Swiss Days 2012

For those of you who have seen the Swiss Days videos, I apologize. For those who’d rather read about my adventures (or who’d rather not hear me sing when I’m bored), I give you the C. P. White Media Blog. I recently drove more than 800 miles in less than 72 hours; a feat that favors the young (-er than I). I did it for Swiss Days. And it was pretty fun.

A good friend and colleague invited Aaron and me to pop on down to Utah from Idaho for this event, which regularly draws more than 80,000 people to the tiny village of Midway, UT. It’s been going on for 65 years, and it’s a great chance to experience a bona fide slice of Americana, with a Swiss twist. Aaron wasn’t able to make it, so I took his Honda and set off, staying at our friend’s house, where I slept on the couch and dreamt about miniature Schnauzers and talked in my sleep very slowly: “Geeeeeeeet ouuuuuuuuut,” I said at about three AM to the trespassing evil dream dog, which woke me up and probably alarmed the other people sacked out in the living room. One doesn’t expect to hear an authorial guest going on at literally all hours; I’m sure it was a little more than just irritating. So I apologize to the people I offended/ horrified, and I have a feeling there’s more of that kind of action in my professional future. Just cuz. It would figure, that’s all.

I met some outstanding people at Swiss Days this year. I signed lots of books and met tons of fans, some of whom had actually heard of the Airel saga, imagine that! One young lady just couldn’t stop talking about how much she loved Airel and Michael and how she really hates that we keep leaving the reader hanging at the ends of our novels. I’m going to blog soon about Les Edgerton’s book Hooked, which is about hooking the reader from sentence one (a great idea), but in today’s world of the series novel it’s almost as important to hook the reader at the end of books one, two, and three, assuming there’s only four books in the series—it’s really the hook before the hook. And technically, the hook at the end of book one is really the hook at the beginning of book two and so on. Anyway, this young lady was chomping at the bit for book three: Uriel, which is coming soon (hopefully before the end of the year). If you want to be in the loop, subscribe to this here blog.

I’ll be headed back to Swiss Days next year. I was stunned by the beauty of the event, and that includes the gracious people that organized it, staffed it, and attended it. I’m super impressed. I’ll be bringing my family back next year, and I probably won’t even have to bribe them with a stop off at Lagoon in order to get them to go. And I woulda stayed longer, but my oldest boy got baptized that weekend, so I had to leave early because I prioritize my fam—especially for things like that (I actually got the be the one who baptized him, and in the Boise River, no less). It was a momentous weekend for me. I’ll be sharing more of what I learned as the blog pages turn. Until then.

The Wagner Diary

It seems like it’s been forever, I’ll tell you that much. I wrote The Marsburg Diary, or at least I started writing it, over a year ago. It started off as a Stoker-esque historical horror piece, but through the constructive criticism of my friends, it became far more. Harvey Marsburg was born. He took on the traits of a couple of people I’ve met in my travels, at least in regard to the amount of Dr. Pepper he consumes (one of my LAV school instructors practically survived on the stuff; a 2-liter of it was always with him like it was part of his uniform of the day). I think ol’ Harv is what makes the series great. He’s like a fifty year old male version of Airel: a little eccentric and proud of it, with the occasional amusing bits of inner dialogue.

But Harvey’s also a little bit of my own personal fantasy doppelganger, too. He’s British, and I’m borderline obsessed with British culture. I’ve been digging for tasty bits of slang to use, and I fairly splattered the second installment in the Airel Saga Diary Books with a liberal amount of it.

Some of the criticism I got about The Marsburg Diary was that it was pretty meaty. You know, all that Victorian English stuff (which I love, and tried to make as authentic as possible). So to wit, the second book has lots more of Harvey. I had to integrate new characters and new diary lines, so the flashback diary bits are more of a seasoning than the main course. You’ll see a little bit more of William Marsburg’s personal thoughts, but the main event is Herr Wagner’s diary entries, which feature a little more of the infamous Mr. Rotheram. And I promise, in this book we finally get to the bottom of that haunting line, “I have always hated Falkenhayn.” Taking my cues from Goethe’s Faust, I really quite enjoyed writing the quintessentially evil Falkenhayn, and hope you enjoy reading him.

Want an excerpt? I knew you did:

Deep in the wood, somewhere in Illinois~

I probably needed a change of underwear.

Have you ever woken up to the sunrise after sleeping on a forest floor? Let me put it to you this way: it’s not like an advert for yoghurt and granola on telly, where the sun is gentle and there are woodland fairies to caress one’s cheeks. It’s bleeding awful. I felt like bugs were crawling all over me, I itched profusely, and I had managed to injure my neck and head with what I had decided to use for a pillow the night previous— a rounded stone. I was as stiff as grandmother’s knickers (whom I never met, God rest her soul).

It’s funny about getting older— when I was young, I was superman. Getting hurt was a rare thing that usually required me to do something really stupid. But now that I’m nearing fifty, all I have to do is wake up. I will try to rise to a sitting position and I’ll have sustained an injury.

Cautiously, then, I raised myself from the dirt. Gradually. Sloooowly. Never mind being nearly fifty. I felt dead.

“What happened?” I asked no one. I was half expecting an answer though, and looked around to confirm my solitude. I was greeted by none but the lone piercing sun in the east. I raised a hand to my brow to shield my eyes, the back of my hand brushing against a twig that had stuck itself to my forehead in the night— which scared me. After dancing around in fear for a moment, though, I finally calmed myself enough to gather my things, tend to the morning necessities, and begin walking.

Where? Out.

What else could I do?

My car was dead. I had shot it.

And though my bestial enemy was dead too, or at least I assumed so, I also assumed there were no others like him chasing me round the wilderness. If there were, I reasoned, I wouldn’t have awakened at all. At any rate, I was an expatriate Englishman stuck within one of the islanded wilds of rural Midwestern America, stranded without a car, carrying only my backpack. My life had been whittled to that and its random plebian contents, with an especial consideration for those three books inside.

I checked my Ruger revolver. Empty still, of course. Anything else would have been uninteresting, after all. I shoved it back into my waistband at the small of my back.

I trudged on.

It wasn’t long before the wood began to thin out and brighten up. Trees gave way to scrub and brambles, which I tried to skirt around as best I could, moving toward some kind of exit. Nature doesn’t clearly mark these things.

Offhand I wondered what in the world I was going to do now. I was out in the middle of Illinois, somewhere south of Champaign, about an hour’s drive. That put me at least a hundred miles from my home in Chatham. The last road sign I remembered seeing was one for Tuscola, another anonymous American village utterly surrounded by corn. I knew at least that my wanderings had taken me off the beaten track and that I was far from help, far from home. Being on foot just made it worse.

I finally found a clear path to the edge of the wood, which was itself clearly defined: a gently curving razor’s edge, to one side of which there was unruly nature— brush and forest— and on the other side tall corn in perfect rows, towering at least two feet over my head, tassels waving in the early morning breeze.

That was the first time I felt what I call “the slip.” Like something just wasn’t quite right.

Some part of my brain was asking urgently why there should be a corn field ready for harvest in the middle of May. It was like gazing at an Escher; something was definitely not lining up here…

The Wagner Diary is now available for Kindle. Nook users have to wait until tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day.

Michael, Book II in the Airel Saga

I’ve been privileged to work with Aaron Patterson for a couple of years now, co-writing and brainstorming with him on a few ideas that have proven to be more than worthwhile. I can state now for the record that we work well together.

And I hope when Michael releases on May 17^th that you agree.

Fans of the Airel Saga won’t be disappointed. Book I, Airel, ended with a big bang and our intent all along was to follow that up with more of the same. Michael opens with the long-awaited explanation of just what the heck happened up there at the top of the cliff, though of course we take our time revealing all the consequences of that as the story unfolds. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who have yet to read Book I, but you can bet you’ll find plenty of drama in these e-pages.

You’ll also find new characters. We introduce a go-getter FBI agent and her rookie assistant, Harry, to the story. Naturally, in a missing persons case the authorities would nose their way into the situation. What they find at the bottom of their investigation is quite a shock. We also decided that we had to give Airel’s parents a little of the stage, so they make a cameo or two. But two of my new favorites are Ellie, a brass knuckles badass kind of girl who carries a mysterious accent and an even more mysterious past, and Mr. Emmanuel, who wears a white fedora when first we meet him and who has… let’s just say… a way about him. Whatever the case may be, and I’m not making any specific statements about any of these characters (you’ll just have to read the book), but I just adore a good villain. Let’s just say that chameleons can give a guy lots of character ideas. Plus it was really cool to dip into African mythology. Beyond that, I cannot go here.

I had lots of fun writing this one. If Airel bore more of Aaron’s imprimatur, Michael bears more of my own. Aaron and I tried changing up the nuts and bolts of our creative process for this one, and it shows in the final product. When we decided to collaborate on Airel, the rough draft had already been completed and edited by the time I had a crack at it, so I didn’t intrude much. But Michael was rather formless and void, a book with which the creative process was far more open-handed between us. Aaron delivered it to me in four sections over the space of many months, so when I made certain tweaks I wasn’t sure necessarily where he was going with some ideas. By the time we got down to the fourth section (Part Eight in the Saga), I found that I had a lot of catching up to do in order to reconcile our work. In the final analysis though, it just flat works. And well, I think.

We’ve pulled out all the stops on this one. When Aaron and I first started talking about Michael, we decided that we had to really go for broke on the setting. From the beginning we’ve been thinking about the Airel Saga in terms of high production value in regard to what the “camera” sees; we look at the storyline as if it’s a storyboard for a movie in a lot of ways. We want to write something that might translate well to the silver screen, in other words. We therefore decided to incorporate dynamic and sweeping visuals into the story, utilizing all the imaginative tools in our kit. The action scenes in Michael go beyond what you’ve seen in Airel. Where the first book had plenty of awesome Old World epic battle scenes that were a total blast to write, the second is a study in contrasts, not only to the first book but also in comparison to each other right inside Michael. There’s a high speed car chase in the rain at night, the blending of high tech weapons with swordplay, and two gorgeous places: Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and Cape Town, South Africa (I actually spent six months there in 2002, so I was itching to write a bit of that into the story line from the get-go).

If you’re craving romance, Michael delivers on that front as well. As I said earlier, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a scene with Airel and Michael in a torrential downpour that ought to spark something in you, at least if you’re not dead inside.

But that doesn’t compare to the scene near the end where one major plot twist comes finally unraveled with Airel and Kreios. That one is my favorite.

As always, the intent with the Airel Saga has been to provide a little something for everyone: drama, romance, action, adventure, intrigue, suspense, even some light humor. Michael delivers all of these and more. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

To all our fans: thank you so very much. We couldn’t do this without you.

Marsburg is free today and tomorrow...

Book One in the Airel Saga Diary series, The Marsburg Diary, is free today and tomorrow. Tell your peeps.

Synopsis:

Harvey Marsburg, son of the late William Marsburg, is reading through his deceased father's long-lost diary. At first, Harv is annoyed at the peculiarities of his father, irritated that he has to uncover old wounds by reading this old book. But he finds to his amazement that his father might not actually have been mad. In fact it appears that William may have been nearly 150 years old when he died in 1977. Now his body lies decomposing in a Yorkshire mausoleum, but his legacy lives on. Harvey reads cryptic notes from the executor: "May your father rest in peace. He deserves it." Something watches him from the darknesses of his house as he reads the diary with growing interest. Plus, there are two other books in that old trunk that the foundation sent. One of them, he could swear it, is calling to him...

What’s the Deal With the Marsburg Diary?

Some may be asking, “What the flippineck does ‘Book one of the Airel Saga Diary Books’ mean?” Simple: The Marsburg Diary is the first book of the subseries in the Airel Saga.

Clear as mud? Good. I like to trust that my audience is smarter by several degrees than the average television-watching slob. Plus working with a quality man like Aaron Patterson is at least a small guarantee of that. Sort of.

By the way, I love compliments that come prepackaged with the tiniest hint of insult; they’re balanced.

So, for those who’ve read Airel and loved her, loved her story, dug the varietals in the plot etc., I have a treat in store for you. Remember the prologue? That little bit about William Marsburg in Stuttgart, 1897? Remember the gigantic question mark that hung in the air as it ended? Well, get ready for resolution in The Marsburg Diary.

And get ready for more questions. But you love that, don’t you. Yes, you do. And you know it—it’s what’s great about being a reader of books. There’s no spoon-feeding here.

Today, get ready to meet Harvey Marsburg: William’s slightly clutzy youngest son. The elephant in the room is that Harvey was born in 1967…which is kinda impossible, given that William would have to have fathered him at well over one hundred years of age. It’s one reason Harv has always thought the old man was crazy. He hates the memory of him and is glad to have moved on after his death—or at least tried.

The problem is, the foundation that William established to provide security for his boys—Jack and Harvey—has now sent a large trunk to Harvey. Addison, the executor of the estate, has left a cryptic note for ol’ Harv. But what starts things in motion before all this is the letter bearing William’s seal. There’s a weirdness to the address that seems to portend more than one meaning…plus, Harv could swear he’s being watched. As a huge thunderstorm rolls in from the west, Harvey begins to look into the trunk. And though it goes against everything within him, he begins to lose all his reasons for disbelief.

Harv gets lots of questions answered, but as a result, he has even more questions now than when he started, and so will you. Don’t miss The Marsburg Diary, available now for Kindle and Nook. Coming soon: Michael, book two in the Airel Saga, and next year look for The Wagner Diary, book two in the Airel Saga Diary Books series. 

Review of Airel by Reviews By Molly

Check out the latest review for Airel. This is one of the best reviews I've ever read for any book anywhere. Amazing. Thanks to Molly.

Review of Airel by Life in Review

Okay, this review takes the cake. Check it out here. And don't miss your chance to pick up Airel on Kindle this month for $4.99. It goes to print this fall. Book II in the Airel saga, Michael, is currently being dreamed up.