Discover Authors

Today I’m pleased to host Massimo Marino, author of the acclaimed Daimones sci-fi trilogy.

When I started writing I was too young to think of what I was doing and have moments of reflection on crafting a novel. My Dad received “Astounding Stories” but I wasn’t allowed to read the magazines but they did have astounding covers, and I dreamed about them. Based on those covers, I created stories in my mind, then put down on paper with a pencil in my little hands so that I could re-read and never forget them.

I didn’t think about plot and action, character development, building my voice, what themes and belief systems I had to, or wanted to cover. The place and the setting came from those cover pictures, and I wasn’t concerned with temporal or structural issues.

Later on, I kept doing that and stopped when I started my studies in Physics at the University. Between that and playing quarterback for the team of Palermo, my home town, chasing girls until I found my future wife thirty-four years ago, put a halt on writing. So it is only when I resumed that forgotten love and got the writing fever again—or my Muse awoke and found me ready—that I started exploring and thinking of  these elements in my work.

Suspense is one thing that will keep readers reading; there’s a tension in the pages and it is not resolved: The writer has been busy building suspense. A common mistake I’ve seen with writers still learning the ropes is eagerness with resolving the tension, as if it was a good thing to provide the readers with the resolution even on the same page. What a missed opportunity. Sure, the longer you wait, the higher the risk of disappointing your readers if the resolution is moot and weak. The readers would go “What! Is that all?” 
So keep in mind that suspense is your key factor to have your book defined by readers as a “page-turner”: they want to discover what resolves the tension points in your novel. If everything is in one page, there is no need to turn anything.

Daimones-Postcard-Front-smallYou will notice something very interesting that you may use as one of your mantras while honing your storyline: Where there is revelation, there is suspense.

Revelations can fall into many categories, it can be part of the plot, a trait of your main character, an anodyne, thinly disguised detail that goes undetected by most readers, and creates “Ah ha” moments later in the story. Try thinking of all the possible revelations in your book. How do these fit into your plot outline? If you have many to share with your readers, how can they be distributed in the storyline. Try not to amass all your revelations together and too early in the book as you need to keep up with the expectations of your readers through some 80,000 words.

Characters are revealed through their actions, what they do and what they say. Drama shows people at their extremes. Your main character must be in the midst of the battle of his or her life, physical or emotional, or an ultimate test, a challenge or crisis of faith.

As they say, “If you want to find out what a person is made of, put that person under pressure.” You’ll also will find that a place or a thing can also function as “character” and be developed. A place, or an object can be charged with emotions and tension to rival with the better developed characters of all stories.

You don’t even need to describe your character physically as if you were—and you are, if you do that—telling people about a picture you have of the character. A character is not a pair of blue eyes, blonde hair, fair incarnation, slim or not, tall or short, attractive or repulsive, beautiful or ugly. These are the traits of a cardboard, not a character.

Build your character slowly, with their thoughts, their action, their unique way of interacting with the events in the story and with other characters. This gives them depth, not whether they’re tall and brunette, or short and blondie. You can even avoid telling physical characters and have the reader guess whether they are tall (she’s able to reach the upper shelve without help) or short, she needs to be on her tiptoes.

Don’t tell how they look, show who they are, and the readers will fill in the gaps.
 If you need a physical trait to be unique and well described (but only if it is *needed* and adds to the story) then introduce that trait *when* needed.

Everyone can describe the picture of a person and tell how s/he looks like, but that’s not character development and—frankly—doesn’t add anything to the reader’s image of who is that person.

Forget physical traits, get into the characters’ personality and they will develop naturally and readers will love or hate them, but never indifferent to their fates.

Development and character—and how both are framed by time and place, and their impact on how your story is also a key feature of your storytelling. It is a key aspect of your story: where it is situated at a particular place. When I  am deep in writing a new story,  I have places and situations and scenes that build up. I try to view them via a close up on something particular in the landscape, or via a long shot from a mountaintop or a helicopter or any other vantage point from above.  I survey the scenery, and I forbid my characters to venture there with me. I explore, trying to “feel” the place well before my characters are allowed in. Then I walk with them, and I hear their thoughts, and question “How do you feel, here?”, “What excites you?”, “What scares you?”, and “Would you go there?”. Hearing “No” as an answer to the last question is usually a good sign that the place needs to be visited in the story

The plot of your book  can be an attempt to illuminate a particular philosophical problem, belief, or snapshot of a world at a particular point in time. In the plot, the writer can and wants to explore underlying belief systems, whether conscious or unconscious. Artfully understanding and using the thematic elements in your novel will result in a work that can be deep and resonant versus flat and merely commercial. Here you aim at writing with your heart, questioning your firm foundations of your persona, and forgetting about making more sales, while concentrating on how to better disrupt something inside the reader. If it bothers you to explore those things, it is a good sign they are good stuff to put the spotlight on in your story. But for this, you need to have the courage to write naked. You will aim at making your work even more resonant and expansive—a book that has the potential to be appreciated by many.

Voice. We’re in the habit of thinking, based on bland television and newspaper reporting, that a homogenized voice is the most objective and appropriate voice for conveying an unbiased story.  That may work well for presenting a certain type of general information to the public, but does not serve the richness and color and personal nature of authentic stories, stories that live and breath what life is really like and the gamut of human experience. For this last point, the only reflection I have to share is that your voice develops as an extension of you—the writer—as a character. When searched for consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation. Don’t fret on finding your voice, it will develop as part of who you are and if you write naked—again!
 The true worth of a writer is not in his style and voice, but in the feelings and sensations that come alive in the readers.

MaryMaddox-TalionI was flattered when reviewer Dan Hagen described Talion as “The Silence of the Lambs meets The Turn of the Screw.” Of course Thomas Harris’ famous thriller is quite different from Henry James’ classic ghost story, but my novel owes a debt to both. Talion explores the twisted mind of a serial killer and leaves readers uncertain whether the protagonist sees spirits or only imagines them.

Ironically, these two distinctive features of the story have caused the most complaints from readers.

Some are repulsed by the graphic violence and darkness of Rad Sander’s sadism. “It made my skin crawl,” one reader said. Another reader commented that Talion ought to be classified as a horror story rather than a thriller. I took her advice and began marketing the novel as horror fiction, the niche where it seems to fit better than anywhere else. And I added a warning to the book description.

In The Turn of the Screw the narrator sees malevolent ghosts that might or might not be figments of her imagination. So does Lu Jakes, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Talion.

Lu is bullied at school and abused at home by her emotionally disturbed stepmother. Her alcoholic father ignores the abuse. Then Talion appears, a beautiful and mysterious spirit who eases her pain and gives her the strength to stand up for herself. Prompted by his sinister companion, Black Claw, Lu almost kills her stepmother.

When Rad begins to stalk Lu and her newfound friend, Lisa, Talion seems to be the teens’ only hope. But are his intentions benign? Does he even exist outside Lu’s head?

Talion only hints at answers, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions. To my surprise, some readers disliked not being told exactly what Talion is and whether he is “real.” They felt cheated. I could justify my use of ambiguity. (“Hey, Henry James did it!”) And no doubt the unhappy readers could justify their dissatisfaction. (“So what? If I wanted a book by Henry James, I would have bought one.”) It doesn’t matter. Writing fiction and reading it are personal experiences.

Other readers enjoyed Talion enough to hope there would be a sequel. There is. Look for Daemon Seer in the first part of next year. It offers more darkness, more violence, and some revelations about Talion.

18185976M. M. McVey’s novella The Trashcan Opera Society tells the story of the doomed love between Jordan, a onetime attorney who lives on the streets of Los Angeles, and Hannah, an aging stripper. The two meet when Jordan inadvertently saves Hannah from a violent patron by vomiting on the man.

McVey’s omniscient point of view keeps its distance from the characters and describes their world in a tone that manages to be both clinical and poetic. The narrative voice put me off at first. Occasionally it seems stilted or strained, but it’s the right voice for a story that blends harsh realism with operatic melodrama.

The characters are complex and unpredictable and very human. Not many homeless guys have premium season tickets to the opera. Not many strippers have the insight to their circumstances that I see in Hannah. I came to care about these two lovers who accept their hopelessness with such grace.

The author has a talent for description. Often I was impressed by the vivid detailing of scenes, but now and then I became impatient and wished the story would move faster. Take this  paragraph describing a chair in which Hannah is about to sit.

There was an old government gray chair resting in front of Donny’s desk that served as a resting place for the few visitors ever invited into his office. One spring, under the right side of the chair’s cushion was broken, forcing anyone sitting in the chair to tilt their body to the other side. The arm rest on the left side was worn through in most places. The exposed padding was gray with years of sweat and body oils. The remaining leather was slick as a saddle horn from a dime store mechanical pony.

I know exactly how Hannah feels sitting in that chair, but the knowledge serves no dramatic purpose. The chair merely reinforces the impression made by quite a few other paragraphs of description spread throughout the story: the joint where Hannah strips is a real dive.

In general McVey repeats too much. Readers are told over and over about Jordan vomiting on the man who attacked Hannah and about Jordan’s education and intelligence. I learn so much about Jordan so quickly that later revelations about him lose much of their impact.

My biggest disappointment with The Trashcan Opera Society is the sloppiness of the copyediting. Indie books usually contain more mistakes than books by commercial and small presses, and nobody is perfect, but this novella is closer to a workshop draft than a polished revision. It contains numerous errors and inconsistencies in punctuation and usage. Obvious errors have escaped correction. Several times its is used in place of the contraction it’s. Hannah has “taught stomach and leg muscles.” Lightening is used in a context where lightning seems to be intended, and discrete in a context that calls for discreet.

I encountered too many passages that made me want to reach for a red pen. Here’s one example:

The eyes acquire signs of aging early in a dancer’s career. It is due to  . . . the hard squinting to see if the paper money being waived before their body is a ten dollar or a one dollar bill.

If you see nothing wrong with the above passage, ignore my criticisms. As I wrote in a post last year, errors bother some readers more than others. If you see the errors and want to read The Trashcan Opera Society anyway, treat them like Jordan’s outward appearance. Overlook the scruffiness and you’ll find a moving story and characters worth knowing.

I’ve been working hard to finish the current revision of Daemon Seer. It’s not  the final revision (is it ever?) , but the novel is complete except for minor changes. My monomaniacal focus on finishing has led me to neglect Ancient Children, so instead of a book review or feature I’m offering the first couple of pages of Daemon Seer. Those who have read Talion will recognize the narrator, Lu—she’s 25 now—and a couple of other characters that she mentions.

Talion will also be back for the sequel—and he’s bringing all his friends.

 Chapter 1: The Co-Star of My Worst Nightmare

“I know who you are.” Ken leaned back in his desk chair and folded his hands. As usual he had on a gaudy jacket and clashing bow tie. His forehead and cheeks shone apple-like in the florescent ceiling light.

I thought of a smart-ass comeback –You ought to know, I’ve been working here for months – but it wouldn’t help matters any. The book was lying right there on the desk, a photograph of college professor Rad Sanders staring up from the cover. Rad looked nondescript, of course. Serial killers always do. Above him the book’s title screamed in lurid yellow: Professor of Death. Beneath his chin crawled the name of the author, Willard Steeples.

“How did you figure it out?” I knew Ken was itching to tell me. Otherwise he wouldn’t have summoned me to his office on work time. He scolded us for using the restroom when we weren’t on break.

“Two things,” he said. “Your name, Luanda. It’s quite unusual. And the town, Deliverance. It’s on your job application you went to high school there. So when I read about Luanda Jakes, one of the girls who escaped from this serial killer here, I thought, wait a minute, there can’t be more than one Luanda in a town that small. It so happens I have a cousin in Deliverance. I called him, and sure enough, he said the folks at Hidden Creek Lodge adopted Lu Jakes. He remembered their name. Darlington, the name you have now.” Ken finished with a smug smile, like I was supposed to gasp at his brilliance in tracking down my past.

“I really don’t like talking about it. I’m trying to get on with my life.”

When Willard Steeples asked to interview me, my foster mother, Debbie, had hired an attorney to threaten him and his publisher if anything about me, apart from facts of the crime that were public record, appeared in his sleazoid book. The publisher had backed off fast. Nobody had tracked me down. Until now. If Ken started blabbing, my coworkers would treat me like a freak and eventually reporters and sickos would come slinking to my door.

Ken lurched from his ergonomic chair, circled the desk, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You poor girl. It must have been terrible, seeing your dad killed right in front of your eyes.”

It had been traumatic — all that blood — but Duane Jakes was no great loss to the world.

Ken was massaging my shoulder. I fought the intense urge to shrug him off. Along with being my boss, he now had this secret to hold over me. So I let silence and passivity send the message. After a minute he got it. He eyed me with that way of his, sullen and kind of pitiful, like a dog driven away from the dinner table. You could say Ken would settle for scraps. He just wanted to cop a feel now and then, and I wouldn’t give him even that. Finally he removed his loathsome hand.

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. But you killed that monster. You’re an honest-to-goodness heroine.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “Guess I should get back to work now.”

“Yes.” He patted my shoulder one last time. “Good girl.”

I escaped back to my station.

“What did he want?” asked my coworker Alice. Maybe it was her eyeliner, the way it curved beyond the outer corners of her eyes, but she looked gossipy and sly. If she ever found out my secret, she would tell the world.

“What do you think?”

She snickered.

I spent the afternoon watching employees at Granville Imports, a business in Long Beach, California. Cyber Watch was in Salt Lake, but Ken had us spying for companies across the nation. One woman had figured out a system to work her eBay store in between creating shipping manifests. She would finish a batch, start printing them out, and then hop online to her seller’s dashboard. She stayed long enough to scroll through a few listings — Hummels, cut-glass dinner bells, and whatnot — or dash off an answer to a bidder’s question. Never longer than sixty seconds.

At first I couldn’t get a screenshot to prove what she was doing. Every time I checked on her, I caught just a flash of the browser window before it disappeared. This woman had to know she was being spied on. She’d installed a program that closed her browser when my remote eye landed on her, so I set the remote eye to take a screenshot the microsecond after it moved to a new target. I finally nailed a shot of her eBay dashboard and — bonus time! — a shot of the You Porn homepage on her supervisor’s monitor. A week ago I’d turned in the evidence and reported my suspicions.

The supervisor got fired, but someone at Granville gave the woman another chance. She was behaving herself now. She wasn’t using her phone to go online either. No phones except on breaks and for verifiable emergencies, a ban Ken always recommended to his clients. Of course he imposed the same ban on us.

*

Instead of going straight home after work, I strolled from the building where I worked to the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake. The two blocks seemed longer in my three-inch heels and pencil skirt, and my car was parked in the opposite direction. But I needed to calm down, and the temple grounds usually relaxed me. Not that afternoon. I hardly noticed the flowerbeds and tranquil fountains, the smell of roses mingled with traffic fumes, or the tourists gawking at the golden statue of Moroni blowing his horn from the temple’s highest steeple. I didn’t even snicker to myself at the name Moroni or wonder why Joseph Smith couldn’t think of something less ridiculous for his angel of revelation.

Ken’s revelation had me too anxious. He was bound to give up my secret. I imagined him at some backyard shindig casually letting it drop. You won’t believe this, but a girl who works for me was kidnapped by a serial killer . . .

My body remembered that night in the mountains with spells of dizziness and trembling. The fierce cold, even in summer. In nightmares I was falling into Rad’s bottomless gaze. Or I was splayed on the ground, my wrists and ankles scoured with pain. He didn’t torture me, but he staked Lisa to the ground on a tarp, the kind you lay underneath a tent to keep moisture out. Her blood pooled on the plastic.

The spells and nightmares had been going on for years, but lately I was having new symptoms. Moments when color leeched out of the world and bleakness sucked the life from me. Moments when pain seized my belly like a fist and I ached with hunger, not for food but something nameless. Two days ago, a fierce cramp had bent me over. My nose almost touching the keyboard, I could barely hear Alice whispering. Was I okay? Did I need to use the restroom? But the cramp hadn’t been my period, which had ended a week ago. The whole thing baffled me and pissed me off. After ten years I should be healing, not spiraling into some kind of weird post-traumatic syndrome.

Redfern Jon Barrett builds his dystopian novel Forget Yourself on a Kafkaesque mystery. The narrator, Blondee, lives in an enclosure with dozens of other people. None of them remember who they are. They assume they must be criminals since they are imprisoned, and they separate themselves into groups based on the severity of their crimes. But they can only guess at what they did wrong.

The story begins with Blondee in isolation, awaiting punishment for some unnamed transgression. She seems to believe she will once again lose her memory, a kind of death even though her body will live on.

Blondee relates how she first awakened in this strange place, her memory gone. She can still read and give names to things, but she has no personal history. No identity. She describes life in the enclosure, her grief after her lover deserts her, and her complex relationships with other prisoners. Barrett’s writing is descriptive and often poetic, rendering characters and setting so vividly that I become immersed in Blondee’s world.

The prisoners receive “rations”—half spoiled food and discarded items. Their food and shelter. They parcel it out according to their own rules, with those who supposedly committed the least serious crimes taking first pick and those who committed the worst taking whatever the others don’t want. Within the groups of criminals, couples receive better rations than single people. After losing her lover Blondee gets worse food and worse junk with which to furnish her ramshackle hut. And of course she’s lonely. She’s something of an outsider anyway, a rule breaker and troublemaker.

As long as the story focuses on Blondee’s predicament, it holds my interest. I almost forget the mystery surrounding it: What are these people doing here? Why are they imprisoned? How did they lose their memories? Or more precisely, who took their memories and why?

(The comments that follow will spoil the story for those who want to read it, so anyone intrigued by Forget Yourself ought to stop reading here.)

The mystery deepens when Blondee begins to remember her previous life. Barrett develops this part of the story masterfully. Blondee’s first memory is an image of a fierce huntress with dogs. She has no clue what it means. Gradually the memory expands, and the huntress becomes a figurine in the house where she once lived with her husband.

Blondee’s rediscovery of marriage is significant since relationships in the enclosure are not lifelong and have no gender limitations. Everyone seems pretty much bisexual. The problems begin—both for the inhabitants of the enclosure and for me as a reader—when she unearths an old magazine for brides. The magazine seems a bit too convenient as a plot device.

The articles on upscale weddings and honeymoons give Blondee an idealized notion of marriage. Driven by the need to remember who she once was, she buys in completely and convinces quite a few others that marriage is the correct way to live. She deserts a passionate female lover to marry a male who is merely a friend. Although I understand her motivation, I lose sympathy for Blondee when she dumps her lover.

Then comes a catastrophe that might or might not be connected to the changes Blondee has wrought. Antifreeze is included in the rations. The inhabitants of the inclosure think it’s something to drink, and many of them die. This brings the mystery back into the foreground. Why poison these helpless people?

I have to register my disappointment with the ending. For no discernible reason, Blondee is suddenly able to channel the memories of her companions in the enclosure. Their stories pour through her mind in italics, disjointed and contradictory, their worlds so unlike they seem to come from different planets. Taken together, they compound the mystery rather than resolving it.

The backstories are a convenient solution to a difficult narrative dilemma. The author funnels information through the consciousness of the first-person narrator. He could have brought down the walls and let Blondee see the world outside the enclosure. Or he could have let other prisoners regain their memories. Either of these solutions would make an already lengthy novel  longer, but they couldn’t be any worse than having the backstories dumped on the reader in a jumbled and inexplicable heap.

I found plenty to admire about Melinda Field’s novel True. In polished prose the author creates a world of memorable characters and a lavishly described rural Northwest American setting. She knows and loves horses. The novel’s title is taken from one character’s description of horses as “true to their ancestral memory, their environment, their instincts, and their herd.”

The same might be said of the Yee Haw Sisterhood, the band of women at the center of the story. They know where they come from. Their lives are rooted in isolated Green Valley, California. They trust one another, and all of them eventually come to trust their deepest feelings.

The story opens with teenager Cat in Phoenix, Arizona. With her mother in prison she has nowhere to go except to her grandmother in Green Valley. Cat is less than thrilled by her new home, where she feels very much an outsider. After her arrival, the point of view switches to the various members of the sisterhood as they gather for one of their regular camping trips into the mountains. All are strong women who endure loneliness, loss, or in one case an abusive marriage, without whining.

Emma, a nurse and midwife, receives more narrative attention than the others. If the novel has a single protagonist, it is Emma. After several teenage boys drug and rape Cat and her grandmother dies, Emma takes her in. The novel chronicles Emma’s struggles to help Cat survive the aftermath of the rape, to care for a dying friend, and to gather the courage to rekindle a romance with the man she loved long ago. Interspersed with these conflicts are the stories of the other women in the Yee Haw Sisterhood. By the end of the novel, I felt as though I knew these women like friends.

As much as I enjoyed True, I think many readers will find it slow going. The lush and sometime purplish description will make some impatient. And the storytelling is flawed. None of the many plot lines dominates enough to give the novel a strong dramatic core. Events don’t build to a climax. They simply unfold. The subplot involving a woman with dementia seems extraneous. It has thematic resonance but does nothing to further the action. The novel doesn’t need the extra weight.

Another subplot fizzles in a frustrating way. Just as Cat faces a serious threat, the story switches to the mother of one of the sisterhood and then to Emma’s romance. When it finally comes back to Cat, the threat is resolved in a couple of sentences of dialogue.

If you crave action and suspense, look elsewhere. But if you love stories with vivid settings and strong female characters, True delivers.

I’m excited to welcome author Tori L. Ridgewood to Ancient Children. Tori, please tell our readers a little about yourself.

I am in my mid-thirties, tall, and I can never make up my mind on what colour I want my hair to be! Married since 1997, I have two school-aged children and I am a full-time secondary school teacher. I get completely tongue-tied around anyone remotely famous, met my husband at a Star Trek club (that he started to meet girls), and I have three tattoos. I also write under a pen name — I find it helps me to tap into my creative side, helps a little with separating my writing life from my professional life, and it’s just a lot of fun.

That’s a great story about meeting your husband. Guess his plan worked. Tell us about your book.

Wind and Shadow: Book One of the Talbot Trilogy is a paranormal romance with elements of horror. A good witch must do battle with a malevolent vampire, and she must convince a skeptical police officer in order to help her. It’s my love letter to things supernatural: witches and witchcraft, vampires and magick.

What was your inspiration in writing Wind and Shadow?

There was an incident in the former mining town of Cobalt, Ontario, about twenty-five years ago. A sinkhole opened up in the middle of a street, a gap big enough to swallow a car, and it happened because the miners of the early 20th century had tunneled everywhere under the community. The timbers holding up the tunnels were starting to rot, so there was a big push to have the mines reinforced. When I was ten, I lived near Cobalt, and I remembered that some enterprising individuals advertised the event as the world’s largest pothole! About seven years ago, while I was on parental leave with my baby daughter, I started thinking about that giant pothole, and what else might have caused the street to collapse. What if it was some kind of imprisoned creature working itself free? What creature is most likely to be lurking underground to begin with? Add that to my love of vampires, and of witches, and I began to build the story.

The cover of your book is very eye-catching. Tell us about the cover design. I’m also wondering how the book came to be titled.

The cover was designed by the lovely Caroline Andrus, and it represents the protagonist, Rayvin Woods. She’s a natural witch with great power, but she can’t always control her power as well as she’d like. The pentacle refers to a charm that Rayvin wears, an inherited piece from her mother and grandmother. It helps her to focus her energies when casting spells.

I had a difficult time finding an effective title for this book. During a period of writers’ block, I wrote a prequel novella for the Talbot Trilogy called “Mist and Midnight”, which explains how the vampire became imprisoned in the first place. I wanted the first full novel of the trilogy to have the same type of title, something three words that referenced natural elements. Earth, air, fire, water, and spirit are significant parts of magick in the novel, as well as the passage of time, so I wanted a title that would help to reflect those aspects.

I also needed something that would reflect the autumn setting, and that would lend itself to a continued pattern of three words in the second and third books of the trilogy. A former student of mine, also a writer, suggested using a formula that involved counting up to a certain number of words in the beginning of the first three chapters. The formula brought me to the words “wind” and “shadow”. It just felt right. Rayvin encounters gusts of wind at fortuitous moments, almost as though nature or another force is trying to warn her. “Wind” also represents her choice to run away from her problems when she was a younger woman, and how she is trying to change her life to make it better. (I do love “Winds of Change” by The Scorpions!) And then, “Shadow” represents not only the darker parts of her life that are making her unhappy, and the coming of winter, but also the evil nature of the vampire stalking her. I love the way the title just seemed to fall into place and belong to the story.

I love the name of your main character. Give us an insight into her.

Rayvin Woods is petite, curvy, redhaired, and tough. She lost her mother at a young age, and never knew her father, but she grew up in her best friend Andrea’s household. She’s a natural witch, in the sense that she manifests psychic and telekinetic abilities and can cast spells very effectively, although not always with a lot of control. Sometimes, Rayvin will work some magick that follows its own path, providing a result that she wants but not necessarily in the way she meant it to, kind of like Schmendrick in The Last Unicorn.

Rayvin’s had a lot of heartbreak and loneliness in her life. She had few friends in high school, always on the fringes of her community, and after she was accused and acquitted of attempted murder, she left her hometown to build a new life in the big city. Her efforts fell apart and she was forced to go home, even though it was the last place she wanted to be. I think that takes an extraordinary amount of courage to face one’s demons like that. And then to encounter something nearly demonic upon arrival, and be able to stand against it—she has a lot of strength, though that may come from her refusal to admit that she often feels weak. She’d rather do things herself, whenever possible, but she doesn’t see asking for help as a threat to her independence. I like that.

What is the best advice you’ve received as an author? What advice might you give to aspiring authors?

I have excellent writer friends who have suggested, through experiences of their own, not to rush the process of developing a novel and polishing it. Rushing means making mistakes, and you want to be true to your story and your voice. It’s important to write what you know, because it’s familiar, but if you don’t know what you need, do the research. Write something every day, no matter what it is, and never, ever delete or throw out your notes—you never know when it will be useful.

And write what you love. If you follow your passion, that love will shine through your words, and others will love it too. But have a thick skin, because as much as there will be readers who enjoy your work, there will be those who don’t like it, and that’s fine. Writing is an art and it’s subjective. Do it because you love it.

Excellent advice. I agree wholeheartedly that it’s a mistake to rush the process of writing. What are your interests outside of writing? Do any of these activities find their way into your books?

I enjoy handicrafts, mostly as gifts for friends and loved ones. I cross-stitch, do little quilting projects, embroidery, and appliqué. I love making miniature furniture out of twigs and bits of broken jewelry, rolling my own beeswax candles, calligraphy, and craft painting. I love traveling, whenever I can. And of course, I’m an avid reader. Some of these hobbies do appear in my writing, and some of my wishes to try different things, like making my own soaps and scented oils, appear there too.

What’s next for you?

The second book of the Talbot Trilogy, Blood and Fire, is set to be released at the end of February 2014. I’m very excited as there are a number of readers who enjoyed Wind and Shadow, and want to know what happens next. This installment introduces new supernatural characters with shapeshifting abilities. It also sets up the final conflict in Book Three: Crystal and Wand, which I’ve begun writing for release in July 2014.

Which author would you say your writing most resembles?

I’d like to think my writing resembles the work of Nora Roberts, as she’s who first inspired me to write a paranormal romance in trilogy form. I’d also like to believe that my style is a little like Stephen King’s, in that it can be gritty, raw, and creepy. But I’m definitely biased, and those two writers are very far apart on the spectrum.

Where can we buy the book?

Wind and Shadow is available as a paperback for traditionalists through the publisher, Melange Books.

It’s also in Kindle format via Amazon.

All other formats are available through Smashwords.

Thanks very much for the interview!

About the author:

After her first heartbreak, Tori found solace in two things: reading romance novels and listening to an after-dark radio program called Lovers and Other Strangers. Throughout the summer and fall of 1990, the new kid in town found reading fiction and writing her own short stories gave her a much needed creative outlet. Determined to become a published author, Tori amassed stacks of notebooks and boxes of filed-away stories, most only half-finished before another idea would overtake her and demand to be written down. Then, while on parental leave with her second baby, one story formed and refused to be packed away. Between teaching full-time, parenting, and life in general, it would take almost seven years before the first novel in her first trilogy would be completed. In the process, Tori finally found her stride as a writer.

At present, on her off-time, Tori not only enjoys reading, but also listening to an eclectic mix of music as she walks the family dog (Skittles), attempts to turn her thumb green, or makes needlework gifts for her friends and family members. She loves to travel, collect and make miniature furniture, and a good cup of tea during a thunderstorm or a blizzard. Under it all, she is always intrigued by history, the supernatural, vampire and shapeshifter mythology, romance, and other dangers.

Tori L. Ridgewood’s new book Wind and Shadow: Book One of the Talbot Trilogy, published by Melange Books, was released on June 20, 2013. For more information, visit Tori’s website.

 

The paradox of the thesaurus is that you can use it only to find words that you already know. Plucking an unfamiliar word from a list of synonyms practically ensures misusage. Now and then I consult a thesaurus to remember a word that has slipped my mind, and the one I reach for most often is the OXFORD AMERICAN WRITER’S THESAURUS. There are now three editions; I have the first one, published back in 2004.

Rather than boring lists, the OAWT provides examples of usage for the most common synonyms. It explains the fine distinctions between words of similar meaning and the contexts in which they are properly used. Sometimes I read the OAWT just to learn.

Recently I came across this commentary by David Lehman:

Why do some words last while others fade into oblivion?

There was a time when dungarees and jeans vied on an equal footing for the linguistic market in blue denim pants. Jeans won that competition handily, in a rout, rather in the way that a company achieves dominance in an industry.

The linguistic process is little like capitalism, then, but purer, with no antitrust legislation or zealous attorneys general to limit the monopoly.

Dungarees

The word dungarees is still used occasionally to describe the bib overalls that you wear while painting a room or planting a garden, but these dungarees aren’t always denim or even blue.

If you accept Lehman’s analogy, does it follow that the best word always wins? I guess that depends on how you view capitalism. Does the best product invariably dominate in the marketplace? Or is it the cheapest product? The gaudiest? The one with the most aggressive advertising behind it?

Anyway, here a couple of once common words that I miss.

Whippersnapper is defined in the RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY as “an unimportant but offensively presumptuous person, esp. a young one.” What other word conveys the same meaning with as much poetry?

There are several ways of saying “a very small amount,” but do any of them sound as tiny as smidgeon? Such a cute little word.

Think about those words you know but seldom or never hear. Why is no one buying them anymore? And if you’re a writer, do you have the power to make them sell again?

In Miseerere Caren J. Werlinger has written an historical novel that weaves together narratives from two periods: the mid-1960s dominated by the Civil Rights Movement and the mid-1800s that saw the Civil War and the end of legalized slavery in America. The story centers on the descendants of Caitríona Ní Faolain, an Irish girl brought to America as an indentured servant.

One descendant in particular, eleven-year-old Connemara Mitchell, carries a heavy burden. Only she can lift a curse that began with Caitríona and has afflicted the family for a hundred years. But first she must uncover its secret.

After Conn’s father goes missing in action in Vietnam, her mother moves the family to their grandmother’s rundown house in West Virginia. Soon after their arrival, Conn sees the ghost of Caitríona, who reveals the terms of the curse. In each generation, one girl child will survive so that someday the curse might be lifted. All her siblings will perish. Soon afterward Conn’s younger brother almost dies of polio. She realizes that his life depends on her finding out the secret.

Through dreams and visions Conn experiences her ancestor’s life. Caitríona and her sister, Orla, are still children when their father sells them to the ironically named Lord Playfair. After a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, locked in the hold of a ship, they come to a pre-Civil War plantation where they labor alongside the house slaves. They are treated a little better than the Africans, but not much.

Catríona falls in love with Hannah, one of the slaves. The lives of the girls become more precarious as they try to conceal their love from everyone in the household. Catríona doesn’t help matters. Quick tempered and embittered, she’s whipped for impertinence. Conn experiences the whipping in a dream. Afterward faint scars appear on her back. She discovers a network of tunnels beneath the house and begins to explore, guessing the secret of the curse is hidden there.

Meanwhile Conn’s mother, Elizabeth, struggles to make a life in a new place. She hires Abraham Greene to help her fix up the house. Once a schoolteacher up North, Abraham now makes a living as a handyman. He becomes a friend of the Mitchell family. Word gets around, and rumors spread. Some people in the West Virginian town think Elizabeth and Abraham have crossed a line and must be punished.

Werlinger moves skillfully between the two narratives, building suspense in both. Her pacing is just about perfect. The characters are complex, believable, and sympathetic. Her view of human nature seems essentially hopeful and kind, given her compassionate rendering of characters that might have been cartoonish villains.

Miserere grabbed me and carried me all the way to the end. I put aside everything else and devoted a day to reading it, which is the highest tribute I can give to a story.

 

Guest post by Tahlia Newland

Another book in my Diamond Peak series has just been published! I think it is worthy of several exclamation marks in a row!!! That, of course, is something I’d never do in a book, no matter how excited I might be. In formal writing, one exclamation point at a time is enough. It reminds me of my mime teacher—was it really thirty years ago?—saying, ‘why do you turn three times when one is enough?’ Hmm, I was always more a dancer than a mime. As a dancer, I could pirouette as many times as I wanted.

But I digress. The topic of this little exposition of joy is that the third book in a four part series is now available for purchase. This, for me, is a magnificent achievement, and just in case you don’t realise it, I’m telling you so.

I began writing the series in 2007. I thought it was one book until I actually put the tips of my fingers to the keyboard and watched the words flow and the world and characters fill out. I wrote the whole series in three years and polished book one, Lethal Inheritance, enough to impress a literary agent. To cut a long story short, book one came out at the end of last year, book two was published a couple of months ago, and book four will be out in another few months.

The story is of a girl learning to handle her emotions as she fights demons on her way up a mountain to rescue her mother from demons, and she uses meditation methods to defeat the demons, which are external manifestations of her negative emotions. It’s all very metaphorical, which is why you can call it magical realism as well as contemporary fantasy, and it’s also metaphysical, because there’s a philosophical element and meditational experience woven into the story.

The central character, Ariel, takes control of her own destiny, just like I did when I decided (against my literary agent’s advice) to forget the traditional publishing system and opt for independent publishing. Perhaps Ariel whispered in my ear. More likely it was Walnut, the wise and rather quirky old mountain guide. It could have been Nick, the earnest, helpful, intense and rather dashing love interest in the story—I don’t think he’d like me calling him that though. He’d probably point out that it took Ariel three books to realise that she’d fallen in love with him.

‘I could have told her that in book one,’  he might say.

In Ariel’s defence, Twitchet, the grumpy talking cat, spent the first two thirds of book two, Stalking Shadows, trying to convince her that she shouldn’t go anywhere near Nick, and she had her reasons to keep her feelings locked away. She had her hands full with demons who were busy trying to fire up her negative emotions, so they could trap her,  feed on her, and then kill her to prevent her from killing their boss & rescuing her mother, which is why she’s in this hidden realm where people can fly and dissipate and where the subtle energy between people can be a tangible force. Yes, it really is electric between Ariel and Nick.

In this book, Ariel faces her hardest test yet—Emot, the demon of desire. He plays on her likes and wants and turns them into the craving he feeds on. The theme of the second part of the book is addiction and the heartbreak and frustration of those who try to help their loved ones get free of the Demon’s Grip. The question is, will Ariel make out alive or will she end up in the addicts ward at Sheldrake hospital? Read the book and find out.

 

Add it on Goodreads.

 

It’s always best to start at the beginning of a series though, so to inspire you to do just that, book one in the series is only 99c until the 6th July on Kindle and Kobo, so pick it up and read your way to the top of Diamond Peak.

 

Purchase Points for Demon’s Grip.

Kindle Store

Smashwords

Kobo

About the author:

Tahlia Newland is an award-winning fantasy and magical realism author with a metaphysical twist. If you enjoyed this blog post, you can join her on Facebook , Twitter or Google+ You can even fan her on Goodreads. When not reading, writing, reviewing or mentoring authors you may find her being an extremely casual high school teacher or making decorative masks. Tahlia began writing full time in 2008 after twenty years in the performing arts and a five-year stint as a creative and performing arts teacher in a high school. In 2012, she set up the Awesome Indies List to showcase quality independent fiction. She has had extensive training in meditation and Buddhist philosophy and lives in an Australian rainforest south of Sydney. Creativity is her middle name!

 

 

Kirsten Mortensen’s Loose Dogs is a wonderful novel, full of comedy without ignoring life’s sadness and cruelty. The characters are deftly drawn. The author gives them individuality even when they’re recognizable types. The story unfolds at a satisfying pace that kept me reading from start to finish.

Paige Newbury, the narrator and protagonist, works as an animal control officer in Rochester, New York. She seems content with her life, but then she receives a ring in the mail—not a diamond engagement ring, just gaudy costume jewelry that her erstwhile boyfriend, Gil Rudman, picked up at a flea market. Paige takes the ring as a sign that Gil, who left a while ago to pursue his career as an artist, is coming back to her.

She doesn’t want Gil to think she’s been waiting around for his return, even though she has, so she enlists the help of an acquaintance to pose as her boyfriend. Larry Crawford is a slick attorney and an accomplished player. He’s attracted to Paige and only too happy to help out with her scheme.

At this point I almost lost respect for Paige. The fake-boyfriend routine is such a stupid move, bound to end badly. And she obviously lacks the panache to bring it off. But Paige is a kind person. She sacrifices a meal at an expensive restaurant (courtesy of Larry) to catch a loose pit bull whose wounds suggest he’s been used for dogfighting. She worries about what will become of the pit. When a callous owner abandons her pregnant dog, Paige takes Lady in and sets about finding homes for the puppies. How could you not like and respect someone like that?

Many of Paige’s observations about the world and herself are laugh-out-loud funny. She thinks of romance as “the Prozac nature has slipped in our drink” to make life bearable.”  She has intelligent and wit. Even though she’s not glamorous, it’s altogether believable that Gil would come back to her and Larry would chase after her.

The plot of LOOSE DOGS turns on the romantic triangle, but I enjoyed the subplots just as much, especially Paige’s efforts to find and stop a dogfighting operation. Animal welfare is clearly an issue that matters to Mortensen. She donates some of the profits from the book to pit bull rescue.

Unlike many of the stories I enjoy, Loose Dogs has no foul language and no graphic sex or violence. Like its protagonist, it has humor, intelligence, and a good heart.

I could never get into zombies. Sad reanimated corpses, mindless and sexless, they shuffle along dropping rotted body parts in their wake, pausing occasionally to gnaw living human flesh. Horrifying, sure. Funny in a grisly kind of way. But mostly boring. Certainly not figures that evoke empathy.

I’ve enjoyed a few zombie movies—George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead, Peter Jackson’s slapstick Dead Alive, and Edgar Wright’s satiric Shawn of the Dead. But I wouldn’t have watched any of them without the urging of my husband, Joe, Heumann, a film scholar. (Joe takes to movies for reasons other than the stories they tell. He would watch anything by Peter Jackson because he loves Jackson’s visual style. Joe has seen The Lord of the Rings movies, parts of them more than once, but he has only a vague idea who Eomer and Faramir are.)

Given my indifference to zombies, it’s not surprising that I greeted the Zombie Apocalypse with a yawn. I had no interest in reading one of the many novels with a ZA premise. I wouldn’t have read Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (now also a movie) except for a recommendation from a friend whose judgment I trust. She loaned me the paperback.

Isaac Marion changed my mind about zombies. In Warm Bodies he creates a zombie hero who’s sympathetic, intelligent, and—amazingly—attractive in spite of his decomposing body.

R tells his own story and wins my sympathy from the start. He remembers nothing of his former life except the first letter of his name. He has a humdrum existence, hanging around an airport colonized by others of his kind, and venturing out to hunt and consume the few remaining humans in the novel’s post-apocalyptic world. But what else is he supposed to do? Everyone has to eat, right? R accepts that his flesh will eventually rot away until he becomes a skeleton, one of the Boneys who act as the colony’s elders.

Boneys keep zombie society functioning. They create schools to teach newbie zombies how to hunt. They join couples in a kind of parody of marriage, and they lead fervid religious services worshiping the sky. Fierce defenders of the status quo, Boneys keep everyone else in line.

The parallels between zombie and human society are humorous at the start, but they grow darker as the story unfolds and it become apparent that zombies are a manifestation rather than the root cause of the worldwide collapse of human societies. Things have gone terribly wrong, and nobody seems to know exactly how or why.

R shuffles through this structured non-life with a kind of bemused acceptance. Then something unprecedented happens. While out hunting, he consumes the brain of a young man named Perry. He experiences the usual pleasurable rush of memories and sensations from the brain, but they don’t pass within moments as they usually do. They linger, and gradually Perry takes up permanent residence in R’s mind.

R feels the need to help and protect Julie, Perry’s girlfriend, who is in immediate danger of being eaten. He conceals her from his fellow zombies and brings her home to the old airplane where he entertains her with recordings of Frank Sinatra songs.

Like a socially challenged high-school boy, R feels deeply but cannot express himself. His stuttering attempts to declare his love to Julie are touching and funny. And her gradual acceptance and growing affection for him show the best qualities of humanity—tolerance, empathy, and forgiveness.

Caring as he does for Julie, R finds he cannot go on as before. He can no longer eat people. He doesn’t know what he might become or whether he can survive the transformation, but love compels him to change. And the love between him and Julie inspires other zombies to question whether their fate is inevitable. In the end the lovers risk everything to find out.

Warm Bodies has zombies, but at heart it’s a love story. It embraces the treasured and audacious belief of romantics that love can change the world.