Seriously.  I’m asking.  Do you want to win a book?  Of course you do!  Who doesn’t like free stuff?  And this is really good free stuff.  It’s a hardcover copy of The Sorcerers’ Plague, the first book in my Blood of the Southlands trilogy.  And it’ll even be signed.  You’ll treasure it forever.  Or maybe you’ll give it as a gift (the recipient doesn’t have to know it’s free!).  You know, the holidays are coming up.

All you need to do is follow this link to the contests page at my website.  Read the contest question, and then go read the sample chapters from The Dark-Eyes’ War, the third and final Southlands book — which is something you should want to do anyway.  Send in your answer to the contest question, and then wait for the contest to end.  Simple as that.

Go on!  Give it a try.  The worst thing that happens (and it’s really not that bad) is that you read the sample chapters and get all excited about the February 2010 release of The Dark-Eyes’ War.

I have two posts going up today. The first, my usual Monday Magical Words post, can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C. E. Murphy. The post is called “Finding Real Magic in Writing” and it’s about the magical things that sometimes happen to us while we create. The second can be found at http://www.sfnovelists.com, the group blog on speculative fiction that I maintain along with a group of over one hundred published authors of fantasy and science fiction. The post is called “Fathers and Masculinity,” and it continues a discussion of gender roles that has been ongoing at the site for a few days now. I hope you enjoy both posts.

I’ve been meaning to post.  Really I have.  I had resolved to post everyday this week.  But then I downloaded my new writing toy, and, well, it’s made the gathering of my research for the new project much more fun.  And it’s kept me fro doing much else.  The new toy is Scrivener, and I know many of you use it already.  It’s a mac-based program designed for writers who are piecing together a project and blending research information with story ideas.  It’s kind of hard to describe really.  I’ve only had it for a few days.  But I like it, and I’m finding it incredibly useful as I begin to pivot from research to writing.

More as I explore further.

My research for the new series continues….

From Carl Bridenbaugh’s exhaustive (and, at times, exhausting) urban study, Cities In Revolt:  Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (Oxford University Press, 1971) comes this tidbit:

According to  Bridenbaugh, “The tavern was the most flourishing of all urban institutions” in the mid-eighteenth century.  New York had more taverns and public houses than any other colonial city, reaching a high of 334 in 1752 [roughly one tavern for every 45 people in the city], but that doesn’t mean that the other cities didn’t engage in their fair share of drinking.  In fact, in  1752, the colony of Pennsylvania imported 526,700 gallons of rum and distilled 80,000 more, “and most of this was consumed in or near the city [of Philadelphia].”  A generous estimate of Philadelphia’s population at the time would come in at around 20,000 people, and even if we assume that only half that rum remained in the city, that puts the annual consumption at about 15 gallons for every man, woman, and child.  That’s a lot of daiquiris….

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C. E. Murphy. The post is called “The Power of Reunions” and it’s about getting to know our characters a bit better. I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and by the way, that new contest is still up on my website: http://www.DavidBCoe.com. Visit the site and maybe you’ll win a signed book!

These days I’m steeped in research for the new historical fantasy project, so I thought I’d share with you my “Fun Historical Fact of the Day”.  Under the heading of “This Sounds Familiar…”:

In the pre-Revolutionary period, the American colonies were eager to be economically secure in their own right, but most of them, particularly Massachusetts, were still tied closely to Great Britain.  So much so, that during the Stamp Act Crisis of the mid 1760s, when they were truly ticked off at the Brits, and went so far as to drink tea out of teapots that read “No Stamp Act!” they had to import said teapots from — you guessed it — England.  Kind of like today, when we talk about how important it is to Buy American, and then we go to rallies and we wave American flags that are made in China.  The more things change, the more they stay the same….

[This tidbit comes from T.H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2004)]

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C. E. Murphy. The post is called “Research and the Writer” and it’s about balancing the need to do research for our books and the need simply to write. I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and by the way, there’s a new contest up on my website: http://www.DavidBCoe.com. Visit the site and maybe you’ll win a signed book!

Some of you may have noticed this on the web yesterday.  For those of you who didn’t, I have just sold a new book project to Tor Books.  It’s a two book (for now) series of stand alone mysteries with a strong historical and fantastic element.  The series will be called The Chronicles of the Thief Taker, or something of the sort, and it will be set in pre-Revolutionary Boston, albeit a Boston with magic — hence the “Harry Dresden meets Samuel Adams” pitch.  I’ll be writing the books as D. B. Jackson.

The first book in the series won’t be out until late spring or early summer 2011, and I have a good deal of research and writing to do in the interim, but I’m excited about this project and I hope very much that you’ll enjoy the books when they come out.

In the more immediate time frame, Magical Words, the blog I maintain with fellow fantasy authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C.E. Murphy, now has a new regular contributor.  Bestselling author A.J. Hartley will be writing for us on the first Friday of each month, and his initial offering is up today and can be found here.  Check it out and enjoy.

Let’s start with the obvious: In the two high profile races last night, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, the Democrats got spanked. There isn’t a committed Democrat in America this morning who isn’t a bit concerned about those losses. And with good reason. In both votes, independents broke decidedly for the Republican candidates, reversing the trend that had swept Democrats back into power in 2006 and 2008. In both states, young voters and minority voters — key elements of Barack Obama’s winning coalition in 2008 — stayed home, voting in small numbers compared with other demographic groups. In Virginia, a state that has been shifting toward the Democratic column for the past twenty years, the Republican, Bob McDonnell won in a landslide, and carried Republicans to victories in the lieutenant governor and attorney general races as well. In New Jersey, a solidly blue state that voted overwhelming for Obama last year, Chris Christie beat the incumbent, Jon Corzine by a small but significant margin. None of this is good for Democrats. It seems that reports of the death of the Republican party were somewhat exaggerated.

That said, the night was not an unalloyed success for the GOP or an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats. First of all, let’s keep a few things in mind about these gubernatorial races.

1) Barack Obama’s approval ratings in both states are still strong — over 50% in Virginia and over 55% in New Jersey. Large majorities of voters in both electorates said that Obama was not a factor in how they voted last night. These were not referenda on the President or his agenda, despite what some on the right might wish to believe. These races turned mostly on local issues and continued concern about the economy. The latter obviously has some connection to the President. People want the recovery to come faster; they’re concerned about continued job losses. But these races were not about health care or cap and trade or even Afghanistan.

2) Foundational poll numbers remain fairly good for Democrats. Obama’s national job approval is in the low fifties (higher than that if you take out the outlying Rasmussen poll). Measures of public optimism and people’s satisfaction with their lives are trending in positive directions even though they remain decidedly negative. And party identification numbers show that the Republican party remains deeply unpopular. Many of those independents who voted for McDonnell and Christie were actually disaffected Republicans who had stopped identifying themselves as members of the GOP, but came back to the fold for this election.

3) This one might be the most important. Creigh Deeds, the Democrat running for governor of Virginia, was a terrible candidate. New Jersey’s chief executive, Jon Corzine, was a terrible governor. The Democrats would have lost these races regardless of who was President and what was going on elsewhere in the country. It’s hard to win when your candidates are as weak as these two.

Even more to the point, while Democrats lost these two high profile races, they won two others that were also quite important. One was a House race in California’s open 10th District. Ellen Tauscher, the incumbent Democrat, is now Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in the Obama Administration, and Republicans had hoped that their candidate for the seat, David Harmer, might pull off an upset and beat Democrat John Garamendi. He didn’t. He didn’t even come close, losing by slightly more than ten percentage points.

The other important race last night — perhaps the most intriguing of all — was the special election to fill another open House seat vacated by an Obama appointee. This one was in New York’s rural 23rd District at the northern edge of the state. The incumbent, John McHugh, was tapped by Obama to become Secretary of the Army, but unlike Tauscher, McHugh was a Republican, a very popular one. He won reelection in 2008 with 65% of the vote, while Obama carried his district by only one percent. The Republican nominee in the race was Dede Scozzafava, a fairly typical northeastern moderate Republican who leans to the progressive side of most social issues and supported the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus plan. She was up against Bill Owens, a Democrat, and seemed likely to win, since the district has sent Republicans to the House of Representatives in every election for the past 150 years. Yes, you read that right: This has been a Republican district since the administration of Ulysses Grant.

But a cadre of high-profile GOP conservatives, led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, current loudmouth Rush Limbaugh, and current wack-job/cry-baby Glenn Beck, decided that Scozzafava wasn’t a true conservative. They recruited a third candidate, Doug Hoffman, had him nominated on the Conservative Party line, and made him the darling of the so-called Tea Party movement, despite the fact that he was not a resident of the district and knew nothing about issues of concern to its voters. Hoffman surged in the polls, and soon took the lead in the three-way race. For a while it seemed that right-wing efforts to purge the GOP of moderates was about to score another success. But over the weekend, Scozzafava dropped out of the race, and in a bold and courageous move, threw her support behind Owens, the Democrat. Last night, Owens won the seat, increasing the Democratic majority in the House and dealing a blow to the efforts of Palin and company to recast the GOP in their own narrow image.

The significance of this race can’t be overstated. The internecine warfare within the Republican party has been ongoing for several years. Already it has driven away moderate Republicans like Jim Jeffords, Arlen Specter, and Chuck Hagel. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine might well be next. Palin has vowed to continue her efforts to make the GOP more like her. Already, right-wing Republicans have targeted Charlie Crist, Florida’s centrist Republican governor, who is running for the U.S. Senate next year. If Crist is the nominee, the Republicans will probably hold on to the seat. But Palin and her pals don’t seem to care. They would rather nominate a “true” Republican and lose than allow ideological diversity in “their” party. And as a Democrat, all I can say is “Be my guest.”

The lessons of last night’s elections remain cloudy today. Yes, the victories in New Jersey and Virginia bode well for the GOP. It may be that the Democratic swing is over, and that President Obama’s party will lose a large number of seats in next year’s midterm elections. But it’s also possible that the right-wing purge that cost the Republicans the New York 23rd will continue, dooming their hopes in Florida, making them vulnerable in other districts and states, and undermining whatever momentum they would like to get from last night’s results. They could be on the verge of becoming a viable national party again. Or, if they keep on turning to the Doug Hoffmans of the world, they could cement their status as a regional party that can win only in the South and pockets of the Mountain West and Midwest. Time will tell.

Today’s Magical Words post is a bit late, but that’s because I’ve just returned from World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California. My post about the con can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C. E. Murphy.