A jacket for 'Billy Gibbs'

Now that I am faced with self-publishing the next Steve Martinez mystery, The Riddle of Billy Gibbs, I have been thinking about a cover for the print-on-demand paperback as well as the e-book.

To illustrate the theme of race and murder on the shore of Lake Superior, I needed a good hanging tree. Hanging trees with simple, even plain, backgrounds are hard to come by. Most are to be found in the deep woods.

But there's one just a few miles west of our cabin on Lake Superior, a maple right on the beach that possesses a sturdy hanging limb. At this time of year in the Upper Peninsula, the trees haven't yet leafed out, so there could be a nice branchy silhouette in that maple.

So I drove out last night with the Pentax and captured several angles of that tree. Under it a young couple sat spooning, and there was also a barbecue kettle in the middle of the shot.

It wasn't difficult to get rid of the people and the grill with a little work with the Photoshop Elements clone tool. Then I applied the text, using the Stencil font to suggest the military subtheme in the novel.

Finally I attached an illustration of a hangman's noose found on the Internet and altered heavily beyond copyright worries. Reducing the noose to a proper size took a little research into the depths of Elements.

I'd thought whatever I came up with would be quick-and-dirty, something to tweak over the next few months before Billy Gibbs is published as an Amazon CreateSpace softcover in January.

But maybe it's good enough to stand as is.

Lighthouse via drone

While I should have been laboring on the as yet untitled sixth Steve Martinez novel, I have been playing with my Phantom drone instead. (My fellow Phantom pilots insist that it be called a "quadcopter UAV," but everybody else in the world calls it a drone, so I will as well.)

The other day Bruce Johanson, president of the Ontonagon (Michigan) Historical Society, invited me to bring the Phantom out to the old Ontonagon Lighthouse, the society's crown jewel, and get some video and photographs of the place. It wasn't terribly windy, but it was gusty, and the video turned out to be jumpy and shaky, not very usable.

But I also programmed the GoPro camera the drone carries to take still photos every ten seconds, and here are two of the better ones. (Click them both on for large, detailed versions.)

The one above looks toward the south. It was midafternoon, so the sun was not on the front door of the lighthouse, but I used Lightroom to open up the harsh shadows as well as straighten out the horizons, sharply curved because of the GoPro's semi-fisheye lens.

The one below faces north toward Lake Superior. One can see how the Ontonagon River silt built up the shoreline until the lighthouse, once directly on the lake, became landlocked more than 200 yards to the south.

Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, but I really should get back to work on that book.

Ice

As you can see from the view from our cabin's front window above, ice has choked the shoreline in front of our cabin and for miles and miles to the west and east for the last few days. We'd never anticipated seeing ice on Lake Superior as late as the Memorial Day weekend, but now they're saying it will linger into June and in some places even into July.

Winds and currents have caused the lingering floes to collect in several places along the southern shore of the lake, according to the two-day-old map below. They're pretty, but they're affecting boaters and fishermen whose craft aren't sturdy enough to shoulder their way between bergs. We hear that in Bayfield, Wisconsin, off the Apostle Islands, the harbor is so choked with ice that the ferry to Madeline Island is having a hard time, and both commercial fishing craft and pleasure boats are remaining ashore. As a consequence, Bayfield is all but deserted on what should be the opening weekend of the tourist season.

I've thought that maybe in a future novel Steve Martinez could chase a bad guy through ice floes in the sheriff's Boston Whaler on Memorial Day. But would anybody believe that?

The Writer's Lair

Even with the first November blow fixing to hit this last week of October, I'd rather be up in our beloved log cabin on the shore of Lake Superior in Upper Michigan rather than down here in Evanston. The Lady Friend calls the place "Far Shore" (her father built it in 1947) and I know it as "The Writer's Lair." This lovely drawing, now hanging on the dining room wall, was her birthday gift from our sons and their spouses.

Grit

Being a charter member of the group delicately referred to as Persons with Disabilities, I have a particular interest in the lame, halt, blind, deaf and otherwise "afflicted," as our grandparents used to categorize us.

For me two of the high points of the recent Labor Day parades in Ontonagon, Michigan -- a city on the shore of Lake Superior with more than its share of indomitable folks, disabled or not -- were a little girl named Anna and a grown man named Dean.

She lives with brittle bone disease, he the consequences of an accident. Neither hides their considerable light under a bushel.

Dean in particular is everywhere. He competes in wheelchair races and serves in a hundred civic capacities, including the presidency of the school board.

They and others like them are one important reason why my mystery novels are set in a county based on theirs.

Rendezvous

One of the more colorful sights in my neck of the Upper Michigan woods this week has been the 2010 Midwest Primitive Rendezvous, a gathering of hundreds of "living history" re-enactors who relive the era of Lewis & Clark (approx. 1800-1840) on a bend of the Ontonagon River near Ontonagon, Michigan.

For several years I've had a keen interest in the group, although I'm not a member. When I first visited the rendezvous in 2006, also in the same place, it gave me the idea for Hang Fire, my novel in progress.

These folks really try to live as Americans did two centuries ago. Their white canvas tent cities are redolent of wood smoke and frying meat, even though one often spots digital cameras, cell phones and "Fruit of the Loom" labels under the reproductions of the buckskins, breechclouts and kilts the mountain men and women of old wore.

Most of all, they're photogenic. Here's a selection of shots taken yesterday, more than half of them (and the best ones) by the Lady Friend:


Fringed buckskins, belted tunics and sashes mark the well-dressed re-enactor.


The Rendezvous is a family affair, a week-long camporee.


This was your great-great-great-grandmother's kitchen on the frontier.


Cooking with wood smarts the eyes and soots the clothes.


The Rendezvous eateries, open to both participants and the public, feature artery-stopping menus.


Kitchen kindling must be chopped and split every day.


Trade goods of all kinds are available for swap and sale.


The big boys liked to make noise with their muzzle-loading toys, many of them hand-crafted flintlocks.


A well-turned-out Scottish immigrant frontiersman on the firing line.


Women participated on the rifle range, too.


Most re-enactors are open and friendly, but this lad clearly prefers his privacy.


Their morning chores were to haul water and exchange secrets.


And some were just bashful.