Preorder Now! TWISTED MAGIC (and a Snippet)

I'm working away on TWISTED MAGIC! The preorder links are mostly live. (I use Smashwords to distribute to Apple and Scribd. They flagged the book because I used the keyword "adult," saying I must categorize it as erotica. Which, it isn't. I meant adult fantasy as opposed to YA fantasy, but apparently adult means erotic now and I can't even.) Anyway, you can preorder pretty much everywhere now. 

   

And, because you all have been waiting so patiently, here is a snippet from the book in progress :-)

 

***

 

Jadren heaved a sigh and rolled his head back, staring at the ceiling. “If I were to hazard a guess, which I apparently am being coerced into doing, I’d say that she means she thinks I ran away only as a bargaining chip. She won’t believe that I don’t truly want, in the charred cinder of my withered heart, to be Lord El-Adrel after her. Katica can’t conceive of anyone not wanting her power. She’s used that to play her heirs against each other all these years.”

“Do you?” Selly asked.

He lifted his head and gazed at her. Blinked, long and slow. “Do I want to be Lord El-Adrel? Dark arts, no! What would possess you to even ask such a question?”

“It’s a reasonable question,” she answered, studying him.

“Not unless you think I’m enough of a monster that I want to become my mother,” he spat back.

“See, that’s not a reasonable answer. You can head your house without becoming your mother.”

“Oh, and I suppose you believe I should follow the example of the sainted Gabriel, Lord of House Phool?” he sneered. “If my choices are to become a tyrannical megalomaniac or an idealistic idiot merrily leading my house to doom, or a passive/aggressive wannabe like Chaim Refoel, then I’ll take option D: none of the above.”

“Or,” she retorted, “you could make the role your own. You’re not one of your mother’s automatons, plodding along mindlessly in the footsteps of others. If you became Lord El-Adrel, you could make the house over into what you want it to be.”

He curled a lip. “Why, Seliah—have you been harboring a secret desire to become Lady El-Adrel? Perhaps all that half-feral swamp beast behavior of yours has been a cover for a heart that quietly yearns for the power and glory of a high house.”

“Be nice,” she warned him. “You know I don’t care about heading a high house and, for the record, I don’t care if you are Lord El-Adrel or not. But I think your people deserve better. And,” she added after a moment, “the house deserves better.”

“The house is a house. She doesn’t deserve anything. She can’t, because she’s not a person.”

“Then why do you talk about her like a person instead of an ‘it’?”

“Because she’s a right bitch,” he observed without rancor. “You saw what she did to us.”

“She helped us to escape,” Selly replied remorselessly. “Besides, I think she wants you to be Lord El-Adrel.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not letting an over-magicked dwelling make life choices for me.”

 

 

   

 

 

 

Summer Reads: Meet the Gatekeeper on a Mission from Hel

THE BURNED SPY: Book 1
Gods. Always ready to screw you.

When Bix the Gatekeeper is summoned from exile by the goddess of the Norse Under World, the former Dark Ops agent knows there’s a catch. On the surface, the terms of the deal are simple. Someone attacked the pantheon’s ambassador to the Mid Worlds and left the ambassador in a coma. In exchange for early parole, Bix must identify the perpetrator and drag their soul to Hel.

It’d be a sweet contract, if not for the details. The ambassador is Bix’s ex-girlfriend, the lead suspect is the key witness from Bix’s trial, and the organization leading the official investigation is the same intelligence guild that disavowed Bix when a covert op went pear-shaped. Undeterred, Bix returns to her old stomping grounds where clues in the smoldering woods of Centralia, Pennsylvania, lead to the waterfront of Washington, DC, and Worlds beyond.

Once valued for her skills in creating passageways as small as a capillary or as large as a continent, Bix’s success now depends on the relationships she was forced to abandon. As she squares off against friends who betrayed her and enemies keen to destroy her, Bix follows a trail of secrets, torture, and treason that leads to the very superpowers who banished her. With her freedom on the line and revenge within reach, this highly-trained operative will take on Fates, dragons, angels, and gods to get exactly what she wants.

Hel hath no fury like a burned spy.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | BN | Apple | Kobo | Google Play

Read the Completed Series: THE IMMORTAL SPY

Career Mulligans

 Who among us hasn't wished for a mulligan in career, relationships, or just life in general? We want do overs for a rough day or a shitty week or, if we really messed up, for an even longer stretch of time. Whether it's wisdom or naivete on my part, I don't entertain regrets about career much. There's no point. If I make a mistake, my only goal is to learn from it and do better going forward because there is no going back.

That being said, I feel pretty strongly that every book offers us a do over for free. I won't lie that I wish some things about my career, my life, and about me in general were different. I do. I wish I weren't a slow writer. I wish I weren't enmeshed in the life circumstance that I am WHILE AT THE SAME TIME recognizing just how privileged the circumstance is. I'm insane and I own that but I don't have to like it.

I did discover something quite by accident the other day about procrastination and I'm still processing it. It feels a little bit like a I got to pull all new cards from the deck, though, so I'll mention it on the off chance it's helpful to someone else. If you self-sabotage and you've done all the regular self-help work around it but can't seem to get traction, it's because you need to forgive yourself for past mistakes. Whatever they maybe. This can be old trauma - anything you wish had never happened. Maybe you hurt someone's feelings and were never able to make it right. Maybe you were a 9 or 10 year old kid home alone when something bad went down outside and you didn't know what to do, even though you tried, and there was no one around you could trust to ask for help and because of all of this, someone died. Oddly specific, I know.

I'm not saying you have to forgive someone else. If you were hurt, you don't have to forgive whoever hurt you. I'm saying it's time to give yourself grace and forgiveness. It's vital because no matter what happened, until you forgive your younger self for not knowing enough, not understanding enough, not being enough - you subconsciously carry around a weight that says you don't deserve any good thing. Forgiving oneself isn't easy but it is necessary. We're monstrously unfair to our younger selves because we look back with the wisdom of knowing what we ought to have done, said, or been and unfairly judge the ignorance of our inexperience.

If you're in a position to wish you could have a do over for just about anything in life, it's a fair bet that you need to practice forgiveness for yourself first. Recognize that you did the best you could with the information you had at the time. Then get busy shaping your future.

Would Today Make a Good Groundhog Day?

Today is my birthday! 

I had a wonderful day and it ended with a beautiful sunset. There’s nothing about the day that I’d do-over. Which happens to be our topic of the week—is there a point in your writing career that you wish you could do-over? 

Like everyone, I make mistakes. They sometimes make me cringe and sometimes make me frown, but I like to look at mistakes or failings as points of growth. If I chose to re-do anything I would be doing so with knowledge gained from said instance…which would mean I would... lose that wisdom…? At that point I think it starts to become a convoluted loop of linear timelines that only the Flash can traverse. 

Oooo, which gives me a great plot idea!!! 

See! A cherry on top of an already great day! 

May your coming weekend be filled with words!

Career Do Overs: In The Beginning...

 This Week's Topic: Do I have a point in my writing career that I wish I could do over?

Hahahaha! So many. {facepalm}  If I had to choose, I'd go with the beginning of my career. To give a sense of era: I started writing when queries were still done via snail mail and mss were printed and shipped between author and editor. In hindsight, I would've paid less attention to the gatekeepers of tradition and rolled more with the innovators and risk-takers breaking ground in the indie market. When I think of all the money spent, time invested, and expectations contorted just to get three minutes with an editor from a big publishing house or an agent with a golden key to the Big 6....{wince}. Don't get me wrong, the folks were nice enough, but it was akin to being an Idol wannabe showing up for an open casting call at the convention center. The odds were not in my favor. Alas, the end of the printed communications era led to the era of "no response means no" from the gatekeepers, which exacerbated the wretched situation of not knowing if your query or requested mss was received when sent into the maw of slushpiles. Hence, why in-person meetings with gatekeepers increased in value, though the odds of getting The Call didn't. In the beginning, I invested too much in playing the meet-and-greet game and not enough in putting my work in front of a hungry audience. Had I been braver (and less arrogant, tbh) I would've embraced indie publishing long before I actually did.

Sure, I definitely needed to be rejected and fall flat multiple times to hone my craft and find my voice. I wouldn't do away with those early experiences. Nor do I wish to unmake the friendships and acquaintances from that time--we were all hungry, desperate, and disillusioned together. Wait, we still are! Only now we bemoan capricious ad platforms, series that miss when we could've sworn they'd be hits, and emerging technologies that harm more than help. 

I certainly feel I have more control over my career now than I did in the beginning, and a lot of that comes from lessons learned from the good, the bad, and the oof-that's-leaving-a-mark. 

It's said if you wish you could go back and make different choices, it means you've not only recognized your mistakes but also have learned from them. Thanks, School of Hard Knocks!

Social Media Trap or Marcella Goes Off the Deep End

"I wanna be where the readers are.
I want to see them reading.
Carrying around those -what do you call them? Oh. Right. - BOOKS.
Out in the sun. Or in the shade.
On the beach or in a cafe.
Read in a bar.
Wish I could be a Tik Tok star."

My apologies to The Little Mermaid.

Social media is hailed as The Way to sell books. You need to know Facebook ads, Amazon ads, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, the rotting corpse that was once Twitter. . . It gets overwhelming fast. Publishers push authors to do all the things! Yet experienced indie author Kristine Kathryn Rusch likes to remind authors that the best advertisement for your current book is your next book. Cal Newport argues that your best, most creative work  comes from flow state and that flow is achieved best in deep work - those times and places where the external world goes away and you descend into deep brainwave activity wherein you lose track of time and are absorbed in your material. This state is predicated on not being interrupted, not having your attention fractured by anyone or anything. He argues that readers shouldn't necessarily have access to you. You have a job. Writing.

I suppose if you compartmentalize extremely well, you could make an argument for engaging in deep work for a few hours each day and then indulging in a little social media promotion. Fair enough. I'm having to think a little harder about that because I don't compartmentalize well. Maybe not at all. It doesn't help that earlier this week, I heard someone mention that cell phones are black mirrors. This rocked me. 

If you aren't familiar, black mirrors are scrying mirrors used in ritual and divination. They are powerful tools and most of us familiar with them keep them carefully wrapped and hidden away from casual glances. This is because a part of you travels when you scry. Part of you goes bye-bye. It's one thing to do that intentionally and for a purpose and then to shut down the mirror after and to reclaim every part of you that went traveling. 

Black mirrors drain energy. It's not malicious. It's just part of the work done with them. They don't have intent, but their utility is the emptiness that draws practitioners out of their human shell to journey for answers to a question or for a vision of something. Used consciously and safeguarded appropriately, they're harmless and helpful. 

If cell phones are black mirrors, they are black mirrors that are used utterly unconsciously. They aren't warded or guarded. We stare into them without regard for where we go when we do. Just try to get the attention of someone absorbed in their phone. Where do we go when we stare in that black mirror? Where does our energy go? I'm not saying that cell phone are traps devised by the Fae. I am saying that if the Fae wanted to build irresistible traps for mortals to fall into, they could have done worse than to have invented cell phones.

Social media, cell phones not withstanding, isn't evil. There are plenty of benefits: engaging with people you enjoy but maybe have never met in real life, finding new-to-you info and books and music, in a world still constrained by pathogens, social media can be a glimpse into a larger, more diverse world. We should absolutely enjoy and contribute to those things. But if we're going to social media *just* to sell books rather than build relationships we enjoy, we'll do more harm than good.

So before you stare into that black mirror in your hand, think long and hard about what you want to get out of it so you know exactly what and how much to put into it.

Cover Reveal: TWISTED MAGIC!

I'm a day late posting because yesterday was crazy. Lots going on here, all good. I hope to share with you all soon! 

In the meanwhile, the news you've all been waiting for, I know: TWISTED MAGIC, Book #3 in Renegades of Magic, has a cover and a release date!!! It will be out October 30, 2023. The preorder links are still going live, but we'll add them to the website as they do. As always, you can preorder directly from me via the website. That includes print (which isn't available for preorder anywhere else). I'll have the back-cover copy and tagline soon, as I'm well into writing the book. At last!! Hooray!!!

 

Social Media Engagement: There's Always a Cost

This Week's Topic: Social Media Engagement

{steeples fingers}

{stares into camera}

Your time is a commodity. A very valuable one. 
Your emotional investment is an undervalued yet critical commodity.
Not every commodity is measured in money.

There's a lot of advice on where, when, and how authors should engage with their audiences. There's even pressure from publishers of all sizes for authors to grow their audiences to the magical level of "influencer" (thus, making the author the owner of the marketing burden, aka the marketing costs). Taking on the social media challenge is all well and good for authors who enjoy virtual engagement, but there's a significant portion of authors who don't, and that's okay too.* 

Social butterfly or not, the minimum requirement in the virtual space for an author is a website that lists your books, preferably by series then by reading order. That's it. No engagement necessary. Your website exists for readers who've stumbled on your work(s) and want to read more. All the other stuff that authors of small, medium, or large readerships have on their sites is there because the author either: a) has the time and desire to offer and maintain it, or b) pays someone else to do it for them. Either way, there is an out-of-pocket cost in cash and time. 

If you want to be more aggressive, get your name out there, and develop an auto-buy readership, a robust social media presence is certainly one way to do it. However, understand that the pressure on authors to be active on social media comes from the misbegotten notion of "free advertising." Just because you're not paying money to exist in a virtual "public" space doesn't mean that you're not paying in opportunity costs, in your time, or in your emotional capacity. Lots of writers prefer to spend those resources on writing their next book. Is engaging in social media a direct 1:1 cost exchange for a writer? Of course not. Your personal resource values are unique to you, and only you can truly know the costs. 

For some authors, it's cheaper to pay big platforms like Facebook, Amazon, or Bookbub to run ads than it is to build brand awareness and loyalty through social media. It's certainly easier to measure ROI on an ad campaign than on a Discord server.

Don't allow external pressures to force you to do more than you can afford, be it in finances, time, or health. 

By contrast, be aware that the less effort you put forth, the fewer sales you get.

When it comes to social media,
you should do what enjoy
and discard all that gives you angst.

*Note: If you're under contract with a publisher, be sure to read and, if necessary, modify any clauses that stipulate your web presence and/or participation. You don't want to be in breach of contract just because Instagram is an anathema to you.