The short version is that I started noodling around with this character dynamic (the Reylo fans would perhaps call it a dyad) when I was first watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. Eventually it would grow into the lead characters from Wolf’s Trail.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl/Posh Guy Dynamic in Wolf’s Trail”Category: Myth
Where Did That Come From: The Hunter Healer King Setting Used in Wolf’s Trail
I fell in love with steampunk machinery the same way a lot of people did:
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From: The Hunter Healer King Setting Used in Wolf’s Trail”Hunter Healer King in Vella
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…
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King in Vella”Happy Centedecenary, Mr. Cushing
Weird Wednesday: Hot Rodding the Silmarillion
Many people are aware that the published Silmarillion was compiled by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, with an eye towards consistency and concision at the expense of poetic detail, from a wide-ranging variety of incomplete (and often mutually contradictory) manuscripts left by JRRT. I have read some volumes (not all) of the History of Middle Earth, which includes many of the source texts Christopher Tolkien used, but I have only recently become aware of the third-party scholarship showing how it all came together, in books like Arda Reconstructed. Also interesting are the fan attempts to construct more comprehensive and poetic-sounding Silmarillions than the one published by Tolkien’s son. These can seem a little dry, because for copyright reasons, they are basically citations to texts compiled in the History of Middle Earth.
This one is a “finished” one-fan project: http://tasarinan.atwebpages.com/silmap.html
This one, the work of many hands, has been ongoing for twenty years: https://forum.barrowdowns.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16
Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse
There are writers who, when they speak of their Muse, are basically personifying their subconscious mind. (e.g. “My Muse won’t give me the rest of the story, it just gives me the opening of a different story. Argh!”) If it works for them, great, and if it doesn’t work for them, it’s not my job to tell them what to do instead. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time myself. I do know that my subconscious is me, and that I’ve not derived any particular benefit from trying to personify it as an Other.
Continue reading “Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse”New Giveaway on Prolific Works!
Happy start of spring! Fantasy author Katherine Wibell has organized a freebie giveaway on Prolific Works (the website formerly known as Instafreebie). She has pulled together a collection of stories and sample chapters that speak of worlds not quite like ours. Some of the covers may not be “safe for work,” but there is a wide variety of worlds and stories represented here.
My contribution is a sample chapter from Slaying a Tyrant, the first book in the Ancestors of Jaiya series: G-rated cover, PG-rated content. Feel free to check it out, if you don’t already have a copy.
Writer Milestones
I am slowly but surely making progress on the Ancestors of Jaiya series (prequel to the main Jaiya series). On Memorial Day (US), I finished the rough draft of Scapegoating a Hero, book 3 in this prequel series. I first began work on Hero in January or February of 2017, so this is the longest I’ve ever spent on a book I actually finished.
Hero is like the other books in both series in that it’s about a man and a woman with supernatural powers who fall in love while fighting evil together. But it has more Continue reading “Writer Milestones”
A World Within a Page…Instafreebie Giveaway
Hope you’re staying warm this winter! (Or staying cool, if you live south of the Equator!)
Rebekah Dodson is hosting a new giveaway of fantasy novels and excerpts on Instafreebie, which runs until February 6, 2018. You probably already have my contribution to the giveaway, which is the sample chapter for my first novel, Marrying A Monster, but there are plenty of other options to check out. Be sure to click here to check out all the freebies!
New Year, Belated New Resolutions
Hello there! Hope you had a great Christmas and holiday season. No, I’m not dead, or even UN-dead. Last year was…complicated in a bunch of ways. I’d hoped to get more writing done over the summer, but instead did a bunch of traveling with family. Then NaNoWriMo 2017 turned out to be one of those years where I didn’t come out with a usable first draft. Instead, I came out with a much better idea of what I needed to do for the second book in the Jaiya prequel series, and a few thousand more words for the third book in the prequel series, the one about the notorious Commander Rijal.
My plans for this year are to stay away from the news media and news commentary sites, because all they do is drag my mood down and distract me from my writing, finish the third book in the prequel series and write the second book, and then edit all four of them and release the whole series together in late 2018 or early 2019.
Not sure where I’m going from there; I have an interesting space opera/romance idea but it needs to stay on the back burner until the Jaiya prequel series is completed.
Jaglion Press 