Spring Book Promo of Alexia's Recent Reads!

Here in zone 4b the grass is turning green, there are buds on the trees, and sprouts are poking their heads up in my garden—it’s spring! Which also means, it’s spring promo week! 

I don’t have any new promo for myself, I still need to get the guts to do something with my current manuscript, but I’ve read some great SFF books recently that I’m excited to share with you today. 

Intergalactic Exterminators, INC by Ash Bishop is a humorous science fiction that’s perfect if 

you’re in the mood for a Men In Black type read—so good and funny!!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett is a historical fantasy filled with the fae and a reclusive professor doing her best to research them. The main character, Emily Wilde, is so antisocial and anal which I found absolutely refreshing and adorable. Oh, and she does have an entire village grow on her, so it’s sweet too. 

Vampire Weekend is another fantastic book by Mike Chen. He’s able to write incredible stories with these deep platonic relationships, I can’t get enough! And this one has vampires—you can’t resist!

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber will hit the spot if you’re in the mood for a creepy, historical fantasy with some steampunk vibes. Hieber has a way of writing that makes your skin prickle with unease. Keep her books in mind come October!

There’s my spring promo—of books I’m a fan of! What have you read recently that wowed you?

The Magic of Group Brainstorming

Hello all and happy spring!

At the SFF Seven this week we're asking: What’s your brainstorming process? Do you come up with ideas by yourself or do brainstorm with someone else?

Me? I don't preplot because I can't. My ideas all come to me pretty much in the course of writing. Some of them come from daydreaming about the story, but the real flow comes as I write. A lot of the time, that's the ONLY way the story flows. 

The salient exception to this is that I love brainstorming with author friends. There are few things more fun for me than brainstorming a world or exits from sticky plot solutions with other creative brains. And I have just as much fun working on their stories! It's a real truth that, for whatever reason, an outside mind can almost always see the story more clearly than we can our own. I can tell other writers how to "fix" their stories and have zero ability to find solutions to my own. And vice-versa. 

Especially when trad publishing wants me to tell them something about the plot before I actually write the book, I turn to my friends. I can usually say who the characters are and I can describe the situation they're in - and then my brilliant author comrades take it from there. It inevitably changes when I write the words, but they are true lifesavers in giving that much-needed perspective.

Brainstorming for the win!

Rites of Spring Flash Not So Fiction

Here's my flash fiction:

He lived.

And because he's still around to adore when we seriously believed the old dude with the bad heart, liver disease, and bladder cancer would check out during surgery to remove a bleeding mass on his back, I am bailing on you to sit and hold the grumpy old man.

But look. Isn't his little spring green coat (hiding a wicked big incision) on point for the season?

Flash Fiction: Rites of Spring

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz
I wonder where the dragons is?
No snow to mark their prints
No ice to frost their flames
How are we to know from whence the dragons cames?

They say the horde will ride
Demanding tithes of gold
Taxes in the season of rain and mud and cold

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz
Do the dragons wonder where their hatchlings is?
Wrapped and tucked in blankets
Buried in the well
When they burn my village, I'll see them all in hell




*A riff on the original "Spring in the Bronx" by Anonymous