Celia Roman's Blog, page 2

Get Vampire Alley now!

The ebook edition of Vampire Alley, the sixth and final book in the Sunshine Walkingstick Series, is now available at a wide variety of online retailers.

We're working on paperback and audiobook editions and will have more news about those editions at a later date, but I do hope to hire Rebecca Winder as the narrator. She so beautifully captured Sunny's voice in the audiobook editions of earlier stories that I can't even imagine having to go with another narrator.

Sunny's been a part of our lives for almost a decade now, and I hope I've done her final story justice.

Here's a little more about it:

When my mama gets kidnapped from prison, it don't take too long for the culprit to come forward. Seems Atlanta's head vampire's got a little problem with her vampires up and dying on her, and she's fingered me as the very body what can figure out what's going on.

Me? I ain't got no problem watching the monster population die off a little at a time. But that vampire? She's determined to save her fledglings, and she ain't afraid to hurt my family and friends to guarantee my help.

Normally I aim to kill monsters.

This time, though, I gotta figure out how to save 'em, else Mama and me both might end up worse than dead.

Vampire Alley is available at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo, and other retailers.

Happy reading!

The post Get Vampire Alley now! appeared first on Celia Roman.

Just ten more days!

In ten days, on 30 June 2024, the final Sunshine Walkingstick novel will be published.

Vampire Alley marks the end of a long journey for both Sunny as a character and me as a writer.

I've discussed this elsewhere (somewhere!), but Sunny first walked into my life in September 2014, as a fully drawn character, accent, attitude, and all. It took two years to write her first adventure, Greenwood Cove, and another almost eight years to finish the sixth and final book.

In the intervening years, I've learned so much about what it means to be a writer, and hope each story has been better than the last.

Saying goodbye to such a beloved character has been a tough but necessary step. Sunny is ready for some peace, and I am ready to begin a new adventure with other characters.

I hope you enjoy this final installment in Sunny's grand adventure.

The post Just ten more days! appeared first on Celia Roman.

Crossville Supernaturals: Power Dynamics

Note: This post first appeared in my newsletter on 1 April 2023.

***

Writing Black Witch Rising has led me down some interesting pathways.

The interactions between Puck Aefre and Nessa, for example, have been incredibly illuminating.

While writing a particular scene in which Puck demonstrates some powerful magic, I realized that Nessa had no true, consistent role model for magical usage. Auntie O doesn't really count: she's a bit too flighty and doesn't use magic for much more than divination.

With Puck, Nessa has a chance to see how magic works on a different scale. She's always thought of herself as weak because of the twin effects of having her magic bound at a young age, thus rendering her nearly incapable of using it, and her (mistaken) belief that she's only a half-witch.

Her views on this are changing, in part because of Puck's ease with her own magic.

Being powerful in that way levels the playing field. When you're a small woman facing much more physically powerful creatures (vampires and werewolves, for example), it's easy to place yourself on a lower, lesser rung.

But witches in the Crossville Supernaturals world are not powerless. They are, in fact, equally as powerful as vampires and werewolves, in their own way.

Many witches know this intuitively, or have learned it over time through continued practice and exploration.

Nessa was largely robbed of that practice and exploration, her "one puny rune" being the sole exception.

I did not deliberately build her this way for the sake of social commentary; Nessa came to me believing herself a weak half-witch, and then showed me her story. I'm not a huge believer in message fiction, but I don't mind taking advantage of a natural message when it's delivered to me on a silver platter.

I have never believed that women were less powerful than men, only powerful in a different way, and that does seep into my fiction.

Nessa is coming into her own power as a woman and a witch. It's a beautiful thing to see.

The post Crossville Supernaturals: Power Dynamics appeared first on Celia Roman.

Rune Magic

Note: This post was first published in my newsletter on 12 January 2022.

***

When I was creating the magic behind the Vaness Kinley, Witch PI Series (and let's face it; that's a continual work in progress), I had to decide what kind of witchcraft to include. There's really no rhyme or reason behind Nessa being a rune witch; it's just what seemed like the right fit for her when she stepped forward and introduced herself to me.

Figuring out how rune magic works was the real trick. Nessa confessed that she had one simple rune spell she used, and from there, I'm building out her magic as she grows into it.

There are plenty of guides out there to runes. I chose to simply pick runes that seemed to fit the magic, then build spells around them. Nessa's illumination spell, for example, is based on the lightning shaped rune called Sowulo (Sowuli in the image below). I didn't know when I chose it that the rune literally stands for the sun and its energy.

Happy coincidence, right?

But that coincidence runs deeper. When I needed another spell, this one for healing, I chose the hour glass looking one, Ingwaz, and added incantation lines to it. Only later did I learn that Ingwaz is the name of that Anglo-Saxon rune and is used as a symbol of life.

I'll likely not consult the official meanings the next time Nessa needs a rune spell. The coincidences are pretty interesting though, right?

As far as incantation lines go, those differentiate the runes used for divination and those used within the story world for rune magic. Ingwaz, for example, must be closed on the top and bottom, then refined by other markings before being activated as an actual spell. Creating the rune magic system has been an interesting journey of discovery, and it will continue to evolve over the four books in the series.

The post Rune Magic appeared first on Celia Roman.

Of Monsters and Men

Note: This post first appeared in my newsletter on 26 January 2022.

***

The first Sunshine Walkingstick story I wrote was Greenwood Cove, which is also the series' first novel. In it, Sunny investigates some strange occurences having to do with the local waterways.

That story was a convergence of several ideas. When Sunny came to me (exactly as she appears in the books, by the way), it was the perfect opportunity to present the backwoods South realistically, meaning not as Southerners are portrayed by Hollywood.

But the story itself formed based on ideas and legends that had been fermenting in the back of my mind for a long while: folklore concerning a man-sized catfish living in a local lake; the legend of Melissa, a sorceress, a contemporary of Merlin; the proximity of this area to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee; and the characteristics of people I've met over the years. Jazz, for one, is based on a real artist, someone I went to school with, though the "real" artist didn't do the things Jazz does in the Sunny stories.

When I was a teenager, some of my favorite stories were myths and legends, so naturally, I turned to those when filling out Sunny's world, and I included Cherokee myths collected by ethnographer James Mooney (which you can read here). If you're at all familiar with Cherokee mythology, then you'll recognize Spearfinger and the Ewah, for example. And, of course, we're all familiar with Medusa and some of the other characters from Greek mythology that appear in the fifth book.

I've always felt that readers come to Sunny's stories for the monsters and cryptids, and stay because the story world is filled with such great characters.

Some of the characters, though, can be just as monstrous as, well, the monsters.

Take Belinda, the avaricious real estate agent who has been Sunny's rival since they were in high school. Belinda was one of the masterminds behind the major conflict in Greenwood Cove, and she continues to hound Sunny over Riley (and other things) throughout the series...even as she helps Sunny, albeit reluctantly, in the fifth book, Devil's Branch.

Like many of the other monsters in this story world, Belinda sits in a gray area between good and evil, neither fully one nor the other. The same with Fame, Sunny's moonshining uncle who took her in when her mother (his sister) was arrested for murdering Sunny's dad. And with Sheriff Treadwell who, despite his long-running feud with Fame, comes to terms with Sunny's place in his son's life.

I think that's what makes those characters so interesting. They feel like real people, like you and me and the people we know. And that's the kind of characters (and monsters) I enjoy writing most.

The post Of Monsters and Men appeared first on Celia Roman.

Kinley’s Mirror

Note: This post first appeared in my newsletter on 22 September 2022.***I've got a neat little tidbit about Kinley's, the bar owned by Nessa's twin Nick in the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series, later in this email that has something to do with this (truly awful) poem I wrote for you:Mirror, mirror on the wall
Dimitri has no reflection a'tallI know. Horrible, right? But that's why I write novels instead of songs like my singer-songwriter dad...Recently, I saw the following meme on Facebook and it reminded me of the very first scene in  Between a Witch and a Hard Place .

In that scene, Nessa notices the lack of a reflection for Dimitri Stanislov in the mirror behind the shelves of liquor at her brother's bar.

At first read, it may appear that I've forgotten a very important element pointed out by this meme, that modern mirrors are, indeed, backed by something other than silver. Dimitri should therefore have had a reflection, yes?

Well, no. Remember that Crossville, the setting for this series, was a mill town, built around the cotton mill which now stands in the downtown area (now the renovated mixed use building where Nick and Nessa live and run their separate businesses). And in mill towns, just like in other 19th century towns, the other businesses served the workers...

...including brothels.

Yup, the mirror hanging on the wall at Kinley's came out of Crossville's 19th century cathouse. A dealer salvaged it while the building was being torn down, then had it cleaned and re-silvered. Nick ran across it when he was searching for inexpensive fixtures for Kinley's. As soon as he heard the mirror's history, he knew it needed to hang in the bar.

That mirror, in fact, is one of the reasons Kinley's became a sanctuary for local supernaturals, a safe spot where they could go and quietly mingle without fear of being attacked. Most supernaturals fear vampires, rightly so; they're one of the more deadly creatures out there and they can be hard to spot when they've recently fed. Naturally, it's easier to relax when you can spot the creature stalking you in the night.

Mirrors have all sorts of interesting uses in witchcraft. They can be used to scry, for one, and they can also be easily bespelled. Not to mention all the folkloric beliefs surrounding them: that they reflect one's true nature, harbor evil, or capture the souls of the newly dead.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself...

The post Kinley’s Mirror appeared first on Celia Roman.

On Vampires

Note: This post was first published in my newsletter on 1 October 2022.

***

Ok, let's talk about vampires, because who doesn't love a good vamp?

Vampires have been a part of folklore for centuries, often taking the form of blood-drinking demons like Lilitu, a Mesopotamian demon who preferred the blood of infants.

The word "vampire" wasn't coined until much, much later in 18th century England, and, of course, the most famous vampire, the fictional Count Dracula, was believed by some (though not everyone) to have been based on the real-life Romanian national hero, Vlad the Impaler.

Vampires are nearly ubiquitous in modern media and have been, in some cases, grossly altered from their original form. (I'm looking at you, Twilight.)

I've included vampires in several stories. In fact, vampires feature in all three of my separate story worlds. In the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series, Nessa is unknowingly guided by vampire Dimitri Stanislov, whose ulterior motive has not yet been revealed. Their relationship begins in the very first scene of the very first book.

In the Kaya Fox Series, vampires play an important role in Kaya's life, as detailed partly in A Vision in Death.

And in the Sunshine Walkingstick Series, one of Sunny's earliest paranormal cases involved vampires (as told in the short story "Death Omen"), which comes full circle in the sixth and possibly final book,  Vampire Alley .

You can get a free copy of "Death Omen" here [ETA: link redacted.] and see the entire series reading order here.

hese weren't my first vampire stories, however. Those first stories were told under a pen name, V.R. Cumming, and eventually became a four-book Erotic Dark Fantasy series called The Vampyr.

When I first started writing about the Vampyr, way back in 2014, serialized Paranormal Romances were becoming quite popular, thanks to authors like Milly Taiden and others.

I was still in my first year of writing fiction and wanted to experiment. The character that popped into my head was a vampire, but not just any vampire; he was a sexy Physics geek attending school at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Eric was introduced to the Vampyr by a friend and, well, things sort of went downhill from there (and uphill again, because the series is ultimately a Romance with an ultimate Happy Ever After, after many trials and tribulations).

This was also one of the darkest, most erotic series I've ever written, so much so that Amazon classified it as Erotica and shoved it into their Adult Dungeon. You can probably see why I separated the pen names out, and why I don't tell my family about having written The Vampyr Series. They're not the sort of stories most people want to read, but they did very well when I was still writing under that pen name.

And thus with that mildly scandalous confession, I conclude my ramblings.

The post On Vampires appeared first on Celia Roman.

Which Stories Happen When

Note: This content was first published in my newsletter on 15 February 2023.

***

During one of my recent aimless drives, I started contemplating how various stories from the same story world fit together.

For example, I would love to write another single witch's guide to dating featuring Nick Kinley, the twin brother of the titular character in the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series. Novella-length stories (like the Single Witch's Guides) make wonderful additions to multi-author anthologies or as reader magnets (read: free stories) for new and existing readers.

I'm not sure where Nick's story would fall in the timeline for his sister's four-book series. Those books are set beginning in the summer of 2021 (for The Single Witch's Guide to Online Dating), with a jump ahead to autumn of that year for the first novel, Between a Witch and a Hard Place. There's a short break between novels two and three, with the second book (A Witch and Her Familiar) ending on Thanksgiving 2021 and the third book (Black Witch Rising) picking up after the first of the year in 2022.

That month-long gap allows plenty of space for short stories told from Nessa's point of view, or even a novella-length story like another Single Witch's Guide to Dating told from Nick's point of view. The question is, do I want to set Nick's story then, or does his story fall at a different (possibly even overlapping) point in the story world's timeline?

I set specific real-world dates for the events in fictional stories so that I can keep the latter straight and calculate things like birthdates and such.

A great example of this need for a logical and well-dated timeline is the origin stories in the Sunshine Walkingstick story world. When I wrote Hunter, Sunny's main prequel, I had to know exactly when it fell as compared to other events, like when her son Henry Carson Walkingstick was born and when Sunny's father died.

That last event is a particular concern because it set up a cascade effect on the rest of Sunny's life. I had to know when Henry (Sunny's father) died so that I could calculate when other events took place and how the lives various characters mesh together.

Henry the elder has been on my mind a lot lately. I've been playing with the timelines in that story world over the past week, working back and forth between various events in advance of working on stories told from outside Sunny's point of view.

When and how did Sunny's parents meet? Was Sunny's uncle Fame a part of that? Had Fame already dropped out of Georgia Tech at that point? What role did Libby's family play in the Panther Clan prior to Betty Walkingstick assuming leadership? And so on.

Many of these thoughts about timelines and dates were spurred by an invitation to submit a story to an upcoming multi-author anthology, set to release in Spring 2024. I'm trying to hit a balance between the anthology's requirements (including a romantic element) and what you would like to read. Would you prefer another Single Witch's Guide to Dating, a story about Sunny's dad, or maybe another story from a character whose life I haven't explored yet?

You tell me! If you have an opinion, feel free to hit the reply button and let me know.

The post Which Stories Happen When appeared first on Celia Roman.

Seth Rhone Character Interview

Note: This interview was published in the 6 January 2022 issue of my newsletter. 

***

I'm excited to bring you a brief interview with Seth Rhone, who plays a pivotal role in the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series.

No, he is not going to tell us what he was thinking during that scene in Book 1. I already asked and he said no. Very. Emphatically.

So we'll take what we can get, right?

Ok, here we go...

Me: Were you born a werewolf or made one?

Seth: I was turned.

Me: How old were you?

Seth: Sixteen.

Me: Wow. Kind of young.

Seth: Yes. We don't do that anymore.

Me: We meaning your pack or werewolves in general?

Seth: My pack.

Me: Are there any specifc reasons or--

Seth: Beause I said.

Me: Okey dokey.  How did you become alpha of the Crossville werewolf pack?

Seth: I took over the pack after my father was killed by rogue werewolves.

Me: I'm sorry for your loss.

Seth: Don't be. He was a dick.

Me: Ooooh. Ok. Doesn't the person who kills the old leader take over the pack?

Seth: No.

Me: ...

Seth: ...

Me: Moving right along. How did you and the Kinley twins meet?

Seth: I can't talk about that.

Me: Why not?

Seth: Because I made a promise.

Me: What can you tell us?

Seth: The rogue werewolves won't bother anyone ever again.

Me: Well, that's good to know. Did Mariah have anything to do with that?

Seth: Mariah's only been with the pack a few years.

Me: *mathing* So that's a no. What happened to them?

Seth: *wolfy smile* They won't bother anyone ever again.

Me: Okey dokey then. Anything else you care to share?

Seth: Do I have to?

Me: That's generally what folks do when they're being interviewed.

Seth: *scowl* I don't like broccoli.

Me: Also good to know! How about a favorite color?

Seth: I'm a man.

Me: Yeeees. And?

Seth: I like man colors.

Me: Practical choice.

Seth: They match. Black, brown, blue, gray. Throw them in the wash with your boxers and nothing comes out pink.

Me: Good point. One last question: Steak or lobster?

Seth: Both. As long as there's no broccoli.

Me: We wouldn't dare. Thanks for the interview! 

The post Seth Rhone Character Interview appeared first on Celia Roman.

Content from Newsletter

A while back, I changed my mailing list provider from MailChimp to MailerLite.

MailChimp has (or had) this neat feature where readers could click through the newsletter's archives and read old posts, even those that were published before they became a subscriber.

MailerLite does not have that feature, and because MailChimp seems to be quickly headed the way of the dodo, I selected content from a handful of old newsletters and am republishing them here.

This is also part of my overall plan to rely less on platforms I don't fully control. Many authors made the mistake of building their businesses around, for example, Facebook's platform, only to be screwed over when Facebook strangled their reach.

In the indie author business, we call building an audience on digital or other space that someone else controls sharecropping. It's becoming increasingly clear that Big Tech doesn't care about its users or content creators, and with the high rate not only of diminished reach but also bots closing down accounts, it's far, far safer to rely on the old standbys of websites, blogs, and newsletters hosted by reliable providers.

Anyway, be on the lookout for that content over the next few days. Happy reading!

The post Content from Newsletter appeared first on Celia Roman.