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Welcome to my home on the Internet. Here you can find where I'm doing book signings or convention appearances, a bit about writing and more on my books. Make sure to check out the Forums where a lot of really cool people hang out.

Newest Books

• March 2010: Moon Called hardcover release (previously published in paperback).
• Silver Borne Mar 30, 2010

Upcoming Books:

• Masques (October 2010) revised, back in print after 15 years.
• Wolfsbane (November 2010) unpublished sequel to Masques.

Every so often we get a letter from an aspiring author worried about sending their precious manuscript out into the cold cruel world. What if a publisher, or even an agent, reads it, and decides to steal it for themselves? We've tried to assuage these concerns, but recently I stumbled onto an article that does a far better job of it. If you, or someone is losing sleep, read Moira Allen's Will an Editor Steal Your Ideas?.

Also, Tor.com did a really nice interview with artist Dan Dos Santos and the cover movel, Jaime, called Embodying Mery Thompson in Person and In Paint.

Once again it's high summer, which in the desert means hot. I had carefully planned to have my outdoor projects completed several weeks ago, so that I could do indoor projects during the hottest weeks. Naturally, it didn't work, and I'm still working on the yard irrigation, which should have been done months ago. There's fourteen different lines, each with six or seven sprinkers, covering about three quarters of an acre of yard. Or at least it used be a yard before I started excavating with heavy equipment; now it looks like a war-zone. The grass is flattened, the ground ripped and shredded, ditches that were originally backfilled to level are now slumping as the ground settles. At least it's wet, and we can work on planting things this fall. I need to learn that things always take longer than expected around here. For example, my estimates for excavating several thousand feet of trenches, laying the pipe, and covering it over were stupidly optimistic to begin with. I hadn't factored the need to chip through rock, sand-bed the pipe, and rebuild the manifold from the water pump. Also, the pump-house wall needed repair, which led to re-wiring the building, which in turn revealed a dangerous underground feed to another building which had to be brought up to code. And all I wanted was a few sprinklers!

When we bought this place, it was littered with many "decorative" piles of rock. Most of them I hauled off, but we also built a nice dry-stacked rock wall around the front yard. It looked pretty good last year, until I realized our mistake. This is a desert, and the rock wall provided a perfect spider habitat. The deep recesses provide shade, and the yard provides moisture: it's spidertopia. Soon, every nook and cranny was harboring a spider (mostly wolf and hobo spiders), with webs covering much of the rock face. It's not as pretty as it was, and Patty's not a big fan of spiders, so the rock wall has to go.

Stacked Stone Fence: The ideal spider habitat

This spring, I saw a beautiful wall made from native stone at our horse trainer's place. It's spider free. It turns out that, without the interior spaces provided by dry-stacking, the wall becomes too hot for the spiders to survive on. We got the name of the builder, and contacted him about building a nice mortared stone wall to replace our spider habitat. I winced a little at the price, but we decided to go ahead with the project.

I was anxious to see how he built the wall. After all, I'd worn myself to a frazzle simply dry stacking a wall, and he was going to be using cement and steel bars as well. I expected some sort of trick or gimmick. Maybe he'd use a slip form, and treat the cement with a retardant, kind of like exposed aggregate concrete. I was wrong. There's no trick. The cement is mixed in small batches on a big metal sheet, which allows him to adjust the consistency to his liking on a stone-by-stone basis. The rocks are individually fitted into place, the mortar is placed, and the excess concrete, spills and drips are cleaned by hand. It's a hundred degrees out there, and most days we have a very patient mason quietly fitting one stone against another in the shade of a portable carport. Suddenly, the price doesn't seem so bad!

I was so sure there was an "easy way", I even asked the mason about it. He said that brick and block are easy to lay, and you don't have to wait for once course to dry before starting on the next. It's much faster to build a block wall, then cover it with one of the many fake rock products on the market. But for a real stone wall there are no shortcuts, just lots of hard, hot, heavy work. There's a lesson in there somewhere!

Mortared Stone Fence: Isn't this pretty?.