Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

The beautiful cover by Anne Cain for Blood for Magic, coming out in November-December from Dreamspinner Press.

Twenty-year-old Tarquin is smart, tactless, and braver than he knows. He’s also been Mage of the Realm of Kelor for two years, taking the title from his mother after she died protecting Kelor from a terrible threat. While on a quest to heal his dying brother, Tarquin is attacked by a horrific, flesh-eating monster. He’s saved by an enigmatic and mute young soldier, cursed with a terrifying form that conceals the heart of a knight. There’s an almost instant attraction between the two men, but no time to explore it. The monster’s attack is the harbinger of a new invasion.

With Kelor helpless, the realm’s only hope lies with Tarquin. As Mage of the Realm, he alone can sacrifice himself the way his mother did in exchange for unimaginably powerful magic. He’s prepared to give up his life to defeat the coming evil, but before the battle is over, he’ll be faced not just with his own death, but the death of everyone he cares about. Including the monster he's come to love.

Aiden's Angel is a novella, which makes it shorter than some of my fanfic. Hilariously (or ironically? Alannis?) it's almost exactly half as long as Black Hawk Tattoo. The drawback is that AA won't be available in hardcover, but the pluses are that it'll be less expensive and faster to read.

I'll have my usual stupidly easy contest as soon as the book is available for pre-order. In the meantime, here's Dreamspinner's official blurb:

Aiden Lobo is a graduate student in a world where magic, gods, and demons are part of everyday life. After a terrible betrayal, he is cursed with a Crack in his heart, turning him into a living doorway for an ancient demon of war to come to Earth and kill millions. Aiden is rescued by his guardian angel, who seals the Crack with his own Light. As a servant of the divine, the nameless angel was supposed to kill Aiden to prevent the growing cataclysm inside him. But he loves Aiden too much to end his life, even to save the world.

Aiden falls for his guardian and names him Eskandar, but then learns to his horror that because Eskandar was created for him, when Aiden dies Eskandar will too. Aiden will do anything to keep his beloved angel safe. But with no choice except to sacrifice himself to prevent the apocalypse, he only has one option: a terrible betrayal of his own.

I realize I may have a thing for graduate students. And guys with wings. I admit nothing.

I also realize I have no idea how to sum up this post. But I'm happy, how about that?

And thank you for reading, as always, of course. ♥

Always dangerous.

This will doubtless amaze anyone who knows me, but I kind of have a thing for (fictional! Dear God, fictional!) emotional and physical H/C, something that has served me well in the past. So instead of going to sleep at you're-an-idiot o'clock in the morning I started thinking of a story plot involving some poor schmuck who could heal really fast and how psychologically godawful it was.

At first I thought this'd be fanfic, but I decided I couldn't be that horrible to Captain America (or John Sheppard again). Besides, everyone knows that when you hurt Steve Rogers a kitten dies.

Most Marvel Universe fanfiction is known as the Great AO3 Kitten Massacre.

With fanfiction obviously out, I figured I'd write something original that took place during WWII, with my own original superhero. Canadian, of course. Only I couldn't call him 'Captain Canuck' or 'Captain Canada', because that had a) been done and b) was kind of lame. And since our national animal is not only furry and adorable, but also regrettably associated with female anatomy, I couldn't use that, either. So I went to the web to see what other nicknames for Canadians I could use.

And here my adventures began.

As it turns out, 'Canuck' pretty much encompasses the entire gamut of Canadian nicknames. But at least my fruitless Googling turned up Johnny Canuck, a Canadian equivalent of Captain America who kicked Nazi ass during WW II. Even cooler, the Wikipedia article link I found said that a publishing house called Moonstone had started a new series starring Johnny Canuck and a bunch of other Canadian superheros.

Naturally I zapped over to Moonstone, and discovered that they were selling the first three issues ridiculously cheap, so I bought them. Then, wondering if there were any more, I clicked on the link for the artist and discovered that he's Canadian too, and also actually famous.

Sadly, it seems that Northern Guard is no more, probably because almost no one outside Canada had heard of them. Hell, I used to live in Canada and I hadn't heard of most of them, either. But Mr. Templeton did have this really awesome list of famous fictional Canadians that made me feel better.

So all in all, while my research was technically fruitless, I did get some new comic books out of it and more warm fuzzies about my homeland. Which we could use right now in Texas, being as we're at the ass-end of a major ice storm.

Of course, it's still colder in Canada. But they're used to it.

(The photos are 'Thinking Woman Looking Up' by David Castillo Dominici, and 'Sad Kitten' by Tina Phillps, via Free Digital Photos.net.)

"You'll be cool if I leave you here for a few weeks. Right, buddy?"

I'll let you think about the inherent problem of that while I chew on (ha!) that other show where civilization's been decimated, this time by The Walking Dead. (See what I did there?) This show bothers me for many reasons, not least of which is how animated corpses could rot so damn slowly in a warm climate. But the thing that bugs me the most is how our hero, Rick, misses the chaos of the outbreak because he's in a coma.

This isn't the first time this trope has been used (I know it was part of the premise for 28 Days Later), but it still makes me crazy. Being in a coma ≠ being in suspended animation. Being left unattended in a coma for weeks = certain and rapid death. It only takes three days to die of dehydration, regardless of how inactive your brain might be at the time. Not to mention infections, edema, starvation--if you even last that long--and blood clots.

Needless to say, when the entire premise of a show makes me crazy, I'm not going to be a big fan. And few shows make me crazier than Revolution.

No matter how badass everyone looks with the old-timey weapons.

Remember those nanobots that eat electricity? Well, they were designed to eat all electricity. Everywhere. And it's been mentioned many times that the nanobots are inside everyone's bodies, too.

The thing is, human brains need electricity to function Hell, as far as I can understand it, so does all life on Earth. Electricity-absorbing nanobots wouldn't just kill our smart phones, they would kill everything. Our planet would be a static-free, sterile ball of dirt.

If I had to choose, I'd rather have a ball of dirt covered with lurching cadavers and the desperate remnants of humanity. But really, I'd rather sleep through both of them. ;)

(Pictures courtesy of Screencapped.net and Google Images.)

Yes, exactly.

A summary is the shorter version of what the book's about, an important distinction that I'm sure I'll forget again as soon as I've finished writing one. Normally I've found the synopsis to be worse, because it's longer while still requiring pithiness, and its hard to figure out what bits are important enough to mention when I'm trying to describe the plot in as few pages as possible. My agent (which makes me sound wayyyyy more famous than I am. Like, enormously way more famous) prefers the synopsis to be no more than two. Publishers don't have much time to read stuff, yo.

And I'll just let the irony of that go unmentioned.

I remember gnashing my teeth and lamenting to the very kind sgamadison about writing the synopsis for Black Hawk Tattoo, though the short summary was pretty easy. But with this novel, so far it's been the other way around.

That's the thing about romance novels: the relationship is the point, so anything that happens that doesn't directly relate to the two protagonists' journey to kissyface can be safely left out. But unlike BHT, my current novel is a fantasy, where the romance is important but far from the only thing that happens. I could, actually, leave the kissyface out and still describe the plot, but these days it seems you can't sell a novel without romance; so mentioning somewhere that yes, the heroine meets a hero for kissyface and mutual lifesaving is probably important.

So, bearing that in mind, how's this?:

This book has magic in it.
There is kissyface.
Lots of bad stuff happens.
No one actually dies.
Then end.

Perfect, right? :P

Okay, break's over. Back to work. Yay. I love writing. No, really.

It was a lot more fun making duck movie posters