August Backlist Bonanza: 'Banshee' and 'Helleville'

For August's Backlist Bonanza sale, we have

BANSHEE

Nathaniel Wakeman is the only child and son of a modest vicar, who lives in the quiet and idyllic confines of the Isle of Wight. When his maternal grandfather dies, Natty's mother reconnects with her estranged and wealthy brother and his family in hopes of raising Natty up in the world, to urge him to go beyond the humble life he's always known.

Though his cousins show no particular regard for him, one of them, at least, lures him away from his retired life and introduces him to the world—and to the son of a baron from Somerset, Miles Lovell. Natty gradually finds himself drawn toward the older and worldlier gentleman and returns to his father's vicarage a changed young man. He also seems to have attracted the attention of a ghost, one that has followed him back to the island.

Haunted by a woman in white, who seems to appear when he's at his weakest, Natty struggles with his own nature and with his family's increasing difficulties. His mother is distant, hiding things from him as she never has, and his father is aging before his eyes. Quarrels between his parents grow more and more frequent, and Natty's increasing terror of familiar and beloved footpaths add to the spiraling tension at home.

While Natty tries to find his place in the world, his childhood is crumbling around him, and he becomes more and more convinced that his persistent ghost is a harbinger of doom.

and

HELLEVILLE

All fifteen-year-old Noah Hipwell wants is to go through high school in peace. Yet he finds himself suspended after a bully pushes him too far, and Noah's forced to defend himself. His mother, fed up with the school's indifference to his plight, pulls him out completely and leaves Noah uncertain of his future while they look for a good and safe school for him.

All Dorothy "Dot" Hipwell wants is to go through single motherhood in peace. Yet she and her son are harassed by weekly phone calls from her evangelical family hell-bent on guilt-tripping them both back into the fold. Then Noah's grandparents ask strange questions about their old van after dropping cryptic references to a group called The Soul Warriors. Pushed to her limits, Dot takes Noah away for a much-needed getaway, only to find themselves suddenly transported to an alternate world, where a town called Helleville awaits them and all other condemned souls.

Along with warm-blooded, living human beings, the Hipwells rub shoulders with zombies, vampires, house ghosts, and occasional "green vomit piles" while picking up the pieces and sorting out what could very well be an eternity in a bizarre, fanciful, and humorous world of ghouls and banned books.

When residents suddenly disappear one by one with no trace and for no logical reason, however, doubts being "housed" in an alternate world for their sins are raised, and time suddenly becomes of the essence as Noah and the rest of Helleville's condemned race to find answers to what's quickly turning into a dangerous puzzle.

From today through the end of August, both books are 50% off in e-book format from online stores. Click the book titles to go to their respective pages and the links to where you can purchase them.  

'The Twilight Lover' is DONE

Another book done! And it was a fun one to do -- a radical departure from what I first planned for it (originally a dramatic story but is now a comedy) because I wanted something cheerful to offset the heavier tone of Compline. 

I technically have room for more chapters, but I stuck to the base length of 26 since I'd like to expand each with the rest of the word count. The current draft tops out at just over 45k words, and the remaining 4k+ will be used for expanded passages and dialogue (of which the draft has several). 

And to celebrate, here's a video of a song that pretty accurately captures the book's plot and mood.

Man, this song was pretty big back in my day, and while I didn't really think much about it then, I appreciate the sentiment now with the book that's just finished. 

So we're on track for a Nov. 1 release, and I'll have all of August to work on revisions and edits. September will be the final sweep, and then I'll get going on Doppelgänger.  

'Gold in the Clouds' and the Sidekick

This book echoes Rose and Spindle in that I wanted to write a fairy tale retelling from the PoV of a side character, not the hero (or heroine in Rose and Spindle). And given how wild fairy tales can be, approaching the story through humor was a promising idea, and it worked. 

"Jack and the Beanstalk" ironically isn't one of my favorite fairy tales, but I really liked the idea of Jack having a best friend who's just as much of a natural slacker as he (they are teenagers, after all, and naturally would love to just hang out and have fun). And they go on a variety of adventures together until the fateful day Jack sells his cow for a handful of magic beans.

I loved writing Blythe and his family. I enjoyed making him a good kid who's just being himself but who also knows when to say when but still gets dragged into trouble. That he's also absolutely terrified of heights was probably the most fun detail about him.

image from Pinterest

But there's Jack as well even though he's relegated to the role of a secondary character. He, too, is really a good kid but with a wholly different background from Blythe, and while both boys are dirt poor, one enjoys a close family bond while the other is fatherless and sibling-less and so is always adrift. 

By and large, this book is a story about friendship and especially Blythe's adventures in learning the value of relationships, of honest work despite the odds being constantly stacked against people like him, and the dangers of taking short cuts (at least for him, not Jack). 

For a while, I was planning to write a series of other fairy tale retellings that focus on characters other than the primary prince / princess / peasant, etc. whom we know in all those classic stories. However, I eventually lost interest in pursuing that idea, though now I really don't mind dusting that off and playing around with possibilities for my current Grostesqueries collection.

Gold in the Clouds is one of the books currently on sale for 50% through the end of July. You can go here for the book page on Books2Read, and there you can find all the online stores where you can purchase a copy.  

'Desmond and Garrick' and Wild, Fun Pastiche-y Rides

My baby! So while I'm proud of every book I've written and published, some are closer to my heart than others, and Desmond and Garrick is one of those. The long and short of it is that this was the book that was as challenging as it was fun since I set out to write my one and only Regency romance that was also a pastiche, and I was able to sustain the dry kind of humor I've always loved from my favorite British sitcoms. 

See: Blackadder for my primary media inspiration.  

As for specific elements in the book, I played with tropes so popular in YA fiction in those days (not sure if they're just as popular now, though) and gave them all my own spin. 

What tickled me the most after my then-publisher released the book was some readers' initial reactions of concern about the possible romantic relationship between the titular characters (the age gap between them is pretty large with Desmond being only sixteen), but such wasn't the case at all. My purpose for choosing the title really was all about friendship developing between two people -- or one human and one vampire -- who at first don't see eye-to-eye but eventually find a middle ground and learn mutual respect. 

Desmond does fall in love, but it's not what you think just by looking at the title. The romance, moreover, is secondary to the main conflict since I really set out to focus on friendship over that. Ironically, this piece was my primary musical inspiration, which only added to the fun:

A bonus detail: all of the really terrible poems in the book are real, i.e., I wrote them all when I was an emo teen. Yes, I did. I ran across them in the course of working on the book and realized, yes, I can actually shame myself and put those ghastly verses out there for everyone to see. 

So, yeah. You're welcome.

Desmond and Garrick is currently 50% off in e-book format through the end of this month. Go here for the book page and the online stores for your copy.  

 

In the Works: 'A House of Profane Gods'

This book won't be out till after Camera Obscura, which may or may not come out next year. It's not that I'm pulling that book from my calendar; rather, I'm considering restructuring my calendar again and falling back to my old bi-annual release schedule. If that moves forward, next year's release will have Doppelgänger and The Shadow Groom while Camera Obscura will be out in 2026 followed by A House of Profane Gods afterwards.

I'm still way ahead of schedule with my current WiP and expect to have the initial draft done by the end of this month. All of next month (and sometime beyond) will be dedicated to revisions and edits, leaving the original release date of Nov. 1 untouched. It's what'll happen next year that I'm toying with at the moment because of, yes, advancing age and the growing need for self-care. I currently follow an extremely rigid schedule divided between work, writing, and everything else that's left (i.e., chores, errands, rest and relaxation, family, etc.). And while I've been able to keep up with it, it's getting increasingly difficult to maintain. 

So something's got to give, and I think a much more relaxed pace in my writing is needed. 

It's been a while since I've been bitten by the plotting bug, and things have stayed relatively stagnant for months -- until the idea for A House of Profane Gods came up. And I kind of like this slowing down of my inspiration and planning process since it allows me to give the new story enough time to sink in and form some roots before I commit to it. And this book is exceedingly commit-able. There are a few elements I'm currently on the fence about, but the story won't suffer if I were to choose to ditch them entirely.

Also I'm not as sold on the title as I prefer The House of Profane Gods over the current version. I've already published The House of Ash, but there's something more urgent and forbidding about the use of "the" vs. "a" regardless of a partial repetition of two book titles in my backlist. At least the second half of the title is good, and that's not changing, but I might be messing with it still. Or the odds of it changing is 40 - 60 (with 40 in favor).

And here I go again with overthinking things, yay!