Category: Fantasy

Hunter Healer King in Vella

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Freebie, history, Mel Dunay, Myth, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…

I’ve decided to serialize Hunter Healer King, the more advanced of my two WIPs, on Kindle’s Vella Store, to help motivate me to keep plugging away at it. If you would like to know more about Vella, read on…

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Weird Wednesday: State of the Author, April 2023

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Fantasy, Freebie, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

Here’s where I am at these days:

–Spider Star, aka Star Master Book 2: this has been released and is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers right now. It will leave KU on June 3, so if you are a KU subscriber, I would advise you to download it before then and read at your leisure. When it leaves KU, I will be raising the price on Shadow Captain (the first book in the series), so keep that in mind as well. Later in June, I will work on putting Spider Star up on the other ebook vendors and setting up an AI-voiced audiobook at Google Play.

-Hunter Healer King, Book 1: Currently a shade under 10K words of a projected 70K, so I think it’s safe to call this an actual work in progress. If you frequent some of the other places I visit online, you may have seen me call this one “the Gothic Dunedain project” or “the Steampunk Dunedain project.” Basically this is a monster-hunting gothic fantasy with a steampunk angle and some Tolkienian tropes thrown in, like an ancient line of kingly monster-hunters who come from a lost civilization. No Elves or Dwarves so far. The plan is to serialize it on Vella, once completed, and then use any feedback to help in turning it into a conventional ebook.

-Regency Sleuth: At 4K of a projected 70K, this is still in the exploratory stages. Call it an “almost-WIP.” It’s not set in the actual Regency, just in a vaguely British Regency like place with minor fantasy elements (so far consisting of a single empath, whose abilities are not so far very useful in solving mysteries). I’m finding that writing a mystery calls for a very different approach so I’m kind of feeling my way through the process. I do like new challenges though, which is why I switch up genres when I finish with a particular setting. If completed, this one will possibly cycle through Vella as well.

-Ancestors of Jaiya: I may get some help stomping typos for these, and if so, I will set up AI-voiced audiobooks for them on Google Play.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at in the writing process. Feel free to share your opinions below.

Real Estate Website That Lists Castles For Sale

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Fantasy, Steampunk, World Building, WritingTagged

I suspect I am the last one to find out about this site, but it’s still cool. Great place to research castles for your fantasy novel, or just daydream about how to spend your hypothetical lottery winnings.

Welcome to https://castleist.com

Also, here’s an interesting study from 2018 of how Lake Powell in Colorado suffers from water management rules that favor keeping Lake Mead (downstream of Lake Powell) filled, and by extension favors the lawns, swimming pools and delta smelt of California, the most populous area supplied by Lake Mead.

Where Did THAT Come From: Essem and Co, Ularti

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Jaiya, Mel Dunay, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, World Building, WritingTagged , , Leave a comment

Ularti, the owner of the tramp freighter Vanner, keeps Jetay and Khed in indentured servitude, and is one of the main antagonists in Shadow Captain. Jetay’s story arc, as previously told is that of the drifter Drafted Into a Good Cause, and frequently in that arc, there’s a character who the drifter used to work with, who represents the pull away from the Good Cause. I didn’t have a good sense of what that might be in this case, until I hit on the “Hansel and Gretel” framing for Jetay’s situation.

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Where Did THAT Come From: Lanati, Menevis and Family

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Jaiya, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingTagged , , Leave a comment

This is actually a fairly large body of characters spread across the two volumes of Star Master, even if they didn’t require as much work on my part as Shenti and her family did.

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