RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//How to graciously answer that invidious question: “Have I heard of you?” Also, some lovely early feedback on ROGUE FAMILIAR – just released!!! – and how we don’t always know what we’re writing.
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He left to save her from herself… But who will save him from her?
When Lady Seliah Phel wakes from a drugged sleep to find herself abandoned by her newly bonded wizard, she vows revenge—and to hunt him down. Tracking him through the familiar wilds of the marshlands of her home is the easy part; learning to use her nascent magical skills is something else entirely. So is facing the vast, uncaring society of the Convocation in a time of brewing war.
Jadren El-Adrel is not known for doing the right thing, but getting as far away from Seliah as possible before he drains her dry will be his one noble gesture. So what if she weeps a few tears. Better than her dying in his service—or enabling him to become the ravenous beast that crawls beneath his skin. Unfortunately, in his self-imposed exile, and without the power of his familiar, Jadren quickly runs afoul of the enemy.
As her vengeful quest for recapture becomes a rescue mission, Selly faces all she still doesn’t know about the greater world of wizards and familiars. And Jadren, once determined to walk his own path and stay far, far away from the idealistic fools of House Phel, finds himself aligning with them against the house of his birth. War is coming to the Convocation, which means a clever wizard should pick the side most likely to win.
Sadly, Jadren has never been all that clever…
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It. Is. Finished.
Yes, oh my lovelies: I completed the final proofing of ROGUE FAMILIAR this morning and will have it uploaded everywhere tomorrow for release on Monday, April 24.
Cue the rejoicing!!!
And, since this is coincidentally (OR NOT???) spring promo week here at the SFF Seven, it’s actually apropos for me to be mentioning this book. I know a lot of you have been waiting for something like mumble mumble two months mumble for this book. All I can offer is….
Now you can haz!
As a special treat, here’s a little excerpt:
It wasn’t as if magic made logical sense at the best of times anyway. Closing his eyes, trying to screen out the worry that he hadn’t heard Seliah’s heart beat in far too long—you wouldn’t be able to hear it from here anyway, idiot—he let his fingers drift over the gadgets. Waiting for one to speak to him. As if a metal doohickey could speak.
You’re wasting time, his inner voice observed. Wasting what little life Seliah has left.
I’m not. She wouldn’t survive a trip to find a healer. She might not survive the next few minutes.
At least finding a healer has a chance of working.
An infinitesimally small chance.
Still a non-zero chance, whereas this… What are you even thinking? You might as well dance around the bed beseeching the spirits of our ancestors to intervene.
He paused. Is that something people do?
You’re asking me? I am you. I don’t know anything more than you do.
I’m not asking you. I’m wanting you to shut up.
Then shut up.
You shut up! Cursing in frustration, Jadren took his own advice and attempted to quiet his mind. If this had any chance of working—It doesn’t. Shh.—then he needed to give it his all. Quiet mind. Trust his wizard’s intuition. Seliah deserved his best effort.
//Happy St. Patrick’s Day! A short podcast today, explaining why I postponed the ROGUE FAMILIAR release date and why it won’t really be as long as it the dates imply.
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Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what’s going on there with the creative professions. I have Opinions, which boil down to my conviction that nothing can replace human creativity. But a lot of very smart people have written on the topic and SFWA has been collating those. Go read those excellent articles.
For my part, I’m trying to get ROGUE FAMILIAR written. I’ve passed 60K words and I’m closing in on the Act II Climax. I’m getting there! But I’m not there yet. No way can I make a March release date. So I’ve pushed the release back. Amazon will tell you the new release date is April 24, but that’s a handy lie. That’s just the farthest date I could push to, just in case. I’m guessing it will be more like April 7 or 10. I can always release early! I know you all are patient and supportive, so I don’t need to apologize. (But I feel I do.) Anyway, I’m working away on this!
No AI involved.
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If you preordered ROGUE FAMILIAR on the Zon, you will have gotten a notice that I’ve postponed the release to March 25. Alas! The good news is that I don’t think it will really be that long. I picked that date because it was the full 30 days out that Amazon allows me to postpone, just to give myself some breathing room. I expect I’ll be ready ahead of that date and will keep you all informed. Better to release ahead of that than push again! I know you all understand, which I greatly appreciate.
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Here’s a little tease of the cover of ROGUE FAMILIAR, book 2 in Renegades of Magic, releasing at the end of February. Cover reveal coming soon!
This week at the SFF Seven we’re talking about the Mentality of Negative Reviews. Specifically, the person who posed the question asked: do you recognize your fight-or-flight response to negative reviews and do anything to stop it?
I’m including the full text of the question because I’m disagreeing with the initial premise. I don’t think I have a stress response to negative reviews. It could be that I’ve been writing long enough (nearly thirty years *gasp*) that I’ve become more or less inured to negative reviews. I remember a review of my first book, the essay collection WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE, AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, that was mostly glowing – but also said I used adverbs too much. It came from a professional reviewer at a venue I can’t recall, and that was long before I realized that many reviewers are aspiring writers who cling to the “rules” of writing with the tenacity of an apprentice seeking the magic formula to catapult them to true wizard status. Mostly I was surprised that, if my professional, experienced editor at a university press hadn’t minded my adverbs, then why did a reviewer? I understand now. I also know more about the weird anti-adverb stance some writers absorb.
Mostly. <- See what I did there? Humor is key.
Anyway. Experiencing a flight-or-fight response to a review means that you feel attacked. I suppose some reviewers intend it that way. They like to speculate about the author’s emotional life, intentions, or deadline pressure. Authors are occasionally accused of manipulating readers to extract profit. Sometimes our moral integrity is questioned. But that’s all par for the course on social media. I think what’s most important for writers to do is separate themselves from their work. YOU didn’t receive a negative review; the book did. Even if the reviewer specifically attacks the author, they’re still not actually reviewing you as a human being, because they don’t actually know you. The author is a construct in their mind that has very little to do with reality.
Keeping your poise, a sense of yourself as a person separate from the work, and keeping a sense of humor about it all is what gets you through. After all, a review isn’t a tiger. No one’s going to die over a review. It’s fangless, toothless, and ultimately dust in the wind.
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SHADOW WIZARD releases tomorrow!! Preorder price of $4.99 will be good into tomorrow, then it goes up. (Along with my grocery bill, alas!) The audiobook is being recorded now and should be available in about 2 weeks.
She flung herself against him, embracing him with fierce tenacity, face buried against his neck, her chin digging rather sharply against his collarbone. For a slender, barely-there wraith, Seliah possessed a surprising amount of tensile strength. And she smelled of water in the moonlight, her tough, tense, thin little body vibrating with spiky silver magic, her breasts surprisingly—and distractingly—soft and full pressed against his chest. He couldn’t help a tiny fantasy of how it would feel to be buried inside that intensity, to have that passionate body surging against his, embracing and engulfing.
It’s never going to happen, he told himself firmly.
Are you sure? part of him whispered back slyly.
Yes. Ruthlessly banishing the image, he refused to touch her any more than he already had. Holding his hands out, even more awkward than ever, he kind of waved them around as he waited for the hug to end.
It didn’t. Instead she held on, a buzzing bundle of intoxicating magic and tempting woman. Jadren tried patting her back, thinking maybe that would satisfy her enough to encourage her to go away, but she only purred, snuggling closer, like a cat who’d found the one cat-hater in the room and had no greater goal in life than encamping on his lap forever.
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SHADOW WIZARD coming September 29, 2022! Preorder now!!
This week at the SFF Seven, we’re sharing our top five worldbuilding tips. Since I just returned from WorldCon in Chicago, where I gave a workshop on worldbuilding from a character-driven perspective, I’m going to cheat ever so slightly and pull from that.
1. All stories require worldbuilding
Even a story set in our contemporary world, written as realistically as possible, still requires worldbuilding because it’s impossible to to replicate the complexity of our world. You will always be picking and choosing relevant details. Choose wisely. (And see Tip #5.)
2. Don’t allow worldbuilding to be displacement activity for writing the actual story
Worldbuilding is fun! Writing is hard. It’s easy to spend tons of time on research and worldbuilding and kid yourself that it’s writing. It’s not. Don’t become the person with megabytes of maps and details and no actual text.
3. The world is yours to shape however you like – build it to challenge your characters
Story is about characters facing conflict. The world they live in creates external conflict for them and informs their internal conflict. Since you get to play deity here, build the world with challenging your characters in mind.
4. RPGs – role-playing games can distort your worldbuilding sense.
Many creatives learn worldbuilding from gaming, which can be a great exercise, but – as dedicated gamers have pointed out (I am not one) – game worlds often don’t make any internal sense. Use caution in emulating that model.
5. Use the iceberg model
While you should know – or discover – all about your world, most of that detail should be like the iceberg beneath the surface. Only the tip of all that knowledge should show up in the story. If you’ve done the work and your world is internally consistent, that tip of the iceberg will be representative of the rest.
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If you missed it, SHADOW WIZARD is now available for preorder! It releases September 29, 2022. This is Book One in my new trilogy, Renegades of Magic, and continues the story begun in the Bonds of Magic trilogy. Preorder links below!