Kris Bowser's Blog

Stars Fall Out: Early access on Laterpress and Kindle Vella!

Magic is power, and only the Kirosz Empire’s oneiromancers can wield it.

When a Nirsuathan professor engineers his own magic, Tyatavar, a failed printmaker stuck running the family bakery, steals a magic vial.

As Nirsuathu’s own laws and traditions clash with imperial power, Tyatavar’s theft proves even more disruptive than the magic itself—and forces choices between truth and power, lies and friendship, home and self.

The Stars Fall Out series launches in early 2024 with Book One, A Chain of Lights, but for now, I’ve set up two early access versions of Stars Fall Out, one on Kindle Vella, the other on Laterpress.

The Kindle Vella version is fairly straightforward: it’s a pay-by-chapter serialized story. While the series will contain six books, they’re written as a continuous story, and both early access versions will (eventually) contain all six books.

If you’re not familiar with Laterpress or are wondering what this whole “early access” thing even means, I’ve written some possibly helpful FAQs.

FAQs that I made up myself

(like most FAQs, if my suspicions are correct)

What does early access mean?

It means that while the Stars Fall Out series—as listed on regular ebook retailers—is still in preorder, you can read an early version.

It still needs edits, covers, and decent (by my standards) formatting. But it exists.

While I’m uploading scene-by-scene to Kindle Vella, Laterpress has a bulk import feature, so the updates will be coming book-by-book. Slower to release, but saves a ton of time. And that time goes straight back into revision.

Currently, all chapters are uploaded for Book One: A Chain of Lights.

What if I want to get the final version later?

I plan to upload the the completed version to Laterpress, the service I’m using to host the early version. So ultimately, if you go with the early access version, you’ll end up with a finalized boxset.

All books with also be available on regular storefronts.

Do you have a pro-con list?

You know I do.

PROS

Updates as new books completed and edited.Cheapest the series will ever be.Downloadable epub that you can load on many different devices.Get one book now with a boxset coming down the pipe.Nice web reading experience.Available internationally (unlike Kindle Vella).Support the author and project in its early stages, and also a platform that looks like it’s genuinely trying to do right by readers and authors.

CONS

Not part of a platform such as Kindle or Nook that you might have your entire library on, and that automatically syncs with your device.Formatting is not up to the persnickety standards of someone who both formats ebooks and copyedits, and if you have strong opinions about paragraph indents or that weird thing people do now where they try to use a hyphen like an en-dash, it might bug you.Slim possibility author will run off with circus before completing work (but only very slim, due to chronic plantar fasciitis).…insert your own cons here. I don’t know your life.

Again, you can check that out here. And if the early access cons outweigh the pros for you (fair—I hate that hyphen thing), the first chapters are still available for preview: just click the link, and you’re there. No sign-up needed.

If you still reading, you might still have one big question:

Why bother with an early access version if you’re just going to release a better one later?

Book launches have something in common with weddings: you prepare for months, only to have everything riding on a single day. In my case, “prepare for months” only meant three months, but still, that’s a lot of months sucked into the gravitational pull of a single day. Both experiences exist on a continuum from exciting to stressful, and for me, they’re too close to the stressful end.

After my wedding, I had all these ideas of what do to better next time. To relax more. To have more fun. To make sure people understood that, yes, it would be cold outside on Halloween night, or alternately, to have the whole thing earlier.

But there wasn’t going to be a next time. (And yeah, people get divorced about 50% of the time; I’m just assuming I won’t want to bother with the remarried part.)

I disliked being unable to practice having a wedding.

Shocker, right? An introvert who enjoys learning new skills, but not parties.

While I’ve already done a couple book launches (and hence have some practice), there’s still the stress of everything riding on a single day.

Indie authors often talk about having more control, but that’s not just about stories and covers. There’s an idea of indie authors stuck in a complex of being simultaneously rejected by and turning up our noses at traditional publishers who won’t take our art, and wouldn’t understand it anyway.

But control isn’t just about artistry and perfectionism; it’s about day-to-day life.

I’m an indie author by choice, not because of the depressing traditional publishing statistics out there. And because I made that choice, I can have a book launch that isn’t like a wedding.

People talk a lot about expanding your comfort zone, something that’s extra difficult when you have an anxiety disorder. But there’s another way; rather than expanding my comfort zone to include book launches, I change the book launches and drag them right into my comfort zone.

Far from making more work for myself (of which there’s only a small amount), I’ve given myself a solid reason to finish it early.

By launching iteratively, I’ve already released pressure from the actual upcoming launch day.

“Tomorrow Is a Difficult Proposition” available to read at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores

“We’ll talk later,” I tell you, with such casual smoothness you have no idea how poor my grasp of “later” actually is.

Then I expand out to formless thought-feeling-presence. I am around your ship, through your ship. I have no edges, no body, only a calmness like shade and meditation and cool water.

I unfold within a nebula, a fair harbor for thought, while patterns form in the blooming and exploding of stars as millennia sweep by.

I return to where you were, but find I have lost you.

You could be anywhere. I’m hazy on the time as well, and so I search backwards and forwards.

I rush through all the reaches of the cosmos where your people have explored and built civilizations, and I rummage through planets and systems like opening and shutting drawers in rapid search.

And all I have to aid my search is a set of dingy keys.

My short story “Tomorrow Is a Difficult Proposition” is now available to read on Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores!

CRES decided to release it as a Valentine’s Day story as it features an immortal cosmic being who falls in love with a mortal ship’s captain and loses her in the vastness of time and space. It doesn’t help that the cosmic being has trouble with small, mortal units of time, such as “later” and “tomorrow,” and with patience in general. And so, while my story involves love, it’s not actually a romance.

In fact, it’s mostly about having no concept of time, something I wrote about in the latest issue of my newsletter.

Fun fact: Did you know that one turn of the galactic wheel is about 230,000,000 years, at least for the Milky Way Galaxy? This is something I learned during the editing process. In the early drafts, my cosmic narrator measures time in eternities. But the editor at CRES suggested using turns of the galactic wheel instead, and that made sense to me. After all, we measure years by turns of the planet.

Anyway, check out the story, and check out Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, if you’re not already familiar with it. They have a ton of cool stories over there.

Gears of an intelligent universe

One time, I accidentally named a character Sean Astin. Yeah, like the actor. You know, Samwise Gamgee, kid from Goonies, assorted other movies that I haven’t seen, but for which he apparently won some awards. Since then, I try to do a quick internet search for my character and place names, just in case. After all, prevention is the best way to avoid naming a wizard “Castro.” Get it? Because of the spells? (No, I haven’t done that one.)

Most of the time, these searches turn up nothing of significance. I partially create my own languages and mash together random syllables, so I have a collection of unique names that feel like they belong together. But they aren’t so unique that they never come up in searches. Maybe an RPG player did the same syllable mashing I did and came up with the same name. Maybe someone syllable-mashed their first name and last name together, and now it’s their screen name, and their screen name is my character name.

It’s almost impossible to create a cast of secondary-world characters with names that have never been used anywhere else ever, in any language. The real question is: is there a significant instance of this name?

I found out that one of my names is a wine, another an Irish word for king, and another is a Hungarian musician. Yet another is a city in Cambodia. (It’s also a city in my books, though maybe not anymore. A little too close, that one.) I also had a couple names that only come up in excerpts on my own website.

Due to the syllable mashing thing, most of my names haven’t been common, even if there are other instances out there.

But there’s one exception, and that exception also happens to be a huge coincidence. Maybe too huge.

The other day, due to procrastination, I found myself searching names once again.

As it happens, I have this one character who likes dried pears. He’s a main character, so pears aren’t his whole deal, but there’s a connection.

It all started in a scene with a campfire. I needed something for a couple of characters to eat, I had some dried pears in the cupboard at the time, and they didn’t require food worldbuilding.

So, dried pears? Yeah, guy had them in his bag.

Later, another scene came up with the same need for packable road-food. All right, guy gets another bag of dried pears. Turns out, they’re his favorite.

At this point, “likes dried pears” became a character trait. When he needs to pack a bag and steal a magic vial in a hurry (people are always stealing those things), what does he pack? Dried pears, of course. They’re his favorite. Guy keeps them on hand. And since they’ve gone up north with him by magic vial, into a situation where food is a little more difficult to come by, guess what the characters are eating during a big emotional moment?

Dried pears. Not only are they a character trait, they now have emotional significance.

So, dried pear guy? His name’s Piro.

What happens when I search “Piro?”

Courtesy of ancestry.com:

Italian:: nickname or topographic name from Sicilian piro ‘pear tree’. from the personal name Piro a shortened form of Pie(t)ro; see Pietro.

What?

This whole time, my random, syllable-mashed character with his straight-from-the-pantry fondness for dried pears has a name that actually means “pear tree?”

Unless it isn’t random, but an instance of synchronicity: meaningful coincidence created by the connectedness of the universe. Or the force. Or the transcendentalist oversoul. Or something. Basically, it’s a nifty concept with a lot of new-agey baggage.

The term comes from Carl Jung, though I first learned about it from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a book best-known for the concept of morning pages. Cameron discusses synchronicity as “a responsive creative force” and “a fortuitous intermeshing of events.”

Synchronicity is thinking about how you could really use a whimsical new wafflemaker, and then your neighbor puts one out in a box of free stuff on the sidewalk. It’s thinking you should find a printmaker to chat with for your writing research, and then you run into an approachable printmaker selling t-shirts at your town’s autumn festival right in your own neighborhood. (Only you don’t ask him your burning printing-plate questions, but that’s not synchronicity’s fault–it’s social anxiety.)

Synchronicity is when the universe gives you pears.

Synchronicity goes along with the idea that we live in an intelligent universe. It’s not necessarily an intelligently designed universe (which isn’t mutually exclusive, just a separate idea), but a universe that itself is intelligent in some half-conscious, pattern-seeking way.

The starlit gears of the intelligent universe turn in a mechanism of unfathomable complexity, and a row of pears click into place like a mystical cosmic slot machine.

While I enjoy imagining it, most of the time, I don’t believe in an intelligent universe. Like synchronicity and the oversoul, it’s just cool.

But there’s another explanation for this whole pear thing. Years ago, I studied Esperanto. I love learning about languages and grammatical features that English doesn’t have, like cooler gender-neutral pronouns and naming schemes other than first-middle-last.

However, collecting grammar and etymology tidbits is one thing; developing fluency is another entirely. I can say only one thing in Esperanto: “La piramidoj esta apud Novjorko.” I could claim that time erased the rest of my Esperanto knowledge, but in truth, I have poor language-learning stamina.

The pyramids are near New York, by the way. Now, you too can say something entirely useless in a mostly useless language. (You’re welcome.)

See, I wanted to be able to say an actual sentence in Esperanto. So, I took the misfit grab bag of Esperanto words I knew and crafted the useless sentence above. It’s been lodged in my brain for almost twenty years.

I have no memory of learning about pears, or “piroj,” as it were, and there’s a good chance I really didn’t.

But guess what else came up in my “Piro” search? It’s the Esperantan word for “pear.”

La piro esta apud la piramidoj?

This might mean my character liked pears before he was a character, back when he was a glint of pre-mashed syllables on a messy sheet of notebook paper.

But it still might mean synchronicity, too. Julia Cameron and Rule of Cool aside, Jung’s synchronicity is now viewed as pseudoscientific. The phenomenon isn’t considered to have anything to do with the universe, but rather to be completely internal, a function of something both that appears both meaningful and unlikely.

Statistically, there’s a probability that any coincidence could happen. I could go to a dinner party with one million people (that’s how dinner parties work, right?) and sit next to the only real estate agent there.

Holy crap, what are the chances of that? (Ok, that’s an easy one.)

But the thing is, I don’t care. Real estate doesn’t interest me. Due to my enormous apathy, the statistical improbability of sitting next to the real estate agent doesn’t mean anything. (Thank goodness the real estate agent is also a huge fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and we can talk about my theory that Jadzia’s hairstyles are a barometer for how dire the plot is. Besties!)

Ardri is an Irish king, Pinuar a wine. Athu Suong is a city named Suong. The surname Wiragh is the musician Wiragh. None of these meant much more that “Ha, interesting.”

But the pears? For an instant, I saw the hand of an intelligent universe moving pieces into place. And yet, it only meant something because of the chain of events that caused me to connect pears with the character. If it weren’t for the internal universe of connections and meanings and context inside my own head, I wouldn’t have seen any synchronicity at all.

In other words, whether the universe did it or my brain did, it still comes down to my brain; meaning is personal.

Meaning is always personal.

Image from Depositphotos

Life lessons from Stardew Valley: keep your spouse happy ...

Life lessons from Stardew Valley: keep your spouse happy by saying one thing to them per day and giving them a blueberry.

OCD and the enchiladas of uncertainty

In 2006, when I was in college, there was a bird flu outbreak that started with domesticated chickens in China. It didn’t end up being a pandemic, but the word was thrown around a lot. During this time, a friend eliminated chicken from her diet to be on the safe side. I knew that eating chicken didn’t transmit the disease, and that in any case, cooking the chicken should negate that risk.

But one night, at a Mexican restaurant, she made a point of ordering anything but chicken. I’d planned to get chicken enchiladas, but I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe, just maybe, in some freak case, I could get the bird flu from eating chicken.

I ordered bean enchiladas. I’m sure they were delicious, but mainly, it was easier to stop eating chicken for awhile than to have thoughts of freak bird flu aggressively poking at my brain-parts every time I ate poultry.

At the time, I didn’t know I had obsessive compulsive disorder, or that I’d spend fourteen years fearing a pandemic before we finally had one. Pandemic was the Lord Voldemort of my own personal phobias: say its name, I feared, and it would come.

As you can imagine, the last two years have been rough. On my last day in a physical office—right at the start of the pandemic—I started washing or sanitizing after I touched any doors at work. I sanitized my hands after I made a copy. I sanitized my hands after I opened the fridge. I held my arms up like chicken wings so they wouldn’t touch my desk or the conference room table.

Remember all the face-touching everyone was obsessed with early in the pandemic? Face-touching, for all that it spreads germs, is also a natural human behavior. For years, if I touched my face, a twitchy feeling would come over me, and I would surreptitiously take a pump of sanitizer and mimic the face-touching I’d done seconds earlier, scratching at my face with the sanitizer.

I’d worked hard to be able to touch my own face without falling into squirrelly twitchiness immediately after, and in general, I’d put a lot of work into sanitizing my hands less.

On that last day, seven years of progress evaporated like hand sanitizer in a matter of hours.

But this isn’t about the germs—it’s about the uncertainty. What matters isn’t that I ate a slightly different plate of enchiladas more than a decade ago; what matters is the thought process behind that choice, and how I ignored the logical voice in favor of doing something that would calm me down.

I make those decisions every day, and have done so for years. The obsessions and compulsions that show up with hand washing are a template, and it shows up other places as well. At the center of that template is uncertainty. Why did I wash my hands a second time? Because I wasn’t certain I did a good enough job.

Sure, life is full of uncertainty. You can’t get around that. I don’t know how I’m going to die, although my four-year-old thinks I should know this. (Yes, it was a disconcerting conversation.) But part of OCD—the part that’s been my own hallmark experience—is having poor tolerance for uncertainty.

I won’t use canned air to clean my keyboard because there’s a warning on the canister about how misusing it could be fatal. “There’s almost no chance that will happen,” my brother pointed out.

Of course there isn’t—and I know that. These anxiety-based thoughts and fears are a scythe undercutting what I know, intellectually, to be true. But I also walk by pots crusted over with old tomato sauce and think, “Oh, god, I hope I don’t lick that.”

It’s not ignorance. It’s about seeing a .0002% crack of uncertainty where, in some parallel universe, I lick the crusty pot and shove an air nozzle up my nose for no actual reason.

It shouldn’t mean a damn thing, but I’m unable to get past it because it’s still uncertainty. That I imagined it happening doesn’t help matters.

Poor tolerance of uncertainty has affected my writing as well. It slipped under the radar for years, until I found myself taking extensive notes during a revision, and questioning whether or not I wanted to note down smaller word and sentence changes, or stick to the big stuff on that pass.

Should I note that down? It’s kind of a small thing, and it takes time to add all these notes. I’ll get it when I type in my changes. Hmm. But what if I don’t notice it a second time? What if I become desensitized to the raging dumpster fire of my own inadequate first draft word choices? What if I forget? What if it stays like this all the way into the final draft? What if I do this every time, allowing an unacceptable level of laxity to slip into my work?

Except for the original thought about the draft, most of this happens non-verbally. In The Perfectionist’s Handbook, Jeff Szymanski writes that a lot of these internalizations sound ridiculous when you write them down. As a fiction writer, I definitely wouldn’t give the above internal monologue to one of my characters. It feels like a cartoon character. Like Wade the Duck.

Examining and verbalizing these thoughts—and deciding if they’re ridiculous—is, incidentally, part of dealing with them. (Thanks, therapy!)

But that doesn’t mean they have no power in the moment. If you looked at my monologue from the outside, you’d see me reading through a draft, making brief notes on the page, then flipping through my notebook to add them to the right section. You’d see me pause here and there to add numbered notes.

Then I stop. Hesitate. My pen taps the page. I go for the notebook. Change my mind. Try to go back to reading. My eyes flick back to the spot that stopped me. Pen hovers again. Rinse and repeat a couple times. I give in and write down the note.

The incident above is probably something that happens to everyone at one point or another, and it’s not a big deal once in a while. But the thing is, I have OCD. So take the above example, and multiply it. I’m not sure what you’re multiplying it by since I lost count, but figure the equation involves a 1125-page manuscript of 234,000 words.

A single grain of sand? No big deal.

Tons of sand? Kind of an issue. It can bury you. Just ask the Fremen.

Now figure, it’s not only a writing problem, and it’s not only a germ problem, either. It’s checking locks and burners, not once or twice, but over and over again. It’s washing dishes in concentric circles and filling the kettle up to the count of thirty, even though that makes it overflow once it boils.

It’s a million other things that aren’t my OCD, but other people’s.

If I could stop doing these things, I would have. It’s the most frequent advice I get from others (“You should try not to do that anymore.”), and one of the earliest “solutions” that occurred to me, before I had my diagnosis. Just stop.

Stop doing that. Stop worrying. Stop being like this. Control yourself.

But it doesn’t work like that, and I expect this to be here for the rest of my life. If I put in the work, and if my life goes well, there will be times when I barely notice my OCD at all. I’ve had those times. And I’ve also had the stressful times that strain everything and make it worse. (Hello again, pandemic.)

Usually, when I conclude a piece of writing, I ask how all the above thoughts, questions, and experiences have affected me or changed me. What’s my takeaway from this whole thing? What questions do I still have? Inherent in any piece of writing—a complete one, anyway—is some uncertainty that comes to a resolution, or at least the start of a resolution. But all the uncertainty above? It doesn’t come to a neat point. The enchiladas, the germs, the counting—they don’t merge into a beautiful sunset of cohesive truth. They don’t add meaning to my life or raise provocative questions.

Sure, there are treatment options. At this point, I’ve been back in therapy for a little over a year. OCD has been my most intractable issue, but I’ve made progress elsewhere, like with perfectionism, and that often overlaps with OCD. Awareness, education, self-knowledge, and support from others, both professionals and personal support systems, can mean the difference between coping and not, surviving and thriving. I genuinely believe those things, and I try to live them, too.

But the idea of giving this too pat an ending bothers me. It feels like a betrayal of my lost seven years of progress. It’s not a lie, exactly, but a small-talk version of the truth. A Disney-fied version. It’s like someone asking, “And what have you been up to lately?” and you answer that, actually, you just got married to a prince, but you leave out the part where your sisters cut off their toes and heels.

So, where does that leave us?

When I get up from my computer, I’ll go out and sanitize my hands too many times and hit my car remote’s lock button too many times and continue to never cook with eggs because I’ll be trapped in a Dishwashing Loop of Uncertainty if I do.

This piece of writing will end, but my uncertainty lives on. But here, in this space, with my words, I have a power that I don’t have in every aspect of my life. I can skip the obsessions and compulsions, the repetitions and the circling. I can create the certainty that I don’t have elsewhere, even if my fingers hover over the keys before I do.

And so?

This piece of writing is over.

Image from depositphotos

Pumpkin Goblins has a print version!

Yup, that finally happened!

And I took a a picture of it in damp leaves. For proof. Because I don’t know, maybe you wouldn’t believe me?

(For the record, no books were harmed in the making of this blog post.)

Finally getting the print copy up was the impetus for relaunching the book last year, but it was the only part of the relaunch I didn’t get to–and this despite the fact that I had the files an inch from ready the first time around.

The response to this has been awesome–I’m not alone in my old school preference for print! (Even though I’ve definitely been enjoying my Kobo Clara the last few months!)

But even better than people buying the print copy? Reading it to my four-year-old. This started as a mandatory chapter per night before I went on to read Little Blue Truck or Phoebe and Her Unicorn (which is a much more awesome comic strip than you’d think from the name!), but it’s now turned into something she looks forward to, and she’s been asking a ton of great questions.

Anyway, you can grab a copy of the paperback here.

Spirit Notes Fading has a new cover!

One of my goals before I release Stars Fall Out has been to update my previous two books. I designed the early covers myself, at a point in my life when I had aspirations of going into cover design myself.

My covers weren’t great. Part of a learning process. I could’ve become better with time, just like anyone with anything. But ultimately, it was a trajectory that I abandoned because I only have so many hours in my life.

One thing that blew my mind recently: when I read The Perfectionist’s Handbook by Jeff Szymanski, he points out that the word “decide” has the same ending as “homicide” and “suicide.”

When you choose one thing, you’re killing other choices.

After I killed that trajectory, it was a relief to have someone else do the covers. And the time I put into self-learning still had value; it helped me to communicate to the designer in a more informed way, with a better idea of what I wanted.

The new cover does a much better job expressing the book’s overall vibe, and I’m pretty happy with it!

As always, Spirit Notes Fading is free to newsletter subscribers here and also available for $.99 at your e-book purveyor of choice. You can even request it at your local library.

Stranger Shores, fantasy, and fruity wine

And now for something completely different; finally, I get to achieve my potential as a hard-hitting Journalistic Maverick. Today, I present an interview with fantasy author Katie Zaber, who writes in a familiar type of writer-chaos and makes fruity wine that I would absolutely try, even though I hate wine. She also has a new book coming out on July 29, 2022: Stranger Shores, the third entry in the Dalya series.

Author Katie Zaber

Katie Zaber, author of the series Dalya and DNA, is a fantasy author whose imagination knows no bounds. As a child, her parents read stories about Atlantis and other fictional places that she dreamed of exploring, fueling her love of history, adventure, and fantasy. She loves to spend what little free time she has winemaking, baking, and reading. When she has a full day to herself, you can find her at the beach or at a winery. Her favorite meals are the ones her boyfriend cooks, and she loves spending quiet nights at home with him, binge watching new fantasy shows or play video games.

Tell me about yourself. How did you start writing?

Hello! My name is Katie Zaber, author of the two different fantasy series Dalya and DNA. I live in Morris County, New Jersey where I can enjoy the woods and it’s a short ride to the beach.

I’ve always been creative, but never took up writing until I was recovering from surgery, was on a lot of meds, and let my imagination loose. Once off the meds and healed, I edited Ashes and Blood, working through draft after draft until I was happy. Ashes and Blood was published May 13, 2020 after working on it for about two years.

What does your desk or writing space look like?

I sit in front of a walnut-stained secretary desk with a hutch holding an array of keepsakes. Albums, picture frames, my Snoopy collection, souvenirs, and nostalgic knickknacks line the shelves of the hutch. My work space is a wonderland of post-it notes in three different colors: pink, neon yellow, and green. On the right corner of my desk, shoved between the monitor and notary stamp, is a yellow, mini-spiral notebook that contains book outlines, plots, and ideas. The notebook is separated by little sticker tabs. The tabs not in use are floating on the surface of pamphlets and lists of login information to accounts I hardly visit.

A leather bounded diary with nautical embellishments, complete with anchor bookmark, holds random thoughts and sketches. A mechanical pen can be spotted, hiding between the yellow notebook and leather diary. Its extra parts—erasers & extra graphite are strewn about the entire desk. Between post-it notes, there are three hacky sacks. There’s also a rectangular leather box with a brass kaleidoscope made to look like it was used on a whimsical pirate ship.

It’s a happy mess.

Which of your characters do you most enjoy writing?

Carmia was a ton of fun to write in Stranger Shores. The amount of research that went into her character and how she would react to the environment was fun to write. Carmia is from Dalya and found a way to come to Earth determined to find technology to bring home. She’s feisty and has the resources to create and launch plans.

Did you have any good surprises while writing your latest book? If so, what were they?

I’m not sure I’d say good, as for the characters I killed, but I was surprised about how many of them I murdered. In the end, their deaths will give more growth. It wasn’t planned, but it’s for the best.

Do you have any other creative skills, hobbies, or interests? What else do you do with your time?

I like to make country wine. Sweet, fruity wine that tastes amazing on a hot summer day. My favorite flavor so far is a watermelon cherry and apple cider wine. Currently, I’m fermenting key limes in the hope of making a delicious key lime pie wine.

Since I live in an apartment and have zero outdoor space, I’ve made an indoor garden. I grow anything from tomatoes to green beans and even a gigantic brussels sprout plant that was as tall as me. Most of my garden is hydroponic, but I do have a diamond grape vine growing in hopes of one day turn it into wine.

If you could take a vacation in any sci-fi or fantasy setting, where would it be?

Most of the time, fantasy worlds aren’t the best places to visit. Too much war and danger I’m not capable of fending off. However, on the show The Simpsons, Homer has a daydream about a chocolate world. I’d like to vacation there. Ski down on white chocolate sloops or sunbath on a dark chocolate beach while waves of milk chocolate crashed on the shore. I don’t think anything would eat me, but I’d eat everything and it wouldn’t be a crime. I also imagine some type of chocolate wine…

What do you like to have for breakfast?

When I’m on the run and it’s a normal workday, vanilla yogurt with crumbled granola. BUT my favorite thing to eat for breakfast is bacon and waffles.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m currently reading, Wedding of the Torn Rose by Brian Mendonca. Next on my TBR pile is The Bones of Crystal and Sand by Laura Winter, followed by Pull of the Vale by Lorin Petrazilka.

Would you rather write an entire first draft by hand or wake up every day at 4:00 a.m. to type?

I’d 100% wake up every day at 4:00 a.m. to type and I’ve done it before when both jobs were pressing. It’s not fun and I don’t recommend anyone to try it. Just thinking about writing a first draft by hand makes it sore.

Stranger Shores by Katie Zaber

Busy learning how to kill with her gift of life, Princess Megan craves time to practice how to heal, but knows that only death will win the upcoming war.

For the first time in Megan’s life, she has fallen in love, and with the wrong man, at that. As much as she loves Mana, will she have to end their relationship to keep her promise to the soon-to-be king of the Syreni, Prince Aenon?

Meanwhile, Kevin is busy preparing for his child with Dana and trying to keep Megan out of trouble. When Brynjar takes him to the Saoirson Fighters’ hideout, he realizes he knows nothing and if he wants answers, he’ll have to talk to people he never expected to meet and never wanted to.

On Earth, Carmia is learning what makes this foreign world spin. She discovers an island with inhabitants that appear primitive but are more sophisticated than anyone on Dalya. Their technology is more advanced than the inventions in her dreams. She flirts with the idea of staying on Earth forever until tragedy sends her sailing back to Dalya and into a deadly storm. She promises to return and never leave Earth again.

At the same time, the king of the Paradise Kingdom and secretly all of Dargone, Megan’s father, plans his next move against his daughter, giving her a surprise she will never expect.

Stranger Shores comes out on July 29, 2022, and is currently available for pre-order at $1.99.

Also check out the earlier books in the Dalya series:

Ashes and Blood will be free on June 16th and 20th, and July 28th, or anytime with newsletter sign-up.

Below Dark Waters will have a Kindle Countdown sale starting June 16th at $.99, then going up to $1.99 on June 18th and $2.99 on June 19th.

The DNA Demons N Angels is also available on Amazon, with a free four-chapter preview available via newsletter sign-up.

Visit Katie online at zaberbooks.com, or find her on social media.

Virgins and apples

Along with my Stars Fall Out revision, I’ve also been drafting Bitter Machines, the sequel(s) to Stars. Working this way has some pros and cons. Cons? Drafting a second, likely 200,000-word book takes a bit of time. You know, just a bit. And that makes the revision take longer. Pros? My sanity. Avoiding burnout sometimes means not working on the revision. Plus, having a lot of this draft done means I’ll be able to release Bitter faster than Stars, once the time comes.

Anyway, here’s another excerpt from the newsletter. The scene this is from might be cut when I revise, due to changing the focus of one of the subplots. We’ll see.

“All right. You’ve got food, games, drinking.” Verei ticked them off one by one on his fingers. “Then they’re going to light a bunch of lanterns, something something ancestors. Then there’s some tradition where virgins present shiny apples to handsome men. And not just the apples, you know?” Nevi got herself a nudge in the shoulder as punctuation to his sentence before Verei turned to me. “Sound about right?”

I laughed. “Maybe five hundred years ago. Virgins and apples went out when the empire came in. I thought you studied at Nirsuathu University?”

“I did. And now I know why my trip to the Nirsuathan Fruit Market went so badly.”

It’s quite simple, really

In this excerpt from Stars Fall Out, Vilari walks into her new life as the first-ever student of a mysterious, engineered magic, and finds that Professor Ghordaa lives up to the rumors. This is another bit that I originally posted in my newsletter. I also read the full scene at last year’s Diverse Speculative Fiction reading event.

Professor Ghordaa plunked a variety of instruments down in front of me—at the time, I had no idea what they were—and said, “It’s quite simple, really,” which should have been warning enough. Does anyone ever say, “It’s quite simple, really: the sun sets each night,” or “It’s quite simple, really: you just add the two numbers together,” or “It’s quite simple, really: it’s only a three-letter word?”

No, they do not. They say, “It’s quite simple, really,” and then follow-up with a convoluted explanation that only makes sense to someone whose brain is a labyrinth of analogies and equations, and can translate one into the other.

And that was how he explained the magic to me. In so many words.