Book Birthday!!!

Today, Blood Sacrifice is officially available for purchase from all your favorite booksellers.

Did I ever think I’d get to this point? Five series books? Not really. Sure, I’d fantasized and dreamt of being a published author, but honestly, even after five novels, two short stories, 4 essays and co-editing a short story anthology, I have to pinch myself sometimes.

When the copies of the book arrived, I was just as excited to see them as I was the first time I saw something of mine in print. It never, ever gets old.

Celebrate with me by stopping by any of the blog tour posts:

• Post over at Suzanne McLeod’s blog
• Dame for a Day over at the Deadline Dames
• Interview at Amberkatze’s blog

On launch day:

• Keira’s take on Tam Lin over at Fantastic Fables
• Interview at The Qwillery
• Interview at Urban Fantasy Investigations

Book giveaways everywhere!

The Summer of Discovery series is over and it was a blast!!

Thanks to every single one of my guest authors for thought-provoking, humorous and interesting posts. Thanks to all the participants for playing along.

What’s next?

The Blood Sacrifice Blog Tour, of course!

I’m over at Suzanne McLeod’s blog, talking about the strange trip to publication.

Later today, I’ll be guesting at Deadline Dames as their Dame for a Day.

The tour continues over the weekend and into next week.

BLOOD SACRIFICE BOOK LAUNCH
The book drops next Tuesday, August 30, 2011! On Wednesday, August 31, I’ll be launching it at the Duncan Public library where I’m doing an author talk.

Author Talk 7:30 p.m.
James M. Duncan Branch Library
2501 Commonwealth Avenue
Alexandria, VA 22301

And then what?
My next project is recording the audiobooks for the series. The books will be available via Audible.com thanks to Wildside Press. I’m just getting started, so I don’t have any information on release dates yet, but stay tuned!

Blood Sacrifice is the end of the Blood Lines series via Pocket Books. It’s been a great and wonderful ride, but it’s time to move along. Nothing definite is in the works for additional books or stories in the series, but I am tossing about a few ideas. For those of you who know the series and my penchant for cliffhanger endings, I PROMISE that this book wraps up all the storylines. I’d already planned this to be the final book of the story arc, so it worked out.

I am working on a collaborative project that is not yet ready for either prime time or announcing. Again, more on that later.

Hoping that all you guys are safe from Irene, etc. I’m pretty DONE with weather events. Last night’s (1 a.m.) 4.5 aftershock from the earthquake was more than enough for me. We’re all battening down hatches and praying really hard that Irene veers further eastward.

TTFN!

Welcome to fellow Juno imprint author, Laura Bickle, who regales us today how she learned to torture her protagonist.

Laura Bickle (a.k.a. Alayna Williams) has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She lives in the Midwestern U.S. with her chief muse, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Writing as Laura Bickle, she’s the author of EMBERS and SPARKS for Pocket – Juno Books. Writing as Alayna Williams, she’s the author of DARK ORACLE and ROGUE ORACLE. More info on her urban fantasy and general nerdiness at her website.

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As writers, we’re told to “murder our darlings.” Don’t get too attached to any part of the manuscript, and be willing to do the tough work of cutting things that we love that don’t work. Be brutal.

A corollary of that rule is to be willing to torture your protagonist.

It’s tough stuff. We lovingly craft a protagonist who speaks to us. We give her strengths and weapons. We want to see her succeed,. We want her to answer the call to adventure, follow the Hero’s Journey, and return to the village with the elixir. We want the reader to root for her, just as much as we do.

But we can’t be gentle with our heroines. We can’t make it easy. It’s all to tempting to create a protagonist with few flaws, who’s virtuous and always makes the right decisions. If we really love our heroine, it’s also tempting to lob softball dilemmas at her, easy choices with few ramifications. We want her to follow the path of all that’s right and good, and we can fall into the trap of paving that road to the quest with golden bricks. We want to shelter her, make sure that her nicely-coiffed hair stays dry and her armor all spit-shiny.

A perfect heroine does not grow. Decisions and missions that are too easy will not challenge her. Or the reader.

To be certain, we want our protagonist to have the tools she needs to succeed: a power, a weapon, pluck, strength. But she needs to bear some flaws. Be human. Make mistakes. Learn from them. In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the hero is called to adventure. And the hero often refuses the call. The hero may fall into the arms of temptation. Atone for past sins.

And our protagonist must face monsters, inner conflicts and external obstacles. Campbell calls this the “Road of Trials.” It’s common in myth for the heroine to fail. And that’s what can make writers uncomfortable.

Why would we want our protagonist to fail? Why would we want her to be weak, to suffer, to fall under the sway of temptation or to be ground under the heel of the enemy? Why knock her down? Why keep shoving her to the mud?

Because we want her to get back up. Because we want her to realize who she is…we want her to become something more than we imagined or created.

We want her to have a life of her own.

When a protagonist becomes autonomous in our heads, we know it. We lose control of her. She strides into situations, and we cannot predict the outcome. We can’t tell her what to do, or expect her to conform to expectations. She may slay the dragon or shack up with it. She may take that shiny sword we gave her and use it to cut off the luxurious hair we gave her. She may tell Prince Charming to go screw himself and take up with his slightly dorky footman.

When this happens, our heroine has become a creation in her own right. She may be bedraggled, muddy, and pissed off. But she’ll smile back at us, for giving her a fictional life of her own, to be ruled by her own choices…like a real person, who’s been through trials. She’s made mistakes.

But they are all her own.

And seeing her smile back at you, whole and multidimensional, is worth it.

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Thanks, Laura!!

Readers, what challenges do you like to see protagonists undergo? When does an author go too far? When it is not far enough? Comment below by Wednesday, August 24, 2011 to win a copy of Sparks, the 2nd book in Laura’s great series!

I first “met” Christopher “Chris” Golden in the tiny horror section of the Bailey’s Crossroads Borders bookstore in Alexandria, VA.

Back before urban fantasy was cool, the only place I could find books that intrigued me was in horror or young adult. I stumbled across this awesome title: Of Saints and Shadows. And hey, look, there were two other books in the series!

In a very short while and through various mutual contacts, Chris and I have become friends and colleagues. He’s a great guy and a brilliant writer. I’m glad to know him & to have had the opportunity to meet him in person.

Welcome, Chris!
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What pleasure in life is greater than discovery? Think about it for a minute. Really.

The moment when you realize that an acquaintance has become a friend or that, sometimes out of the blue, you are falling in love. The hole-in-the-wall restaurant that surprises you with its quality. The unfamiliar song that comes on the radio that makes you pause and turn it up, and want to hear more. The stopover at a place that is not your destination, but to which you realize you must one day return. Beauty in all of its unexpected places.

Years ago, my wife and I were attending a Bonnie Raitt concert in Boston. The opening act was a guy I’d never heard of prior to that night—Keb Mo—and he blew me away. Once upon a time, during a Mediterranean cruise, we found ourselves on a small boat that ran passengers from the cruise ship to the docks of Dubrovnik, Croatia. From the water, the white walls of Dubrovnik captivated me; it looked more like Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings than any earthly city. The city had been pummeled by war not terribly many years before, and yet it was beautiful and clean and its people were friendly and welcoming. Though the cruise took us to many better known destinations, Dubrovnik was my favorite. It was our discovery.

Of course, not all discoveries are pleasant. Some are…terrible.

In February of last year, my eldest son was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I’ll never forget that phone call. I was home alone when the doctor called with the news, and I had to break it to my wife when she returned…and then to our children, beginning with Nick, as the news was his. I couldn’t tell my wife over the phone. I called my brother, but I could barely get the words out. I could barely breathe. All I could think…or say…was “What if he dies?”

The oncologist we went to see at the local hospital told us that Nick’s kind of lymphoma developed slowly, which sounded good until she explained that because of this, chemotherapy would only offer a temporary respite…that he would likely have to have chemo every two or three years for the rest of his life. Then she told us that she figured he had ten to fifteen years to live.

This was days before his sixteenth birthday.

Yeah.

Thing is…she was wrong. They were all wrong. We had our suspicions right from the start. I won’t bore you with the details of the worst weeks of my life. Suffice to say that almost a month later, I received another phone call—this time from the amazing people at the Jimmy Fund Clinic in Boston.

Nick didn’t have cancer. At all.

Yeah. You can imagine.

This all really happened. If I wrote it out in detail, put it in a book or a tv or movie script, a large part of the audience would think this is such bullshit. What a cop out. You don’t get that kind of happy twist to a story that dark.

But the thing is, sometimes you do.

Anything can happen. Anything.

That was the greatest discovery of my life—both in the sense that I learned my son would be all right and that I truly understood that our fortunes can take turns that are literally the worst imaginable, or the best. That discovery has affected me in many ways, of course.

Creatively, the belief that anything can happen has definitely informed my work and allowed me to give my imagination freer rein. The process began years ago while writing Strangewood, a novel that was a sort of epiphany for me, and continued in many other works. While working on The Myth Hunters and its two sequels (the Veil trilogy), I opened myself to the idea that characters could sometimes grow so strong in the mind of the author that they seem to determine their own fate. It’s a natural instinct to want to rein in those characters—or the subconscious creative instincts that they represent—but the best part of writing, for me, is in allowing the story and the characters to break free from my own expectations. In The Myth Hunters, the character of Kitsune was not in my plot or outline at all. When I began to write about a mysterious presence shadowing the main characters through the woods, I had no idea who or what that presence might be…not until the moment she first makes herself known to them, which was, of course, the same moment that she made herself known to me. She wasn’t what I planned, but she was what I, and the story, needed.

Such moments of discovery are the very finest creative moments I have ever experienced. In my most recent Peter Octavian novel, Waking Nightmares, there are many such moments. A vampire named Charlotte arrived in my story much the same way that Kitsune did in that earlier work, as did references to the growing threat of a sinister creature named Cortez. Those were pleasant discoveries, but as in life, not all discoveries were pleasant. Characters I had expected to live—characters I had plans for, you understand—died. Others were irrevocably changed, including Octavian himself. Future volumes will be decidedly different because of these events—plot turns I didn’t see coming until they were upon me.

Anything can happen.

I’m not comparing real life to fiction, mind you. Nothing make-believe will ever make me feel what I felt when I received those two phone calls early last year. But if I can tap into those and other emotions and manage to remind you of your own moments of discovery—large and small, joyful and sorrowful—then maybe I can make you really feel something. That is a writer’s greatest reward.

I wish you a lifetime of discovery.

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Thanks, Chris!

Readers, what creative moments have you discovered via something in your life? How did it change your work or you?

Comment below through Wednesday, August 17, 2011 for a chance to win a copy of Waking Nightmares!

Welcome to this week’s guest blogger, Ms. Kat Richardson! I “met” Kat online via a small Buffy group I run, then got to meet her in person at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore. I had the awesome luck to be on a panel with her. I remember so clearly when Charlaine Harris recommended Kat’s first book, Greywalker. No stranger to Charlaine’s recommendations, I pre-ordered it immediately and fell in love with Kat’s series.

Her most recent book, Downpour (book 6), debuted this week to kudos and many greedy fans. I can’t wait to read it!

In the meantime, enjoy Kat’s post, comment below to win a hardcover copy of Downpour!

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Discovery! (kat richardson gets out and about)

In the course of writing a series, I have discovered a lot—about myself, about writing, and about what horrible things are going on in my and my characters’ heads.

Really, it’s a bit scary in there.

No, I mean it.

When a large part of the cast are ghosts, vampires, and monsters, it can be a bit dreadful—gruesome even—to be privy to their thoughts. Which most of the time include a lot of variations on “I think I’ll eat you…” and not in a nice way.

I’ve also discovered that when imagination is given free reign, it is not only the light that comes through, but the darkness, too. That’s not bad, when you write something as shadow-ridden as my books. And it makes my dreams so much nicer (since I’ve given my nightmares away to all of you. Mwahahaha…. )

I always get to discover new things in my research and travels. A few years ago I went to London to do research for a book—I’d never been to England and it was fun to go someplace new and explore and still call it “work.” This was so much fun I thought I needed to do it again, so last year I went to the Olympic Peninsula to investigate a new area for my heroine, Harper Blaine, to experience.

Even though the Olympic Peninsula is only a few miles away from where I live in Seattle, it’s a little hard to get to and slightly isolated due to the shape of Puget Sound. The easiest way across at the top is to take a long ferry ride to the east shore of the peninsula at Kingston and then drive to the west. The trip at night had a strange, haunted quality with the ferry mostly empty and the lights on the black water outside spreading like an inverted sky for the boat to skim across. The roads on the other side were dark and narrow, tree-lined so they felt like tunnels as we drove through them with our headlights illuminating only pieces of the scene, so the trip seemed like a slide show. A view of a building, a bit of road, a cluster of trees, a bend that gives way to split rail fence, looming ahead like a barrier…. and then we turned and went on.

My companion and I had a lovely time wandering around near Lake Crescent—where DOWNPOUR takes place—and finding all sorts of interesting things and gathering bits of history from the historical society there. We also discovered a whole new range of allergens and sneezed a lot, but it was still a ton of fun.

And having discovered so much that was old, but new to us, and interesting, though others thought nothing of it, we came home again armed with stories and details to clothe our imaginations and let our books take on the colors of new places and ideas.

Discovery is a gift, even the less-than-fun parts of it. I love to investigate things, research, play, see, and try new things and places—it’s the meat of writing, since discovering something—even something in my own backyard—fires my imagination. And I didn’t even have to travel to England this time!

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Thanks, Kat!

Readers, what things have you investigated that have led to nifty discoveries? Comment below for a chance to win a brand-new hardcover copy of Downpour! Contest open through Wednesday, August 10, 2011.