Another Contest, Oh Yay!

Okay, I’m canceling the last contest because it just seemed to confuse everybody.  Honestly, I thought the crypto solve would be a lot easier than the airplane photo.  Shows you what I know.

So, for free audio books of the entire Praxis trilogy, be the first to answer the following question:

“What common household implement is worn by Vashti’s followers?”

The answer is in one of my books.  Not one of the books I’m giving away, either.

As for the last question, here’s how to solve the clue “confused exhorting lip salve.”

As I mentioned, the clue is in the form of a British, or Cryptic, crossword clue.  (Honestly, I figured someone would have known how to do these puzzles.)

Your big clue is in the first word, “confused,” which tells you that what follows is scrambled.  As reorganizing the following three words doesn’t make any sense, you should figure out that “exhorting lip salve” is an anagram.

You can plug this into any one of the myriad of anagram generators online, or you can save yourself some work by noticing that there’s an “X”, and only one of my books has an X in the title (I think).  So that  gives you “Praxis.”  It makes sense that the word before “Praxis” would be “the,” which just leaves you with a few letters, which (plugged into a convenient anagram generator) gives you “long live,” which produces the complete answer, “Long Live the Praxis!”

See how easy that was?  Now you know how to solve a good many of the puzzles in Deep State!