.



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Where the Wild Things Still Are; or, Children Are Beasts

A delightful and acerbic look at children's books today from one of my heroes, the irrepressible Maurice Sendak. What's wrong with kids' books today? They're too goddamn nice!

When your work first appeared, it was considered to be new, something different. What were you doing that nobody else had done?

I was developing a child who I recognized as myself as a child, from my observations of other children around me in Brooklyn. We were wild creatures. We did things that were objectionable.

Max, to me, was a very average normal kid, but he upset a lot of people at the time. He yelled at his mother, he talked back to her, she deprived him of food and then gave it to him. Children who fight back, children who are full of excitement are the kind of children I like.

Max was a little beast, and we’re all little beasts. That was what was so novel.

More terrific observations about the cowards that were and are our parents from Mr. Sendak here. God, I love this man!

"On the Phone With Maurice Sendak" (The New York Times)

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Have an adventure this weekend!

Need a good book to read for the Labor Day weekend? Try one of my novels, The Glasschanger's Child or Orphan Stone. The Glasschanger's Child is a contemporary fantasy with wizards and dragons, an opera-composing gryphon, and the the Greek god Pan. Orphan Stone is a science fiction adventure about a young girl battling furry pirates among the rings of Saturn. Follow the links for more details about the novels and where you can buy them. Enjoy!



Orphan Stone

The Glasschanger's Child

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The Glasschanger's Child

My novel The Glasschanger's Child is now available in an Amazon Kindle edition! This one is a contemporary fantasy-adventure tale with some fascinating characters and lots of interesting twists.

Young Ciar Allyn pleads to the heavens for news about her vanished father, but the only reply is a gold glass star given her by two mysterious faeries. Years later Ciar discovers the Fledglings, a free-spirited band of mytho-magic creatures seeking Ciar’s powerful star aboard their fantastic flying vessel Orpheus. Ciar learns that her father was secretly a glasschanger, a powerful wizard who left Earth to help the Fledglings save the throne of their home world, Klyrrok. Swept up in their quest, Ciar fights side-by-side with werewolves, a gryphon, a man made of blue glass, the goat-god Pan, an abrasive and well-armed guardian angel, and a world-famous opera singer who sometimes turns into a tiger. Together the Fledglings battle an evil wizard and his cheerfully sadistic henchmen to save Klyrrok’s true king. But only Ciar’s growing mastery of her newly discovered glasschanging powers can carry the Fledglings to final victory.

This novel is one of my favorite creations, and I hope you enjoy it!

The Glasschanger's Child is now available in a print-on-demand paperback edition (just follow the link to Amazon) and in other e-reader formats. Also, some independent bookstores have the print-on-demand paperback edition available, too. Check with your favorite book retailer!

The Glasschanger's Child at Amazon.com

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Orphan Stone

My novel Orphan Stone is now available in an Amazon Kindle edition! It's a novel I first wrote a few years ago and had no success placing through traditional channels, so I decided to try the self-publishing route and see what happens. Here's the description of Orphan Stone:

Erzsébet Warren doesn't let anything get in her way. It's been just a few months since Erzsébet was made an orphan when her father murdered the rest of her family. Now she wants to do something fun, like mining diamonds in the dangerous rings of Saturn. But Erzsébet doesn't anticipate that the place is crawling with hated chimera-boys, humans who genetically alter their bodies to become part animal. Nor does she count on a ship full of vicious pirates, who not only want to steal the miners' diamonds but also have a personal grudge against Erzsi. And least of all, she never thought she'd fall in love with a chimera-boy. Erzsébet's adventures rack up no end of trouble for both the daring diamond miners and the dissipate and deadly pirates. But when pirates try to take over the huge mining station, it's Erzsébet's cunning improvisations that help the outgunned miners fight back.

Orphan Stone is a rip-roaring adventure tale with lots of drama and humor. I hope you enjoy it!

Orphan Stone is now available in a print-on-demand paperback edition (just follow the link to Amazon) and in other e-reader formats. Also, some independent bookstores have the print-on-demand paperback edition available, too. Check with your favorite book retailer!

Orphan Stone at Amazon.com

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Gay Teen Blogger Blasts School, Public Librarians

An outstanding interview with Brent, the awesome author of the post on LGBT YA lit that I highlighted a couple of weeks ago. I love this bit:

How did it make you feel when your middle school librarian told you LGBT novels were inappropriate?
Can I cuss in this interview? I felt disgusted. And pissed at her.

Here's your chance to get it off your chest. Say something to her.
Get over it. Get over your prejudice. It doesn't matter. It's not your place to judge what kids should read based on your prejudices.

Read the whole thing; it’s well worth it.

"Gay Teen Blogger Blasts School, Public Librarians" (School Library Journal)

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Gay Teen Pwns Gay-cist Librarians!

This blog entry by Brent, a fifteen-year-old bibliophile who is also gay, brought tears to my eyes and made me want to jump for joy. With more and more confident gay kids like this, the world is certain to become a better place -- I dare any bigot to look into this young man's face and try to shame him. You can't. You...simply...can't.

When I set out to find more LGBT titles, I turned to my school’s library. Honestly? It was pathetic. There was not one single LGBT novel. But oh, of course the librarian went out of her way to buy books about gangs, drugs, and teen pregnancy. Like, for real, the people who actually do care about gangs, drugs, and teen sex sure as hell don’t read–they’re too busy (note: gangs, drugs, and teen sex. Yeah, they’re going to interrupt all that fabulous action to sit and read a good novel!). When I asked her about it, she replied, “This is a school library. If you are looking to read inappropriate titles, go to a book store.” Uhm, how in the hell is LGBT YA lit “inappropriate”?

I mean, think about it. Let it register: The librarian claimed LGBT novels were inappropriate, yet she approved of books that had heterosexual sex. Yeah, she was being gay-cist! It wasn’t until May of 2009 (my last month of attending that school) that she bought a book that mentioned gays. It was Ellen Hopkins’ Impulse. FINALLY!

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The world needs more librarians who serve the purpose of finding the right book to put in the right person’s lap. Not librarians who think that they can decide what’s “inappropriate” and what’s not, based on their personal prejudices. There are tons of gay teens, struggling to find a group to fit in. LGBT YA lit helps us find out that no, we aren’t alone and no, we aren’t worthless or disgusting. It helps us discover that we are part of a group. The LGBT group. Which is the group to be in. Tons of brilliant people, doing brilliant things, fighting for brilliant causes (Straight people with gay tendencies included).

Read the whole thing. Astonishing and wonderful! Check out Brent's own blog here.

"Gay teen blogger/book reviewer takes librarians to task over LGBT lit" (Pinched Nerves)

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h/t Andrew Sullivan

Great Books Do Not Always Make Great Movies

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a post by one of his readers on books and adapting them into movies. Some great comments here. For the most part I always enjoy books more than the resulting movies, but there are some exceptions. Oh, yes; The Godfather; such an amazing film made from such a trashy potboiler of a book!

I got into a friendly argument about one of my least favorite clichés recently. It was this: the book is always better than the movie. First, always beware the use of "always"--it obviously only takes one counterexample (oh, there's this little movie called The Godfather) to prove the assertion wrong. Though the cliché is often stated this way, let's be charitable and relax the statement to something like "the book is usually better than the movie."

It's considerably more difficult to prove this wrong because there isn't, to my knowledge, a database of movies that are based on books that we could readily consult and then perhaps use some agreed-upon method--metacritic scores? Rotten Tomatoes scores?--to more-or-less prove the point objectively. But there are a number: The Godfather; most of the good Philip K. Dick adaptations (and there are several: Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and perhaps the upcoming Adjustment Bureau will be good); The Talented Mr. Ripley is, I believe, better than the book it's based on...there are more examples, I'm sure.

Anybody want to share their own examples?

"Great Books Are Great at Being Books" (The Atlantic)

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