Wave Without A Shore

by Jane S. Fancher…can be viewed on PC, Apple, readers, phones, OR printed out, if you like. We give our readers every option! Also available: the prior 3 novels of the Ringdancer arc, Ring of Lightning, Ring of Intrigue, Ring of Destiny. Closed Circle Store
This is a fantasy universe with several unusual turns—a dynastic tale with a twist, and no few turns of unusual sort…no, there are no elves. There are brothers, lovers, rivalries, intrigue, and a very different world. I love this series—and if you haven’t read the first 3, do!

Closed Circle Store: Jane Fancher’s second Ring-book cycle begins with Rings of Change: Alizant. This is the first publication anywhere: so if you haven’t got the Ringdancer books, go get them now before the price changes.
You can get the first three books now, starting with Ring of Lightning, then Ring of Intrigue, and Ring of Destiny. Go for it. Price subject to change.
Note: Closed Circle books can be read on any device, can be read on your computer, can be stored on DVD, and can be printed out and bound by a binder of your choosing.…which is something you can’t do with a file from Amazon, la! They come in 11 different formats, one of which will work.

The line: from Algini: “—we shall track it, and we will act.”

I’ll almost lay you money a copyeditor is going to come to a screeching halt and try to draw both statements into uniformity. Which will remove a layer of meaning. And which I shall have to stet. So, I think I WILL insert the [sic] (Latin for ‘thus’) into the text and hope the copyeditor does not fail to strike THAT printer’s notation before it’s set in print.

Do you read that the quality of copyediting is going down by the stern? You’d be right.

Here’s the grammar involved, and it’s really quite simple.
The present tense of the verb ‘track’.
First person means “I,” and “we” (closest to you.)
Second person means “you singular” and “you plural”, ie one, and more than one.
Third person means “he, she, it” and “they” farthest from you, over there.

The rule of shall and will is simple. Shall is only first person when it means future action. “I shall track” and “we shall track.”
Will is second and third person when it means future action. “you will track,” “you pl. will track,” “he will track, she will track, it will track, and they will track.”

NOW, the tricky and subtle bit. The rule totally reverses when it indicates determination about the act.
If you say, “I will track,” it’s as good as italicizing ‘will’ and speaking it with emphasis. It is a subtlety of expression which expresses Intent.
So it becomes, by reversing the above rule: for Intent: I will track, we will track. Then: you shall track, you pl. shall track becomes an Order, isn’t that clever?
And yet one more trick: he shall track, she shall track, it shall track, and they shall track become a Legal Directive.

If you remotely think this is a distinction without meaning, well, the State of Oklahoma managed to void its inheritance law by screwing up the “he shall track” bit. Instead of “he shall track”, they wrote “he will track,” which made it legally ineffective, and unenforcable by the law.

Just one more of the little slippery slopes American English has been skating down ever since it abandoned grammar instruction in favor of the “people naturally talk right” rule of teaching English.

English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it.

The new book release (Alizant) is still set for the 1st. For those of you who’ve never tried e-books, remember you and your printer can turn one of our e-books into paper. Just print out the pdf. Or use the html and your own word processor to convert it into any size format you like. Do a 2-sided print and head for Kinko’s, for a binding. And this is something we can do that Kindle doesn’t offer! DIY books!

I’ll start with one of my favorites: Crocodile on a Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters, (c) 1975. The Amelia Peabody mysteries. They’re a hoot.
And just to give you the idea that they don’t have to be totally period: The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith. Precious Rambotswe is the detective. It’s also a very good HBO series.

Both of us are sore from yardwork. You know we pulled up the lawn, and you’ve seen photos of the water feature in the front over on Jane’s site. Well, facing that we set Jane’s early birthday present, a yard swing, so she can sit in the shade out there and watch the traffic and the fountain, and the wildlife, when we get our plantings established.

Well, we had to level the area where the swing would be, then cover it in weedcloth, then cover it in mulch, then move the swing onto it, pin it down, then try to straighten up the surrounding territory, as our maze of mulched sunken paths and sunken ‘dry’ streambed of rocks and gravel becomes a clearer pattern in our design. One of our major features is the the path that will let us get the trash from the back door to the front curb—not too elegant a need, but definitely a necessity. That bin gets heavy!

We are also thinking of submerging the front walk in mulch, because the concrete is so fractured.

We’re going to set some low bushes, build a retraining wall—the spendiest part of our operation—and figure out what we can plant in the way of trees without obscuring the view from the front window, or our neighbors’ window. We plan a pink dogwood, and we’re moving one of those hemlocks to the front/side which would be a good place for it to shade our roof, ultimately. We have some red-twig dogwood, a bush, and various other things like iris which are going to be all over.

We would have had pix of the swing construction, but my camera died on the cruise, and since it’s under a 90 day return policy from Costco, it’s getting returned, bigtime. It started out being Jane’s camera, then my birthday present, and right now we’re just thinking we’re going to get something else than a Cybershot [Sony], because this breakdown is not a good advertisement for this camera. I have another in mind.

It’s one real good reason to get things from Costco. They are very good about returns, and this is as good a reason for returning something as I can think of. It was doing fine and normally on the cruise, and just started dying—then got to where it won’t do anything but turn on and cycle its lens over and over and complain [onscreen] about its battery. Some sort of switch probably died.

Jane and OSG and I…on the littlest dinner cruise boat, the Osprey, in a 40 mph gale with blowing dust. But we love the upper deck…so there we sat, having dinner (the boat was near the hilly shore at that point, which, gave us enough calm to keep the plates on the boat.

We took a lot of good photos. A few not so good (person with no head because of pitch and roll). And then my new camera broke. But it’s under warranty. So…that’ll get handled.

I love being out in weather, with no lightning to worry about. This was a dry blow, so we were fine to be out there.

And because the dinner is salmon and beef with ample salad, I could keep to my diet. Jane had a little cheesecake, and OSG, well, I think OSG had cheesecake, too. But mostly we had a really good time.

Greeting me this morning, two Romanian spammers and an utter ripoff in Amazon’s marketplace…where a pretty brazen pirate is offering downloads. I’ve had to ferret Amazon’s addy out of an impenetrable maze…which has cost me an entire hour of work time. Where in cosmic law do I deserve the personal attention of two Romanians who think spam is ok and a major large-scale pirate operating under Amazon’s flag. Do not buy any download of mine from Amazon until they get this straightened out.

This is a process. However, by eliminating the .plmz, she says we are saving 4 meg off the ‘full’ download. We’re amazed. The whole typescript of the novel is 2 meg. How in heck does .plmz multiply it by 2?

I’m still doing rolling re-write, and have to remind myself to get up and move around before I get a sore back. The intense concentration feels good, however, and I’m ironing out some of the 10,000 little things I generally try to remember as I go.

…and recovered some features that had gone dormant when a blank got unchecked. Now if you want to go to one of our other Closed Circle sites, including to the store, you have convenient links over there. Easier still: bookmark us when you arrive, and you’ll never lose your way.