Category: ebook

Guest Post & Review: I Am Smoke by Henry Herz, Illustrated by Mercè López

I Am Smoke
by Henry L. Herz
Illustrated by Mercè López
Hardcover, 36 pages
Published September 14th 2021 by Tilbury House Publishers

BOOK BLURB 

Smoke speaks in mesmerizing riddles: “I lack a mouth, but I can speak…. I lack hands, but I can push out unwanted guests…. I’m gentler than a feather, but I can cause harm….”This rhythmically powerful narration is complemented by illustrations in which swirling smoke was captured on art paper held over smoky candle flames, and the dancing smoke textures were then deepened and elaborated with watercolors and Photoshop finishes. With this unique method, Mercè López “let the smoke decide how the idea I had in mind would dance with it, giving freedom to the images.” The resulting illustrations are astounding, and they resonate with the otherworldly text.

MY REVIEW 

Smoke is both an ephemeral and illusive subject to capture, especially in a children’s book. At first, I thought this book might be full of safety lessons for kids about what to do if they encounter smoke in various situations. However, I Am Smoke is a beautifully illustrated story of how humans have used smoke to benefits throughout the ages.

Starting off with a simple explanation of what smoke is and traveling around the world, through the ages, the story still manages to keep things simple for kids, yet leaves the door open for inquisitive minds to follow up on various subjects like soothing bees or creating smoke signals. The wee little chemist in me gave an approving eyebrow lift to the little atomic drawings of water vapor and carbon dioxide. Science for the win!

The tour of smoke wraps up with circle of life and the joys of campfires. I also loved the follow up at the end with more in depth info. Then there are source of info included as well in case you have older kids who want to look up more info. The illustrations for this book are top notch, some being quite fascinating. I can totally see prints of some of these illustrations hanging on my wall and bringing me contemplative peace. All around, Herz and López have made a great team bringing us a wonderful children’s book. 5/5 stars.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are 100% my own.

GUEST POST 

Using Creative Nonfiction to Inspire Young Readers by Henry Herz 

Just like kids need a balanced diet in what they eat, young readers also benefit from consuming fiction and nonfiction. Even when I write fiction, I figure out a way to include some nonfiction elements, offering entry points into developmental conversations between child and parent or teacher. My fictional Little Red Cuttlefish has an author’s note offering some interesting tidbits about cuttlefish and tiger sharks. My fictional Good Egg and Bad Apple is loaded with word play not critical to the story, but great for English language learning. My 2 Pirates + 1 Robot includes a tiny flying robot who asks questions about what’s happening in the story. The math and physics  underlying the answers are laid out in an author’s note for when the child is ready for them.

But what about when I’m writing nonfiction? It should come as no surprise that I sprinkle in fiction, like salt enhances food’s flavor. Fictional elements can entertain young readers, increasing their interest in the underlying facts in a subtle, engaging way. Fiction can be the melted cheese we pour on top of the broccoli of nonfiction.

There are some picture books with anthropomorphic characters, but I’d never seen smoke treated as a character. And who better to explain the various ways in which people have employed smoke over the ages and across the world than smoke itself? With that approach in mind, I researched the chemistry of smoke. It turns out that wood smoke is primarily carbon dioxide, ash, and water vapor. One thing leads to another in planning a book. Water vapor got me thinking about the water cycle—water evaporates from rivers, lakes, and oceans to form clouds. Eventually, the water precipitates as rain or snow. Rinse and repeat.

Then I considered the carbon dioxide given off by wood smoke. Two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom. Carbon… Inspiration struck like lightning splitting a tree. Plants are the lungs of the Earth. They breathe in carbon dioxide through their stomata. They drink up water through their roots. Sunlight provides energy to split those molecules. The plant forms cellulose from carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, sequestering more and more carbon as they grow. Conversely, burning tree branches releases the stored carbon. Eureka! Smoke has a “cycle” too.

Subverting expectations is a tried and true writing technique. When people think of smoke, they often think of fire. And both are dangerous. But what about the beneficial uses of smoke? More research followed. Be forewarned—research is a risky undertaking for the intellectually curious. For we can easily tumble down the rabbit hole of Google and forget why we’re doing the research in the first place. But what fun things I discovered.

Smoke has been used to coax seeds to sprout, to drive out pests from homes, to send signals over long distances, to cover foul smells, to calm bees when harvesting honey, to flavor and preserve food, as part of religious ceremonies, and even to heal. I wreathed all these uses within the framework of the aforementioned smoke cycle.

“I am smoke. I twirl in dark dance from every campfire.”

Praise for I AM SMOKE

“Herz presents a provocative and unique look at the lifecycle and benefits of smoke throughout the millennia. López’s multimedia artwork further illuminates the ethereal nature of smoke as it drifts and dances across the page.”
– John Rocco, author/illustrator of the Caldecott Honor book BLACKOUT

“A fascinating, refreshing, and beautifully atmospheric take on something often taken for granted. I’ll never look at smoke the same way again!”
– Matthew Cordell, author/illustrator of the Caldecott Medal-winning book WOLF IN SNOW

“I Am Smoke is an absolutely beautiful book, where smoke is both poetry and science. Readers will rest, float, and dance along with smoke’s quiet power across time and traditions. I have lingered over its pages more than once, and I’m sure young readers will, too.”
– Doreen Cronin, author of the Caldecott Honor and NY Times bestselling book CLICK, CLACK, MOO: COWS THAT TYPE

“Wowwwwww”
– Raina Telgemeier, #1 NY Times, #1 USA Today, #1 Publishers Weekly bestselling author/illustrator

All About the Author

Henry Herz authored 11 traditionally published children’s titles: MONSTER GOOSE NURSERY RHYMES (Pelican, 2015), WHEN YOU GIVE AN IMP A PENNY (Pelican, 2016), MABEL & THE QUEEN OF DREAMS (Schiffer, 2016), LITTLE RED CUTTLEFISH (Pelican, 2016), CAP’N REX & HIS CLEVER CREW (Sterling, 2017), HOW THE SQUID GOT TWO LONG ARMS (Pelican, 2018), ALICE’S MAGIC GARDEN (Familius, 2018), GOOD EGG AND BAD APPLE (Schiffer, 2018), 2 PIRATES + 1 ROBOT (Kane Miller, 2019), I AM SMOKE (Tilbury House, 2021), and THE MAGIC SPATULA (Month9 Books, 2022).

He sold the children’s short stories: “Born to Dance” (Highlights for Children), “Pay the Piper” (Highlights for Children), “Maria & Maslow” (Highlights for Children, 2020), “A Proper Party” (Ladybug Magazine), “Bar Mitzvah on Planet Kishka” (sci-fi MG story in COMING OF AGE anthology, Albert Whitman & Co., 2021), “The Castle on the Loch” (YA story in CASTLE OF HORROR anthology, Castle Bridge Media, 2020), and “Cheating Death” (dark sci-fi YA story in THE HITHERTO SECRET EXPERIMENTS OF MARIE CURIE anthology, Blackstone Publishing, 2022).

Henry edited three anthologies: BEYOND THE PALE adult dark fantasy (Birch Tree Publishing, 2014) – stories by Saladin Ahmed, Peter S. Beagle, Heather (Zac) Brewer, Jim Butcher, Rachel Caine, Kami Garcia, Nancy Holder, and Jane Yolen. COMING OF AGE: 13 B’NAI MITZVAH STORIES middle grade #ownvoices (Albert Whitman & Co, 2022) – stories by Sarah Aronson, Barbara Bottner, Stacia Deutsch, Debbie Reed Fischer, Debra Garfinkle, Alan Katz, Nancy Krulik, Stacie Ramey, Jonathan Rosen, Melissa Roske, Laura Shovan. THE HITHERTO SECRET EXPERIMENTS OF MARIE CURIE young adult horror (Blackstone Publishing, 2022) – stories by Mylo Carbia, Stacia Deutsch, Sarah Beth Durst, Alethea Kontis, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Scott Westerfeld, Jane Yolen.

Henry is an editor at Running Wild Press. He’s an SCBWI member and moderates author panels yearly at San Diego Comic-Con. He earned a BS in Engineering from Cornell U., an MS in Engineering from George Washington U., and an MA in Political Science from Georgetown U.

Facebook ~ GoodReads ~ Website

All About the Illustrator 

Mercè López has a degree in illustration at Llotja Art School in Barcelona. She has illustrated many projects for different markets from design, editorial, cinema, and theatre to publishing with Spanish and international book publishers. She recently moved to Mallorca, Spain, for a new adventure.

Website ~ Instagram

 

Audiobook & Ebook Giveaway: Moonblood by T. W. Fendley

Check out T. W. Fendley‘s new dystopian science fiction book, Moonblood! Check out my review & then scroll to the bottom for the audiobook & ebook giveaway, courtesy of the author.

Moonblood
By: T.W. Fendley
Narrated by: Amanda Leigh Jerry
Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
Publisher: Spoken Realms
Release date: 08-11-20

Book Blurb

Who wants to live a century before seeing the outside world? Not Ariadne.

Restless and idealistic, the young immortal sneaks out of the Eves’ secret compound and finds the outside world more dangerous than she could have imagined. Cut off from her own kind and hunted by mortals, she is forced to hide among the Adams, the immortal sons born of her sisters.

But the Adams have sinister plans of their own. Ariadne must find a way to stop them, even if it means sacrificing her immortal life.

Written by award-winning author T.W. Fendley and rivetingly narrated by Amanda Leigh Jerry, Moonblood is a deeply thought-provoking and exciting near-future adventure.

My Review

Moonblood is Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games. In a future dystopian world, humans come in three flavors: the Eves (immortal women who live off moonlight); the Adams (immortal men who live off sunlight); and the Cains (mortal men & women who need real food to live). Many of the Eves live in a clan isolated from the rest of the world. However, the Adams have managed to capture some Eves over the years, plus they control these towers filled with Cains. Women are mostly kept in harem-like situations with very little say over their lives. Then there are the average people, all Cains, who live outside the safety and stability of the Adams’ towers. The story is a delicious mix of social castes coupled with an exploration of misogyny.

Ariadne makes a dumb mistake at the start of the story and it puts the Eves in danger of being discovered. She’s assigned a task that takes her away from the only home she’s ever known and almost immediately, things go sideways. Luckily, there are allies out there in the bigger world and Ariadne must take on a role she feels very ill-suited for: to live as a man while she figures out her next move.

The tale brings in more main characters, switching the point of view between them. Blair is some kind of mutant that was somehow identified by this somewhat militant force that forcibly separated her from her family. I forget what this force was called, but it’s separate from the Adams who keep the Tower Harems. As Blair struggles for freedom and also to be reunited safely with her family, she comes across several allies, just as Ariadne does. However, not all allies are created equal. Some of these allies are men and some of these men truly believe the women in the towers have the best life, being cared for and protected. Of course, all the ladies disagree with these men, wanting control over their own lives.

There are some points that I wanted some more explanation for – like how the Adams and Eves live off of sunlight and moonlight, how so many of the men are chemically brainwashed into misogynistic control of the women in the towers; why the Eves die always when they birth male children. I was ok with the parthenogenesis (virgin birth) for the Eves because if we can live off moonlight, why can’t we do parthenogenesis? I can see how a sequel could explore these things and really add to the world building.

The story takes an excellent and unexpected turn at the end. While I did feel it wrapped things up a little quickly and a little too neatly, it still had me on the edge of my seat. I was very worried that the bulk of the Eves would be captured, or even killed. I was worried that a certain character had betrayed Ariadne. Oh, and I loved the pizza delivery vehicle that helped make it all happen – because everyone, no matter which side you’re on, want pizza. 4/5 stars.

The Narration: Amanda Leigh Jerry was a great choice for this book. She had the perfect voice for Ariadne. I also loved her old lady voices for the Matron, Margery, and the cross-dressing ally in one of the Towers. I did sometimes want a bit more distinction among some of the characters, like when the point of view shifts from Ariadne to Blair, it wasn’t always clear with the voices. Yet Jerry had the shift in attitudes down pat. Most of the male voices were distinct and I especially liked the amount of emotion that went into Nathan as he struggles with his established morals. The pacing was perfect. There were a few mispronounced words but they were few and far between. 4/5 stars.

The Giveaway!!!

Author T. W. Fendley is giving away 5 Downpour audiobook copies and 10 Bookfunnel ebook (pdf, epub, or mobi) copies of Moonblood. Do the Rafflecopter thing below or answer these questions in the comments to be entered into the giveaway: 1) Do you want an ebook or an audiobook copy? 2) What other dystopian novels have you enjoyed? 3) Leave a way to contact you if you win (email, twitter, etc.).

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Giveaway & Interview: S. P. Oldham, Horror & Zombie Author

Let’s give a big warm welcome to the talented author S. P. Oldham. We’ll be checking out Wakeful Children, a collection of horror stories, as well as the zombie trilogy, Mindless series. Enjoy the interview! Scroll to the bottom to enter the giveaway!.

What unique hobbies would you pursue as an immortal?

Hmm. Interesting question. In reality I am the polar opposite of an adrenaline junkie, so if I was immortal I hope I would be a lot braver! I would have to indulge in extreme sports, like bungee jumping, base jumping, white water rafting and so on. I would also have to do something hugely dangerous, like walking with lions or filming hippos underwater. For now, I am quite content to sit on my sofa and watch other people doing it!

A toy company makes a replica action figure of your likeness. What 2 accessories do they include?

This made me laugh! A walking stick and a shopping trolley! I have arthritis, fibromyalgia and what can only be described as chronic sciatica! Obviously though, they wouldn’t be any old garden variety accessories. The walking stick would conceal a sword and the shopping trolley would in fact be a bottomless pit, which holds endless supplies of anything you might happen to need, but would also act as a portal to another time, place or world, as the case may be. Hey! There could be a story there…

Society has fallen into a dystopian land full of dangers untold. Which 4 dystopian genre authors would you want with you in order to survive & perhaps raise us all out of this dystopian world?

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) because she would be very perceptive of women’s needs in such a situation, and wary of what could happen if certain moral codes and standards were allowed to lapse.  (Please note, I am not some raging feminist, I just recognise that some issues are unique to women. Just as, undoubtedly, there are issues unique to men.)

Robert Harris (Fatherland) because of his exceptional intelligence and knowledge of history. It is so important to pass knowledge of the past onto children of the future. It may just prevent them making the same mistakes again. Though if current affairs are anything to judge by, then perhaps not, sadly.

Stephen King (The Running Man; The Stand) just because if anyone can tell a great story, it’s him! With no T.V, radio, computers etc… he would be a valuable asset in whiling away dark and cold winter evenings, although you wouldn’t necessarily be able to get to sleep afterwards!

Nevil Shute (On the Beach) for his skills and knowledge in aviation. Who knows? We might come across some abandoned aircraft that he could rig up and then fly us (he was a pilot) to somewhere warmer, more abundant and altogether safer!

If you could have a signed copy of any novel what would it be and why?

I am a huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett. Although I love Discworld and everything about it, I also enjoyed reading all of his non-Discworld books. I devoured Nation, which I thought was excellent, but if I had the choice, I would have a signed copy of The Carpet People, STP’s first book ever, I believe. If only he was still here to do book signings. He is very much missed, but he left a wonderful legacy behind in his writing.

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Not so much a mystery, but I often recall something that happened to me a very long time ago, when I was just a kid in college, that I think could well be the prompt to a story.

I had just missed my bus home and was in for a long wait. It was winter, very dark and cold and all I had on me was a few pence and my bus ticket, which I had tucked away safe. A much older woman, certainly old enough to be my mother at the time, had also missed the same bus. I remember her looking at me kindly and suggesting we go have a coffee at a nearby café. I was very shy when I was young. I remember being embarrassed that I didn’t have money to pay for a drink. I explained this to her and she just smiled and said it was her treat.

We found a table in the café and I think she bought me a cup of tea. She was lovely, very kind and gentle. As we began talking, I learned a little bit about her. She was on her way to visit her critically ill husband in hospital. I think he must have had cancer, looking back. Although she smiled a lot, there was a real sadness about her.

We chatted together for at least an hour. We finished our drinks. I thanked her, then we caught our bus and said goodbye. She got off a good few stops before me. I remember that she didn’t turn to wave, because I was anticipating it and was disappointed. She got off the bus and just headed off to the hospital.

Over the years I have wondered many, many times what the outcome of that story was; what happened to the lady and her husband. When I recall her, I feel a strong sense of sadness, but more than anything I remember the kindness in her eyes and her lovely smile. I hope she found a way to happiness in the end.

The public library of your dreams has arrived! What special collections does it hold? 

Well obviously, the entire works of Sir Terry Pratchett, all in hardback. Then the entire collections of; Bernard Cornwell; Philippa Gregory; Jo Nesbo; Lindsey Davis; Robert Harris; Conn Iggulden; Stephen King; James Herbert; Agatha Christie; Spike Milligan; Stephen Fry. Complete with autobiographies or biographies of all of these authors. There would be lots of beautiful books about nature, birds and wildlife, as well as fabulously illustrated history books.

What has been your worst or most difficult job? How does it compare to writing?

I once spent an horrendous eight weeks or so working for a company that made audio and video cassettes. My job was to stand at this tall contraption of a machine, which never worked properly and was always jamming, and put the tape into the cassettes. The machine did the spooling, my job was to take the filled cassette off the machine, put it onto the conveyor belt and snip the tape. The number of times I was too slow and long line of tape went winding the entire length of the belt was nobody’s business. I got several dirty looks from the other girls working the line, and the boss was just exasperated with me. In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, it was so monotonous and depressing, so I left. I really feel for factory workers. They are generally underpaid and they work bloody hard!

Then there was the summer I worked in an insecticide factory, before I went to college. I was sixteen. That job held horrors all of its own. I was sent to make tea once and did so willingly, passing around the cups to the boss and various others. When everyone had a cup in hand, the boss smiled and told me to look in the cupboard below the kettle. To my disgust, there were three different insecticide papers, covered in cockroaches! I never made tea there again!

These jobs don’t in any way compare to writing. I write for the love of it as much as anything else. I would never willingly do any of these jobs again, no matter how much the pay might be. If there is any justice, I will never again be asked to spool tape into a cassette or make tea above a nest of cockroaches!

What does your Writer’s Den look like? Neat and tidy or creative mess? Can you write anywhere or do you need to be holed up in your author cave?

My little ‘office’ is a converted under-stairs cupboard, and I like it very much! There is space beneath my desk where my little Cocker Spaniel often curls up in a sleeping blanket. I have all the equipment I need, and two shelves above which hold a variety of things, but most importantly, framed photographs of my family. It is generally a tolerable mixture of tidy and messy. I could not write in absolute chaos, I would have to tidy up first. On the other hand, a little bit of messiness doesn’t bother me too much.

Yes, I can and do write anywhere. I often jot little things down because I know I will forget them later otherwise. I have written in a variety of places, including lying on the floor, in bed, on the bus and most recently, in a local café. The only atmosphere I cannot write in is a noisy one. I can’t even tolerate the radio on in the background, I find it hugely distracting.

That said, my last book was inspired by a number of things, including a specific piece of music. Strangely for me, I did not find that at all distracting, but very motivating and enigmatic.

Finally, what upcoming events and works would you like to share with the readers?

I have just written my first ever Grimdark book, called The Dragon Has Wings. It is available as an e-book only at the moment, but that may well change. The blurb reads:

“Carreg Tan is a peaceful kingdom, watched over by a protective and benevolent Dragon Queen. It is thrown into sudden despair when the Queen’s own guard, known as The Six, overthrow her, murdering her and seizing power. Her son Ifan and daughter Crystin are forced to run for their lives.

Only females can take dragon form, meaning that Carreg Tan’s only hope is Crystin; yet many challenges lie along her path to power, the greatest of them all being survival.

Murderers, mercenaries and malevolent beasts are not all Crystin must overcome to achieve her one, single goal; to regain power. But can she do it; and will the world be the better for it if she does?

A tale of grim, dark fantasy following the fortunes of a young heiress who has to fight at every turn to take back what is hers, whatever the cost.”

I am very excited about this book, as it is a genre I love. Fantasy and Dark Fantasy always attracts me, as both a reader and a writer. There are elements of my other work that could also be said to be fantasy. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this book. I hope others enjoy reading it.

I have another book planned with a Dystopian feel to it, but I am going to be cagey about that for now, except to say I am really looking forward to getting stuck in!

About the Author

S P Oldham lives in the beautiful Sirhowy Valley in South Wales. She has always enjoyed writing and has recently ventured into self-publishing, Although she writes mainly horror and dark fiction, she likes to dabble in other genres from time to time. She is also an avid reader. She has been married to Adam for 30 years. They have two grown up sons and an adorable Cocker Spaniel called Milo.

S P Oldham currently has five horror fiction books available on Amazon. Three of these make up The Mindless Trilogy – The Zombie Apocalypse: Where a Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing.

The other two books are short story collections. Hag’s Breath: A Collection Witchcraft and Wickedness, and Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales. Wakeful Children is also available in paperback.

S P Oldham has also ventured into Grimdark and has a new release, The Dragon Has Wings, available on Amazon now.

Where to Stalk S. P. Oldham

Facebook ~ GoodReads ~ Website ~ Amazon UK ~ Amazon US

About Wakeful Children

Wakeful Children is a collection of highly imaginative and inventive short stories. The oak sways gently, a shiver shimmers its way from roots to tip. A branch creaks as if in resistance. A small, fresh leaf strains to curl into life, shows promise for an instant, then withers and dies. A sigh, just beyond human hearing, vibrates the night. All else is still. You will be unwittingly taken on a journey to witness the twisted brutality of Joe Gallows, the weird dream-scape of The Sandman, the ice-cold grasp of The Face of the Gale, the elemental horror of an ancient, evil entity in Devil’s Drop. You will visit some of the residents down a darkly troubled street in Absorption; watched over by a beautiful, malignant presence all the while.

These and other tales make Wakeful Children an extremely unusual, compelling and refreshingly different read in this genre. One that will leave you thinking of it long after you have turned the last page…

About Sleep, Think, Die (Mindless Trilogy #1) 

Picture this: you’re sitting in a bar minding your own business, having a quiet drink or two, when trouble steps in off the street. A shambling wreck stumbles over the threshold, bloodied clothes torn, muttering incoherently. Just another idiot who doesn’t know when enough is too much. You raise your glass, take another slug. It’s okay, security can handle it.

But then over by the juke box a woman screams, a man swears loudly. You look up to see the barman drop the pint he’s pouring and back off, pale and shivering. Maybe you should turn around and take a closer look…

Then the world goes crazy. Before you know it, you’re shoulder to shoulder with security, fighting a wave of undead. Someone throws you a cue – a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘killer pool.’ When it’s over, there’s only four of you left; you, two hard men and the terrified girl you find hiding beneath the corpse of her boyfriend.

So begins the story of a new kind of world; where the dead are far more ambulant than they should be, and the living must walk amongst them, fighting to survive.

GIVEAWAY!!!

S. P. Oldham is offering up a signed paperback copy of her horror short story collection Wakeful Children, along with a tote bag, pen and bookmark (UK only due to shiping). Oldham is also giving away ten codes to claim the zombie Mindless Trilogy (world wide). Do the Rafflecopter thing below or answer these questions to be entered into the giveaway: 1) What country do you live in? 2) What are some of your favorite horror or zombie stories? 3) Leave a way to contact you if you win (email, FB, etc.). Giveaway ends Jan 13, 2020 midnight.

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Book Giveaway & Guest Post: Things Too Big To Name by Molly Best Tinsley

Things Too Big To Name by Molly Best TinsleyThings Too Big To Name by Molly Best Tinsley

Publisher:  Fuze Publishing (August 30, 2019)
Category: Literary Mystery, Psychological Drama
Tour dates: Sept. & Oct, 2019
ISBN: 978-1733034401
Available in Print and ebook, 289 pages
Things Too Big To Name

Book Blurb

Margaret Torrens trades academia for early retirement and the solitude of a cabin in the Oregon mountains. Four months later, she is locked in a ward for the criminally insane undergoing assessment, and a charge of murder is in the air. Pried out of her by an impatient young psychologist, Margaret’s story features Jane Farrow–a former student, who showed up at the cabin uninvited with an odd, mute child in tow–and Victor–Margaret’s alleged victim, who put his claim on both. As Margaret works to control this narrative of the recent past, she is waylaid by secrets, borne by the ghost of her young husband, lost decades before.

Advance Praise

“The psychological drama of Things Too Big to Name plunges us into the mind of Professor Margaret Torrens as her plans for rural retirement unravel and she’s forced to confront the life choices she’s made since the death of her musician husband years before. One of her first students, Jane Farrow, appears at her mountain cabin with a strange child and asks to be taken in.  Days later, disruption threatens to explode in violence when Victor Primo barges in looking for them. Molly Tinsley’s distinctive braided narrative offers intense story-telling, studded with surprises, that keeps us on edge until the end.”-Merrill Leffler, poet, Mark the Music and publisher, Dryad Press

“A prickly but appealing narrator unspools events from her recent—and distant—past.  The plot’s gradual unfolding vibrates with the tension of unwilling confrontation and detonates with a satisfying jolt. A fun and absorbing read; I zoomed through it. –Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches and Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up

“A recently retired English professor must explain to a Qualified Mental Health Professional the events leading to her arrest and commitment to a mental hospital. The more this brilliant psychological thriller excavates the layers of Margaret’s mystery, the more we understand how we all hide parts of ourselves. Molly Tinsley’s established talent for narrative and her familiarity with classic literature fold into one of the best novels I’ve read.”-Sheila Bender, poet and memoirist, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief.

About Molly Best TinsleyThings Too Big To Name by Molly Best Tinsley

In an episode of sanity, award winning author, Molly Tinsley resigned from the English faculty at the US Naval Academy and moved west to write full-time. .

She is the author of MY LIFE WITH DARWIN (Houghton Mifflin) and THROWING KNIVES (Ohio State University Press), she also co-authored SATAN’S CHAMBER (Fuze Publishing) and the textbook, THE CREATIVE PROCESS (St. Martin’s). Her more recent books are the memoir ENTERING THE BLUE STONE and another Victoria Pierce spy thriller, sequel to SATAN’S CHAMBER: BROKEN ANGELS.

Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. Her fiction has been widely published and her plays have been read and produced nationwide. She lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Website: https://fuzepublishing.com/authors/fiction/molly-best-tinsley/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/molly.b.tinsley
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbtinsley

Guest Post

To Tell or Not To Tell?

Storytelling is a devious art. In the end it may unveil a brilliant vision of the world and human behavior, but to get to that end, you have first to arouse the curiosity of your readers, then hold them in a state of helpless eagerness to know more. The strategy is a little like a striptease: you keep the big picture behind a curtain, and ration out the glimpses bit by bit. There’s a sense of power in controlling the flow of information. Maybe that’s why many fiction writers today choose to work in serial form, luring readers through a book-length series of conflicts and resolutions only to leave at least one important question unanswered on the final page.

It’s worth noting that journalism proceeds by the opposite method, curtains pulled open, a bright light on all the details, eliminating any shadows. That’s why a big scoop is billed as an expose, a tell-all. In a standard news article, the who, what, when, where, how, and why are supposed to be announced in the opening paragraph.  The goal is to report factual truth. With a story, the goal is ultimately pleasure, but it’s pleasure after a convoluted, often puzzling or disruptive journey.

The main character of my psychological thriller, THINGS TOO BIG TO NAME, is spinning stories to survive. Margaret Torrens has retired from a career as a literature professor, where she coached students to decipher the hidden meanings in the great and semi-great stories. Now she finds herself locked in a psychiatric ward under a possible charge of murder.  She must attend daily sessions with a psychologist who’s supposed to assess her sanity. He’s ordered her to write an account of the events that took place during the previous week, when a former female student landed on her doorstep with nothing but the clothes on her back and a strange mute child by the hand.

Margaret does not want to be found insane, but she doesn’t want to be pronounced sane either. She’s willing to exist indefinitely in a limbo of no diagnosis, as long as it protects the woman and child, whom she thinks she’s taken care.  Like all storytellers, she’s working to control the narrative, lacing it with detours, distractions, and some disinformation. The psychologist is trying see through her tricks, and a reader of the book too learns to read between her lines and figure out her hidden agenda.

Unreliable narrators like Margaret are not unusual; they’ve been around since the novel form first appeared in the eighteenth century. But here’s the weird part about this one, at least in my experience as a fiction writer: at the same time that Margaret is keeping the impatient shrink wondering what happened and why, she also kept me completely in the dark. I never felt that I held the power. She’d spring her surprises, and I’d scramble to figure out how to write, and rewrite, them into the text.

Let me back up a little: The starting point for this novel was a real-life incident. I live out in the country, and driving home one night at dusk, I hit a deer. The collision totaled the car and left me deeply disturbed: I’d just wiped out a living creature at least twice my size. I decided I would process the experience by converting it to a short story. In my first pass at it, Margaret, my stand-in, weathered the accident and managed to drive her wrecked car the few miles to her cabin afterward. There, to my shock and dismay, she found her long lost husband, who had died decades before. I am pretty skeptical where ghosts are concerned and was ready to reject this one, but I eavesdropped as the two conversed and realized there was a secret in their past, something that would take me far beyond the confines of a short story to uncover.

I had no idea how to keep going, so I just pushed forward in time. That original, real-life deer, shrouded in twilight, had been impossible to see until it was crunching the front end of my car. During the fictional journey it launched, I was driving blind again, trusting Margaret. It paid off the next day as she was having her car towed: a former student of hers drove up in a BMW and hopped out. I didn’t know what to do with her until a little girl climbed slowly from the car.

In my novel’s final form, Margaret braided together three different timelines, each one strung with surprises.  I realize effective plots are woven out of twists and revelations, but really, shouldn’t the author be in on the reveals before they occur? Instead, I had to follow Margaret and her visitors all over the place, jotting notes and googling research, hoping to conceal my ignorance about things like the criminal justice system and the pornography industry. I’m grateful to the Internet for flinging open the curtains on pretty much anything in the world. But the whole time I was writing I worried that after I died, someone would explore my computer and decide I must have been hooked into the underworld of X-rated videos.

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Giveaway!!!

This giveaway is for the winner’s choice of one print or ebook copy of the book. Print is open to the U.S. only and ebook is available worldwide. There will be 3 winners. This giveaway ends November 1, 2019, midnight pacific time.

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Things Too Big To Name by Molly Best Tinsley

Interview: Javan Bonds, Author of Still Alive Series

Folks, please give a warm welcome to author Javan Bonds! It’s great to have him here as I’ve quite enjoyed his Still Alive zombie series. You’ll see his sense of humor in this interview & that crossesover into his books, making them so much fun!

If you could be an extra on a TV show or movie, what would it be and what would you be doing? I wish I had been on True Blood. Because I have a real southern accent and it’s extremely sexy, I wouldn’t be an extra for long. I would have become the main star; they would’ve killed Bill and Eric, leaving me to become the love interest for Sookie. Our babies would be beautiful!

A toy company makes a replica action figure of your likeness. What 2 accessories do they include? Likeness of me? God, I hope not. Maybe the likeness of Mo from Still Alive. He would probably have a compound hunting bow like the one he found and never used in Zombie Lake and of course he would need a pack of baby wipes.

The apocalypse is here! Which 4 apocalypse/prepper authors would you want with you in order to survive the first big upheaval? I would have to go with Shawn Chesser because he knows how to kill zombies in creative ways. Next, I would pick up Mark Tufo because he could at least make us laugh about the bat shit going on. After that, DJ Cooper would be on my list because she can just organize the zombies to death. Finally, I’d make sure to find David Simpson, just because he has a bad ass zombie killing car.

If you could introduce one of your characters to any character from another book, who would it be and why? I would like to introduce Mo Collins to Michael Talbot from Zombie Fallout. It would just be funny as hell to see the two of those self-loathing guys join up and barely survive a zombie incursion.

How does modern culture influence your work?  The only answer I can give is “lots.” You know from reading my books, I make innumerable references to TV, movies, music, video games, and everything else pop culture.

Millions of generations into the future, you are an alien archaeologist come to Earth to sift through the ancient remains of humanity. What is the oddest thing you find?  Probably an English dictionary. If I was able to decipher the garbled words into my alien language, it would still be confusing. “What the hell was wrong with these people?” is all I could say.

What book should be made into a game (card, PC, board, etc.) and why? Is there a specific character who you would want to play in this game? Could you see my books being made into a videogame with Never Winter Nights rules? Smokes would be carrying around magic bags full of snack cakes. I could see Mo constantly casting invisibility on himself so no one would bother him.

What is a recurring or the most memorable geeky argument or debate you have taken part in? Reading my books, you know. “Are zombies living dead or undead?” It’s always been clear to me, they’re undead. I’ve never really understood why Night of the Living Dead wasn’t called Night of the Undead. I mean, a classical reanimated corpse doesn’t have to have a heart to continue functioning. By definition, it’s not alive. I win… the argument I’m having with myself.

Finally, what upcoming events and works would you like to share with the readers? Book Four of my Still Alive series: Zombie Oasis is releasing on Audible as we speak.

Also my very first book is with Beta readers right now as it has gone through an extensive re-editing, preparing it for a rerelease and rebranding. It will become The Free State of Dodge Saga Book One; the first book in a new post apocalyptic/dystopian trilogy.

In late August I will be attending a survival/prepper show in the Atlanta area along with fellow authors David Simpson and DJ Cooper just to name a few.

Oh and if you haven’t heard at The IAA Ceremony on June 7th,”Zombie Lake: Book One in the Still Alive Series” was selected as the winner in our Humor category! Needless to say my narrator Shawn Salzman and I are ecstatic.

About Javan Bonds

Javan Bonds is the Amazon Best Selling author of the Zompoc series, Still Alive. This series includes Book One: Zombie Lake, Book Two: Zombie Island, Book Three: Zombies On A Plane, Book Four: Zombie Oasis, and Book Five: Zombie River Run. Upcoming books in the series yet to be released include Zombie Paradise Lost, Zombie Insurrection, Zombie Deliverance, Zombie Tide, Zombie Bay, and Zombie Gulf … just to name a few.
The Still Alive series follows a group of survivors in small-town Alabama trying to keep their wits about them while making a new life in a world overrun by naked, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, nocturnal zombies that spew vile shit everywhere. Also, these former humans attempt to devour every last morsel of flesh on any uninfected as they become increasingly more intelligent and sadistic. Fun times! Think WW-Z, Zombieland, and Shaun Of The Dead, only better.
Bonds has had to overcome numerous obstacles in writing, as well as to live his daily life. Diagnosed at the age of eleven with Friedrich’s Ataxia (FA), (a progressively degenerative neuromuscular disease under the umbrella of Muscular Dystrophy ), FA has slowly robbed him of his physical abilities through the years. Bonds started using a wheelchair in 1999, but that was only the beginning of his setbacks. In 2010, his sight started diminishing, to the point he is now legally blind. Now, because of his deteriorating hearing, he can’t pick up individual voices in a noisy room.
In spite of all of this, he continues to work tirelessly… seven days a week on his writing. Bonds, never letting his disability rule him, has lived, loved, and laughed often. Reading and writing have long provided Bonds with both pleasure and a creative outlet. At a very young age, he began blogging and has written articles and letters for local newspapers. In 2010, he discovered a passion for writing novels. With the help of Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking, he continues to write every day.
In late 2015, at only 28 years old, Bonds was told he might have only a short time left, due to the ravages of FA on his heart. After learning that, he has been hard at work to complete his other novels and have them finished before his time in this world runs out. In mid-2016, Bonds published his first novel, FREE STATE OF DODGE, the first book in a dystopian series about America in decline and its rebirth.
Bonds hopes you enjoy the Still Alive series, with its humor, pop culture references, and excessive zombie killing action. Oh, and there is a pirate ship too. Planning to write many more installments in his Still Alive series, he is revisiting the Free State of Dodge, working on completing a saga sometime soon… as well as releasing Audible versions of most of his current works.
Javan has these words of wisdom to offer for others stricken by a life-shortening illness. “Live your life. Light your candle on both ends and let it burn. It may go out faster, but it will be brighter than some who live much longer.” Keep an eye on his flame. Watch it burn!

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Book Blurb for Zombie Lake

Mo Collins, the reluctant hero, has sailed around the country on board the replica pirate ship, the Viva Ancora, and now he finds himself only miles from his childhood home. But now the world has gone to hell. Hordes of naked, blue, biting zombies have flooded the now dead Alabama lake town. Mo and his only surviving shipmate, Crow, are surviving. They fish and watch the monsters roam the night; seeking untainted flesh and leaving a disgusting mess in their wake. But when a lone survivor stumbles upon Mo and Crow they gain a new crew member but also find much needed direction. The new comer, Smokes, will change Mo’s view of this zombie infested world forever.

As reality mimics fiction, an ever growing cast of crazy characters play out their role carving out an island sanctuary in a plague ridden world. The Expert, The Tech, The Oracle, The Sacrifice, The Old Friend, plus many more… Join us on this wild ride where the fish bite, the Zombies bite…sometimes life bites.

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Book Blurb for Free State of Dodge

The United States of America is in crisis. Radical militiamen are targeting hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, devastating the power grid. The economy, already weakened by government mismanagement, is in free fall. Food and gas shortages rock the nation. And in Washington, the US Senate is devastated by a terrorist attack.

Childhood friends Jackson Pike and Cliff “Redstone” Stone worry for the future of their country, but their life in rural Alabama hasn’t changed much. In fact, thanks to the Pike family’s disaster preparedness, the town of Dodge is well equipped to ride out the madness. Their main concern is for Jackson’s cousin Hollis, a page for the senator from Alabama. Hollis was present for the Senate attack and hasn’t been heard from since.

When the National Guard first pulls into Dodge, the townsfolk assume the worst of the crisis is over. They’re wrong. Under the iron command of Abraham Samuel Sherman, the National Guard begins stripping citizens of their rights, all while aggressively searching for something—or someone.

Jackson and Redstone aren’t sure what motivates Sherman, but they’re determined to oppose him, his superiors, and anyone else who challenges the constitutional rule of the land and people they love.

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Giveaway & Interview: Nightfall by Andrew J. Harvey

Book Details:

Book Title: Nightfall (Book 1 in the Clemhorn Trilogy) By Andrew J Harvey
Category: Adult Fiction, 250 pages
Genre: Science Fiction Military, Alternate History
Publisher: Zmok Books, an imprint of Pike and Powder Publishing Group LLC
Release date: February 2019
Tour dates: June 3 – 14, 2019
Content Rating: PG-13 (My book includes some violence and adult themes including one off-camera torture scene)

Book Description:

After eighty years of war the remnants of humanity on the Nayarit Line struggled to survive in sealed domes, surrounded by radioactive wasteland and genetically engineered viruses. It was in the last, desperate years of the war that the first trans-temporal portal was developed at Chiqu, a small research facility on the west coast of North America. As the domes finally failed and civilization collapsed around them, Iapura led fifty-three survivors to found a new empire on a parallel Earth; an Earth where, in 1884, Russian and English armies faced each other across America’s Great Plains, totally unprepared for the technology of the invading Nayarit. The Cross-Temporal Empire now encompasses fifty-four parallel Earths. But with its ruling Council riven by dissent the death of First Leader Manet, sets the Council into a slow and irrevocable slide into civil war.

A war that threatens not only the lives of the Clemhorn siblings: Conrad, Arnold, Donald, and Ivy; but the very future of the Empire.


To read reviews, please visit Andrew J. Harvey’s page on iRead Book Tours.

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Dab of Darkness Interview with Andrew J. Harvey

1) A toy company makes a replica action figure of your likeness. What 2 accessories do they include?

A 2-in-1 laptop, and an Akubra Hat (which is an Australian hat made out of rabbit felt.)

2) If you could have a signed copy of any novel what would it be and why?

Terry Pratchett’s ‘DiscWorld’. Armed with this copy I would then be able to provide my son with it, to replace the signed copy he had lent me, and which I accidently spilt liquid on.

3) What would you ask a hyper-advanced society?

Given the state the Earth is in, and the risks we continue to face to our future over the next hundred years or so (climate change, environmental degradation, over population, war, terrorism, etc. etc.) what can you do to assist us to overcome these risks, and how much is it going to cost?

4) If warning labels and safety features didn’t exist, what would be the likely thing you’d die from?

Probably high blood pressure caused by salt. I religiously check cans for their contents, particularly salt and sugar percentages. Without them I’d have no idea what I was eating.

5) If you could, what book or movie or TV series would you like to experience for the first time all over again and why?

A tough call as there’s several, but I’m going to go with Netflix’ The Umbrella Academy. The Umbrella Academy had an excellent, multi-layered story, with characters that developed over the arc of the first series. Unfortunately, there are so many spoilers throughout the story that I wouldn’t be able to watch it again with the same level of interest and passion, knowing what I do now. The good news is that they’ve committed to a second series!

6) Reality in my fiction: how important is it? Lengthy travel, cussing, and bathroom breaks happen in real life. How do you address these mundane occurrences in your writings?

I try hard to avoid describing mundane occurrences as readers tends to find them boring. I can remember a series of very large books I read many, many years ago which had a lot of lengthy travel – I simply skipped the 5 pages of so the writer dedicated to writing about it and started reading again when the characters arrived at where they were going. Swearing though – is that mundane? In Nightfall, the first book in my Clemhorn trilogy, a lot of my characters are soldiers and you can’t avoid some swearing. In my soon to be released young-adult trilogy, The Portal Adventures, the Publisher insisted that I remove all the swearing, which hadn’t been much, because of the market they’re targeting. That was very difficult, I couldn’t even say ‘dang’.

7) Millions of generations into the future, you are an alien archaeologist come to Earth to sift through the ancient remains of humanity. What is the oddest thing you find?

That this period in our planet’s history is in the middle of only its sixth mass extinction in the past half-billion years. In short we’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The oddest thing is that isn’t the result of an asteroid, or some sort of massive super volcano, but because of a single species of naked ape. What is happening now seems to have certain parallels to the Great Oxygenation Event which occurred around 2.45 billion years ago when Cyanobacteria bacteria produced so much free oxygen they ended up suffocating themselves. It also parallels certain aspects of my own, recently released, novel Nightfall.

8) What are the top 3 historical time periods and locations you would like to visit?

  1. The Aztec and Incan empires in 1518 (just before the arrival of the Spanish in the New World)
  2. China during the period of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD)
  3. Europe 1913 – before the outbreak of the Great War

9) Would you prefer to visit Earth in 2100 or travel back to 1900 for a short visit? Why?

I’d prefer to travel back to 1900. I’m a bit of a fan of steam locomotives and I’d love to ride the zig-zag railway up Perth’s escarpment behind one of the early locomotives. The line was ripped up in 1949 so it’s impossible to do now. 1900 represents a time of significant cultural and technological change, and I based a lot of the Cross-Temporal Empire in my Clemhorn trilogy on that particular time period. It would be wonderful to actually visit it for a short time.

10) If you could sit down and have tea (or a beer) with 5 fictional characters, who would you invite to the table?

I’ve assumed that I’m inviting them to a party, because if it was one-on-one I’d be too tongue-tied to actually talk to them. With this list I’d tried to ensure that they can at least talk to each other.

  • My first guest would be Imperial Auditor Miles Naismith Vorosigan, Lois McMaster Bujold’s hero of the Vorkosigan Adventures.
  • Miles would be sitting next to Admiral Honor Harrington, David Weber’s hero of multiple novels.
  • Third would be Sandy Arbuthnot, a Scottish nobleman, and the hero of John Buchan’s The Courts of the Morning. Sandy was normally a ‘bit’ character to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, but he got the staring gig in The Courts of the Morning, which is one of my favourite romance-adventure stories of all time.
  • Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama, Gail Carringer’s hero from the Custard Protocol series (I did consider inviting Sophronia from Gail’s Finishing School series but felt that Prudence and Sandy would probably have more in common given that Sophronia was only sixteen by the time she graduates).
  • Ivy Clemhorn from my own Clemhorn I would dearly love to find out what she thinks about my views on some of the other characters in the book, particularly her brothers.
Meet the Author:
 
Andrew spent his high-school years in the school’s library lost in the worlds of Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov.

His first novel to be accepted for publication was originally completed to be read to his two sons at night. Now his children have left home he lives in Perth, Western Australia, with his wife, one dog, and sixty-four goldfish.

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Win 1 of 3 copies of Nightfall, another winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card (4 winners / open internationally)
Ends June 22, 2019

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Giveaway & Interview: Michael G. Williams, Author of A Fall in Autumn

COVER - A Fall in Autumn - Michael G. Williams copy

Michael G. Williams has a new queer sci fi book out: A Fall in Autumn.

WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES

It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.

Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.

Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.

Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?

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Giveaway!!!

Michael is giving away an eBook copy of “Perishables,” book one of The Withrow Chronicles, with this post:

Everybody hates their Homeowner’s Association, and nobody likes a zombie apocalypse. Put the two together, and Withrow Surrett is having a truly craptastic night.

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Interview with Dab of Darkness

MEME 2 A Fall in Autumn

A toy company makes a replica action figure of your likeness. What 2 accessories do they include?

A pair of dark black sunglasses and a backpack, but the backpack is able to be reversed somehow – turned inside out, flipped around, something along those lines – in a way that suggests I gain new powers from each variation.

I have so many pairs of sunglasses, and I have them tucked all over the place. I am always wearing sunglasses. I remember after a party, years ago, the host emailed me to say, “You left a pair of sunglasses at the party, and I know they’re yours because no one else wears Agent Smith glasses at all times.” I have spare sunglasses hidden away in many of the places where I keep regular sunglasses, too: by the front door, in the glove compartment, in the emergency roadside kit in the hatch of my car, in my gym bag, in my laptop bag, in my gaming bag, on my desk at work, you name it.

That last sentence might give some indication as to why a variable backpack would be the other accessory. I kind of have a problem when it comes to buying backpacks and messenger bags. I am obsessed with new bags, and I need a different bag for each reason I might need a bag. I have one bag for my laptop and all my writing stuff. I have a bag for gaming (I play a lot of tabletop RPGs with friends). I have my convention-guest bag. I have my convention attendee bag. I have my visual arts bag, with a drawing pad and some good pencils and sharpeners and the like. I have my old gaming bag, which has in it a bunch of character sheets from games we don’t play anymore but I’d like to pick back up. And, of course, I have my “the fascists are at the front door” go-bag, which is fully stocked with emergency supplies.

I guess the bag accessory doesn’t really need to be reversible, because now that I think of it, they’re all black. Wow, that Agent Smith jibe was really on-point.

If warning labels and safety features didn’t exist, what would be the likely thing you’d die from?

I think, given the number of accidents I’ve been in (only one, ever, was my fault, and that was nearly 30 years ago, but I’ve been in many), the serious answer is a car crash. I’ve been in enough car accidents that they’re a recurring nightmare. (And yet, I love to drive, and racing games are one of my favorite video game genres!)

But I think the more entertaining answer is undoubtedly the kitchen. I mean the whole kitchen would kill me. I love to cook, especially to bake, but I am a total klutz. I had to buy special gloves to wear when using knives because I stabbed or sliced or otherwise mangled my hands so many times. I’ve had the blades break in a food processor, I’ve had the motors burn out mid-use in countless small appliances, from immersion blenders to food processors to whatever. An old oven once died by way of having only the broiler element work, which I found out when I set a cardboard box of pizza in the oven on “warm” and had it burst into flames. I’ve had a refrigerator spring a leak that sprayed directly against its own power outlet. And we’re not even going to get into the times I’ve stopped up the garbage disposal.

Is there a genre or literary niche that you feel hasn’t gotten its deserved amount of attention?

I’m going to give two answers to this: the genre I think deserves more study and the genre I think deserves to be taken more seriously.

First, I definitely think more of us should be reading the Decadents: the weird fiction and proto-horror of the late 19th century, especially the nature-as-ultimate-alien-evil subgenre of things like The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. It’s a legitimately terrifying story, and it’s incredibly imaginative. These days we’ve become very accustomed to the standard horror tropes: there’s a slasher/monster/Big Bad, and after we see some people suffer at their hands we can rest assured we’ll get narrative satisfaction from watching the Final Girl drive a stake through its heart and box it up until the sequel. That’s very gratifying, and I love those stories, and they allow writers and filmmakers to use those familiar structures to talk about other, deeper things. (For instance, I think the Scream series is easily the greatest horror franchise ever made, and that each installment is an incredibly complex film worthy of any college class. I could go on at length about how Scream 3 interrogates the way we experience memory and nostalgia as a constructed, artificial version of our own past and how that reveals the story we make of ourselves.) But our familiarity with that also keeps us comfortable. The whole idea of stuff like The Great God Pan, or any of the other, similar treatments of the overlap between ecstasy and terror, is the notion that the increasing human understanding of the natural world would lead us along a path of things we can know and comprehend to a realm of things we cannot, and the horror that would invoke in rational minds. The people of that time were just as haughty as we are in thinking the natural world was something for them to tame and exploit rather than a complex system much larger than themselves. In a lot of ways these are cautionary tales for our times, too, about how the natural world is not something to abuse or to take for granted, but something that will punish us for our hubris. In a time of rising seas and global climate change, we are the future the Decadents were trying to help their contemporaries avoid.

As for the genre that doesn’t get taken seriously enough, that’s urban fantasy, hands down. I think a small number of people who appoint themselves the gatekeepers of “real fandom” have decided it’s just soap operas with fangs and fairy wings, to which I say, (a) that sounds pretty awesome, and (b) who asked them anyway? Urban fantasy is in many ways the most complex and compelling genre going right now. It’s often a reflection of the fears and folklore we’ve inherited and are recreating in the contexts of our own times, and it’s often about an antihero, and I find both absolutely fascinating. I like to point out the moral behind any of a number of “old-fashioned” folklore: fairy rings, and the idea one should not eat the food or drink the drink the wee people offer, and so on. Those are all warnings that there are scary places the listener shouldn’t go, that one should have their guard up, that strangers may not mean well. I think the antihero stories of urban fantasy take the systemic and institutional prejudices we know exist – the racism and classism behind assuming urban environments are “dangerous,” for instance, and the misogyny behind devaluing the skills and achievements of women, particularly of independent women – and turn the sock inside out to tell us stories about how the characteristics that make a person feel isolated and denigrated are also the engines of their strength and individuality. Urban fantasy gives us opportunities to create diverse casts of characters and talk about prejudice, about hostility across intersectional boundaries, about how to build coalitions and strike back at entrenched power structures. It tells us stories of people who feel like they’re on the outside looking in, who find their people, who create opportunities to flex the muscles of their agency, who learn from one another’s uniqueness. That’s powerful, and we should respect that and be grateful for that.

What has been your worst or most difficult job? How does it compare to writing?

My day job is in information security, and for a couple of years I worked at a small company that specialized in doing information security for banks, credit unions, and lending institutions. That was incredibly stressful, not because the clients were tough – mostly they were great – but because the management at the company where I worked was so completely callous and utilitarian. They placed absolutely no value on the loyalty of employees and were constantly firing people or reassigning them on a whim. Management’s only direction seemed to be to get more out of fewer people, or to squeeze people harder for more work. I remember getting criticized because a manager said I was “spending too much time reading email,” whatever that was supposed to mean, in a month when I was responsible for 25% of all the work done by an 11-person team. It was that sort of place, where the underachievers and the overachievers were punished equally for sticking out and absolutely no one could have any sense of certainty about their future. On top of all that, the only way to get ahead was to go to “happy hour” with our boss’ boss’ boss on Friday afternoons, which was definitely not my scene. (I was once asked why I never went and I said, “Because I have real friends,” which at least meant I didn’t get asked anymore.) Last but not least, I caught them committing fraud and my management’s reaction was to yell at the person who let it slip that they “warned him never to let Michael find out.” I hated it, and when I got the job offer that allowed me to leave, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot and I just broke down crying. I would get so stressed out I was physically ill. I remember getting a stye on my way to work one day and driving the rest of the way half-blind, knowing it was a reaction to the stress.

Let me tell you, I’ve worked some hard jobs – waiter, farm hand, computer helpdesk – but no matter what the particular job is, nothing is harder than feeling trapped in a job you hate. If that’s where you find yourself, I hope to every god and devil that you find a way out of that. It’s awful. It kills people.

Would you prefer to visit Earth in 2100 or travel back to 1900 for a short visit? Why?

2100, here we come! I want to know what happens in the future! Books and movies and libraries and museums already let me see as much of the past as I want to see. (There are exceptions to this: I would love to see San Francisco during the gold rush.) My natural inclination is to look more to the future than to the past. I would love nothing more than to know what’s next, what’s down the road for our culture and society. I worry about it, to be frank, and I would like the chance to find out if the future is progressive or regressive, and if it’s the latter then what I need to do to try to correct our course.

You have to run an obstacle course. Who do you invite along (living or dead, real or fictional)?

First, I’m inviting Willow from Buffy. She gives us a big magical edge, and just speaking for myself, I’m going to need that. Next up in the draft is definitely Lauren Olamina from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. There is no one more capable of surviving a calamity, and of working with a team’s strengths and weaknesses. Third is going to be Starbuck from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, because she’s going to scare the trousers off the other teams in addition to being a complete bad-ass and a gifted leader. Last but by no means least will be Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop. Not only is she as talented as anyone else at literally anything she tries, she’s also not afraid to cheat a little if that’s what it takes to succeed. I don’t want to know if she cheats, because I would feel bad, but I would like to win.

What is a recurring or the most memorable geeky argument or debate you have taken part in?

I think the most enduring one I’ve ever been a part of is, which Star Trek captain, and why? For me it used to be a tie between DS9’s Sisko and Voyager’s Janeway. These days I think it might be Captain Pike from Discovery. It might even be Lorca from Discovery (yes, really, and I have a whole set of reasons why). It’s one of those topics I don’t even need another person to debate: I can debate myself. It’s also a topic that lets people really examine and reveal what matters to them in leaders, and in stories, and for which there is no wrong answer. It gets at the heart of my favorite franchise, and it lets me really dig in and enjoy examining the distinct and overlapping elements of that franchise’s different iterations. I could talk captains all day, and I think I’ve probably been involved in debates about it since ST:TNG premiered.

(My other answer – I always have another answer – would be, what really happened at the end of Twin Peaks and at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return? But you probably don’t want a 25-page academic paper with citations.)

You’ve lost the use of your vocal chords for a solid 30 days. How does this affect your life?

I am, as you may have guessed from this interview, a big talker. I think I would probably lose my grip. I would very rapidly turn into a character from a 19th century novel, with a slate around my neck and a shard of squeaky chalk I bang against it when I want attention. I mean, let’s just be honest here. I would not handle it well.

I actually worked with someone once who took an oath of silence for a month as part of her spiritual tradition. She was allowed to speak but only if it pertained directly to work or to obtaining necessities. So, like, she could talk to her boss about a work task, or she could call 911 if she needed an ambulance, but otherwise she was expected to maintain perfect silence. At the time I found it humbling to see someone so steadfastly stick to her principles. She and I were of different religions, but I had tremendous respect for what she was doing. I also knew it would be patently impossible for me. No way. I think I would not do well. I suspect I would violate the terms of such a prohibition immediately upon accepting it by asking a hundred different questions about the terms of the deal.

What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?

I’ve just signed a deal for 4 more books in the world of A Fall in Autumn and will be writing the sequel over the summer. I can’t wait! I expect the second book, to be titled New Life in Autumn, will be out a year from now.

Later this year I have several other works, already finished and coming out from Falstaff Books:

Nobody Gets Out Alive will be coming out sometime soon, probably over the summer. It’s the fifth and final(-ish) book of The Withrow Chronicles, my suburban vampire series about a guy who became a vampire in the 1940’s and has declared himself the boss of all of North Carolina’s blood-drinkers. The series is a ridiculously fun sequence of genre mashups – vampires and zombies, vampires and superheroes, vampires and spy thrillers, vampires and war, vampires and their witch frienemies – telling a story that gets increasingly complex as Withrow slowly but surely learns the world of the supernatural is much bigger than he thought.

I also have the four-novella San Francisco urban fantasy series, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN. It starts with Through the Doors of Oblivion, and it’s about some of the most evocative moments in San Francisco’s history – such as the 1906 earthquake and fire – and witches and demons and time travel and real estate scams. I’m just exceptionally proud of it, and I get to really focus on the features of San Francisco I most adore, which are not necessarily the parts of the city they try to highlight for tourists. I don’t know exactly when that one is due out, either, but it’s made it through the content edits and the copyeditor and it’s now with the proofreader, so it’s getting close!

And, last but not least, I’ve reached the rights-reversion point on a bunch of short stories I sold years ago so I’m possibly going to reclaim those rights and produce an anthology of short stories and nonfiction essays I’ve written for various venues. That’s a maybe, though. We’ll see.

Thank you so much for having me – I really appreciate your and your readers’ time and attention. I hope you enjoy A Fall in Autumn and I would love to hear from you about it!

You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.

Folks who sign up for my monthly newsletter get a free short story and can read the ongoing first draft of a story set in the world of A Fall in Autumn but in our time rather than 12,000 years from now. Give it a shot! I keep marketing to a minimum and try to focus on rewarding your interest with new content.

And thanks again!

Author Bio

AUTHOR PIC - Michael G. Williams - A Fall in Autumn
Michael G. Williams writes wry horror, urban fantasy, and science fiction: stories of monsters, macabre humor, and subverted expectations. He is the author of three series for Falstaff Books: The Withrow Chronicles, including Perishables (2012 Laine Cunningham Award), Tooth & Nail, Deal with the Devil, Attempted Immortality, and Nobody Gets Out Alive; a new series in The Shadow Council Archives featuring one of San Francisco’s most beloved figures, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN; and the science fiction noir A Fall in Autumn. Michael also writes short stories and contributes to tabletop RPG development. Michael strives to present the humor and humanity at the heart of horror and mystery with stories of outcasts and loners finding their people.

Michael is also an avid podcaster, activist, reader, runner, and gaymer, and is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi. He lives in Durham, NC, with his husband, two cats, two dogs, and more and better friends than he probably deserves.

Author Website: http://www.michaelgwilliams-author.com

Author Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/mcmanlypants

Author Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/MichaelGWilliamsAuthor/

Author Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcmanlypants

Author Instagram: https://instagram.com/mcmanlypants

Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6429992.Michael_G_Williams

Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Michael-G.-Williams/e/B001KIYBBU/

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Guest Post from Carl Vonderau, Author of Murderabilia

Please give a warm welcome to author Carl Vonderau. He’s here to share a little about his upcoming novel, Murderabilia, as well as a thoughtful (and perhaps creepy) guest post.

Is Murderabilia Really What I think it is?

a guest post from author Carl Vonderau

I’m afraid so. I stumbled across this term when I was inventing a serial killer for my thriller, which also turned out to be called, Murderabilia. Like Harey Glatman in the Fifties, my killer took pictures of his posed victims, postmortem. I wondered what would happen if my killer’s black and white photos were artfully composed and well-lit. Would they create a notoriety that transcended him? In researching this, I discovered something astounding. A market already exists for serial killer artwork—or any personal item associated with a killer. It’s much bigger than I imagined.

Murderabilia. Even the name is appropriately creepy. It could be a killer’s clothes, art, weapons, crime photos, poetry, and letters. Or more intimate things like hair and nail clippings, dentures, or a chip of tombstone from his grave. The more notorious the associated person, the better. Like one item I discovered—a swastika fashioned from Charles Manson’s actual hair. These curios are traded in a market of collectors, dealers and on-line auction houses. The top sellers are artwork and letters.

But is this really that surprising? For thousands of years, the black arts have used hair and nail clippings for spells and charms. Primitive tribes ate the hearts of enemies to gain their powers. We all know about shrunken heads. Something about the physical essence of a killer speaks to deep and primitive parts of us. Maybe to the part of us that the Twentieth Century discovered as “the subconscious.”

Almost as soon as photographers made black and white pictures, they were snapping shots of killers and their victims. Snuff films emerged almost as soon as motion film was invented. Enterprising “curators” sold these oddities to “discerning” buyers. Even now, a killer’s weapon holds great cachet. A revolver owned by Al Capone recently sold for more than one hundred thousand dollars.

One of the earliest known instances of modern murderabilia profit was in 1997, when Elmer Wayne Henley held his first public art exhibition. His fans curated the event. Evidently their admiration for his art trumped their outrage over his torture, rape, and murder of 28 teenage boys. Henley’s art tended toward landscapes and painted still lives.

In 2016, George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, put the handgun up for sale. The public auction was withdrawn but he is supposed to have sold it anyway for a quarter million dollars. It seems like another example of racism that lies hidden in our country. Maybe someone was funneling money to him. It also proves that no instrument of death is too awful to hawk.

The most famous serial killer art was created by John Wayne Gacy. In the Seventies, he killed thirty-three men and boys and buried them in the crawl space below his suburban Chicago home. He was put to death in 1994, but his paintings endure. More than two thousand are in circulation. One painting advertised on an auction site depicted his house and crawl space. The price tag was $175,000.

Gacy loved to entertain children as a clown. While on death row, he painted portraits of his alter ego, Pogo the Clown. He said he was trying to bring joy to people’s lives. Almost all his clowns are painted in the same colors and one of its hands is always raised and open. His clowns wear a cap and have painted red lips and blue-rimmed eyes. There are balloons and trees. It was as if he were trying to uncover an innocent part of himself. Or maybe his entertainment of children, and these paintings, hid secret sexual fantasies and obsessions.

It seems obvious that the sale of things so despicable should be outlawed. EBay banned the sale of such merchandise in 2001. In 2005, a serial killer sold his artwork online and the State of Massachusetts tried to block the sale. Almost all states have laws against the sale of murderabilia. There’s just one problem. The Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional in 2001. In 2010, Congress put forward a bill specifically outlawing murderabilia. It didn’t pass. The argument got more difficult when our government auctioned off personal items that belonged to Ted Kaczynsk. Whitey Bulger’s possessions were also sold at auction by U.S. Marshalls. Yes, the proceeds went to the families of his victims, but…

The best known activist working to eliminate murderablia is Andy Kahan. He was the victims’ rights advocate at the Houston Police department in the late 90s. When he read that Arthur Shawcross, a man who tortured and killed fourteen people, was selling his paintings out of his cell, Kahan coined the phrase “murderabilia.” He has worked to get legislation through to ban the practice.

Recently Kahan teamed up with an unlikely assistant—David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Berkowitz killed in the Seventies and claimed his dog made him do it. He’s now a born-again Christian. When Berkowitz gets a request for art, he forwards it to Kahan. In this way Kahan has learned how slimy some of the dealers are. They befriend a killer and eventually suggest art as a means of expression. Why not gift some of that art to their new friends?

It seems that Murderabilia is firmly entrenched in the darker layers of our society, and coordinated and amplified through the Internet. If you visit a friend and find a strange clown painting with balloons, a red-rimmed mouth and blue-rimmed eyes hangs from the wall, you might ask a few questions. Preferably in a public place. The name John Wayne Gacy might come up.

Website ~ Facebook ~ Twitter ~ LinkedIn

Book Blurb

The son of a serial killer must reconcile with his own dark past and stop a new string of murders.

William MacNary was eight years old when his father went to prison. Since then, he’s carefully built a life as a family man and a private banker for the wealthy. He tries to forget that his father dismembered and photographed thirteen women. And he tries to forget those exquisitely composed photos of severed hands, heads, and feet that launched the “murderabilia” art market.

William has not spoken to his father for thirty-one years. No one at his tony bank knows whose son he is. Not until his wife’s colleague is murdered and carved up in the same way his father would have done it.

All the evidence points to William. And only one person can understand the copycat killer–the monster William hasn’t seen since he was a child.

Goodreads ~ Amazon 

About the Author

Carl Vonderau grew up in Cleveland in a religious family that believed that God could heal all illness. He left that behind him when he went to college at Stanford and studied economics. Somehow, after dabbling in classical guitar, he ended up in banking. Carl lived and worked in Latin America, Canada, and North Africa, and conducted business in Spanish, French and Portuguese. He also secretly wrote crime novels. Now, a full-time author, he also helps non profit organizations. He and his wife reside in San Diego, where their two sons live close by. Check out more at  http://carlvonderau.com/.

Giveaway & Guest Post: The Hands We’re Given by O. E. Tearmann


The Hands We're Given - O.E. Tearmann

O.E. Tearmann has a new MM (trans) hard sci fi/cyberpunk tale out, book one in their “Aces High, Jokers Wild” series: “The Hands We’re Given.”

Aidan Headly never wanted to be the man giving orders. That’s fine with the Democratic State Force base he’s been assigned to command: they don’t like to take orders. Nicknamed the Wildcards, they used to be the most effective base against the seven Corporations owning the former United States in a war that has lasted over half a century. Now the Wildcards are known for creative insubordination, chaos, and commanders begging to be reassigned.

Aidan is their last chance. If he can pull off his assignment as Commander and yank his ragtag crew of dreamers and fighters together, maybe they can get back to doing what they came to do: fighting for a country worth living in.

Life’s a bitch. She deals off the bottom of the deck. But you play the hands you’re given.

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CAN | QueeRomance Ink | Goodreads

Giveaway

O.E. is giving away an eBook copy of After Hours Game: A Wildcards Christmas with this tour – for a chance to win, enter via Rafflecopter:

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GUEST POST

Genetic Tinkering by O. E. Tearmann

Genetic testing.
Gene tailoring.
Helping humanity.
Or…not?
Genetic tinkering is something I play with entirely too much in The Hands We’re Given and its sequels in the Aces High, Jokers Wild series. The possibilities of gene tailoring sound great…until you realize that every genetic flaw will become a moral failing. When perfect becomes possible, imperfect becomes criminal. We see it already: I’ve caught myself thinking ‘wow…didn’t your parents care about that?’ when I see an adult with crooked teeth. We extoll clear skin and lustrous hair. Thousands of trees have died for magazines that tell us that we just have to drink more water, exercise, and eat our vegetables to get smooth skin…they don’t talk about how much money the ladies on their covers spend to get it, though.

We confuse moral worth with physical perfection. And in an era when genes can be edited, that may get a lot worse. Those who can’t afford or don’t want to improve their children will be listed as criminally negligent. And you have to wonder what it’ll do to our sense of humanity.

Well, some people have to wonder. I have to write In The Hands We’re Given, I’ve loved playing with the power, the costs and the downfalls of genomic tailoring. In 2155, drugs are tailored to your personal genome, which improves their effectiveness many times over. But your genome is also used against you.

For example, the medical Cavanaugh Corporation, which has publicly stated that its aim is to perfect humanity. Genetic ‘aberration’ is treated as a punishable offense by Corporation-contracted workers: after all, they’re removing future profits by producing children that will have lower productivity. ‘Aberrant’ children with preventable genetic issues (and the list of preventable issues is very, very long) are listed as cases of neglect. Babies born ‘aberrant’ to mothers who could not afford gene optimizing are removed from the home, under the Aberrant Progeny Policy.

For the company’s upper management, gene optimizing is compulsory. I explore these issues in writing the character of Kevin McIllian. Kevin was born into a family belonging to the upper echelons of Cavanaugh’s management structure, and his genome was designed to the specifications of a Corporate board. His brain chemistry and function should have been optimized in vitro as well, but his parents bribed the technicians to leave his mind alone. He treasures the flaws he bears as a result of the incomplete optimization. They’re his only proof that he is still human; that he still has free will and his own choices to make. He hates the fact that he was designed to meet the standards of a Corporate blueprint. He proudly calls himself ‘aberrant’, and wears the glasses that show off the fact that he’s nearsighted as a small, daily gesture of defiance. He detests the fact that he’s been manipulated since he was conceived by a Corporation that intended to use him. That anger acts as a fuel, pushing him on.

And then, of course, we get into the fact that every technology has some mistakes. What legacy will the first genomic experiments leave? Will we get children who are genetically perfect in our first trials? Or will they appear perfect until they begin to have children of their own, and spliced genes begin to mix into the germ lines in unexpected ways? But on the flip side, if we could remove Cri-du-Chat, Parkinson’s, and bad teeth from the gene pool, shouldn’t we? Is refusing to remove a gene for cerebral palsy or cystic fibrosis tomorrow any different from refusing to vaccinate a kid today?

Gene editing is a fascinating and terrifying area to look into, because it walks a fine line: on the one hand, the prevention or removal of preventable suffering. On the other hand, the pathologizing of untold numbers of issues. What will end up on the list of ‘preventable genetic disorders’. That’s my greatest question. And, perhaps, my area of most intense interest as a writer.

The morally grey area of whether we should genetically modify our children or not can be seen as three intersecting planes. Let’s call Plane 1 the Access Plane. Who has access to these changes? Who is compelled to be changed? I think in our popular imagination we see the “designer baby” trope played out: class and social power are linked to genetic alteration. On the other side of the coin, we see lower class colonists genetically adjusted for their new worlds in the Spin State novels. In my book, poor countries were incentivized to have their children tailored in order to require less food and water.

Plane Two, we’ll call the Biological Politics plane. Who gets to determine what needs changing? Is it a democratic choice? Is there a bureaucracy? Is there state intervention when there is a perceived danger to a society? And what’s the danger, exactly? We already see some of these issues around the world. For instance: what do you do in a country that wants more boy children than girls? And what do you call a ‘disease?’ In Russia, being gay’s on that list. If we start getting involved before the children of the future draw their first breaths, things could get…unpleasant.

Plane Three is the Plane of Consequences. Beyond looking at the implications of such societies, what are we saying as creators/fans/curators of speculative fiction when we engage with the idea that things like sex/gender/orientation are things that can be tinkered with using genetic technology? Today, academic and medical institutions usually act in ways that perpetuate our current structures of power. It’s the water they swim in. If people could change genomes in the future to suit ‘society’, would they genetically manipulate the population to make sure that men are more intelligent than women? Will they unravel and then erase the genetic triggers for stepping out of the gender binary? And what would that make us, as people? As a writer, it’s my job to ask these questions. I need to hold a mirror up to our society and ask it to look itself in the eye.

Like so many things, I don’t want us to label this technology as wholly evil, as writers. Let’s not get out the tar-and-feather kit, as people are already doing for GMO crops. But let’s use our writing to remind people, again: scientific techniques are amoral. They arrive in a box labeled ‘ethics not included’. We have to supply those. Let’s use writing to remind our readers that we must use gene-tailoring tech with the greatest possible breadth of fully experienced life and the least harm as the goals. We don’t need humanity to be perfect. We need it to be as human as possible.

Author Bio

AUTHORBIO

O.E. Tearmann lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in what may become the Co-Wy Grid. They share the house with a brat in fur, a husband and a great many books. Their search engine history may garner them a call from the FBI one day. When they’re not living on base 1407 they advocate for a more equitable society and more sustainable agricultural practices, participate in sundry geekdom and do their best to walk their characters’ talk.

Author Website: http://aceshighjokerswild.com/

Author Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/wildcards1407/

Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18359444.O_E_Tearmann

Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/O.E.-Tearmann/e/B07J62VX9W

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Giveaway & Spotlight: Ithani by J. Scott Coatsworth

Ithani
The final MM sci fi book in J. Scott Coatsworth’s “Oberon Cycle” trilogy is out – “Ithani”!

Time is running out.

After saving the world twice, Xander, Jameson and friends plunge headlong into a new crisis. The ithani–the aliens who broke the world–have reawakened from their hundred millennia-long slumber. When Xander and Jameson disappear in a flash, an already fractured world is thrown into chaos.

The ithani plans, laid a hundred thousand years before, are finally coming to pass, and they threaten all life on Erro. Venin and Alix go on a desperate search for their missing and find more than they bargained for. And Quince, Robin and Jessa discover a secret as old as the skythane themselves.

Will alien technology, unexpected help from the distant past, destiny and some good old-fashioned firepower be enough to defeat an enemy with the power to split a world? The final battle of the epic science fiction adventure that began in Skythane will decide the fate of lander and skythane alike. And in the north, the ithani rise…

Oberon Cycle Trilogy

Ithani Buy Links

Dreamspinner eBook | Dreamspinner Paperback | Amazon eBook | Amazon Paperback | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo | QueeRomance Ink | Goodreads

Book 1: Skythane:

Dreamspinner eBook | Dreamspinner Paperback | Amazon Kindle | Amazon paperback | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo | QueeRomance Ink | Goodreads

Book Two: Lander:

Dreamspinner eBook | Dreamspinner Paperback | Amazon Kindle | Amazon Paperback | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo | QueeRomance Ink | Goodreads

Giveaway

Scott is giving away a $50 Amazon gift card and ten copies of “The Stark Divide,” the first book in his other trilogy, his other trilogy, “Liminal Sky,” with this tour. Enter via Rafflecopter:

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Unique Excerpt From Ithani

Jameson rubbed his temples. He had one hell of a headache. It stretched from his neck all the way up the back of his head to his forehead, and his scalp tingled too.

All of him tingled, actually.

The key had begun to glow. He’d held it out to Xander, and there’d been a flash.

He opened his eyes.

“Hey there, you okay?”

Xander stared down at him worriedly for the second time in a day, his face framed by ruddy red sunlight.

There was something wrong with that, but Jameson couldn’t quite get his head around it. “We have to stop making a habit of this whole sleeping-Jameson-white-knight-Xander thing.” He sat up, pressing his palms into the golden grass to support his weight. “What happened?”

It was warm, and a stiff breeze blew through the blades, creating a sound like running water.

“A gateway, I think. At least, I’m pretty sure we’re not at OberCorp Headquarters anymore.” He helped Jameson up.

Jameson’s head pounded like he’d just had a really bad drunken jag. “If you feel half as bad as I do—”

“Like you were shot with a pulse rifle?” Xander handed him the new key, the one that had set off whatever this was.

Jameson took it. “Something like that.” It was inert now, no longer resembling liquid mercury, the surface flat and still.

He looked around. The grassy plain extended off into the distance, where mountains were painted purple against the blue sky. Bits of conference room desktop and flooring—and maybe cement or heavy plas—littered the grass around them. Where are we? Was it a different place? A different time? Was that even possible? “Why is the sun red? Not pink—red?”

Xander shrugged. “I don’t think we’re on Erro anymore.” He stared at the key. “What in the Split did that thing do to us?”

“Hell if I know.” Quince had been talking about going back to the Common worlds, before whatever this was had happened. Would things simply go back to how they had been before? How could they? I have wings now. And Xander. Sure, he wanted to stay with Xander, but would that mean they’d have to cut themselves—and Erro—off from the rest of the human race? Now, maybe, it no longer mattered.

He spied his carry sack half buried in the grass. “Looks like we got lucky. This made it through.”

Xander nodded. “I found mine over there.” He pointed to a rocky outcrop fifteen meters away.

Something flashed at the edge of his vision, but when he looked for it, there was nothing there. Jameson sank into the grass, crossed his legs, and went through his sack. He felt strangely calm—somehow traveling to heretofore unknown worlds had become a normal part of his life.

They needed to find their way back, though. Erro was in imminent danger, and he and Xander might be the only ones who could save it.

Author Bio

Scott lives with his husband of twenty five years in a Sacramento suburb, in a cute little yellow house with a brick fireplace and two pink flamingoes out front.

He inhabits in the space between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into science fiction and fantasy by his mom at the tender age of nine, he quickly finished her entire library. But he soon began to wonder where all the queer people were.

After coming out at twenty three, he started writing the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at Crown Books. If there weren’t many queer characters in his favorite genres, he would will them into existence, subverting them to his own ends. And if he was lucky enough, someone else would want to read them.

His friends say Scott’s mind works a little differently than most – he makes connections between ideas that others don’t, and somehow does more in a day than most people manage in a week. Although born an introvert, he forced himself to reach outside himself, and learned to connect with others like him.

Scott’s stories subvert expectations that transform traditional science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something different and unexpected. He runs both Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark.

His romance and genre fiction writing brings a queer energy to his stories, filling them with love, beauty and power. He imagines how the world could be – in the process, he hopes to change the world, just a little.

Scott was recognized as one of the top new gay authors in the 2017 Rainbow Awards, and his debut novel “Skythane” received two awards and an honorable mention.

You can find him at Dreamspinner here, Goodreads here, on Amazon here, on QueeRomance Ink here, and on Facebook here.

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