Judith Post's Blog, page 54

Babet & Prosper

I got the files back for my Babet & Prosper novellas, so that I could load them on Amazon myself.  I spent all morning doing that, and since they’d already been in mobi format, Amazon processed them really fast.  I had as much fun writing Babet and Prosper as I do now writing Raven and Hester.  I intended them to be “lunch hour reads.”  Each story is about 40 pages, and when I finished four of them, I put them together in a bundle.  I read a few of them before I loaded them, and I think my writing style’s changed a little since I published them.  I hope it’s smoother with a little more padding.  But who can judge their own writing?  Anyway, they’re up, and here’s the breakdown for each bundle:

[image error]  The first collection has:

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[image error]   The second collection includes the four novellas on the cover.

 

[image error]  The third collection includes:

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The last novella is longer and concludes the series:

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I had a lot of fun finding covers for each of these.  When I first sold them, I wrote free short stories to promote them.  I’ll add them here, too, eventually.

 

Mystery Musings

For the first time ever, I’ve been invited to join a book club through Zoom while they discuss The Body in the Attic.  I’m thrilled to be invited.  It doesn’t take place until Nov. 3, so I have time to learn how Zoom works.

I’ve never had to Zoom before.  I’ve done an hour long chat Q&A on Kensington’s Between the Chapters Book Club.  That was fun!  I got so many good questions and discussions.  I’m thinking this will be a great two hours, too.  At conferences, I really enjoy talking to readers.  Most of them are more well-read than I am and know a slew of authors and their work.  It’s a learning experience listening to them, especially what they like and what they don’t.

I was going to buy a new laptop.  Mine died, and I hardly ever used it–so never replaced it–but my grandson sent me info about a camera and mic that plug into my desktop.  Lots cheaper and more practical for me.  I’m going to try to set it up and then use it enough to feel comfortable with it.

I don’t always resist change, but I’ve dragged my feet on Zoom.  This invitation was good motivation for me to catch up with the rest of the world.  Wish me luck!

It’s Here! Astral Conspiracy Series Book 1: THE GATE #scifi #aliens

I read Staci Troilo’s book when it first came out, and I’ve been waiting for the rest of the series ever since. I’m not a sci-fi fan, but I really enjoyed The Gate.

Staci Troilo

Ciao, amici! Today, it all begins.

I want to express my gratitude to you for supporting me through this whole endeavor. Writing a series is hard. Writing a five-book series is harder. Writing a five-book series in an existing storyworld built by someone else extremely difficult.

Last year, my publisher released The Gate (book one of my Astral Conspiracy Series, my contribution to the established Invasion Universe). To those of you who have read it, I want to express my thanks. And remind you to check for updates in your e-reader. Because the book was pulled down to do a re-release with the rest of the series, I had the opportunity to make a few little tweaks. (If I didn’t have a deadline, I’d still be making minute adjustments.) The content is the same; I didn’t make massive changes or retcon anything. But if you want to do a re-read…

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Two more, and maybe another

The digital rights director at my literary agency is letting me put up my old urban fantasy stories on my own as self-published.  First, she has to take them down, and then I can load them under my own name: Judith Post.  It hasn’t been quite as easy as I expected it to be, but we’re getting there.

At the beginning of the transition, we worked on the Fallen Angels series.  Then Wolf’s Bane.  This week, she took down Empty Altars, Spinners of Misfortune, and Fabric of Life.  We hit a hiccup with the Fabric file, but we’ll get there.  There were only two books in the Tyr and Diana series.  I’d hit too many deadends for urban fantasy by then and moved onto writing romances before I tried a third.

In the meantime, I wrote a lot of short novellas and collected them into bundles.  That’s what we’ll work on next.  I’m especially happy I’m going to get to put up all of the Babet & Prosper stories.  All of you know, I have a fondness for witches and supernaturals working together.  Stick them in a fake version of New Orleans, and those were just plain fun to write.

Empty Altars and Spinners of Misfortune were special for me, though.  I love Greek myths and dabbled a little in Norse myths, too.  In this series, I got to combine the two.  Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon, also known as Hecate to witches, is the protagonist in those stories.  She’s not a warm, nurturing goddess.  In fact, when it comes to survival of the fittest, she can be ruthless, just as Nature can be.  She also can call on hellhounds to do her bidding.  And at the dark of the moon, she can hunt predators to exact justice.

Diana’s runes call her to a modern-day, Norse meadow, but the mortals who live there have kept the old ways and still sacrifice to the old gods.  Someone, however, is trying to destroy the old traditions and to defy the gods.  Diana finds herself working with the Norse god, Tyr, Thor, and the goddess Freya to restore order to their world.

Almost everyone recognizes Thor because of the movies, but his other name is Donar, and he has wild, red hair.  I’d heard of Tyr but never paid attention to him until I started these books.  Tyr placed his right hand in the wolf Fenrir’s mouth so that the world would be safer.  When the wolf realized the trap, Fenrir bit off Tyr’s hand, and the god of war and justice now is an expert sword wielder…with his left hand.  Freya is the goddess of love and lust.  She and her brother, Frey, inspired the Norse Maypole tradition–and it wasn’t just about ribbons and wishing people a happy spring.  She makes Venus look maidenly.

It was fun combining the two sets of myths into stories.  Fabric of Life, if I ever get it loaded:), is a standalone.  I’m a horoscope junkie and teeter back and forth on the idea of destiny, so it was interesting to write about a modern day woman who has to take over the job of the ancient Greek Fates.  Before a new soul can come to earth, it has to stand on a scale, and Thea Patek weaves a bookmark of each bounce back and forth that create the journey of that person’s life and cut the thread at the end.  The bounces only create a map.  How the person reacts and deals with each turning point is his or her choice.  So, yes, the person’s journey is preordained, but not their life.  Freedom of choice determines that.

I’ve left ideas of gods and goddesses behind, for now, and I’ve moved to writing mysteries.  But that’s still a matter of life and death.  And mysteries pose their own questions.  That’s part of the joy of writing, isn’t it?  Asking a question at the beginning of a book and answering it at the end.

Happy Writing!

 

A new cover!

I’m trading back and forth, working on Lux #2 and a new Muddy River short fiction.  I’ve surprised myself, and Lux is getting close to done.  Then I can spend all of my time on Raven and Hester while my critique partners mark up Heirlooms To Die For before giving it back to me.

For Muddy River, this time, I’m trying a different type of cover.  So far, I’ve used images of people with a background I hope hints at magic.  This time, I found an image that I think captures the theme of the story.  See what you think:

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And since I’m sharing the cover, I thought I’d share the opening scene of SURVIVAL, too:

Muddy River’s spring vacation usually brings bad weather.  I never schedule coven meetings during that time, so that I’m free of all responsibilities.  I love my young witches, but by early April, I’m as eager for a week away from them as they are to be free of lessons and me.

Days can be almost balmy right up until students leave my classroom on Friday, but that’s just to tease us.  Soon, clouds gather to deliver torrential rain, blinding snow, or hail.  It’s as though the heavens don’t condone our week off.

This year, we were supposed to get lucky.  According to Meda, one of my coven, her bespelled weather vanes predicted the sun would shine the entire month and the temperatures would be mild. I hummed as I waved my hand to lock the school before crossing the field to my yellow Victorian house.  A week of good weather.  A miracle.

Claws ran ahead of me, only stopping to check both ways before crossing the street.

“Don’t go too far!” I called to him.  “We’re leaving as soon as Raven gets home.”  My fire demon had decided that we should spend the week at the lake cottage he’d bought for getaways.  He was craving a little privacy.

His Lamborghini wasn’t in the drive, so I kicked off my shoes and headed straight to the kitchen.  I poured a glass of wine, ready to celebrate my last day of school.  Looking out the kitchen window, I saw Claws prowling the river bank that bordered the back of our property.  He could burn off some energy before we made the hour drive to our cottage.

I was sipping pinot grigio, letting my mind drift, when I heard Raven’s car pull into the garage.  A minute later, he pushed through the kitchen door.  Six-five and corded with muscle, with black hair and amber eyes, he locked gazes with me, and his look sizzled.  “Is everything packed?” When I nodded, he grinned.  “Brown’s covering the office while I’m gone, and Strike’s promised to help out if needed.  We have an entire week to ourselves, just you, me, and Claws.  I have plans for you, witch.”

It was about time.  Raven was Muddy River’s enforcer.  Between his job and mine, it was hard for either of us to get away.  I pointed to the suitcases and coolers sitting in the corner.  Swallowing the last of my wine, I stood.  “Let me change, and I’m ready.”

He licked his lips.  “Need any help?”

“If you want to get to the cabin by supper time, it would be safer if I did it myself.”

“Right.”  His expression turned lascivious.  “Everything in due time.”  He went to start loading my SUV.  Twenty minutes later, Claws curled on the backseat and I rode shotgun, wearing my worn jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.  Raven turned away from Muddy River, and we headed north to enjoy ourselves and each other.

 

Hope you enjoy these.  I still have a decent amount to write for Raven and Hester.

Money, money, money

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(Lux)

I thought I grew up middle class.  Now I’m not so sure.  Most of our neighbors had less money than we did, and my parents struggled quite a bit until my dad got a better job at the factory he worked at and made better wages.  They felt comfortable by the time my little sister was born, but I was twelve by then.

After I got married, had two daughters, and couldn’t get back into teaching, my husband and I dropped to middle class, too.  I only really think about money when something rears up and worries me, but we’re sure not rolling in it.  And sometimes I wonder what it would be like to NEVER have to think about budgets or bills or saving.  And that’s why I created Lux for my new mysteries.

Lux is filthy rich.  She’s so rich, it bothered my agent when she read my manuscript.  Jazzi and Ansel are well off, but they don’t throw money around.  Hester and Raven have amassed fortunes over their centuries-old lives, but they live in Muddy River with lots of other supernaturals who’ve done the same and try to avoid attention.  Lux is rich and enjoys it.

When I was growing up, I didn’t trust people who had a lot of money.  But then, when I started college, I got a job as a waitress at our local Chamber of Commerce.  And I served a lot of rich people at lunches and parties.  And I liked almost all of them.  Some were awesome and some weren’t, just like everyone else I’d met.  And then our church got a retired minister for a year, who’d grown up in Israel before marrying a rich woman and moving to the U.S.  He preached about enjoying blessings as often as he preached about being the best person you could be.  I loved him so much I asked him to marry hubs and me.  I still remember him fondly.

But he helped me realize that enjoying blessings was as important as facing the challenges thrown at us through life.  And that’s why Lux is so much fun to write.  I think she does both well.  She loves all of the money she has, but it doesn’t determine who she is or what she does or who she spends time with.  And as a reporter, and a protagonist who stumbles on crimes and bodies. she rises to each challenge with intelligence and a lot of compassion. She enjoys her yellow Bentley, her sprawling house, and her hunky chef boyfriend.  But she’s willing to pass out lunches at the community center, too, when Keon’s brother needs a helping hand.

As a writer, I love living vicariously through the characters I create.  And this time, with Lux, I get to experience a lot of things that I never had in real life.

 

Harry Dresden

I’ve been deluged by fans of Harry Dresden lately.  Lynn Cahoon, Midu Hadi, and Mae Clair.  So many who are so enthusiastic, I had to see what I was missing.  So I bought the first Harry Dresden book–Storm Front.  And for the first couple of chapters, I did an inward shrug.  What was the fuss about?  And then I got seriously hooked.

What is it about wizards named Harry?  Well, both of the ones I know are pretty much alone in the world.  Their parents, like every Disney animated movie I watched growing up, are past tense.  Kaput.  The establishment isn’t too fond of them.  And they have more talent than any single person (even a wizard) should have.  Add to that, that they’re up against monumental odds.  Odds they shouldn’t survive.  And neither of them take themselves too seriously.

Dresden has a great mix of lethal and humor.  People die horrible deaths, but the skull in the basement who helps him make potions, bargains for a weekend of ribald entertainment.  And the women in their lives are no shrinking violets.  When Dresden apologizes to Murphy, she hobbles into his hospital room to throw the flowers he sent her in his face.  The action made my adrenaline pump.  The monsters are scary.  And the villain’s scarier than the things he creates.  But even with magic bouncing off walls, Dresden felt REAL.  Because I could relate to him as a person.

When I finished Storm Front, I downloaded book two.  I never read books back to back, but I’m looking forward to the next story to see what Dresden does next.  Now I know what the fuss is about.  Harry Dresden is one fun series to read!

The old is new again

When I found my agent–the wonderful Lauren Abramo–she wasn’t sold on self-publishing.  She did like my writing, though, and she was pedaling my book Fallen Angels, an urban fantasy.  Editors wrote nice notes about it but didn’t like having a human detective and a serial killer thrown into an urban fantasy.  That only encouraged me to write more books, but ones that didn’t include mortals mingling with supernaturals.  And those didn’t sell either.  Editors said that they had too many urban fantasies, that the market was glutted, and they didn’t want any more no matter what they were like.

Lauren still believed in my writing, so Sharon Pelletier at the Dystel & Goderich Agency formatted my manuscripts and loaded them online as e-books.  That was years ago.  And I didn’t do anything with those books–no ads, no blogs, no marketing–so they just languished.  But I’ve started playing with supernaturals again with the Muddy River series.  And it made me think of them again.  So a while ago, I asked Sharon to make Wolf’s Bane free for five days, and she told me that some of their authors have asked to have their books back to self-publish, and that Dystel & Goderich would be happy to send me all of the files for my urban fantasies and let me load them myself on Amazon.  That way, I can reduce prices, pay for ads, and have a lot more freedom to market them.  I jumped at the chance.

So far, we’ve only removed the three Wolf’s Bane books from Dystel & Goderich, along with the three Fallen Angels novels.  Little by little, I’m hoping to swap them all over to self-publishing by me.  There are a lot more, so I’m only going to bother with a few a week.  I’ve started with books.  The two Empty Altars novels and my very first book that Lauren took–Fabric of Life–will be next.  And then I can start on bundles.  I love writing short fiction, and I let myself write a wide variety of series.  Death & Loralei is about Death, who materializes into a man when he comes home to his own home with his wife, Loralei.  Christian and Brina has four medieval stories about a castle trying to defend itself against vampires and other supernatural villains.

Transferring them from Dystel & Goderich to me is going to take a while, but it will be a labor of love.  I’m not expecting huge sales or finding an army of fans.  I’m just glad that the books will no longer be thrown into the digital wasteland of forgotten stories.  It’s nice connecting with them again.

I’m still pounding the keys for Lux.  I can transfer three books at a time in my spare time, and they won’t litter my Judi Lynn page.  I wrote all of those as Judith Post.  It’s sort of nice to keep them separate from my newer works.  Between writing and transferring books, I shouldn’t be bored for a long time.  Hope you have plenty of things to keep you excited, too.

Happy Writing!

 

Virtue

I decided not to off Keon’s grandmother.  She’s a pain in the you know what.  Everyone’s lives would be better if she bit the dust.  She’s pushy and mean.  And Lux is a murder mystery, after all.  But I’ve already killed off two other old ladies in this manuscript, and I decided enough is enough.  Especially since she’s family.  After all, family has bonds, even if they don’t like each other.  I had the entire scene plotted out, and it was good.  High drama.  Lots of emotion.  And that’s great for a subplot.  But…  I scratched the scene and went for something else.  Lux still caught the killer–for that crime–and the plot moved forward.

There are things I try not to do in mysteries.  I never kill cats.  I never kill dogs.  But people are fair game.  I mean what’s a murder mystery without a body or two..or more?  And let’s face it.  If the body provides a punch in the storyline, all the better.  But killing Grandma Johnson?  I decided that might be pushing it.  But what do you do with an old woman whom a nursing home won’t even take?

And this probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read my work, but I added two kittens in the mix.  I like to show the maternal side of my characters.  In the first Lux book, I introduced Ian–a young teen in trouble–and that filled that slot in the story.  A grandmother who’s a pill doesn’t accomplish what I wanted.  So Lux and Keon buy two kittens.  It was Keon’s idea.  The man’s a big marshmallow inside.

I’ve never not had a pet for any length of time.  When my black cat Pywackett had to be put to sleep at twenty years old, I swore I’d never get another cat.  Turned out, a gray cat meowed at our door and chose us.  A chihuahua turned up on our porch and scratched to get in the house, too, and before I knew it, we had two  more pets.  A house feels empty without one furry beast to demand attention.  So they end up in my stories.

My main plot is a tried and true mystery type, so I didn’t need to wrestle with my conscience about it.  Only Grandma.  And Grandma, blast her rotten disposition, won.  She’s going to live to grace another page.    That might be good for Grandma, but not so much for the Johnson family.  Oh, well, mysteries have to be a little true to life, right?  And we don’t always love every family member we have to claim.

Happy Writing!

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery Musings

I should call these wanderings today instead of musings.  I’m not very focused, just pondering random thoughts.

When I was young, I wrote darker, gloomier stuff.  Not as dark as my daughter’s bleak poetry period when she turned sixteen.  She wore black every day and wrote poems about death.  Worried me for a while until friends told me that was normal.  And it didn’t last.  It was just a phase–one of a few that I was happy to see gone.

The thing is, now that I’ve gotten older, somehow I’ve mellowed  more.  I’ll never write completely cheerful, humorous stuff, but I don’t push the bleak as much as I used to.  And I was in a happy phase of my life when I wrote it.  But life happens to everyone, and I’ve survived more ups and downs than I ever saw coming.  Bleak doesn’t appeal to me like it once did, (and I think bleak is different than dark.  I still like dark once in a while).  It’s made me think that my writing has changed with age, just like I’ve changed with age.

Stephen King has always written horror, hasn’t he?  I know he plays with different things between books, but when he sits down to write a novel, it’s horror, right?  Has his horror changed over time?  I love Alice Hoffman’s PRACTICAL MAGIC, but I read her newer book that was a prequel to that story, and it seemed a lot gloomier than the original story to me.  But she’s survived breast cancer.  Did that change her writing?

I read a title on twitter and was busy so didn’t take the time to read the actual blog.  But the title was about the different stages of a writer’s life.  I wish I would have read it.  Do we all have similar stages?  Or does each person’s life affect his or her fiction?

It’s the Fourth of July as I write this.  Fireworks are bursting up and down our street.  I’ve made three slabs of BBQ ribs to take to Indy tomorrow to see my daughter and to drop off at my grandson’s and his wife’s.  We were all going to get together, but one of Tyler’s friends was exposed to Covid and he doesn’t want to take any chances and give it to us.  So I’m leaving a slab on his doorstep:)  Along with a container of watermelon salad and a small container of panzanella salad.  We’re taking the rest to my daughter’s to eat at her apartment.  She’s providing the dessert!

It’s going to be a nice weekend.  Have I mellowed because life is good?  Or have I mellowed because I’ve learned that I’m strong enough to survive things that I thought would flatten me?  And fingers crossed, I don’t have any major challenges in my future.  I hope the same for you.  But you know the saying…if wishes were cabbages… and all that crap.  If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.