Happy Halloween and Samhain and end of the fall harvest!

“Moisture hung in the chill evening air in that halfway place between fog and rain.  The denuded trees thrust their claw-like branches upward while their leafy corpses littered the ground—evidence of a battle lost.”

 

This quoted first paragraph of my latest short story, The Vampire’s Raven, reflects exactly what I’m seeing outside my window on this cold, foggy, dark, damp, dreary October day. After a summer of long, cloudless days and warm, but not too hot, temperatures, the rapid slide into fall always makes me kind of grumpy. It is pitch black at seven a.m. and equally dark at seven p.m. which leaves me waking up sometimes not knowing whether it’s morning or night, especially with my variable sleep schedule.

At this point in the year, I contemplate breaking out the Christmas lights. Oh, who am I kidding—I set them up long ago in my bedroom for some cheer and haven’t taken them down since. However, I did get a star globe which plugs into my computer’s USB port and shines red, blue, and green stars on the ceiling. I think I’ll actually set that up very soon. Because you see it’s very dark here, even during the day, with the thick cloud cover giving the sun the middle finger.

This moody scene did inspire me to write a vampire paranormal story though, based on one of the few poets I actually like—Edgar Allen Poe. And since a badass vampire wouldn’t lament his lost Lenore, he’d do anything to get her back, the story is only inspired by The Raven instead of an actual modern retelling. Because we all need some good kick butt demon slaying to cheer us up when winter is coming. (Yep, I totally went there.)

You can buy my novelette directly from Amazon right now, or you can wait until Nov 1 to get it for free as part of the 150 plus book promo – The Ebookaroo SFF November promo – which is sure to keep you occupied during the cold, winter months. (Or the blasted heat if you are in the upside down part of the world!)

Warning! The free offer ends Nov 15.

The Summoner and the Seer is now available for purchase!

So I did it. I hit publish and my first novel is out on Amazon. It feels really good and also a little scary.

Fun facts

  • Some of the earlier chapters I hadn’t read in months. I’m more of an ‘edit a chapter as I get done with it and then move on’ kind of writer. It was fun to see the waffling of style choices as I went with quoted italics for thoughts in the beginning and later dropped the quotes near the middle. I had to clean all that up.
  • There were 12 instances of calling poor Nalani, ‘Nalini’. I remember that stretch of writing where I’d taken a break and came back and, for the life of me, I kept getting her name wrong even though I do have an outline with all the peoples’ names listed. I thought I’d found all the mistakes and corrected them. LOL! I was wrong.
  • I like using ‘stand up’ a lot. For future reference, it’s ok to say ‘he stood’ without the ‘up’.
  • I had 44 instances of two spaces in a row even though I’ve long gotten used to only one space after ending punctuation. I’m old, but not too old to learn new tricks, thank you very much! So where did all those come from? I blame aliens!
  • The word count came to 102,435 give or take a few depending on ebook or print format since I do some hyperlink cleanup for the print version. (Sheesh, they haven’t invented click on paper to bring up web pages yet?)

To buy the book (it’s free if you are in Kindle Unlimited!), click this link: http://a.co/j1BgKgo

Instafreebie Promotions

I also have an Instafreebie promotion where you can read the first three chapters for free to see if you want to buy it. (Same as viewing the Look Inside on Amazon).

Just my book sample:
https://www.instafreebie.com/free/Fj6Bm

A giveaway I joined with other fantasy books that might be cool too: https://www.instafreebie.com/free/KGibxnCCigvDiFmaQDQI

Enjoy!