June Backlist Bonanza: 'Automata' and 'Children of Hyacinth'

Hello, June! Love you already (don't make a liar out of me, bro). My current WiP is coming along pretty swimmingly, I've finally put in a vacation request for my birthday week in August, and other real life things outside work are also progressing surprisingly well. As an aside, for a variety of complex and irritating reasons, I haven't taken any vacation time for over five years straight, so this is a massive victory for me. Hoping to do better next year with at least two weeks off (not taken together, of course). 

But I'm not here for that. I be here for this month's books for my Backlist Bonanza. So for starters, a book from my Curiosities collection:

AUTOMATA

A disastrous incident at a ball in St. Jude threatens to undo Alexej Sauveterre, and his protective adoptive family whisk him off to San Marco, a mythical and romantic city in the water. Born sickly, young Alexej has grown up resigned to the fact that only his family's immense wealth makes him barely palatable to other gentlemen seeking partners.

The family's sojourn in San Marco at first promises a much-needed distraction to Alexej when his older brother introduces him to an aristocratic inventor of automata as well as an old school friend who now tours the European continent as a classical pianist. Baseless hope and heartbreak, however, seem to follow Alexej everywhere.

Alexej's fascination for automata and his hopeless infatuation with Briant Cousineau draw the attention of an entity from the otherworld, one that's been wandering the globe for unwary souls to claim through cursed wishes. San Marco's winged lion summons the city's supernatural guardians in answer, and in the midst of glittering balls, magical clockwork puppets, and lonely dreams, a terrifying fight for Alexej's soul darkens the streets of a fading city.

And secondly, a book from my Arcana Europa collection:

CHILDREN OF HYACINTH

Iulian Dalca is a twenty-one-year-old musical prodigy with big dreams. He's also blessed with a hint of light magic in his blood, a gift that's apparently unique to prodigies and whose purpose appears to be the developing of an extremely strong connection between artist and audience during a performance. Unknown to most, the gift of light magic also allows him a powerful and inexplicable psychic link to someone who remains invisible, a person he's never met in the real world. It's a connection that strengthens over time, a symbiotic bond whose purpose remains a closely guarded secret among the goddesses believed to have created it.

Cosmin Vasile is an eighteen-year-old young man living in obscurity and poverty in a rural village in the Wallachian countryside. Gifted in song, he spends his time adding to his parents' meager income by weaving and gathering wool for sale, singing rustic songs he knows by heart as he works. He's also plagued by mysteriously restless sleep lasting a week and occurring once a year since he turned eleven, though he remembers nothing of the dreams or nightmares that may have caused the disturbance.

Then out of the blue on two separate occasions, a once-in-a-lifetime chance at fulfilling their dearest dreams suddenly comes along, and youthful hope takes flight...

Only to tumble headlong down a nightmarish pit of old magic twisted for a darker purpose, where lines separating reality and decades-long madness blur. Haunting portraits of long gone students, a cursed mirror hiding a terrifying world of corruption and death, a monstrous satyr lurking in the shadows of the mirror's world - time and hope for escape disappear as Iulian and Cosmin suddenly discover the awful price of being marked as the Muses' rare, favored children. 

For the entire month of June, both e-books are 50% off at all online stores. Just click the book titles above for their respective pages and store listings. For readers who prefer to shop at Kobo and Smashwords, click those two respective links to get to my author pages at both stores. Later this month, I'll be posting individual stuff for the books so readers can enjoy a bit of behind-the-scenes goodness that led to their writing. 

What a Bizarre Month It's Been

In truth, nothing major's happening at work. Things have been quiet and predictable and even dragging at times, but we're nearing summer, and the amount of work we have has surprisingly gone up following a slow spell. 

What makes this month feel like passing through some demon's blocked bowels pertains to my daily commute, which is monumentally cursed all month long. I can understand an occasional snafu with the early bus service. Same with the local train service. But missing my train for an entire week straight because the bus was painfully slow or having the entire train system shut down for a day -- followed immediately by equipment problems the next week and then an electrical fire that crippled everyone's southbound commute for a good week afterward...

Well, let's just say I can't wait for June to come despite all the unknowns. Who the hell knows what'll happen next to either bus service or train service? 

Oh, another thing -- I've avoided taking the car on Fridays for the last couple of months since it was unavailable for the most part, and when I finally DID drive it to work, I was rewarded with a veritable parking lot on my drive home because of an injury accident. And! Said accident happened in the OTHER DIRECTION, with nobody in mine involved at all. So that parking lot of cars on the freeway? Just rubberneckers doing their thing and making me want to set fire to the entire Bay Area. 

So! That's how it's been on the day job front. Things are a significant improvement on the writing end of things, though. 

I'm progressing pretty well, I'm having fun with the story, and I'm finally having a go at a love triangle, but seeing as how this is me I'm talking about, there's a twist to this triangle. I did say something about the Narcissus and Echo myth, and I'm running with it even though this book's main plot isn't a retelling of the legend. I just love playing with certain elements in the original story and figuring out how to make them work in this book. 

In other news, I've also been raiding the public library for gems and have been dividing my time between print and digital books. My inching back to the analog world IS making me think about the future and what I'd like to do next after 2026, which is the extent of my publishing calendar so far. I've been mining Pinterest for images I can use for prompts, but I do find myself saving pretty similar and even predictable art. 

So I'm trying to expand my reach by checking out YT videos on subjects that I'm peripherally interested in but never bothered to explore. I find that more productive than simply collecting images, and I'm already forming ideas on what else I can do with my story ideas down the line. If something more solid and sure forms, I'll be talking about it here; otherwise, it's been a smattering of vague ideas for the time being, and I hope something comes from this pea soup in my head.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite videos, which I dedicate to my fellow creatives or even those who appreciate and support art in all its forms:

All right -- final week of May is here, and I'm already looking forward to the weekend.

'The Twilight Gods' and a Favorite Fairy Tale

This book was my gay YA retelling of the Native American folktale, "The Girl Who Married a Ghost", which ended up on my very short list of favorite folktales of all time. I first ran across it in the anthology edited by Joanna Cole called The Best-Loved Folktales of the World, but when I moved, I had to give up pretty much every print book I'd collected over the years -- including this amazing volume. Oh, I can still get a used copy, of course, and I just might because I'd like to reread those stories from anywhere outside Europe. 

Particularly Asia, whose stories I found to be gentler compared to those from Europe (which tended to be pretty dark and violent). I'd love to write my own take on one of those stories, but I'm jumping way ahead of myself.

this was the edition I owned

The Twilight Gods is set in the mid-19th century England during the time of The Great Exhibition, and I wrote the story as a metaphor for a queer kid's coming-out. 

"The Girl Who Married a Ghost" has some spectacular scenes in it that I kept, and the second half of the book is nearly a blow-by-blow retelling of the fairy tale. And that's because that fairy tale easily tracks the progression of a teenager's self-discovery and the aftermath. So everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- about what follows Norris's talks with his family's strange lodger, though eerie and (yes, I'll always default to this word) gothic, encapsulates the confusing and even terrifying experience of learning more about one's true nature and how best to reconcile it in a world that's still saddled with so much stupid and ignorant ideas. 

The presence of ghosts, of skeletons, and the lodger who becomes Norris's guide (she represents the original fairy tale's Screech Owl, who also acts as the bride's guide in the story) are all in the fairy tale, too, and nothing could have worked more perfectly for my purpose. 

The setting was also carefully chosen since The Great Exhibition was a celebration of progress in science and technology and all that, yet backward thinking still runs rampant in the book, and just like the bride in the fairy tale, Norris is forced to make a choice in the end.

Here's a small bit of trivia about the book:

After I had the second edition of the novel published by JMS Books some years ago, the publisher was approached by the ALA to see if they were interested in submitting The Twilight Gods for a Stonewall Award. Unfortunately, as it was the second edition, the book didn't qualify, and I had to decline. 

Did it suck? Yeah, it did.

The Twilight Gods is 50% off through the end of May. You can check out the book page for the blurb as well as the link to different online stores where you can get a copy, including Smashwords and Kobo. 

'Renfred's Masquerade' and Music as the Ultimate Muse

This book was one of those inspired by a very specific song and a very specific performance or interpretation of that song. It was a purely orchestral recording of Offenbach's "Barcarolle" from a cassette tape I got for myself as an undergrad. It was a time when I was discovering classical music and used whatever money I had saved from my part-time job to buy cassettes to listen to. This was way back in the late 1980s.

I found the piece not only romantic, but melancholy, and I used it more than once as a prompt for short stories when the time came for me to pursue writing more seriously. For this book I took to vocal performances of the aria for my muse. It's one of those songs that conjure so many images in my head, and Renfred's Masquerade actually started with one single image: that of a gondola sailing off in the night and two people sitting in it. But the very, very strong impression I had wasn't one of romance, but tragedy. 

It didn't help that I also bought a copy of E.T.A. Hoffmann's short stories, which included "The Sandman" and was one of the works that also found its way into Offenbach's opera. So double the muse-whammy, and eventually more appendages sprouted from that one image of the gondola until I ended up with extensive notes for Renfred's Masquerade. 

This book is a pretty elaborate fairy tale with a tangled backstory. I wrote it specifically to read like a gay YA fairy tale that takes place in an AU Venice. 

Every song mentioned or described in the book is an actual song I listened to. Offenbach's "Barcarolle" is the primary one, including the final notes of music toward the end. 

Other songs I used are Khachaturian's "Masquerade Waltz":

And Shostakovich's "Waltz No.2":

And, finally, for the penultimate ballroom scene with Davide and Nicola, I used Smetana's polka from The Bartered Bride. As with the other pieces I specifically inserted into the book via descriptions, the actual scenes were also written to fit each composition. For the polka scene, it's a rousing and terrifying moment for Nicola, who faces his shame and allows himself to be finally seen as he is. The final minute and a half of the song, in particular, influenced that scene the most. It's still so easy to picture poor Nicola panicking while Davide whirls him around and around to an upbeat polka.

None of those compositions are accurate for the time period I had in mind (maybe Offenbach comes closest), so I never referred to them by title or anything like that. Just descriptions of the individual songs and how they influence the dancers and the main characters. 

Renfred's Masquerade is currently 50% at all online bookstores this month, including Smashwords and Kobo. For a complete list of these stores and the blurb, go to the book page at Books2Read. 

The Next Book, 'Tis Underway

I didn't expect this, but The Twilight Lover has turned into a hybrid of sorts. My original plan -- one I came up with months ago, in fact -- was of a serious ghost story with a contemporary setting. But after going through a pretty challenging time working on Compline, which turned out to be much heavier and darker than expected, I decided to switch gears and turn the new book into a comedy for balance. 

I do, however, tend to have a more difficult time making ghost stories work in a universe that's swimming in so much information and technology. And I'm not just talking about the cynicism that usually affects our perception of things and of events. I'm talking about the ease with which we're able to access information via so many devices available to us. Unless I turn the setting into a full-on urban fantasy, which I'm not interested in, it's hard to justify the mystery of a haunting without automatically debunking it in my own head. 

I've even been watching ghosts on camera type of videos on YT, and it's pretty obvious where some clever editing's been done in a majority of those "paranormal" events supposedly captured on video. It really does hamper inspiration, and I can't get myself out of that mentality when I attempt something like a straightforward ghost story in a modern setting. 

Even accounts such as the ghosts reported in Fukushima after the tsunami disaster are explained away with trauma responses and not actual supernatural phenomena (at least among certain writers and researchers, anyway). That said, accounts from survivors who claim to have encountered the ghosts of tsunami victims FEEL more genuine than what's shared on social media via videos and stuff. But they're also very limited to the catastrophe. 

What I love about writing a historical fantasy is the limitation of knowledge and technology, and characters' reactions to the inexplicable are always fun to explore. I can make it serious and dramatic or off-beat and funny, those limitations helping a great deal in forcing boundaries the characters are fighting against. 

And so The Twilight Lover is now a humorous ghost story set in the distant past, and I'll be making full use of anachronistic language to pump up the comedy.

Another thing about this book is that it's also turning into a retelling of the myth of Narcissus and Echo, which I didn't realize was happening until I actually sat back and inspected my notes. It's really weird how a lot of things we read find their way into what we do -- in my case, some of my favorite myths and legends impress rough sketches of stories in my head without me realizing it. Mind you, it didn't start out that way, but I can see various elements in my notes that mirror key things in the myth. 

But we'll see how things turn out as I work some more on this new book. I am glad I went with comedy, though. I needed it.