Category Archives: Novels
Happy Turkey Week!
Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the whole week off for Thanksgiving like my kids do from school now? I could laze around, drinking cocoa, wrapping X-mas presents, watching cheesy Hallmark movies on TV, getting to some writing when I felt like it… on second thought, that’s not such a hot idea after all. For whatever reason, I need the stress of a deadline to help me produce, and so far so good this month, it’s Day 21 of NaNoWriMo and I’m up to about 62,000 words of my new vampire novel, Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down.
I just finished the final update of my Vampire Diaries Fanfic, Dark Side of the Moon and that always gets me to thinking about starting something new. I can’t wait to start the next one, but it’ll have to wait a few weeks I think until the novel is edited and ready to go. I might even take a break and get to some reading I’ve been looking forward to (Got Storm Chaser by Mark R. Hunter already downloaded to my Nook and ready to go!) before I start the next book in The Fallen series.
I’m looking forward to some turkey with family and friends this week. I always make the same delicious recipe with lemons, rosemary and dijon mustard. (I know it sounds a little weird, but it makes the best gravy!) I’ve just about got my holiday shopping done too except for some online purchases, how about you guys? Are you going to brave the Black Friday deals or settle in with some cocoa and hit the online sales?
A Taste of Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down
Day ten of NaNoWriMo and I’m going strong! Up to 32,626 words so far, and it’s going well. I thought I’d give you guys a little taste. Here is our heroine Anja who has just woken up in the hospital morgue, to the surprise of the guys about to transfer her to the Medical Examiner’s office.
(I should preface this by saying in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month, this is an extremely rough draft. Punctuation and such is bound to be way off.)
A millisecond before the sheet came off, my eyes popped open and a high, keening cry leaked out of me like the air out of a balloon; my only available version of a scream, I suppose. The effect was electrifying. Both men screamed, and like a switch was flipped, I felt the energy rush back into my limbs. Filling my lungs with air, I screamed right back at them, and we stared at each other, all of us screaming for a good ten seconds before the room got really quiet.
“You’re… you’re…” The guy dropped his clipboard as he backed up a few feet. The other man, the one who came to get me I assumed, continued to stare at me like I had just risen from the dead, which was understandable.
“W-where am I?” My voice sounded shrill to my ears and I couldn’t help but wince, doing my best to swallow back my fear. I felt… wrong somehow, but I couldn’t quite identify why, finding myself in such strange surroundings was too distracting.
“Shoreline Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. You’re um, you’re supposed to be dead.”
“I’m sorry…” slipped out reflexively, though what I had to be sorry about, I couldn’t imagine. Shoreline was the same hospital Bridget worked at, and I wondered if she knew I was there. I was tired of lying down and I might have said something to that effect as I pushed myself up to a seated position, but I was too busy looking at my surroundings to be sure if I’d spoken out loud. It wasn’t my own bedroom, or a hospital room as I’d assumed until they started talking about death, but what looked like a morgue, based on my experience with tv and movies.
I was still half lying on a gurney, but a large stainless steel table stood in the center of the room, with holes drilled through it for drainage of various… ugh, I didn’t want to go there. “I feel…” dizzy, confused, itchy, nauseous, sore, tired…wrong… “…different.” My tongue finally supplied and I again marveled at the sound of my own voice. Was it my ears or the timbre of my voice that had changed? It was impossible to tell.
“That’s understandable, you’ve been dead for over an hour,” the morgue attendant replied distractedly, bending to pick up the clipboard.
Between The Scenes With Iris – Adam
Five minutes with Adam from Angel of Mercy
Iris: Iris here, I’m talking to everybody’s favorite fallen angel Adamiel, or Adam as he goes by these days. Thanks for joining us today, I know you like to keep a low profile.
Adam: You called, I came. [He shrugs nonchalantly, reclined in the chair with lazy grace]
Iris: If only it was always that simple. Are there many fallen angels living among us? Sam shot me down on this one.
Adam: I haven’t taken role lately, but there’s a fair number of us, yeah. Most of them keep to themselves though, they’ve got notions of working off their sins or something. [A roll of the eyes is given]
Iris: But not you?
Adam: I’ve suffered plenty, believe me. If God had wanted to torture me further he would have done it. No, I believe in taking pleasure where you can.
Iris: Sounds like an enlightened way of looking at it. I gotta ask, what’s with the all in black look. Do you have a thing for Johnny Cash? Would a little bit of color hurt every now and then? [He is dressed from head to toe in black. Boots, jeans, shirt, jacket, the whole shebang]
Adam: You don’t like it? Most women do. [Those bright blue eyes flash playfully and I have no trouble believing that. In fact, it takes me a minute to remember what I'd asked him]
Iris: No, it’s a good look for you, I admit. But it sort of paints a certain picture. Are you really still the same bad boy who’s been debauching his way through the past two thousand years? Or have things changed?
Adam: I’ll just say that some things have changed, but I won’t go into detail beyond that.
Iris: Because you’re worried that admitting you have feelings for Mercy will put her in danger? [He drops a quick wink, but doesn't say anything else] Who do you think might be listening in?
Adam: You never can tell who’s paying attention. For the moment Mercy will have to get along without me.
Iris: Is that such a good idea? Aren’t there a lot of people after her? What about this prophecy I keep hearing about?
NaNoWriMo is upon us!
Once again, I’ve signed up for the crazy breakneck pace of National Novel Writing Month. This year I’ll be working on my new vampire series, and hope to have the first draft done my month’s end. I’m stealing the name from one of my fanfics, Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down. Apart from some similarities that are bound to come up in the transformation process, it’ll be a completely different story though. I was thrown for a bit of a loop at the end of last week’s Vampire Diaries when I saw they were making the Originals be Viking in nature, but I’ve decided to go ahead with my idea anyway. I guess great minds think alike!
I don’t have a formal synopsis written up yet, but the basic premise is this:
This series is about a girl in San Francisco who is turned by an ancient race of natural born vampires that are very reclusive. She remembers very little about being turned, the circumstances necessitated her maker leaving without explaining who he is or anything about the fact that she’s becoming a vampire, so it’s partly a mystery for her to figure out what’s going on. It’s set in a world where vampire society is very strictly controlled, and you need permission/papers before you can turn a human. There is an order of vampires set to uphold the laws and police them, keeping their presence a secret from humans and my MC is a little surprised when The Order shows up at her door, demanding to see her papers. Through a series of events, the fella who’s supposed to put her down for being an unlicensed vampire ends up helping her, forging documents and helping her be accepted.
She’s still clinging to her human life, so she’s trying to keep anyone from knowing she’s been turned and struggles with keeping her humanity in the face of how she has to live now. Because she was turned by such an old vamp, she is much, much stronger than typical newbie vampires, which leads people to believe she’s a few hundred years older than she is, and she has to pretend to be someone she isn’t in vampire society as well.
Out there somewhere is the vamp that turned her, his own reasons and motivations shrouded in mystery, and there are ties between all of them.
I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with mythos for the origins of vampires in this one, blending norse mythology with vampire lore, and I can’t wait to get started!
Pretty Witches All in a Row is out in Print!
In addition to being available as an ebook, Pretty Witches All in a Row is now available in print through Amazon.com! As usual, here is another sample from the book between Detective Nick Gibson and his teenage daughter Veronica.
It was later than he would have liked when Nick pulled into the driveway of his home. The modest, three bedroom house was all ablaze with light, and he could hear the music all the way out in the car before he even opened the garage door. “Sounds like V’s home,” he murmured, leaving the car. The music swelled as he opened the door into the hallway, the music dark and throbbing.
Nick ventured deeper into the house, finding his teenaged daughter at the kitchen table, head bobbing to the music, bent over a textbook. How she could study with all that racket was beyond him, but he had to smile at the way her little spiky ponytails bounced, oblivious to his presence.
Not for the first time, he fretted over her appearance, thinking she looked more like a college co-ed than a high school girl in that get up. Her naturally wavy, medium brown hair was dyed a vibrant red color that didn’t occur in nature; straightened within an inch of its life so that the ends of her ponytails stuck out at odd angles making him think of a burst of fireworks. A black velvet choker wrapped around her pale throat, and her ears boasted three sets of piercings apiece. Nick flat out put his foot down on piercing any other part of her body until she was eighteen, and he had two years left to hope she grew out of that phase. As per usual, she wore a short skirt, not indecently so, but shorter than he would have liked on principle.
Her outfit du jour consisted of a black denim miniskirt, frayed at the bottom and no fewer than three visible shirts of varying lengths in shades of alternating black and red. Brown eyes that mirrored his own were heavily lined with dark gunk, and lips stained a vibrant shade of red. Veronica looked as if she was dressed to go to a club instead of sitting at home doing her homework. Though Nick had to consider; better to have her dressed for clubbing and home doing her homework than dressed like a librarian and out all hours of the night doing God knows what.
“Hi Daddy,” she called out without turning around.
Surprised, he set his briefcase down on the table opposite her. “I didn’t think you knew I was there,” he yelled over the music.
“Please, I could feel you standing there watching me.”
“What if it hadn’t been me? What if I was a robber or worse? Then it wouldn’t make much sense to leave me standing there with your back turned,” he taunted her, but in a way he was serious. A girl at home alone, he hoped he’d raised her to have a little more self preservation than that.
“Then turning around and freaking out wouldn’t have changed a whole lot by the time he’s right behind me, would it?” she pointed out, her head tilting to one side. “Besides, I saw your reflection in the window when you came in, I knew it was you the whole time.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“I didn’t want to miss out on lecture number twelve, it’s been overdue,” she grinned cheekily.
Dreamcasting – Pretty Witches All in a Row
Somehow or other, casting this one in my mind turned into “how can I fit the cast of Firefly into one book?”. Once I got started, it was easy to fit most of them in. So here you go, how I would cast this book as a movie or tv show:
Sgt. Nick Gibson – Nathan Fillion, because he can handle that glib, charming, borderline obnoxious sense of humor that Nick has so well, and you can still believe that he’s very capable of catching a killer at the same time.
Anneliese Cross – In my mind she’s actually been a blend between Evangeline Lily and Kate Beckinsale, if that makes any sense. Because I see her as down to earth and vulnerable sometimes, but with an inner strength when things get tough.
Seraphine Ryan – Morena Baccharin – with hair, thank you! While I see a lot of her attitude and mode of dress like Anna from V, she’s got the innate sensuality of Inara wrapped up in one package.
Rose Spencer – Melanie Lynskey. I’ve been a fan of hers since Ever After, and I think she’s capable of playing someone who you dismiss as one thing to begin with, but then reveals hidden depths.
Skye Mackenzie – an early Drew Barrymore because she’s so full of light and laughter, you can’t imagine why anyone would possibly want to kill her.
Noah Cahill – Sean Maher. A good looking man, but he could pull off that smug, self-righteous quality that makes you want to punch him in the face.
Veronica Gibson – Scarlett Johanssen from “The Perfect Score”. She’s a good girl in a bad girl’s body. I love the style she embodies in that movie, I think it suits Veronica to a T.
Detective Kip Brady – Seamus Dever. Love him in Castle, and he makes a great cop.
Detective Michelle Park – Grace Park. I think it’s funny that she’s actually on a cop show now, because when I wrote this, I only knew her from Battlestar Galactica.
Sgt. Michael Troyer – Adam Baldwin, because he has that gruff authority and I can see him being a little difficult to work with.
Libby Fielding, M. E. – Jewel Staite. Though more like she was on Stargate Atlantis than on Firefly.