Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
(Note to pedants: I use “girl” here in a colloquial sense, as the counterpart to “guy.” All the female character concepts mentioned below were college age or older when I stopped to think about how old the character ought to be.)
As previously stated, the basics of the feisty girl/posh guy teamup came to me while watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. It was a long road from there to Wolf’s Trail.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl in Wolf’s Trail” →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” →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” →
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” →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
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” →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.
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” →
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!
Jaglion Press