E.P. Clark's Blog, page 7

The Breathing Sea I is Free this Week! Plus this week's selection of giveaways

Greetings, all! With the spring equinox rapidly approaching, now seems like a great time to make the first part of my story of spring, The Breathing Sea, free! The promo will be running March 16-20. And of course it's always free on KU. Get it here: http://mybook.to/tbsi

Well, I could add more about my current project and how you should be expecting to see my first story in a brand-new/old and revived series set in a magical version of Renaissance Florence soon, but I'll just tell you to stay tuned for more updates, and leave you with a list of yet *more* free giveaways to check out.

Are you feeling lucky? The St. Patrick's Day Giveaway has books of all genres: https://books.bookfunnel.com/giantstp...

The Explore Science Fiction and Fantasy Giveaway comes with the chance to win a $25 gift card to the ebook retailer of your choice: https://mybookcave.com/g/2d167f2a/

The March Fantasy Extravaganza has over 100 free fantasy titles to choose from! https://books.bookfunnel.com/marchfan...

Snakes and Steam: Rewriting Chekhov's "In the Ravine" (plus this week's selection of giveaways)

It's another not-so-beautiful early spring day here. The daffodils are blooming, but the occasional flake of snow falls from the sky. So it seems like a great opportunity to write some more about my story of spring, The Breathing Sea.

As I wrote last time, The Breathing Sea starts in early spring and continues until midsummer, and is a story of uncertain hope for the future. Summer will come, but when? The question we're all asking ourself about now!

It's also, like all my books, stuffed to the gills with references to Russian literature. Dostoevsky is probably the most obvious influence, with allusions to The Brothers Karamazov (when the heroine admires the sticky green leaves of spring), The Idiot (when both the heroine and her sister see golden light glinting off things as a sign of immortality, like the condemned man awaiting his execution in The Idiot), and Crime and Punishment (when the heroine has a terrible dream about beating a horse, like Raskolnikov). But another work that looms large in The Breathing Sea is Chekhov's short story "In the Ravine."

"In the Ravine," which was published in 1900, is one of Chekhov's most mature and disturbing works. It's the last work in a trilogy about peasant life: "Peasant Women," "Peasants," and "In the Ravine." Chekhov, who was of peasant stock, wrote about the Russian peasantry with a clear-eyed compassion that presented all their failings as well as all their troubles. Not for him any cotton-candy idealization of Russia's largest and most unhappy class.

"In the Ravine" is so brutal because none of the characters are either wholly good or wholly bad. Lipa, the shy, submissive, sympathetic heroine who is married off in her early teens, is incapable of standing up for herself or her child, just as her mother failed to protect her. Aksinya, the clever, hard-driving villain who becomes a murderer, has also come up from nothing, and unlike everyone else, is able to make something of her life. We are invited to contemplate the fact that Lipa's innocent sweetness is no shield, while Aksinya's amoral ambition can actually accomplish things.

In the story, Lipa is associated with a lark, while Aksinya is associated with a viper:

"Aksinya had naive grey eyes which rarely blinked, and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snake-like; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head."

This depiction of Aksinya-as-viper is unusually ambiguous: normally when we call a person a viper, it only means something bad. But it is Aksinya's smile and her naivety that associate her with a viper, as well as her spring-like colors of yellow and green. The viper here seems as much a symbol of spring as it does of danger.

Accordingly, when I went to write Dasha, my own heroine, I associated her with a viper in the spring rye:

When they stopped for a rest and a meal, Dasha went to examine the young heads up close—and jumped when a brown and yellow snake popped up out of the rye and hissed at her, smiling. Dasha leapt away, her head snapping back hard enough to make her shriek.

“It’s a viper,” said Oleg, pulling her back. “A female expecting young. Let’s move on, and leave her be.”

“Is she dangerous?” asked Dasha, shaking tingles out of her shoulders.

“Vipers won’t normally chase you down, but they’ll strike if you bother them, and females with young are always dangerous. Come.” They backed away and led their horses a few yards farther down the road, and the viper disappeared back into the waving rye. Dasha knew that she should be afraid of her, that she should be repulsed by her, but mainly what she felt was a curious sense of…kinship. As if she and the viper were sisters, which couldn’t be right, but was.

****

Dasha, like Aksinya in "In the Ravine" in general, is also associated with fog and steam, and as in "In the Ravine," the final denouement of The Breathing Sea I takes place while the characters are doing laundry. In the opening passages of "In the Ravine," we are told that "there was boggy mud there even in the summer," "sin seemed to hover thick like a fog in the air," and every morning "Before the sun had risen in the morning Aksinya was panting and puffing as she washed in the outer room, and the samovar was boiling in the kitchen with a hum that boded no good." And indeed, Aksinya will use boiling water to commit her terrible act.

Dasha is less murderous than Aksinya, but she has to learn how to balance and control her affinity for steam. As she sets off on her journey, Dasha has her Raskolnikovian warning dream, in which she also dreams of a village much like Aksinya's:

As they crested the rise, she saw there was a village down there, down in what was almost a ravine at the bottom of the hill, so that the only thing she could see of it from the road was the smoke rising from its chimneys—or was it steam rising from vats of laundry? She could feel it scalding her skin even from here. She whimpered and tried to pull back harder, but her father only dragged her forward with redoubled strength. Dasha twisted around to try to run the other way, but as she did, she caught sight of…something coming down the road after them.

***

I was not a fan of Chekhov when I was first introduced to his plays as an undergraduate (undergrads can be foolish like that). But reading his stories as a grad student finally made me appreciate him, something helped by the fact that I took a class on him with Radislav Lapushin, one of our foremost current Chekhov scholars (and my dissertation advisor). I doubt that I ever learned to appreciate Chekhov to Radik's satisfaction, but reading "In the Ravine" was, even if maybe not in the way that Radik intended, a life-changing experience for me.

And now for this week's selection of giveaways!
First of all, I still have a couple more proof copies to give away. So if you'd like a signed paperback (proof copy) of either The Dreaming Land II or The Dreaming Land III, let me know!

And then there are dozens of free short stories, previews, and full-length novels in the following giveaways:

The Series Starters Giveaway is for, you guessed it, first books in a series: https://books.bookfunnel.com/seriesst...

The Fantasy Book Binge Giveaway has all subgenres of fantasy: https://books.bookfunnel.com/fantasyb...

The Magic Rises Giveaway has over 100 free books and stories of all magical subgenres! https://books.bookfunnel.com/angels-a...

Spring is Coming! Fear, Faith, and Free Signed Paperbacks

Well, it's the first week of March, which means spring isn't quite officially here yet, but the daffodils and crocuses and pears are already blooming in my neck of the woods. I hope they don't get nipped in next week's predicted hard frost/winter storm.

Things have been pretty exciting for me recently, and only sort of in a good way. Remember how I've been trying to detox from toxic mold exposure? Well, I guess it's been working, because I suddenly became WAY sensitive to all kinds of things that have even trace amounts of mold and mildew in them. Touching them or even being in the same room with them results in a nasty sensation of being poisoned. Alas, since this is the Southeast, "anything that has ever mildewed" means lots and lots of things. I've had to get rid of my bed, bedding, and most of my clothes, and am doing another aggressive purge of my books. I'm currently sleeping on a camping mattress on the floor and wearing a selection of hiking clothes hastily thrown together by my dad after several emergency trips to REI. Needless to say, I have not been feeling well, to put it mildly.

But--BUT BUT BUT!--this morning I walked all the way to the end of the block! After losing more and more of my ability to walk over the past few years, and spending the past couple of years struggling even to make it across a room, that's a HUGE deal. So while I'm not out of the woods yet by any stretch of the imagination, I am seeing improvement, which is encouraging.

Anyway, on to literature. As part of my book purge, I realized I have two more paperbacks of The Breathing Sea I, so the first two people who request them will get signed copies!

The Breathing Sea is a story about spring, and like any good springtime story, tells a tale of fear, and hope, and faith. Spring comes...and goes...and comes again, finally bringing summer with it. In the same way, Dasha, my most dualistic, Dostoevskyan heroine, goes back and forth between fear and faith. Her mother's gift from the gods, Dasha is gifted--with premonitions of possible futures, frequently disastrous. Throughout the two-book mini-series she struggles to reconcile her fear of these terrible possible futures with the faith that something better will come to pass. In the end of The Breathing Sea II she manages to come to some kind of fluid, ever-changing balance:

The waves were blue-green up by the strand, but she could see a long line of darkness where the beach dropped away into the abyss. So close to the shore! The abyss and the beach were separated by no more than a few paces.

“What are you looking at, Tsarinovna?” asked Alik.

“My future,” she told him.

He grinned uncertainly. “I hope you only see good things,” he told her.

“No one will only see good things if they look their future square in the face,” she told him. “There will always be suffering, and terror, and all those things we seek to hide from. But there is wonder as well. The world is so full of wonder! And we are part of it! We are part of that wonder too! We just have to have faith in it!”

***

As Dasha discovers, that's easy to say, but harder to do. In any case, spring is the time to go back and forth between those two states of fear and faith, and the sense that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

Spring is also a great time to check out some new books. Below are some giveaways currently running. These giveaways always instill equal parts fear and faith in me, since you never know when you're going to pick up something terrible or something wonderful--but it's all free, so you're unlikely to be out much, and you just might find your next favorite series!

Links:
The Breathing Sea I: myBook.to/tbsi
The Breathing Sea II: myBook.to/tbsii

The Explore Science Fiction and Fantasy Giveaway includes the chance to win a $25 gift card to the ebook retailer of your choice! https://mybookcave.com/g/2d167f2a/

The No Happy Endings Giveaway is full of fantasy and sci fi for lovers of dark, gritty tales: https://books.bookfunnel.com/nohappye...

The March Fantasy Extravaganza is a giant blow-out giveaway of all subgenres of fantasy: https://books.bookfunnel.com/marchfan...

Sneak Peek of Brand-New Work in Progress! Plus this week's selection of giveaways

I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine's Day! Maybe you had a wonderful Friend Day, as they say in Finland, by eschewing all the marketing around yet another over-commercialized holiday, but that's okay too. That's what I did. And if you went out and had a super-romantic experience, well, the rest of us will try not to be too envious.

My health continues up and down, although once I went off my B12 supplement the anxiety and panic attacks that had been plaguing me started to recede. It turns out that B12, like all the other B vitamins, does not mix well with me. It was like I was mainlining espresso all the time, which is not actually a very fun experience. I've been off a week and I'm slowly getting clean, so fingers crossed that that continues.

Spending a few weeks in a state of increasingly surreal fear was certainly eye-opening. Unfortunately, it was something I'd already had my eyes opened to before, so I could have done without it *again*.  But it did renew my interest in a collection of stories I started more than 10 years ago, which among other things are about extreme fear. I keep meaning to finish and publish, them, so I've promised myself that it will happen this spring!

I'm still thinking about what I'm going to do with the final story, but here for your delectation is an excerpt from the first story. It's set in a kind of Renaissance Florence, and features the bodyguard of the younger prince of the ruling family. Magic has fallen out of favor with the new craze for reason, but just because something is irrational, doesn't mean it doesn't exist...

"The Shadowy Man" (Excerpt)

“We’ll leave the portcullis up until you get back, Giacomo,” the guards at the gate told him as he left for the tavern. The portcullis normally came down for the night at the tenth hour, and anyone who hadn’t come back by then had to find alternate sleeping quarters, but there was some flexibility allowed the more senior men.

“No,” he told them. “Lower it. Lower it now. I have a key to the catwalk door. Tell whomever’s on duty there to expect me.”

“It’s only the eighth hour,” the guards at the gate protested.

“We can’t be too careful with the del Sole delegation arriving,” Giacomo said. The gate guards looked dubious, but as he walked away he heard the portcullis come clanking down behind him.

The castles were lit with hundreds of flickering torches that made strange shifting patterns on the walls and streets. The nobles’ houses around them had torches outside their doors, allowing a passer-by to move easily enough from pool to pool of light. As Giacomo left the rich part of town behind and drew closer to the tavern, though, he had to rely on his lantern. A drunken man would have no problem imagining followers in the shadows.

The Hunter’s Rest was a pleasant-enough tavern that sold cheap local wine and was consequently a great favorite amongst the guards. Once upon a time it had been on the edge of town and hunters had come there to sell their catches, but now it was firmly inside the city and hunters never came there at all.

Giacomo was not a great frequenter of taverns, but the proprietor of The Hunter’s Rest was not the kind of man who would fail to recognize Prince Luca’s personal bodyguard and tutor. He immediately offered Giacomo the seat of his choosing and a glass of his best wine, on the house. Giacomo took up a position at the bar and tasted the wine. It was not, of course, as good as his mother’s, but you can’t have everything. He complimented it handsomely when the proprietor asked him how he liked it. The conversation flowed to the other guards, and to the tavern’s regular patrons, and then on to any unusual visitors.

“We normally see the same faces over and over again,” the proprietor told Giacomo. “Last night we only had one stranger.”

Giacomo allowed himself to appear mildly interested, and asked if the man had seemed to enjoy himself.

“Mostly he just sat in the corner and sipped his glass.”

Giacomo asked if he had seemed to have anything shady about him. He was, he explained, a little concerned that some of the less scrupulous guards were lifting things from the kitchens–just bits of plate and silver, things like that–and passing them on. He wondered if the proprietor thought the strange man could be involved in anything like that? And if so, did he look like he might have done business with any of the guards who were visiting the tavern last night? Had he, for example, spoken to any of them, or followed any of them out onto the street? Giacomo was particularly suspicious of his man Fabiano.

The proprietor said he hadn’t noticed anything of that sort, although the strange man had left shortly before Fabiano had. But so had lots of others–anyone who worked at either castle had to be back before the tenth hour, and the sensible ones gave themselves enough time to get there without a rush. Fabiano always left it until the last moment, though, and then paid up in a great hurry and dashed off. Half the time he underpaid, but half the time he overpaid, so in the end it came out even. The proprietor gave his opinion that Fabiano was too loose-tongued to be involved in anything underhanded, and Giacomo should look to his more tight-lipped men for the culprit. Giacomo thanked him for his advice, and left.

He still had a vague irrational feeling that he shouldn’t leave the castle for too long tonight, and stood in the street for a while, debating whether or not to go see Massimo, in the hope of gaining useful information. After a brief mental struggle, he decided to go. After all, there were fifty men guarding the Castello degli Eredi, and he wanted to put the matter of the shadowy man to rest once and for all.

Massimo was a surgeon, although now that his hair was white he rarely practiced any more. He had patched Giacomo up more than once. Giacomo thought that there was no one better than a surgeon for stitching up wounds or setting broken bones, but they unquestionably operated close to the dark side of things. If someone were to know about something shady going on, he felt, it would be Massimo.

Once he arrived at Massimo’s rooms, which were only a few streets away from The Hunter’s Rest, Giacomo had to knock on the door several times in order to rouse anyone. Eventually he was let in by a sleepy-looking maid.

“Tell them Barbaro down the street has a much steadier hand for stitching these days,” an old man called from the back room.

“If I ever need stitching, I’ll bear that in mind,” Giacomo replied, brushing past the maid and into Massimo’s bedroom.

“I was just going to bed,” said Massimo, by way of a greeting. “Come back during the day.”

“You know I can’t leave the Prince during the day,” Giacomo told him. “I need information.”

Massimo struggled between several conflicting emotions, but curiosity and pleasure won out. “About what?” he asked, sitting up in his bed.

Giacomo told him the story of the shadowy man.

Massimo picked thoughtfully at his counterpane. “You say that Alberto from The Hunter noticed nothing odd about him?” he asked.

“No.”

“But Fabiano was frightened of him?”

“Yes.”

“We all know how much credence to give Fabiano’s fears...”

“This was different. Sometimes when he’s drunk he sees things and screams and makes a fool of himself, but this time it wasn’t like that. He was...spooked. Like a horse who knows there’s something in the woods, but can’t tell whether it’s a squirrel or a wolf.”

“I see.” Massimo fingered the counterpane a bit more. “And you felt it too,” he stated.

“Not at first, but when I left the Castello tonight I made them lower the portcullis. And I keep feeling I should go back.”

“Do you think someone might make on attempt? Do you think Prince Desiderato is in danger?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Giacomo said. “I only thought of Luca.”

“Why would anyone be after Luca?” Massimo asked. “Desiderato is the heir, and the Princesses are old enough to marry and bring a man a place in Court, but Luca is hardly more than an ordinary boy.”

“I don’t know,” Giacomo admitted.

“You’re too fond of him,” Massimo told him severely.

“I know,” Giacomo admitted. “I can’t help myself.”

“A sensible man with your abilities would have arranged matters so as to end up guarding the heir,” Massimo said.

“I don’t like Desiderato,” Giacomo confessed. “He’s a bully.”

“Just like his father,” said Massimo. “Well, he is what he is, and this isn’t helping us solve your problem. We need to concentrate on your shadowy man.” He returned to picking at his counterpane, and pulled out a pink embroidery flower. He gave the crinkled thread a disproportionately horrified look.

“Micca!” he shouted.

The maid came in, her arms full of the bedclothes she was using to make up her bed in the front room, took the thread, and left the room, shaking her head.

“There are various orders of self-appointed assassins, alchemists, and other shady characters,” Massimo said once she was gone. “A lot of them enjoy sitting at the corner table in a black cloak and frightening the customers. Of course, that’s about all they can do, so they might as well enjoy it. Your shadowy man sounds different.” He gazed at the tiny holes in the cloth where the embroidered flower had been.

“When I was a young man, just a journeyman surgeon, I served far down in the south, in the Forzesco Kingdom,” he said suddenly. “While I was there, the Forzesco heir was struck by an arrow. The wound festered. The chief surgeon wanted to take off the arm. Otherwise, he said, the poisoning would spread to the heart and Prince Sandro would die. But the King wouldn’t hear of it. He called in two more surgeons. They both said the same thing. So he called in an herbwoman. She agreed with the surgeons–but, she said, there might be a chance. There was someone she knew of, someone who might be able to effect a cure without removing the arm. The King ordered that he be brought over immediately, and the next day he was there.”

Massimo paused for a moment to clear his throat, which sounded curiously tight.

“They told me later he was called Lo Sfilatro–The Unraveler, in their dialect,” he said. “He was a small dark man, but no smaller or darker than is usual there. He wore the clothes of an ordinary man. His speech was soft, with a strong Forzesco accent. The only unusual thing about him was a blue and red tattoo on his right wrist. Somehow the lines in it seemed to writhe before my eyes.

“I was tending the Prince when he came in. He came over to me and asked me how the Prince was–was he eating, was he sleeping, what his urine was like. He never looked me in the eyes–he only watched my hands. As he stood there beside me, my heart started to pound. I answered his questions, and my voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. My ears kept ringing and ringing.

“‘You will be a good surgeon one day,’ he said when he was done questioning me. ‘I can tell by the movements of your fingers. But someday you will have to conquer your fear of the unknown.’ Then he told me I wouldn’t be needed for what he was about to do, and sent me away. I stumbled out of the tent and sat on the ground for a long time.

“I don’t know what he did. I didn’t see anything unusual happening in the tent. But after a while he came out, and said that the Prince would live, and would retain the use of his arm. Then he left. As he walked by me my heart gave me a sharp stab, and I knew–just for a moment–what it would be like to die. And as he walked away, I thought he seemed cloaked in shadows.”

“Do you think this Sfilatro might be my shadowy man?” asked Giacomo when it became clear that Massimo had finished.

“I don’t know,” said Massimo, looking at his hands. “But somehow his story came to mind. I will ask around tomorrow. Perhaps someone will have heard something.”

Giacomo thanked him for his information and his future help, and left. On the whole, Massimo’s story had comforted him. If the shadowy man was this Unraveler, or someone like him, he didn’t sound like a potential threat, no matter how frightened Massimo and Fabiano had been of him. Surgeons and healers might stray over into things a sensible man would shy clear of, but it seemed unlikely someone like that would be plotting against the royal family.

He walked back to the center of the city and went in through the front gate of the Castello Maggiore. He dropped in on Piero, the captain of the guard there. Piero said that the watch had been doubled, in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities, but in general things had been quiet as the grave.

Giacomo wished him a good night and climbed up to the catwalk. The guard at the door from the Castello Maggiore greeted him and stood aside to let him use his key. He made his way quickly across the swaying rope bridge–Luca loved crossing it, and begged Giacomo to let him go out on it every day, but he was only allowed to use it on special occasions, when speed was of the essence–unlocked the door to the Castello degli Eredi, and greeted the guard who was there waiting for him.

“How has it been?” he asked, surprised at the sudden return of his earlier anxiousness.

“Quiet as the grave, Giacomo,” the guard said cheerfully.

“I don’t like that expression,” Giacomo told him, his voice sharp. Hearing it twice in a row had made something heavy settle on his heart. “It’s gloomy. Couldn’t you come up with something else?”

The guard apologized with a surprised look. Feeling guilty for his outburst, Giacomo apologized in turn.

“I must be turning into an old woman,” he made himself say.

Ulricco was standing guard outside Luca’s door, just as he should be, when Giacomo climbed up to the Prince’s tower.

“How has it been?” he asked.

“The Prince asked me to let him out a couple of times, like he does sometimes, but then he settled down, and he’s been silent as the dead for the past hour,” Ulricco reported. “Did you have a good time? Was your outing...productive?” He leered suggestively.

“Very productive.” Giacomo checked the lock on the Prince’s door out of the corner of his eye. It seemed secure enough to hold off a mid-sized army. He wished Ulricco a good night and went to his door, which led to the next room over. Also locked. For some reason, his hands had a hard time working the lock. Giacomo told himself he would have to arrange to have it oiled tomorrow. He bolted the door behind him.

Giacomo’s room was a small windowless chamber, only slightly larger than his bed. The door between it and the Prince’s bedroom was the only thing ever left unlocked at night. Giacomo opened it slowly, trying not to let it creak. Luca was a light sleeper and often woke up when he checked on him, but tonight there was no glad cry. Giacomo raised his lantern a little in order to look at the bed. It was a warm night, and the bedcurtains had not been drawn closed. The bedclothes seemed awfully flat. He rushed over and shook them out, his hands trembling feverishly. The Prince was gone.

***

So there you go! I'll keep you updated with the book's progress. Meanwhile, if you're looking for some weekend reading, check out the following selection of book giveaways:

The Fantasy Book Celebration is in celebration of the release of Rise of the Realms, and has a mixture of fantasy, sci-fi, and paranormal romance: https://books.bookfunnel.com/fantasyb...

The Origins Giveaway is for series starters: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/Q...

The Daring Damsels & Warrior Women is for all speculative fiction and action/adventure genres featuring kick-ass female leads! https://books.bookfunnel.com/daringda...

The No Happy Endings Giveaway is an anti-Valentine's Day giveaway of dark speculative fiction with absolutely no Happily Ever After romance! https://books.bookfunnel.com/nohappye...

Sometimes Dragons are Real. Plus Giveaways and Excerpts

Goodness, is it February already? It is! How the time does fly. I hope everyone who is in the path of the latest polar vortex is slowly defrosting. We didn't get too hard hit here in North Carolina, but we did have several days below freezing, which is pretty dang cold for us.

Things have been fairly up and down for me. As many of you know, I'm currently on medical leave for late-stage Lyme disease and what has turned out to be a nasty toxic mold exposure. The most impressive result was my literally off-the-charts readings for Ochratoxin A exposure.

And that probably doesn't capture my actual levels of exposure, since I failed to do the things you're apparently supposed to do to get the toxins circulating before taking the test. So goodness only knows how much toxic gunk I actually have inside of me. Judging by how I feel, quite a lot.

Anyway, after a couple of months of avoiding my workplace and sitting around an air purifier, my ability to walk is coming back! A tiny bit. And there have been a lot of other nasty crashes and detoxing side effects. To paraphrase Xander Harris, it not only sounds skippable, it is skippable.

So I'm here to tell you that this toxic mold thing is no joke. Once again, you might find it illuminating to read Julie Rehmeyer's Through the Shadowlands,Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand which is about part of her toxic mold journey.

But enough about that! It's time to get down to the serious business of fiction. What with all this fun I've been having, I thought I'd share a little excerpt from my short story/novelette "The Dragonbone Wand," which was inspired in part by my experiences with treatments for Lyme disease and the delightful die-off reactions they trigger. It's in the fantasy anthology The Magical Book of Wands, which is currently still free on KU if you want to go give it a read: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...

Here's that excerpt:

“You are not simply born a dragon, Laela.  Well, you are, or rather, you are born with the blood and the gift, but that is not enough.  You have to undergo the training.  You have to undergo the change.”

“What change?”  He didn’t look very changed to me, but perhaps I was missing something.  Perhaps it was one of those things where fancy people used fancy words to dress up things that weren’t very fancy or exciting or interesting at all.

“You…the training…you have to change…”

“Change in what way?”

“It will make you stronger,” he said, not looking me in the eye.  “That’s all.  It will make you stronger.”

“But it will make me weaker first?” I guessed.

“A bit.  Sometimes.  It can make you…sometimes you don’t feel so good…but you will be fine.  I’m sure of it.  You will be fine, and you’ll have it over with by the time we arrive, and that will make the training easier, and you’ll be ahead of everyone else.  Come here, Laela.”  He raised his eyes and looked me straight in the face.  “Come here, Laela, and take it.  It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.”

I walked over to him, why I couldn’t say.  My feet no longer seemed like my feet.

“Only a drop,” he cautioned, holding the vial up to my lips.  “One drop, no more.”  He tilted the vial.

FIRE!

I was clutching onto the cart to keep from falling.  Joki was watching me with dispassionate concern.

“Why does it do that?” I asked.  “It was like…being suddenly squeezed all over…or struck by lightning…”

“It just does,” he told me.

“Will it get better?”

“It will.  Once you stop taking it.  Now come.  Let’s see if you’ve left any food for us.”

I tried to get Joki to tell me more about the red liquid and its effects as he made supper—despite his dire words there was no shortage of food for the humans as well as for Tähti—but he put me off with stories that seemed to twist me around more and more as I felt odder and odder, till I accused him of poisoning me.

“No,” he said.  “Not like what you mean.  It’s the change, working on you.  It makes you feel a bit sick at times, is all.  But a strong girl like you, I’m sure you’ll survive.  Now go to bed, and you’ll feel better in the morning.”

I wanted to argue with him, demand more answers from him, insist on promises that he wouldn’t harm me in the night, but none of the words would come out right, so I crawled over to the cart and made up my bed underneath it, where I lay for a long time, both sleeping and waking, dreaming and seeing, until the stars came out and the moon rose and set, dragging me down into darkness with it.

***

Thus far I have not actually transformed into a dragon myself, but I remain hopeful. I'm afraid that the real dragons are the spirochetes and molds, though. Probably this would be a good time to meditate on the interdependence of all things, and the fact that we humans are not the masters of the universe that we like to think we are.

In the meantime, here's a sampling of the giveaways I'm participating in this month:

Winter Escapes Book Cave Promo: https://mybookcave.com/g/1aa5c6c5/

Clean Fantasy Creatures Reads: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/j...

Speculative Fiction Promo: https://books.bookfunnel.com/speculat...

And here's the link for The Magical Book of Wands again: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...

The Midnight Land is Free This Week! Plus Excerpts and More Giveaways

So much news! But first things first. The Midnight Land I myBook.to/tmli is free on Kindle January 20-24, and for those of you in the Amazon.com market, Part II mybook.to/TMLII is just 99c! Of course, they're always free on KU.

Hmm, and while I'm on the subject of free books, the Portal to Fantasy Winter Reading Giveaway https://books.bookfunnel.com/portal_t... is still going strong. Why not check it out if you haven't already?

And heck, while you're at it, you might as well mosey on over to the New Year? New Worlds Fantasy Giveaway as well. https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/q...

Regular followers of my posts may have noticed that I was AWOL last week. Alas, it was not because I was devoting the time to my new, semi-secret contemporary suspense project (pick up the free ARC and sign up for my other newsletter here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/e4j2xkak30). No, it was because, after a week of marked improvement, in which I even walked my dogs! Down the street!!!!! Okay, it was only half a block, but that's half a block more than I've done in a year and a half--where was I ? Oh, yeah. I got better...and then I crashed. Last weekend was spent in bed, when, that is, I wasn't wondering if I needed to take myself to the ER. My crashes can be pretty scary sometimes. In fact, as the caretaker to a dog with Addison's disease, I now recognize them as being quasi-Addisonian crises. Which sucks, in case you're wondering. There's a lot of suffering and fear involved in these crashes, alas, like there is in everything else involved in health problems. That's why they're health problems: because they cause ridiculous amounts of pain and misery, and there's no way to hide from them. Suffering is terrible, full stop. Try to cause less of it.

On the other hand, as a Buddhist and a Russianist, I recognize the benefits involved in suffering. Suffering can break you down, but it can also lift you up and make you a wiser, more compassionate person. If, that is, you have the strength to make it do so.

This seems like a good segue into my discussion of The Midnight Land. While one of the key inspirations for the story, other than medieval Russian literature, was the question we feminists have to ask ourselves of "How on Earth did we let men get so out of hand?" somehow this morphed into a meditation on sensitivity, compassion, and how to make the world a better place, one with less suffering in it.

Obviously these are big topics, but my heroine Slava's answer to it circles back to the concept of yin and yang and finding strength in your opposites that I wrote about last time. In the beginning of Part I Slava frets about how ill-behaved the men around her are, but does nothing but fret and fail to stand her ground. (Spoiler alert: that's how my heroines think we let men get so out of hand).

But,

SPOILER ALERT!!!! MAJOR PLOT REVEAL!!!!!

If you don't want to know something of what happens to Slava at the end of TMLII, skip the following excerpt!

over the course of the story, Slava manages to transform her sensitivity into compassion, and her angst into courage. This leads her to the following realization, from the end of Part II: 

“A piece of irony, indeed,” Slava agreed. “Or perhaps it was all the will of the gods.” The fact that her reign rested on what some might call masculine treachery and inconstancy was an irony not lost on her, and one that was, as Olga had pointed out, rather worrisome. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this was what all those aunts and grannies had meant when they had patted her arm and told her, with many a salacious look and leering grin, that she needed to take in a “bit of a man.” Perhaps she just needed to act a bit more like a man from time to time, or at least accept the misdeeds of the men she had encountered throughout her life, because without them, without all their thoughtlessness and cruelty, she might not have gained the rule of Zem’. Perhaps without all the wrongs that had been done her, she would never have been given this opportunity to do right. Perhaps there was a reason for all of it, or, most likely of all, she realized, this was her opportunity to turn all that foolishness and futility into something that was neither foolish nor futile. She could transmute the dross of pain and petty human problems into something more, if she could find the courage to do so.

***

Slava comes to the important realization that pain is, to a certain extent, what you make of it. Not that it can be wished away, but that it can make you bigger person, if you are willing to accept its thorny gifts. Sadly, that's easier said than done, which is why Slava is a hero. Most people want to be heroes, but only real heroes can take the pain that everyone goes through, and turn it into something worthwhile.

And with that bracing thought, I'll leave you with those links again:

The Midnight Land I (free Jan 20-24, and always free on KU) myBook.to/tmli

The Midnight Land II (99c Jan 20-24, and always free on KU) mybook.to/TMLII

The ARC and newsletter signup for my semi-secret suspense project https://dl.bookfunnel.com/e4j2xkak30

New Year? New Worlds Fantasy Giveaway https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/q...

Portal to Fantasy Winter Reading Giveaway https://books.bookfunnel.com/portal_t...

Yin, Yang, and New Year's Resolutions that Won't be Kept (Plus More Free Books!)

Happy 2019, everyone! How is it 2019 already?

My 2019 is starting off well-ish, in part because I'm on medical leave. That's not normally a positive, and I'd much rather *not* have to be on medical leave, but since I do, I might as well look on the bright side. And one of the bright sides is that I don't have to go into work when the semester starts up next week. Although I'll miss my students (there was a lot of angst and sadness on all sides when I announced I wouldn't be around next semester), debilitating illness really puts a damper on what might otherwise be fun activities. Plus it seems that it might be my workplace itself that is a major source of the problem, as part of the mold saga. Stay tuned for more breaking mold headlines as this story unfolds...

Anyway, it's January, which is about as wintry as it gets, so I thought I'd start gearing up for a promo for The Midnight Land, the first mini-series in my overall Zemnian Series.

I was going to write about how I was inspired to start the series by reading A Game of Thrones and falling in love with the northern landscape depicted in it, and how I wanted to write something similar, but with a Russian slant, and more woman-friendly, but it's supposed to get up above 60 degrees tomorrow here, so I'm not really feeling like winter is coming at the moment. I'll save those posts for later. Next week it's supposed to get down into the 40s, or something frigid like that. Of course, since I can't tolerate even the slightest amount of cold, I should probably be grateful.

Anyway, with the recent vagaries I've gone through with my health, I thought that now might be the time to contemplate ups and downs and how vulnerability can turn into strength and vice versa, which is really what The Midnight Land is all about, or at least one of the things it's all about.

My heroine, Slava, is a kind of anti-heroine, not because she's bad, but because she's sensitive and vulnerable. Which has made her kind of bad, or at least self-centered and hysterical, at the beginning of the story. Her vulnerability is mainly emotional, but she sees it in physical terms:

Sometimes Slava wondered if the gods had created a certain amount of skull material that was supposed to be shared equally, but somehow something had gone wrong, and other people had ended up with hers, so that their heads were thick and unfeeling, while she was left with no protection at all. That was how she felt: as if there were nothing shielding her from the outer world, so that other people’s thoughts and feelings could enter into her whether she willed it or no, while her own thoughts and feelings were brushed aside without hesitation, like falling autumn leaves. Or sometimes she saw herself as carrying a glowing sphere of light where her head should be, while other people were dark lanterns whose shutters could not be opened and whose light could not be released. Only if that were the case, then her light should be able to shine on them, only it seemed as if it never did. They all wore heavy armor, while she had no skin at all. Although, it seemed, plenty of arrogant selfishness…why did she always end up brooding on the flaws of others, when she should be doing something about her own…why, why, why…

***

Why indeed. Brooding on the flaws of others instead of your own is so seductive, isn't it? I'm currently trying to limit my own indulgence in that sin to, oh, a mere five or six hours a day, instead of all day, every day. It's a nice, high-minded New Year's Resolution to fail at.

But--spoiler alert!--of course Slava's greatest weakness is also her greatest strength. In the beginning, she often wishes she could weaponize her feelings and force them on others. When she gets her wish, though, it hurts her companions almost as much as their enemies. It is only when she embraces her vulnerability that she is able to come into her true power, as a protector of others:

Someone has to! said Slava.

So true, agreed the cold wind. And that someone, it seems, is you. For not only will you scream, but there is, perhaps, a faint chance that others will hear you. Perhaps you have been given this task because you might, unlikely as it is, succeed where others have failed. Tell me, little daughter: does it make you happy to be chosen for this honor?

No, said Slava, and yet…

And yet you do it anyway. Why?

I have to, explained Slava. I can’t help myself.

No, no doubt you can’t, said the cold wind. It is your purpose in life, or so it seems. Did you know, little daughter, that everyone—leshiye, the creatures of the forest, even you city-dwelling humans—is born with some skill, some special ability that only they possess? You are all different, after all, and that is why. All of you have a purpose, if only you would realize it. And your purpose, as you have sensed, is to protect others.

***

Slava's weakness and vulnerability makes her more aware of the vulnerability of others, and quick to defend them. If she were a "strong" person in the traditional sense, she wouldn't be able to become the hero she becomes. Throughout the series, all my heroines discover the same thing: their flaws are their strengths, and their strengths are their flaws, with the two intertwined like a yin-yang symbol.

So maybe keeping your New Year's Resolutions involves harnessing your flaws for the good, or not letting your strengths get out of control, or...in general, accepting the mix of good and bad that we all possess, and turning the bad into good without turning the good into bad. It's a big task, but I'm sure we're all up for it.

And I promised you free books, so here we go! This week's selection of book giveaways includes:

Portal to Fantasy Winter Reading Giveaway: https://books.bookfunnel.com/portal_t...

New Year? New Worlds Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/q...

Where Women Rule Fantasy Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/z...

Reading Recommendations, Book Giveaways and...Ssssshhh, It's a Secret!

With the coming New Year, as we say in Russian! I hope 2019 brings whatever it needs to bring for all of us.

I've been doing a reasonable amount of reading over the past few weeks, so I thought I'd share some recommendations of books and authors that are not super well-known, and therefore may not be on your radar.

But first, speaking of finding new books, a reminder that this is the last week to check out the Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway and the It's EPIC (Fantasy) Giveaway. If you haven't browsed their selection of dozens of free fantasy books yet, now is the time!

Going through these giveaways is a bit like digging through the bargain pile at a used book store, or the free books on the tables outside of libraries. It can take some hunting to find what it is you personally want, but chances are good you'll come up with something good if you look long enough. So here are some books I've found in the past couple of years of sifting through free giveaways.

Kat Ross's The Fourth Element trilogy, and its continuation The Fourth Talisman series, is an exciting and vividly drawn epic fantasy series set in a magical version of ancient Persia and Greece. And it features some dangerously ass-kicking heroines, which is always a plus. The first book in the entire series, The Midnight Sea,The Midnight Sea is perma-free.


Sarina Dorie's Tardy Bells and Witches' Spells Tardy Bells and Witches' Spells is the first book in a series that combines cozy mystery, a hidden Harry Potter-ish magical school world, romance, and goofy humor. It's free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

The Redemption of Erath: Consolation The Redemption of Erâth: Consolation starts a series of dark, atmospheric fantasy that is strongly reminiscent of aspects of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. It's currently $0.99 on Kindle.

Deborah L. Davitt's The Valkyrie The Valkyriebegins The Saga of Edda-Earth, a riveting and extremely epic fantasy trilogy set in an alternate world in which magic is real and Rome never fell. It follows a Valkyrie who serves in the Praetorium Guard and may have to save the world. It's free on Kindle Unlimited.

And...now for the secret! In my copious spare time I have started a mystery/suspense series under another pen name. I'm keeping it semi-secret because, well, some aspects of it are awfully true to life (others are not). There's no element of fantasy in it, but it is full of Russian! I'm including an excerpt below, and if you want to sign up for my mystery mailing list, you can do so here. I should have ARCs ready of the first book within the next few days, and, if all goes according to plan, the next book will be ready sometime in the spring. In related news, I'll probably start posting about fantasy on a biweekly rather than weekly schedule soon, so that I can alternate between my fantasy and my suspense posting.

Excerpt
They say knowledge is power. Those people must never have gotten a Ph.D.

Case in point: the way I sidled into the room my first day at my first job. If my power corresponded to my knowledge, I would have stridden in like a conquering hero. But my knowledge of the sigmatic aorist or the Onegin stanza only seemed to weigh me down as I slithered into the faculty meeting room, smiling like a meek little idiot and wishing everyone would stop staring at me.

“You must be our new Russianist. Rowena Halley, right?” The speaker was a big bear-like man, a rarity in a foreign language department, where the faculty tended to be mainly female and inclined to the childish or the wizened. His joviality, though, had the manic edge common in academics, honed through decades of politically correct bullying into a weapon capable of inducing suicidal depression in everyone who encountered it.

“Yep.”

“They say you’re from Georgia.”

Now everyone was staring at me, like they’d never seen anyone from Georgia before. Which was all too possibly true.

“Originally,” I said.

The all-white group did a collective grimace as they bit down on their reflexive desire to berate me about racism and segregation. No doubt it was coming.

“But I did my Ph.D. in Indiana,” I continued, triggering another collective grimace at the mere thought of the Midwest.

“Indiana…” said the bear-like man. “That must have been…different. Was it the first time you saw snow?”

“I lived for several years in Moscow. So no.”

“Moscow! I bet you have lots of opinions about Putin!”

There was a chorus of titters.

“Is what they’re saying about police harassment true?” continued the bear-like man, his eyes avid. “It must not be safe to be an American there these days, is it?”

“It’s at least as safe as it is here in New Jersey,” I said, and sat down on the one remaining empty chair, between a woman who was vaguely familiar to me from my Skype interview for the position, and the only man in the room other than John Greene. The woman was wearing chunky gold earrings and a thick necklace that hinted enough at Central America to leave her open to accusations of cultural appropriation, so even though I couldn’t remember her name, I was guessing she was from the Spanish program. The man was slender and had bristly dark-blond hair and dark-blond stubble covering his face and looked like he hadn’t yet turned thirty.

“Good to see you again, Rowena,” whispered the woman, but didn’t remind me of her name. The man gave me a sideways flicker from his eyes, and then went back to looking straight ahead, stony-faced. His left leg, though, was quivering slightly under the table, hidden from everyone except me, as if he could barely contain his pent-up energy and desire to be out of this room.

There was an awkward silence, and then printed agendas were handed around and the meeting broke out, starting with pointed introductions to the one newcomer—me.

The bear-like man was John Greene, Associate Professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Modern Languages. Of the other fifteen faculty members there, eight also taught Spanish, and three taught French. The Spanish instructors kept inserting bits of Spanish into their speech, some with better accents than others—John Greene’s was particularly shaky—causing the French instructors to laugh sycophantically and nod to show that they, too, spoke a Romance language.

Aside from the Romance contingent, there was one German instructor, one Chinese instructor, one Arabic instructor (the man sitting next to me), and me. We all sat in nervous silence as the Spanish contingent discussed business that had nothing to do with us and swapped in-jokes, with John Greene occasionally making little digs at Georgia until he got caught up in an argument over something that everyone kept referring to as “C. Diff.”

“Why is everyone talking about c. diff?” I whispered to the woman sitting next to me. “Was there an outbreak of diarrhea here last semester?”

She gave me a weird look, but got distracted by the argument over whether or not the Department of Modern Languages was adequately supporting C. Diff’s mission.

“It’s the Committee for Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Fairness,” the man to my right whispered, bending close enough that I could feel his stubble brush my ear. “C-D-I-F. It’s a student-faculty collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative to increase the presence of under-represented minorities and engage in town-and-gown outreach in order to encourage local members of the community, especially potential first-generation college students, to apply to TLASC.” He delivered the words in an inflectionless whisper, but when he broke away, his whole body was now quivering, I assumed with suppressed laughter.

Meanwhile, an argument had broken out between a Spanish and a French instructor over item three on the agenda, the cross-listing of survey literature courses with tempting titles such as “French Neoclassicism: An Introduction” as comparative literature, or CLIT (pronounced See-Lit), classes.

I looked down at the agenda to confirm my suspicions of the spelling of the course identifier, and then sideways at the woman sitting to my left, but she sat there impassively. If she had ever found it amusing to teach classes labeled CLIT 101, those days had long since passed. The man to my right was running his hand over his face, maybe from tiredness, maybe because his stubble itched, or maybe from the desperate need to keep from exploding with mirth. I fought the urge to ask if Introduction to Differential Equations was labeled DICQ 101 on the course bulletin, and narrowly won.

The argument was settled in favor of foreign language instructors teaching courses cross-listed as CLIT 101 as they apparently always had in the past, but with a motion to request that the courses be listed as FORL first and CLIT second, instead of the other way around, as they currently were.

“After the latest curriculum survey they’re obviously planning to reduce the foreign language courses as much as possible, maybe phase out the requirement altogether!” said the French instructor who had been arguing in favor of getting the courses listed as FORL first and CLIT second. “We need to remind them that we’re still here!”

“Which is why we want to get in on the CLIT listings!” cried the Spanish instructor who had been arguing against her. “Raise our visibility!”

“I’ve heard they’re thinking of cutting the CLIT program entirely,” put in a third person, a bird-like woman whose tiny stature was balanced out by a large mane of wispy, hay-like hair that appeared to have last been brushed sometime back in the Bush administration. The first Bush administration. I couldn’t remember her name or what she taught, but odds were it was Spanish.

There was a vociferous outcry against the perfidy of budget cuts aimed at foreign language programs, which united the room long enough for us to move on to the next item on the agenda: the promotion of our LCTL (pronounced “Lictle”) program.

“Now, I know you haven’t been here long, Rowena, if I may—you don’t mind if I call you Rowena, do you? I know how touchy some new PhDs can be, especially young women, about being called by their first names—of course you have to stand up for yourselves, I understand that, and in the classroom you should, but here we’re all not just colleagues, but friends—but you must have talked about growing our LCTL program during your interview? In fact, that’s part of why we hired you, isn’t it?—because you had some really good ideas for outreach and development for our LCTLs, which is something we really want to do; the Provost has named it a priority, and anything the Provost wants that might raise the profile of foreign languages on campus, well, we want to get behind that, and it’s always so exciting to bring in promising young scholars, even from places like Indiana; I mean, maybe you have some great ideas you’ve gotten there that you can share with us”—there was a reflexive giggle from a number of my new colleagues at the thought of great ideas coming from Indiana—“and so, why don’t you and I, Rowena, meet after this to talk about some of those ideas, just the two of us, to really hammer out some plans?”

John Greene fixed me with a bright stare at the end of his speech. I smiled weakly back. Before I could say anything, we had moved on to item five, the cut in the office supplies budget and how this would force us to act in a more environmentally responsible manner by not printing out so many handouts (the man to my right looked down at the printed-out meeting agenda, caught my eye, and then looked swiftly away, rubbing his hand over his face once again) and then briskly to item six, student mental health reporting.

“After what happened last semester”—there was a pregnant pause, during which everyone, even John Greene, appeared to shrink a little in their seats—“the Office of Student Wellness has instituted a new protocol for notifying them and the authorities of students who appear to be a danger to themselves or others. There was some question over whether the new mandatory reporting rules violated FERPA, but it was decided last week that they are in fact FERPA-compliant, so everyone will need to do the online training seminar prior to the start of classes, which I don’t need to remind you is in two days’ time. Rowena, you’ll have to do your regular FERPA, Title IX, and Health and Safety training at the same time. It’s all online; shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, but it has to be done before classes start or we could be facing a potential lawsuit.”

Now John Greene did wait for me to promise that yes, I would complete the FERPA, Title IX, Health and Safety, and Student Wellbeing training within the next 48 hours.

There was some grousing about more mandatory online training, and a little tiff between two Spanish instructors, but no further explanation of what had happened last semester, and with that, my first faculty meeting as a real professor was over.

***

Links:

My super-secret suspense mailing list! http://eepurl.com/gcoL5T

It's EPIC (Fantasy) Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/M...

Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/c...

Giving More Than You Take: Fantasy and Philosophy (And Free New Books)

Lads, lads, lads! By which I mean mainly ladies. It's here! It's finally here! The official launch of The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice is upon us, and in celebration of that, it's free on Kindle December 15-19.

Releasing the last book in a series is always a big moment. Is, you might be asking, TDLIII the last book in the series? Well, it's always possible that I might go back and revisit the story later. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me for a minute if I did. But for the moment I'm planning to let the story rest and come to some kind of temporary conclusion as I go on to other projects (more about that soon).

As for what that conclusion is, well, that's open-ended. Each mini-series within The Zemnian Series, as well as the series as a whole, is less about external events and more about internal revelations. Without giving away too much, I'll say that The Dreaming Land mini-series ends with a certain amount of resolution of the external plot, but with a very important moment of internal resolution for Valya, its heroine. After struggling all series with her (justified) heartbreak and her (justified) outrage at the slave trade and other iniquities that take place on home soil, she reaches an important realization, one that promises to make things better not only for her but for all her people. As I wrote in a previous post, Valya is modeled off of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings, but an Eowyn with much more agency, and, let's be frank, a good deal more inner fire, too. Valya's inner peace comes not from resignation to her situation and a return to passivity, but from the clarification of her healing mission and a commitment to active striving. As Valya tells her second-sister (first cousin) Sera towards the end of the book:

"But you and I…we can act to change it. We must act to change it. Because we can’t live in a country, in a world, where people sell their children into slavery because it’s the best choice they have. That can’t be the best choice they have, and if it is, we need to…instead of telling them to sell their children because it’s their best choice, we need to make it so that they have better choices. And I think…I think now we can. And we can because…you know, I like to win, I always have, and I sometimes—well, often—want to break the world over my knee like kindling.

“Only now I think that that would be…not winning. It would seem like winning at first, only it wouldn’t be. We don’t need to break the world like kindling, because then we’d have nothing but a broken world, quickly burnt to ash. We need to bend it as we would a living willow branch. Bend it so that it still lives, but forms the shapes it needs to. And to do that we’ll need to change. We’ll need to…oh, so many things, but we can’t go taking all the time, taking and not giving. We were given a gift, and now we have to give back. We can’t go taking from the mines and poisoning the earth and the water, we can’t go taking from the people who work them, the people who are no better than slaves, whatever we might tell ourselves, we can’t go killing the creatures that serve us and hunting down all the animals in the forests until there aren’t any left, and then we look around and wonder why we’re all so hungry, we can’t go taking from others, from everything around us, like heedless children, certain that we are the center of everything and everything belongs to us.

“And so we’re going to have to change. I don’t think it will happen right away, but it will, if we try hard enough for long enough. That’s the main thing, to try hard enough for long enough, and not to quit, not even when you want to give up and scream in frustration and never try ever again, not anything. So that’s what we’ll have to do. And we’ll have to…Princess Velikokrasnova was right about this, we’re too closed off from the rest of the world. We’re afraid of the world, and so we closed ourselves off from it. And we’re right to be afraid of the world, because the rest of the world is afraid of us, the rest of the world would be more than happy to hurt us, but…we still have to open our arms to them, because that’s what will make us strong. We are strong enough to take them, so we have to be strong enough to take them in, the kind of taking that is giving instead of stealing. We have to find the strength to open our hearts up to them in their time of need, because that will make us stronger. So there will be change—well, there will be change no matter what we do, or want. Change is inevitable. But if we are brave and strong, we can make it the kind of change that needs to happen.”

***

I may have been making a pointed commentary about contemporary events in the "real world" there. Maybe.

Anyway, if you want to contemplate philosophy and ethics while reading an epic fantasy novel with a kick-ass heroine who doesn't take no nonsense from no one, you can grab your free copy of The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice here.

And that's not all! I'm also participating in several group giveaways this month, so here's your chance to pick up literally dozens of free fantasy stories for absolutely nothing. Links are below.

The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice: mybook.to/TDLIII

The Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway features books with a historical slant: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/c...

The It's EPIC (Fantasy) Giveaway is--you guessed it--a giveaway of dozens of epic fantasy books: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/M...

Delightful Deer: Celebrating Gentle Creatures in Fantasy (plus sneak peeks and free books)

I won't lie: I've spent the past couple of days casting about for things to write about this week. It's the end of the semester for me, which means much madness and burn-out. And while the fact that I'll be on medical leave next semester (Lyme disease plus probably other things, for those of you just joining the party) is GREAT, since it turns out that doing stuff is basically awful if you're constantly on the edge of collapsing and blacking out, and also my campus is probably overrun with building toxins or something unpleasant like that, it would really be better not to have to take a medical leave at all.

Anyway, my brain is basically an end-of-the-semester kasha at the moment, BUT since the big launch promo for The Dreaming Land III is next weekend, I want to keep gearing up for it! Raising excitement, and all that! So I thought I'd write about deer.

The things is, I love deer. And all kinds of hoofed mammals (*cough* horses *cough*), but deer just don't get the love that they should. Humans have this reprehensible tendency to identify with major predators like wolves and lions, even as we do everything in our power to exterminate them. One could write and write about that, but for the moment I'm just going to say that I consider my spirit animal to be the deer (what, not the horse?!? you say in surprise), and deer appear at key moments in both The Breathing Sea and The Dreaming Land, acting as physical or spiritual guides.

While Dasha, the heroine of The Breathing Sea, is overtly very deer-like, Valya, the heroine of The Dreaming Land, is a warrior. Or is she? What does it mean to be a warrior? And are deer warriors, and warriors deer-like? These are questions that Valya wrestles with throughout the TDL trilogy, along with the problem of causing harm and suffering, even for "good" reasons. As she travels across her land in her quest to stamp out the underground slave trade, she is forced to confront the fact that slavery and suffering are everywhere, not just in the slave caravans but in "good" things too. Human society is built on it, and the natural world also has the destruction and consumption of others as one of its foundations. One of the things that Valya must confront is the fact that suffering seems inevitable in the natural world--and the fact that humans use this is an excuse to perpetrate vast amounts of egregiously unnecessary suffering. As Valya would say, doing that and calling it, for example, logic, "is when you tell yourself a bunch of lies that sound like cold hard truth but are really you being scared and selfish, only you manage to hide it away behind your twisty edifice of half-truths." (Valya rarely hesitates to speak a harsh truth when the moment calls for it).

The problem of taking what belongs to others becomes particularly acute for Valya at the end of TDLII and the beginning of TDLIII, as her magical healing abilities manifest themselves with ever-greater strength--and appear to demand an ever-higher price, not just from Valya but from everyone around her. At one point early on in TDLIII, Valya stops for the night after a very hard day's ride, and has a significant encounter with a deer:

I leaned against a tree and poked at the fire. That’s me, I thought. Or rather, that will be me. Nothing but a pile of ash. And no wonder. All I can do is take. My gift—my magical gift, my life—it’s just stealing from others for my own ends. All I can do is take. I’m a killer. A thief and a killer…my gift is in stealing from others, my gift is in stealing from others, my gift is in stealing from others…

The clearing suddenly went silent, even more silent than before. I looked up from the fire. A young doe was standing between the trees, looking at me.

Can you hear me? I asked her. But there was no reply. She was just standing there looking at me with her limpid brown eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said to her out loud. “You should stay away from humans.”

She continued to look at me with her large clear eyes.

“Even me,” I said. “Especially me. After all, another person would have to shoot you. But I could stop your heart and steal your life with just a thought.”

She stood there, looking at me with what, I thought uncomfortably, was trust shining out of her big eyes. Somehow they reminded me of Ivan’s. There was the same innocence, the same belief that I meant no harm…all the scents, all the sounds of the clearing rose up around me so strongly, as did all the life around me…I could sense it all…it was giving me strength…I was no longer slumped against the tree, but sitting up straight…even the fire seemed to be burning more brightly…Zlata rose to her feet, and then Svetlyak…the doe stumbled and fell to her knees.

“No!” I screamed. She hauled herself back to her feet and tried to bound off, but managed nothing more than a shaky trot.

“No!” I cried again, and I tried to go after her, I tried to give back what I had taken, but despite my strength and her weakness, I was too confused about what I needed to do, what I wanted to do, and before I could fix what I had done, she was gone and I had to come back and throw myself down by the fire and stir the stew before it burnt.

Something dripped off my chin. I must have started crying without realizing it. It didn’t make me feel any better, the way I had always thought it would, all those times when the tears wouldn’t come.

***

I don't want to spoil the end of the book, but things do work out well in the end for many of the characters. Nature is harsh, and humans are cruel, but one of the things I've taken a kind of comfort from in my own experiences with being seriously ill and quite literally being eaten alive by a wily predator (even less fun than it sounds) is that, in the very long run, there is a tendency towards symbiosis. Multicellular organisms like, for example, humans, are symbiotic hosts to all kinds of other organisms; our mitochondria may once have been bacteria, and consciousness itself may be the result of a viral infection. That super-pesky Lyme spirochete can live in stealth mode for months or years in humans, instead of causing instant death like, say, Ebola, and is even more adapted to dogs, deer, and its main host, mice. So maybe, one day, the lion really can lie down with the lamb.

In the meantime, maybe we can all think a little bit about how to be gentler creatures, and give more than we take.

And there's nothing like reading to entertain different possibilities, is there? So why not check out this week's selection of free fantasy giveaways.

Links:

The Dreaming Land I: mybook.to/TDLI

The Dreaming Land II: mybook.to/TDLII

The Dreaming Land III: mybook.to/TDLIII

This is the last week for the Magic and Fantasy Giveaway! https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/4...

And then there's the Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway! https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/c...

And finally, the Myths, Gods, and Ancient Worlds Giveaway! https://books.bookfunnel.com/mythsand...