Read Past Monthly Midden Topics Here:
August 2008
READ OF THE MONTH: Tess Gerritson's Body Double.
Wow! August already? Time is like a good bottle of cognac: It's tough to make it last.
As an update, we've been really busy and learning how to work the new website is going to take some getting used to. First we've had a very busy summer including trips to the Western Bison Association board meeting in California, a West Coast book tour for The Betrayal, a journey to New York for the 3rd annual ThrillerFest where we met with agents and publishers, then to the BMWMOA national motorcycle ralley in Gillette, Wyoming. In August we were off to Denver, Colorado, for the World Science Fiction Con--our first attendence at such an event in 13 years.
So far this year we've put over 12 thousand miles on our BMW 1100RT and over a thousand on the Moto Guzzi Norge. As noted in our new blog, we do many book events and a great deal of research on our motorcycles. Both of the bikes average right around fifty miles to the gallon, and riding cross country is our favorite mode of travel. At the BMWMOA rally our RT even received a blue ribbon for being an outstanding specimen. We were tickled, having made the Beemer into a perfect long-distance ride. By the time the RT is shut down for the winter the odometer will read close to 85,000. In all that time we have only had to replace one fork seal, and recently had to have the ABS system fixed. While the BMW is our long-distance ride, the Moto Guzzi is our take-the-afternoon-off-and-ride-to-Cook-City bike. Only this year we haven't been able to take an afternoon off to ride to Cook City. The Guzzi has only made Mike's birthday ride, and a trip to Denver to have a luggage rack replaced on a factory recall. Maybe next year?
Perhaps. We'll have to see how many books get written in the meantime.
Which, of course, takes us to our writing. We've finished the final, final revisions on the children's book: Children of the Dawnland which Tor should publish in June of 2009. We have also gone through page proofs for the upcoming hardback of People of the Thunder and the page proofs for People of the Weeping Eye in paperback.
Currently we are working on two new novels, one a traditional "People" book will be set in upstate New York and deals with the formation of the Iroquois confederacy in the early 1400s. The second is a novel about the de Soto expedition entering Florida in 1539. This latter is a novel that we hope will spin off into a new series: Contact: The Battle for America. The book is exciting in that we're taking a slightly different approach, writing in first person, and well, we've got Spaniards. The actual de Soto expedition was an abject failure. Native peoples won that first round rather handily.
With regard to People of the Weeping Eye and People of the Thunder, there have been comments from some fans that wish we hadn't split the story into two volumes. We didn't want to either. The grisly facts are that publishing is a business for Tor/Forge and the modern market is changing the kind of books being sold. Had we kept Weeping Eye and Thunder as one volume, the price would have been more than $30.00. So, dear faithful readers, be ready for the second half to land on bookstore shelves in January. In the future we will struggle to keep the page count down as a means of avoiding such problems.
As of this writing we still do not have a U.S. publisher for Comes a Green Sky. For you bilingual types it will be available in Germany next summer. Our literary agent is waiting until publishers get back from their August vacations to send the manuscript out to different thriller editors looking for environmental thrillers.
At the 2008 World Con we had a delightful dinner with Betsy Wolheim and Sheila Gilbert, our publishers at DAW Books. The occasion was to celebrate the 20 year anniversary release of Warriors of Spider. The book has been repackaged with a great new cover and can be picked up at Barnes&Noble as well as Borders and Amazon. If you've never read the Spider trilogy, this is your opportunity. We both offer our most sincere thanks to Shiela and Betsy for their constant support of our science fiction books. With a few exceptions the novels are as relevant today as they were when Michael wrote them in the late 1980s.
Also upcoming on the horizon is the 20 year collector's trade edition of Michael's Long Ride Home. This was the first novel he sold way back in 1987. Tor Books bought it three days before DAW bought the Spider trilogy. For more information on either of these titles, see the book section of the web site.
Upcoming events include a sell-in tour through the Southeast in October. This is currently being planned by Dot Lin in publicity, and we'll try to get events listed in the calendar as the schedule is firmed up. Also we will be appearing at the Deleware Book Festival. You can Google their website for updated information.
On September 5 and 6 the Rocky Mountain Bison Association summer meetings will be hosted by Red Canyon Ranch. We're looking forward to seeing old friends and feasting them on some of the best buffalo burgers in the country.
Also in September we have to bite the bullet and learn how to do Powerpoint presentations. This really eats the slimy banana as far as we are concerned. Slides worked just fine, thank you. Put them in the machine, push the button and look at the machine. Even undersophisiticated primates like us could do it. We have yet to see a powerpoint that didn't take twice as long, have some computer glitch, and bring up the wrong string of photos. Kathy has made the assumption that Mike is smart enough to figure this out. Mike has no assumptions left: he knows Kathy is assuming he's smarter than he really is.
In bringing this to a close, we would remind you that the fall elections are looming. If neither candidate is your cup of milk, please don't sit home on election day. No matter what the right to vote has only been won by blood and sacrifice. If you really don't like either party's offering, remember, you can always write in for the person you think would do the best job. Not worth while? Think about how the parties would react if twenty percent of votes were write ins!
Until next time, all the best and read good books.
----------------
March, 2008
Favorite Read of the Month
Pax Dakota , by Ken Rand. ISBN-10: 1594146721; ISBN-13: 978-1594146725 (Five Star Science Fiction and Fantasy)    
Interview: The Betrayal
Mike and Kathy are interviewed a lot. But this one is special. Recently, they opened their home to Karen Jones for an interview on The Betrayal, a great rarity.
----------------
February, 2008
Mountain and Plains Library Association Award
Wyoming authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear have been selected to receive the 2008 Literary Contribution Award from the Mountain Plains Library Association. Beth Avery, the Chair of the Awards Committee, says "The award is given to an author whose published writings most successfully further an understanding and appreciation of the Mountain Plains region." The MPLA Award banquet will be held at the annual conference, Thursday evening, May 1, 2008, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Gears, who say they are "deeply honored" by the award, will give the keynote speech at the conference.
----------------
November, 2007
Michael and Kathy will have an article in the Spring issue of Bison World Magazine. The title is The Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Children of Dawnland is complete, but still no publication date. Other publication dates have changed as well; the new dates are posted on The Books page.
Expect a mass market paperback of People of the Nightland in March, 2008.
Kathy and Michael's new thriller, Under a Green Sky, currently weighes in at 350 manuscript pages. It is due to the German publisher, Lübbe,, in February. No US publisher has signed up yet.
Characters' names get changed from time to time, just ike books. Special Investigator Christopher Keef is now "Skip Murphy".
Some upcoming events are listed on the Public Appearances page.
People of the Painted Canyon, and People of Dawnland are now under contract. The latter takes the characters of Children of Dawnland up to adulthood.
----------------
September, 2007
Under a Green Sky
A new thriller by the Gears is in process.
When a luxury cruise ship is found floating in the Atlantic with 4,000 people dead, three Muslim fundamentalist groups immediately claim responsibility. Even worse, the vessel was carrying a world famous Christian preacher and 2,000 loyal supporters on their way to the Holy Land for a controversial "Crusade" to recover the Holy Land for Christians.
As tensions mount, it is up to Dr. Maureen Cole and Special Investigator Christopher Keef to uncover the truth.
But as Christian suicide bombers begin picking targets, Maureen and Chris begin to understand that another, greater threat may be at play.
To Cast a Pearl has a new title, The Betrayal: The Stolen Life of Jesus. As noted, it is already in print in German, Italian and Russian.
Kathy's Children of Dawnland is complete. It takes place as a comet exploded over eastern Canada, 12,900 years ago. There are over a million elliptical depressions we call the Carolina Bays scattered from New Jersey to Florida. There is a "black mat" layer in the Earth at about this age, laden with iridium, glass sphericles, carbon spheriules, fullerenes and other material associated with large impacts on the Earth. This is about the time that Clovis activity stopped, and Kathy notes that Clovis sites occur below or in the "black mat" layer, but not above it.
The event lead to what we call the Younger Dryas Cool Episode, in which the slow deglaciation of North America was interrupted by a cooling period, and many large mammals such as the mammoth went extinct.
There will be a Teachers Guide. The book will be used in classes such as science and history for children aged 8 to 12.
Two scripts are in progress, for Children of Dawnland and The Betrayal.
Tor Books interviewed Kathleen and Michael at Red Canyon Ranch on People of the Nightland. (21MB file, Microsoft ASF format)
Mike and Kathy are working on contracts for two new prehistory books. People of the Painted Canyon, and People of Dawnland, which takes the characters of Children of Dawnland up to adulthood.
----------------
July, 2007
We've added a new excerpt, from People of the Weeping Eye and People of the Thunder. Release date for People of the Weeping Eye is currently April, 2008. There's no release date yet for People of the Thunder.
To Cast a Pearl is published in Germany, from Lübbe. Look for US publication from TOR in June of 2008.
Michael is pleased to announce that he is now (unofficially) an Iron Butt motorcyclist! On July 13-14, he rode his BMW from Denver to Thermopolis, almost circumnavigating Yellowstone in the process. He rode 1445 miles in 22 hours and 44 minutes, and has the gas receipts to prove it. He qualified for the SaddleSore rating, but is 65 miles short of the BunBurner Gold rating. Once the association certifies his records, his name will go up on the Iron Butt Association's web site.
Kathy, meanwhile, has started work on a book for children ages 8-12, for Tor's Young Readers category. The working title is Children of Dawnland. It takes place some 12,000 years ago as a comet explodes over China, and glaciers begin to melt. Kathy says that writing for children requires a very different writing style. Kathy is freshly elected to the Western Writers of American board for a two year stint. |
Twenty years in print! Not only Mike and Kathy, but Michael's The Warriors of Spider will have been in print continuously for 20 years as of March 20, 2008. Expect to see a special 20th Anniversary edition. And maybe similar treatment for Long Ride Home, Michael's first book sale? Mike says his writing has gotten a lot better since then. As Kathy observes, "If you're not getting better, you will be winnowed out."
Michael and Kathy have a new thriller under contract to Lübbe, their German publisher. The working title is Comes a Green Sky, and the tentative German publication date is Summer, 2008. No US publisher has been signed. Yet. The story line involves a fully automated cruise ship sailing the Indian Ocean — with everyone aboard dead. Mary Celeste version 2.0? Wonder how that will go over on the next Authors at Sea cruise.
February, 2007
An update on People of the Weeping Eye. The book has been pulled from the catalog. Tor now says the book is too long. They want to split it into two parts — something like Morning River and Coyote Summer. The current thinking is People of the Weeping Eye Winter and People of the Weeping Eye Spring. The two hardbounds would be released a season apart, and the mass market paperbacks in subsequent months. There is no planned date for release.
The manuscript for To Cast a Pearl has been delivered to Lübbe, the German publisher, and other European publishers. Tor Forge also has the MS, but there's no announced US publication date yet.
A long time ago, in a magazine far, far away, Ken Rand interviewed Michael and Kathy. That interview, and several others, has been collected into an anthology entitled Human Visions: The Talebones Interviews by Fairwood Press. Unfortunately, the Fairwood Press web site does not allow deep links, so go to the main page, click on "Catalog", then on "Anthologies". Your webmaster hasn't read the book, but would be very interested in reading Ken's interviews with Michael and Kathy, Jim Hogan, C.J. Cherryh, Spider Robinson, Fred Saberhagen, and Harry Turtledove. For starters. There are a few new notes on Kathy and Michael's March book tour on the Public Appearances page. We'll have more details as we get them. |
