Astrid gets an interview, and a Fur Thing snippet

Mia Darien, author of the Cameron's Law series, was very brave and had Astrid from the Blue Moon Detective's over for a character interview, and let her snark all over her blog. Check it out here: http://www.miadarien.com/character-interview-j-h-sked-astrid-from-the-blue-moon-detectives-series/

Fur Thing is coming along nicely, and I've got a snippet to share with you today. Usual warning: edits may change things, and there may be typo's. Enjoy.


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Jenny Lightfoot had spent a lot of time in this room. Her scent was everywhere, especially in the bedroom doorway. She leant against it now, frowning at the bed, and I knew why the hotel staff hadn't thrown me out on my ear. This death was bugging the hell out of her, and I was a possible source of information. Once Sam Prent's husk left the hotel, Lightfoot had no case left. No suspects to question, no answers to get. Along comes Billy, and a way back into the case.

I couldn't really complain, since it got me a lot further than I would've by myself.

"Why is this one getting under your skin so much?" I asked her. She was right about the vamp-in-ice scent. It had crawled into every part of the room, seeping into the carpet and curtains and especially the bed. It entwined with the dry, ancient fur smell of a very large cat, and I had to restrain the urge to arch my back and hiss.  That was not a friendly smell. That was a smell that said 'If you cross my path I will eat you.'

"Do you know what I did in the Corps?"

I shook my head. "I know you were at Captain's rank, and I know they blew the hell out of you and your team. That's about it."

She nodded. "We were MP's. The IED that hit us was set by one of our own guys. He'd shot three civilians and his C.O. and run."

"Did you get him?"

"Oh, yes." Her eyes went flat and cold. "He  died in the blast."

I looked at her face and considered how certain injuries could be consistent with bomb trauma. I'd seen that look before. Astrid had no compunction about killing when it was needed, and she did it with the same eyes.

"Before we ended up getting blown to hell in the desert, I was stationed in Prague for eighteen months. The only case I didn't close was a murder in a smart hotel. Twofer; a visiting colonel and his wife. The colonel was shredded; his wife looked a great deal like the girl I saw on this bed a week ago."

"Same scent?" Astrid wouldn't find that case on any law enforcement database. Military investigators don't tend to share with the civilian cops.

"Same scent."

"How, exactly, was the colonel shredded?"

Lightfoot looked at me. "Ever seen what a cat can do with its back claws?"

I thought back to the video, and the glint of claws in dim light. Those things had been long enough to give Freddie Kreuger an inferiority complex.

"Shredded," I nodded. "Gotcha."

I'd seen enough. If Samantha Prent's ghost was in the hotel, it wasn't interested in talking to me. Maybe Ruth would have more luck. Ghosts and cats can interact pretty well, but if the ghost doesn't want to play, I can't go looking for them on the ether. There's nothing that can play hide-and-seek like a dead girl.

Cool Shiny Stuff, and ye old Archeology course, and Chingford Plains stuff

For the past week I've been watching my fellow Allegories of the Tarot authors coo over their pendants on Facebook, and made little whimpering noises in the back of my throat. Then I got home from work on Thursday, and a sweet little package containing this was on the carpet:

So I promptly went on Facebook, and made my own cooing noises, because it's gorgeous!

This past week was a bit crazy. I'm doing a part-time archeology course through Coursera, which offers free courses run by different university lecturers. I'm having a blast, although there is a weekly quiz and a weekly assignment, which when you're as anal as I am about doing stuff right can be a tad time consuming. One of the Blue Moon books I have planned for the future features a dig, and I'd always wanted to learn about archeology, so the two things just combined really well.

This weeks course saw me heading to Chingford Plain to snap some photo's. It's easy to get to for me, since it's about seven minutes away from the train station (if you have short legs, like I do. I guess taller folks will make the trek faster). I spent a happy hour or so tramping around. I got shots of the Hunting lodge, the plain itself, and on the last couple of shots, heading back to the road, I tripped over these:

They look like some sort of flagstone, set into the ground. The edges are pretty well defined, and although I'm aware of the geological fracturing process that can make rocks appear to be shaped by humans into geometric shapes, I'd expect to find more than just these. I did a bit of tap dancing over the area (I'd just landed on my butt in the grass, I wasn't going to get stranger looks at that point) and there's a definite difference in sound in that location to other parts of the plain. I know this was a popular day-tripping spot up until the first world war, but I can't find a record of any building on this part of the plain. It's pretty close to the main road, so I expected to find something, but nope.

Then I took a wander back along the road and found these:

At first glance, it looked like some sort of worm party. A careful look showed that whatever this is wasn't moving, or doing much of anything except give the plant concerned the appearance of chicken-pox. The forest around the plain has a pretty unique ecological system, and I'm not a gardner, so I've no clue as to whether there is a fungus or something that is common, but the single leaf I found with one red whatever, a couple of feet away from the leaves swarming with red, suggests that it spreads. 

So I don't know if I'll ever solve the mystery of the Chingford Plain rocks/stones I tripped over, and I have no clue what is growing on the leaves - but the whole evening has given me a pretty funky story idea that I'm going to leave to brew for a bit. 

In the meantime, have a few more pics: Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, and a couple of views of the Plain itself.

I never knew books had testicles? A few thoughts on the gender brouhaha.

The SF and Fantasy world has been in an uproar this week, over this. (The latest unbelievable WTF moment comes courtesy Theodore Beale. Jim Hines has a pretty excellent post on this creature, but don't click on the links in that unless your idiot tolerance is higher than mine.)
There've been a lot of people screaming that the cries of sexism were unfair, and the authors themselves responded in a post that pretty much exacerbated the whole damn mess, to be honest. My view? If you have to pick physical attributes about writers, and you're being non-sexist, where are the comments about male authors stunning good looks and movie-star charisma? Their tight buns and manly chests, and comparisons to Ken dolls and He-Man? Why is there even a "lady-writer" and "lady-editor" distinction? I mean, I don't particularly care what an author looks like, or whether they're male, female, or both. I don't care which gender they identify with, and I don't care what their race, religion or sexual orientation is. I care about story.

Then the blog-spots came out. Female writers telling stories about being marginalised, insulted, and humiliated at Cons. And the hate mail that they got for speaking out; like Ann Aguire. And I was floored, because I never, ever, expected gender to be an issue with my writing. Never.

I've dealt with the misogyny BS my entire life in other areas; from my first job where the sales manager thought it was hysterically funny to grope me in his office, (right up until I punched him and got a warning for it) to the guys who would tell me, in all seriousness, that I should be at home making babies instead of selling ironmongery in a hardware store. One of the reasons I consider myself very, very lucky at my current job is that nobody on my team gives a damn about what I have in my pants. They care about me doing my job, and doing it well. There is no glass ceiling in that organisation that I can see; or if there is, it's been well camoflauged. Half of senior management is female, and we have every race, religion and colour you can think of working side-by-side. I love that about it.

I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy by female and male writers. Ursula Leguin, Joan Aiken, Vonda M McIntyre, C J Cherryh are just a few of the names off the top of my head. It never occurred to me that they might have been considered lesser writers because they didn't posses a penis. As far as I know, even male writers use a keyboard, their brain and heart to write with. I'm fairly sure typing with testicles would be awkward, and possibly painful.

When I started publishing, and reached out to fellow writers and bloggers, I never had the gender issue thrown back at me. Then again, I publish using my initials, mainly because I wanted to keep the writing career separate to a small degree from my work life. (It's an open secret; pretty much everyone I work with knows I write. A couple of them have even read my books:)) The whole gender thing never occurred to me.

My twitter handle is the same, and I'd been on there a couple of months before I realised some people thought I was guy. (To be honest, I thought that was quite funny. Still do.) And when I pointed out that I was a girl, and yes, I had boobies, and yes, I still write the same books, I didn't have any issues. Nobody came back and called me the Downfall of Writing because of my ovaries. Which is good, because my ovaries don't write my books either; I think that would outweigh testicle typing in terms of inconvenience and pain.


I've never been to a con. I keep meaning to go, but the timing and finances have never co-operated. My friend and fellow writer, Anne-Mhairi-Simpson, regularly goes to the UK cons and has a blast. She hasn't mentioned anything about stalkers, harassment or the
general unpleasantness others have come across, so I don't know if that's even a thing here in the UK. I'd be surprised if it wasn't; it's a sad fact that most females will put up with a certain level of dickish behaviour because we've done it all our lives. (That doesn't make it right. It just means it happens so frequently and so often we no longer process it, like the fact that if you go out and it rains, your shoes get wet. Unpleasant, and unavoidable, but at a low level tolerable and forgettable.)  So I can't speak from personal experience regarding cons.

Apparently, judging from some of the comments I've seen, there's a good chance readers won't pick up my books because I'm female. I'd like to think the average reader is more intelligent than that, because thinking my writing is inferior because I'm female is not just insulting my girl parts, it's insulting your own intelligence. 

Books don't have testicles or ovaries. They don't frantically hump each other in the library after lights-out to make new books. That's left up to the writers. (Making new books, I mean. I pretty much don't care who my favourite authors are getting down with either, as long as they write in other moments.)

At the end of the day, story is what counts. Story is everything. Story has no gender, no race, no religion. It transposes those barriers; it brings a meeting of minds across distance and time and nationality. It takes us down the rabbit hole, and if your first concern is whether your rabbit is a boy or a girl, you have issues that no story will ever touch. 

 

Self Inflicted Pain (Pilates Diary, Part 1)

This week I decided to give Pilates a bash. I haven't actually exercised properly in years, and I like my food (when I remember to eat), so my four-pack has gone the way of the dodo. Eating in the UK doesn't help, to be honest; most of the stuff here has enough processed sugar and syrups added to give a small village either a diabetic coma or the mother of all sugar rushes. It's in EVERYTHING. Even worse, to eat healthily costs a bloody fortune. If the government is serious about addressing obesity, they should subsidise healthy foods, instead of quacking on about banning stuff, like overbearing nannies trying to get another headline.
I had a bit of spare money for once, so I bit the bullet and went for the good stuff. So I've been on fresh fruit and salads and home-cooked meals with no shop-bought sauces, and the energy levels are definitely up. However, there is still the matter of bouncing in ways that insult the law of gravity, and since I've got a family wedding coming up, I'd like to not channel my inner-pregnant hobbit look for the photo's. Healthy eating helps, but exercise is the only way to get the flabby bits to stop swaying in the summer breeze.

There are a few pretty good clips on you-tube, so I've come in from work each night, picked a ten minute session, and tried to go along with it. The results have been … erm. Well, this is me.  Overall, it hurts. It's also a lot of fun, and I'm enjoying it, so I'll keep at it and see how it goes. My comfortably round shape feels a little bit firmer, which is what I want, and the hobbit pouch is disappearing, which is what I really want - I've avoided pregnancy for years, so looking like I'm about to give birth is awkward. But today I didn't actually fall over, so I think I'm improving.

Monday resulted in one face-plant, one oh-bugger-there-goes-the-table, one bounce of the wall and a great deal of whimpering. When an exercise is introduced with "This will really test your balance," this is code for "For the love of Cthulhu, don't let Janet try this."

Tuesday we investigated how to become a human pretzel, and discovered the enchanting position of Screaming Beached Whale. The fact that I the Violent Femmes Blister in the Sun running through my head at this point really didn't help.

Wednesday my body was still sulking, and I had to do my assignment for the archeology mini-course I'm doing, so I took that as my rest day. My body said thank you, but I wasn't quite as bouncy today.

Thursday (tonight) we re-discovered the human pretzel, and why accidentally doing the splits is a Bad Thing, at which point Screaming Beached Whale appeared again. I may trade-mark it.

The writer and caffeine - a brief guide

If you have a writer in your life you already know this. If you have the rare writer that doesn't consume caffeine, you may be required to donate your writer to medical research. For those that don't, here's a quick guide.

The relationship between the writer and her caffeine can be both complex and simple. The simple part is usually that your writer is a caffeine addict, and removal of the substance  may result in trauma. (Said trauma may be inflicted on the hapless barista at the nearest coffee shop who tries to serve decaf, and gets head-butted by said caffeine-deprived writer. Should this happen, tip well and leave before the police get there. Or save a small portion of your monthly income for bail.) 

The complex part involves the relationship between the writers mind and body. This usually involves some sort of internal dialogue, as follows:

The Morning Dialogue:

BODY: Coffee. Need coffee.
MIND: Gah. Coffee. Need Coffee. No use big words yet.

The Afternoon Dialogue:

BODY: Coffee. Want coffee.
MIND: We can do that. The last cup was at least an hour ago. 

The Evening Dialogue:

BODY (sits up, after a few hours of typing): COFFEEE!!!
MIND: It's nearly eleven. You won't sleep.
BODY: Do you want to finish this chapter or not?
MIND: I don't really need sleep.
BODY: And make a decent cup this time. The last one was like sucking on tar.
MIND: You cheeky cow!
BODY: Do you want to write or not? GIVE ME MY CAFFEINE. 


It may be useful at this point to mention that having your writer bounce off the ceiling is not really a good thing, and pays havoc with your deposit.

Bath Time Blues (Moment of Oops, part 3679)

Bath time is sacred. It's one of the few times in my life I can just chill, surrounded by warm water and soapy things and bubbles. It's been one of my favourite things since I can remember, and retreating into warm, chest deep water with a book and a beverage and an hour or two is my kind of heaven.

It is not the place I expect to be assaulted by my own bath mat.

One of the first things we discovered when we moved into this flat is that the bathtub is slippery as hell. Getting in and out of it for the first couple of days was the equivalent of strapping bacon rashers to your feet and trying to stroll out over a frying pan; somebody was going to get hurt.

So we toddled across the road to the little corner shop, which sells everything from carpet shampoo to little wire baskets, and got a bath mat. It's cute. It has little dolphins on it, and three shades of blue, and a whole bunch of suckers, to stick to the bottom of the bath.

Tonight's bath was no different to start with; I spent a happy forty minutes or so splashing around, giggling quietly over the story idea that hit me earlier tonight. The usual. Then I pulled the plug as the water was cooling rapidly, and stood up.

The bath mat came with me.

Remember those suckers? Those multiple, strategically placed, ultra-suction cups that are intended to stop people like me cracking their skulls in their own tub? Turns out that when you don't check to make sure the bath mat is the right way around, and spend nearly an hour sitting on the damn things, they attach just as efficiently to the human body. 

It also turns out that because of the way I'd managed to get the bloody thing stuck to me (there are parts of my anatomy that were never intended to have suction applied, dear readers. Tonight I found them all), I'd no sooner get one part loose than the next section would clamp down again.  Standing in the bath means I have a great view of the vanity mirror. There is something incredibly disconcerting about watching yourself frantically shimmy around the bathroom with a dolphin stuck to your pertinent bits.

I finally got the wretched thing off by lining up with the edge of the sink stand, and rubbing against it like a small, grumpy, hairless bear trying to scratch an itch against a tree. It puddled around my ankles in a heap of blue plasticy dolphins, leaving my rear end looking like I'd been groped by a very enthusiastic and amorous octopus. 

I took my red, throbbing behind to sulk in my room, and write my blog. I guarantee I'll check that mat tomorrow night, and at least for the foreseeable future. 

8 things you need to know about Gastro (Pass the disinfectant, please)

There is currently the mother of all gastro bugs circulating. Since I've just recovered from this one, and the damn thing would make the Terminator cry while trying not to soil himself, here's a handy guide to what you can expect during the process.

1) You will be too scared to hiccup, and you will be right. You also don't want to be on any form of public transportation, or anything that will jostle you in any way. This includes walking, stairs, and crawling. Things will get messy.

2) You will feel hungover without touching alcohol. There is something intrinsically evil about any bug that makes you feel like you made friends with a tequila bar for 5 frigging days, without any of the benefits, like actually enjoying yourself during said visit to the bar. It gets worse in bright light, and is exaggerated by working on a PC screen, which brings us to the next point:

3) If you try to work on a p.c. or laptop, you will throw up your toenails. In addition to the pounding headache, playing with any sort of backlit screen will make you feel incredibly nauseas. This includes smart phones, so the recommendation here is to wail about wanting to die on whatever social media pool you play in, and log off again.

4) Your legs will hurt. This bug has the side-bonus of truly flu-like symptoms. To make reaching the bathroom in time an extra-special adventure, it will remove your leg bones and replace them with noodles made out of pain. 

5) You can dehydrate really, really fast. Joking aside, if someone in the household gets this and they are really young, elderly, or already sickly, be very careful. Dehydration makes the headache worse (fun! not.) and it can kill. Plain water and this bug operate under the anti-gravity rule where what goes down must come up. Get some electrolyte sachets, and if needed, hit the emergency room. They may need a drip.

6) The pharmacist will give you stuff that is useless. The fun part about medicine is that you have to swallow it, and it needs to stay in your system for around 15 - 20 minutes to work. Anti-nausea tablets are as much use as a vegetarian vampire at this point.

7) You will crave weird things, and be unable to eat them. I spent nearly a week fantasising about everything from chocolate fudge to pickled herring. I have a fridge full of food that I couldn't touch because one bite triggered the return of every meal I ever ate. Once you can eat, avoid dairy at all costs for a couple of days. Just trust me on this one. Soy milk is better. Dairy bad.

8) As you get better, the rest of your house-hold will come down with it. There's nothing quite like hearing your housemate imitate a cat with a large hair-ball outside your bedroom door at 3 in the morning.

So there you have it. Hopefully this bout passes you by, since there are more pleasant ways to spend a week, like teasing Cthulhu or playing chicken with a great white. 

Holiday Weekend Freebies, & the whole word count issue

I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only author on the planet that doesn't write by word count. Just about every writer I know has a set amount of words that must go down on the page daily/weekly/monthly/by the hour, and then either do the happy dance when the goal is reached, or flog themselves bitterly when they've missed it. 
I seem to have the paddling-pool approach: I open the document, splash around as much as I can, and then get out to clean up the mess. Word count is usually the last thing I look at.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One of these is that I write on my phone during the work commute, and that doesn't give me a word count. It's just me, headphones on, ignoring the sardine crush around me, happily tapping away at the screen until my stop. I won't know the word count there until I transfer it to the laptop. This can be a bit awkward when writing shorts; the piece I wrote for Allegories of the Tarot had to be edited down by about 1K, and I had to kill a couple of nice little scenes, but it was a stronger piece for the edits. I tend to suffer diarrhoea of the keyboard, and while that can work in a book-size piece, it hurts a short.
The other reason, I guess, is that I'm a pantser, not a plotter. I have no idea what's going to happen in a story until I write it. (I've tried the plotting thing, and it was the most awkward, dreary bit of cardboard ever to hit my trashcan.) I know the story's going well when I re-read the last part and go "Cool! What happened next?" I write until the story is done, and some worlds write long (everything on the Crescent, by the looks of things) and some of them write shorter-ish (Blue Moon Detectives, although that may be about to change.)

I'm quite happy with writing this way, although it does sometimes feel a bit awkward when you're chatting to other writers and they mention their word count for the day, and then ask what yours was. Shrugging and saying you got a couple of chapters in sometimes gets you the same kind of look as the strange guy who sometimes wonders down Kentish Town road with his underwear on his head. 

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In the spirit of the long weekend, I have Blood Moon Dance and Quarter the Moon free on kindle for today and tomorrow. If you don't have a kindle, but want a bit of lip-smacking free-story goodness, hit me up in the comments and I'll happily send you a PDF. Amazon links and descriptions to whet your appetite:

UK SITE :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Dance-Tales-Crescent-ebook/dp/B00CNCUI1Y
.COM SITE :
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CNCUI1Y

 Serial killers and hawks don't get on well.

A small logging village on the outskirts of the Crescent is being terrorized, and an innocent family is being blamed for the murders.

In this fresh adult take on the Red Riding Hood myth, Amber and Jadah have to match their wits against the killer before time runs out, and the killer finds another victim - or the village turns on the werewolves that have lived amongst peacefully them for years.

"This is the blood dance, this is the end dance, and the outcome is death." -Amber.


Blood Moon Dance is a novella of around 17K, and takes place shortly after the events of WolfSong, but can be read as a stand-alone piece.

This book contains strong language and scenes of violence.

UK SITE:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Moon-Blue-Detectives-ebook/dp/B0088QK72E

.COM SITE:
http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Moon-Blue-Detectives-ebook/dp/B0088QK72E

The first Blue Moon Detectives collection. Two brand new tales from the Blue Moon Detectives characters, plus Basement Blues and Die Laughing.

House Mates - When Astrid moves into her new apartment, she has to deal with an unwanted house mate, and the dark secret she's hiding.
Yes, Astrid, There is a Santa - What happens when a centuries old vampire discovers that Santa is real?
Blue Moon Detectives - Saving the (undead) girl shouldn't be this hard...
Die Laughing - The gods are back in town - and they don't play nice. Billy and the gang find themselves fighting a Norse god with a bad habit of killing comedians.

The stupidity of evil is contagious (rant alert)

I've been lucky enough to see some really good social changes in my life. I remember the Berlin wall coming down. I saw the end of apartheid, and Madiba become president.  A large amount of LGBT folk no longer feel they have to hide who and what they are. Mixed marriage is longer regarded as a perversion in most circles.

Then there's the other side of the coin. The folk that still think women should accept a casual hiding when they ask for it, that anyone being raped or molested deserves it, and that an institution with a history of interfering with little boys and covering it up, has the right to dictate what two (or more) consenting adults get up to. The people that think that having breasts and ovaries mean that you should suck up a lower pay-cheque, that the government has the right to decide what you can and cannot do with your own body, and the ones that think that sending police into rob the homeless of their belongings is completely acceptable because they're bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood, dear. The ones that think that having a darker skin tone makes you sub-human.

On that side of the coin there are the moments of true evil, given a human face and leaving the rest of us soul-sick.

They are the men who pick up weapons, mow down an unarmed man with a car, and butcher him in front of on-lookers, and then pose for filming by those on-lookers with some sort of rabid manifesto that should chill anybody. (On a side-note, I completely fail to understand why somebody - anybody - didn't try to stop these guys. It takes a bit of time to behead a man, and a good swift knock on the back of the head with a rock might have stopped that part. I would also like to know how they were so sure he was a serving soldier, since he was out of uniform, because that implies they targeted Lee Rigby a good while earlier.)

They are also the people who riot in the streets afterwards, screaming racial epithets and attacking places of worship. Both of the guys who did this were British, but I doubt the EDL screamed "Piss off Brits!" while they were hurling bottles and charging the cops. There were two sets of terrorists on the streets that day. Unfortunately it doesn't appear the second will face any justice at all.

The idiot MPs who criticised the armed police for taking so long to get there. Pick a direction; those cops have to wade through a bunch of security including getting authorisation just to get to their weapons. Their locked up weapons, unless there was an armed car in the area; in which case they are locked in the car armoury. This is a policy that you enforced, so yeah, it'll take a bit of time. But it's a lot easier to use a man's death to get a sound-bite, isn't it?

The people who climb onto social media declaring a mini-war on an entire religion or colour of people - yep, they fall into that category too.

And the worst thing is, they did exactly what the two butchers wanted, and likely planned for. Rage begets rage, and violence begets violence, and at the end of it you have another potential blood feud starting.

Who wins, in messy, stupid little wars like this?

Any politician or government department with bad news to bury wins. Any politician pushing for less civilian rights and more police power will ride this one into the ground. 

The people who abuse a religion until it's bent and shaken and almost unrecognisable to the millions who genuinely practice it. They'll win too, and likely use these two men as poster boys in the future. 

The far right, who've already leapt all over this like starving vultures, and gone out to do a little damage of their own. They win.

The ones who seize any excuse to hate. The ones that want power. The ones addicted to blood. They win.

The rest of us? We sure as hell don't win. We bury our dead, and mourn, and rage on blogs like this over the utter stupidity of it. The futility of another man dead, and families destroyed, and if we aren't very, very careful, we just add to the hate. It's contagious that way.

How to Destroy the Prince of Darkness (Moments of Oops, Aargh, and Possible Conversion)

Before we enter the latest saga, a quick heads up on the Allegories of the Tarot project. My gorgeous Moon teaser card is up there, and will be up here, just as soon as I can get the file to save. Me and tech, folks. It's like putting a chicken on roller skates. We've hit the $2250 mark, which is amazing. Thanks to everybody who's spread the word, donated, or simply encouraged us. It's been a hell of a ride, with more to go.

Anyway, returning to our previously scheduled programming, I present the following guide :

1) Climb onto crowded tube car for trip home after long,looooong, day. It works better if your nerves are already frayed. It makes the shrieking more effective.

2) Feel something with eight legs scuttle over your throat. It helps to be severely arachnaphobic for this part.

3) Bitch-slap yourself, hard enough that other passengers turn to stare at you. (Do NOT miss this step. It is crucial.)

4) Hold your hand out to your fellow passengers, with shaking fingers lightly smeared with ex-arachnid, and screech "SATAN!".

5) In the sudden, stunned silence that descends over the car, think about what you just said, and realise there is no conceivable way of explaining you meant spider, and you really aren't dangerous, and can the guy with the briefcase edging carefully away from you be any more obvious? Really?

6) Wait out the ride to the next stop in an ever-widening space, which is actually quite pleasant. Usually at this point you're wedged under someone else's armpit, with a baby stroller trying to climb your leg.

7) Watch about 80% of your fellow passengers dog-pile out of the carriage at the next station, and stand staring at you from the platform.

8) At this point you actually have a seat. (To be honest, you have most of the tube carriage to yourself.) Waving at the people who got off as the tube pulls out is an optional extra, but shouldn't be dismissed for the sheer enjoyment factor.

9) Spend the rest of the trip thinking the little bugger that started all the trouble has revived and is now zombie-spider, because it feels like you have legs all over your throat, even places it didn't touch. As a result, you end up frantically patting yourself every 8 seconds or so. The remaining passengers get off at the next stop.

10) Realise that this being London, there is a very good chance that someone in that carriage believes you really DID just kill Satan. At this point, it would help if you actually believed he existed, but hey. Slaying the Prince of Darkness got you a seat on the tube. You can't really top that.


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You can catch up with my fictional worlds on kindle at  Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. So far, nobody has been attacked by any spiders in them, but we do have lots of violence, snark, magic, and strange events.

Character Interview : Jadah, from the Crescent series

Jadah was introduced to the world as the ill-fated younger cousin of Amber in WolfSong. Known for her sharp tongue and off-beat sense of humour, being dead hasn't stopped her following Amber and the squad around the Crescent and beyond.  

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Q: Thanks for agreeing to the interview. Tell us a bit about yourself?

A: You do know I'm dead, right? Life-challenged? I suppose you could call me an ex-hawk.

Q: The life-challenged thing has been mentioned, yes. What are the hawks? Can you give us some background?

A: Hawks are one of the three main races in the Crescent, the country I'm from. The other two are humans and the Clans - the werewolves. There are others, like the fey, but they tend to keep to themselves.

Q: There are exceptions, though? Brin, for instance.

A: The fey king, yah. He has a thing for Amber. I hope it passes soon, but I think he's well and truly smitten.

Q: You sound concerned. Is that a bad thing? I'd think Amber deserves a bit of happiness, to be honest.

A: He's an immortal royal who loves politics. Amber is a half-blood hawk who thinks with her sword first, and has all the tact of a drunken buffalo. There is no way this will end well, for either of them, and she knows it. Why do you think she left the Crescent so fast? Happiness would be nice, but I'm not sure Amber would know what to do with it.

Q: Why are there mixed squads on the borders and not the internal Crescent, where your squad is from?

A: The short answer is: because people can be bastards.

Q: A little more detail would be nice…

A: That entails a bit of a history lesson, then. Hawks were on the Crescent for a very long time. Then the wolf folk came, followed closely by humans. Best I can tell they were fleeing a war of some sort - you want Garliaan for the historical stuff - and they entered the Crescent as refugees.  The folk that settled on the borders mixed well and thoroughly with the hawks and the werewolves both. The ones that had a problem with the species difference headed for the interior, hoping to find their own place. The result is a bunch that don't play well with others, and there's a lot of resentment of the hawks because of certain laws. The little things, like mandatory education and women having the same status as men. There's a certain kind of person that doesn't like that.

Q: Wouldn't it be easier to just leave those communities alone?

A: Our country, our rules. And here's the thing: thoughts like that spread. It's like a disease, and it doesn't take much for them to catch hold. Even some hawks fall to it, and that is intolerable. Our job is to hold the Crescent safe, and you can't do that if you hate your charges.

Q: So the squads are the Crescent police?

A: More like a combination between your police and army. We ride the borders as well as internally, and if it comes to a war, we're the ones on the front lines. And most of your police don't use magic.

Q: None of our police use magic. They use technology and forensics.

A: You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you sleep better. We have science, and scientists. Magic and science are pretty compatible, when you use them the right way. Stating something doesn't exist because you don't believe in it makes no sense at all.

Q: But you have the Shrike cult, which doesn't believe in it either. They've caused a lot of trouble on the Crescent in the past.

A: There's a difference in not believing in something, and loathing it. And the Shrike cult is still causing trouble; that won't stop.

Q: How come you came back as ghost?

A: Because it was better than coming back as a garden slug? Because I needed a hobby? Pick one.

Q: In WolfSong, you said you were sent.

A: I was. Look, I can't go into too much detail about who runs the afterlife. But  I'm back for a reason, because if something isn't done, there won't be any more hawks. I can't stop geology, and you know what is going to happen to the Crescent. But I can help try to save my species, and to do that, I need to be with my squad. To be specific, I need to be with Amber.

Q: So whoever's in the charge of the afterlife wants to save the hawks? Does Amber know this?

A: Would you want the entire species camping out on your doorstep at once? There are some things my cousin doesn't need to know just yet. Confusing someone who likes to solve problems with a sharp blade is not a good thing.

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You can catch up with Jadah in WolfSong and Blood Moon Dance, both available on kindle at  Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

                                                

New WolfSong cover, Blood Moon Dance goes live, & Allegories of the Tarot updates.

The new WolfSong cover is done, and I think it complements Blood Moon dance quite well. I'm liking this theme, and I already know what the Raven's cover will look like, so I may work on that a bit this long weekend.

You can grab your copy here on the Amazon.com site, and here from the UK site. NB - there are no changes to the book itself; this is purely a cover change, so don't panic.



Blood Moon Dance has gone live today. It clocked in at around 17.4K, so it's a nice little chunk of story - something to get your teeth into, but not over-long. Jadah seems to have developed a streak of snark a mile-long, and she uses it a lot. She's becoming one of my favourite characters to write. I have a great deal of fun with that ghost, and she kindly gave me a character interview that'll be posted over the next couple of days.

It's a re-working of the Little Red Riding Hood fable, Crescent style, which means that everything gets turned upside down, and inside out. As usual, lots of blood, gore, and sharp pointy objects abound.

You can grab your copy from the Amazon.com site here, or the UK version over here. This one comes with a  strong language and scenes of violence warning, which is pretty par for the course in Amber's world.

Seriously folks - these are not really grandma-friendly or kid friendly books. If you like horror and dark fantasy, you'll be fine. If you don't want characters saying anything stronger than "poot" when things go pear-shaped, you may be in for a shock. 

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With 30 days of fundraising left, Allegories of the Tarot is going strong. The goodies up for grabs on the Indiegogo page are really impressive, and there's a very special perk coming up. The kind that makes you go Oooh! Shiny! and stroke your p.c. screen in inappropriate ways (although that may just be me). 
Being invited to write for the anthology was the reason I ended up with Blood Moon Dance, so it's really, really cool to see it doing well and getting the support it already has. I can't wait to read the rest of those stories.

Cover Art Reveal & Give Away- Blood Moon Dance

Blood Moon Dance will be released next week. Here's a sneak peek at the cover art for you.

The WolfSong cover will be re-designed on a similar theme; although I love the old cover, I'd like to see if a new, simpler version has an impact. 

If you'd like an ARC copy of Blood Moon Dance, I have 10 e-book versions to give away - let me know in the comments. 

Blood Moon follows straight on from WolfSong, but can also be read as a stand alone; it features Amber and Jadah investigating a serial killer mystery in a village close to the border of the Crescent.

Strange Day of the Week - Moments of aargh!(again)

Anyone reading this blog regularly know that strange things tend to happen to me. Occasionally they involve pigeons. Every so often I have a day where so many moments of WTF occur, my brain shuts down trying to process it. For your reading pleasure, I present : Thursday. (Note - although weird stuff happened during the day, it was mainly job related, so not included. Although threatening to head-butt your PC screen gets you very disapproving looks from IT.)

Moment 1 :

Reaching the train station, looking down, and realising I'm wearing my new slippers. These aren't the type of slippers that can pass as shoes if you squint either; they have fluff. And ears. Go home to change into actual boots, and realise that I can now feel every stone, slimy puddle, and bit of nastiness that doubles as a London pavement, even in this little outpost of the city. The slippers are unsalvageable.

Moment 2 :

Get home from work, and can't get my key to turn in the front door. This door has been a pain since we moved into the flat; the wood swells and warps every time it rains and I've had a few moments of struggling to get it open. Choice: call a locksmith (mucho, mucho money would go winging it's way out of my bank account. I can see the wingbeats when I think about it) or call Mandy and Tim. Tim is a big lad - I'm five three by the skin of my teeth, and the top of my head doesn't quite reach his chest. Mandy send Tim thundering down the road to my place, and I spend the time waiting visualising what sort of superhero cape he'd wear.

Tim crosses the road, rolling his shoulders in anticipation; I need in that door. My bladder is singing Ave Maria, my feet hurt, and my Nando's is staring up at me. Either we get that key turned or the door is saying fare-thee-well to this world. Tim shoves the door a few times. He doesn't want to kick it in and turns sad, puppy dog eyes on me. Then he reaches through the letterbox, pulls the door in, and turns the key in one easy motion, opening the door. I feel remarkable stupid at this point in time. My bladder thinks he's a god.

Moment 3 :

I climb into bed at the end of a long day and hear a ping. Followed by a clunk. Then another ping. When I turn on the light and look under the bed, there are a couple of bolts lying on the floor. My bed base appears to be dismantling itself. As I watch, another washer answers the call of gravity and drops, missing my nose by an inch. The bolt that follows doesn't miss at all. At which point I utter a phrase that would have my mother reaching for the soap. I picture myself trying to fix it, and decide that if the bloody thing does collapse, it's not that far to the floor anyway. I put a plaster on my nose and get back into bed. Every couple of hours I wake up to a creak-ping-clunk noise, although the bed is still standing in the morning.

My theory? Thursday was the day this week that the Universe made itself some popcorn and settled in to watch me, while pointing and laughing. The Nando's was pretty good, though.