Introduction. Also, what the heck is a Dilophosaurus Bard anyway?

Never been very good at these first post thingies. I always feel like I'm supposed to open with some big fanfare. Instead I tend to come out like I'm giving a fifth grade report on a diorama I made of a scene from a Goosebumps book.

 "So, uh.. yeah... here's this thing I made. It's, uh.. it looked cooler than this in my head but.. er, see, I put little eyestalks on this dude... and this tissue paper is supposed to be a ghost, but..."

Anyway, like the description says, this is going to be a place for me to share my thoughts on writing. Being a former museum docent, I have a tendency to unconsciously launch into mini-lectures on whatever is currently rolling around in my head. So, you're going to see a lot of posts about some of the background details in my books.

Those little explanatory signs at museums? Absolute magic. My big dream is pretty much to write those things professionally.  This one here is from the Joe Webb Peoples Museum and Collection at Wesleyan College in Middletown, CT.

 I'll also be sharing my thoughts on the process of writing. How I work. How I critique and edit. What I think about all this hate for lengthy descriptions and info dumps. And so on.

I'll also be doing the occasional book review. Partially because I enjoy the process of analyzing a book, partially to give you a taste of what I'm reading, and partially to encourage me to actually find time to read. It isn't always easy to squeeze in a little reading time, you know?

So, what the heck is a Dilophosaurus Bard?

The name actually came from an old Dungeons & Dragons character I used to play, a lizardfolk bard named Hrithisk (for those who aren't big D&D nerds, a bard is a traveling storyteller and entertainer, with some thieving abilities welded on for gameplay. I'll let you guess what a lizardfolk is). He was obsessed with entertainment in all forms- music, dancing, singing puppetry, etc- and had a habit of taking the adventure on little detours to ask the band of goblins our characters were supposed to fight if they could maybe sing him one of their traditional drinking songs first. He eventually grew to have a pretty eclectic repertoire for his performances, incorporating bits from kobold plays, ettin shadow-puppet shows, werewolf hunting songs, etc, etc. Here he is playing a Chinese erhu.   

After that campaign ended, I kept Hrithisk as a non-player character in my own home-brewed campaign which was itself a big hodge-podge of bits of history, geology, culture and other things that I picked up in various places. Mostly from old National Geographics, the Amusing Planet website, or the couple hundred books scattered around my house. That habit of taking bits and pieces from all over and wielding them together into a cohesive world is also how I approach my writing. So I figured Hrithisk, with his habit of picking up details for his stories from all over, would be the perfect mascot for my writer's blog.

Original Hrithisk. Nice hat there, guy.

Why a dilophosaurus? Mainly because I'm a huge nerd for that particular dinosaur. In the original game he was just a regular ol' lizard-person, but I figured why not make him a more intelligent, humanoid version of my favorite terrible lizard.

The majestic Dilophosaurus wetherilli. This model comes from Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, CT. His name is Dilly. I know because I work there.

So check back every now and then to see whatever thing has been floating around in my head that particular day.