Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 37

Eagle’s Shadow

Eagle’s Shadow, the seventh book in the Thaumatology series is now available. Use coupon code PV37L for 50% off at the Smashwords checkout until June 30th.

From Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174874
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008E17TYW
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008E17TYW

Ceridwyn Brent and Lily Carpenter are on top of the world as they attend the New Year Ball at the Chinese Embassy. Attending are the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of the United States, and Huanglong, the Chinese Imperial Dragon. It seems as though they have really entered into prestigious circles when Ceri and her boss, Cheryl Tennant, are then invited to a function at the US embassy.

Then Ceri is accused of attempting to assassinate President Wilson, and Ceri and Lily fiend themselves hip-deep in a plot designed to bring America to a state of war. With an old enemy emerging from the shadows, the American government hunting them, and very few friends to help, they must find a way to stop the plot and get out of it alive.

Happy reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eagle’s Shadow Teaser – Black Crows

A second exert from Eagle’s Shadow in which Ceri gets to do something she enjoys, observing people… after the cut.

Ceri walked through the camp slowly, fairly obviously just watching people, and no one seemed to be bothered about it so she just kept on going. It was the first day she had had where she could just wander about, observe the pack, be herself for a while.

The camp formed a roughly circular arrangement. The tent Ceri was sharing with Lily and Nita was not on the outer edge, but it was not far from it. Ceri made her way to the outer edge and began to walk the perimeter, looking for anything interesting and different. The wolves kept the entrances of their tepees aimed toward the centre and there was not much to see outside the big circle. However, Ceri had managed to attract a following of about ten children by the time she was halfway around.

Werewolves did not have the ability to shift at birth and, contrary to popular opinion, they did not develop it at puberty either. Shifting, like the ability to work magic, was a function of the brain, and it was not until certain brain developments took place that wolves developed the capacity to shift. Even then they had to learn to do it and it looked like none of these kids had figured it out yet. Ceri was not exactly sure how she knew, but she knew. Something about the way they moved? Her supernatural senses? Whatever, they could not shift.

The oldest looked to be in his early teens, perhaps fourteen, the youngest was maybe six. None of them were terribly shy, but it was the oldest one who was most interested and leading the pack. The interest from most of the younger ones was pure inquisitiveness; Ceri got the feeling they did not see many humans in camp, or maybe it had got around that this was the woman Luperca had asked Katarina to help. The teenager, though, was finding his place in the pack and at least part of that was to do with his sexuality. Ceri was an attractive woman he did not know and it was always easier to have a few naughty thoughts about a stranger…

The kids followed her as she made her way into the tent village. Typically for werewolves confident in their nature, the people here were mixed forms. There were wolves sitting around, lazing in the winter sun, and there were man-form wolves conducting various activities, or just chatting. She passed a woman mending a pair of jeans who nodded to her, smiling. Everyone appeared to know who she was, so the kids probably did too.

There was a group of women sitting around the fire in the middle of the camp and Ceri settled down in an empty space on a log without saying anything. No one commented and the woman beside her, pretty, white, and engaged in sewing buttons on a shirt, smiled at her. The children sat behind her, about six feet back, and started whispering amongst themselves. All except for the teenager anyway, who was too busy watching Ceri.

Eagle’s Shadow Teaser – Dancing with a Dragon

I’m going to try something new for this release, and put out a few teasers. These are going to be little exerts from the book to give some hints and flavour. While I’m trying to avoid actual spoilers, you may find out things you’d rather read in context, especially if you haven’t read some of the earlier books. For that reason, the actual clip is beyond the cut; continue if you dare!

‘I’m not as old as you believe me to be,’ Huanglong said as he swept Ceri around the dance floor. He was, clearly, a skilled dancer and somehow, in his arms, Ceri felt far more capable than she usually did.

Ceri raised an eyebrow. The statement had come out of nowhere, as though he knew what she had been thinking during Mei’s speech. For all she knew, he did. ‘The dragons I’ve met so far were all around during the Toba Flare,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘I was born around a thousand years before I came to Earth. I am about six thousand years old, by your counting.’

‘Almost a youth,’ Ceri said, smiling.

‘Compared to Mei Long or Athro I suppose I am. Compared to your ancestors I am a mere babe in arms.’ He watched her face, his lips twitching. ‘You did not know. Your Brenin had over eighty thousand years when he died. Brenhines is over a hundred thousand now. You come from long-lived, powerful stock.’ He smiled. ‘Your human line is a strong one. My condolences.’ He was obviously referring to her parents.

Ceri dipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘I still miss them, but it’s been long enough and I have enough friends around me that I’m over it, mostly.’

He was silent for a few seconds, sweeping her around in swirling arcs. She became aware that a space had opened up around them as people moved aside to watch. ‘You feel responsible for their death,’ he said.

‘Not exactly,’ Ceri replied.

‘You feel that they might still be alive if you had been with them then. I have been trying to work out why you put yourself in danger so readily. You have done things to help others which were far outside your tolerance zone.’

‘Overactive sense of guilt,’ Ceri said. ‘Dragons do things which don’t appear to benefit them. You taught a bunch of uncivilised tribesmen to read and write.’

He shrugged slightly. ‘We are dragons,’ he said as though that explained everything.

Ceri laughed. ‘Well, I’m me. Why the interest in my motivations?’

‘Human motivations interest me. Admittedly, Mei Long is the better observer, but one has to have a hobby.’ The music ended and he swirled her into what should have been a back-breaking dip; Ceri felt lighter than air.

Cover Art – Eagle’s Shadow

And here it is. Careful examination of this may give some clues about the plotline.

As usual, there’s a full sized version of the image on my Deviant Art page.

Search Term Update and other stuff

It’s been a while since I did a round-up of interesting search terms people have used to find this blog, so I figured it was time to have another go.

“succubus porn” and related queries remains popular. To be fair, I guess if you mention succubbi then you’re asking for people to come looking for porn.

I’m really winning on reviews. My review of The Secret World has drawn various people here. I wonder whether they found what they wanted. My Iron Sky review also trigger a number of hits, but every single one of them was looking for pictures of Julia Dietze getting her uniform blown off in the airlock. I never knew so many people were into 1940s-era corset/garterbelts.

Finally, what has to be the most specific request I’ve seen: “young girl meeting an angel in heroic fantasy and deviantart”. Sometimes you have to wonder what the search engines are doing.

That was a random lunchtime post, but while I’m here… Eagle’s Shadow will be out this weekend and I’ll be posting up the cover art here tonight.

The Secret World, an Urban Fantasy MMO Review

So, this weekend I spent some time gaming for about the first time in a year. I’ve been keeping an eye onThe Secret Worldfor a while since it seemed like something a bit different and, to be honest, it is. So, here’s my views on the beta which I played through some of Saturday.

The Setting: The Secret World is a Lovecraftian hidden secrets setting, modernised with liberal use of sex and violence. The violence is to be expected; this is an MMO, violence is basically what these games are about. The sex… well, also to be expected to some extent. It’s a Funcom game. Funcom pretty much sold Conan on exposed nipples, so a bit of titilation is to be expected. It’s handled with humour, but this is still a game which is probably not for the young or the prudish.

The plotline seems interesting in an apocalyptic way. The stores seem well put together and hold your interest. I could see me trying to play through the game to find out what happens.

Gameplay: I rather enjoyed the skill progression system, which features a rather more flexible mechanism than is typical among MMOs. MMOs (Computer RPGs in general) were developed by people who played first edition D&D. Pen and Paper RPGs have progressed hugely since those days, but CRPGs are still stuck in the “gain a level, increase you hit points and abilities” school. The skill progression in TSW is point-based, but there is still a level-oriented mechanism to it, which is disappointing.

Combat is positional and fairly advanced. It’s fairly fast moving too. My character kicked butt! She died exactly twice, but more of that later. (If anyone was playing and spotted Ceridwyn Brent running around the opening zones, yes, that was me, I was having trouble coming up with a name no one had grabbed.)

The Problems: The game crashed three or four times, once under circumstances which left my character to die. (Happily it’s an MMO so she just got up again.) However, the blue screen crash was more disturbing than any of the assertion failures. BSODs are not supposed to happen in production code. Beyond that, the game froze a lot. Running: game locks up. Click on an object: game locks up. Fighting: game locks up. These seemed like server-end problems too. Not infrequently the game would inform you that it had lost contact with the server and would you like to migrate to another. I’m worried that they would put in a mechanism to handle this kind of thing; it implies it happens a lot. The other character death I had was as the result of a freeze. I encountered no in-game bugs, but the code seemed unstable.

Now, this was a beta, you expect problems, but the game goes live in a week or two and I’d be hoping for more stable code than this. I seem to recall Conan was similarly flaky when they made it live.

The other big problem I have with TSW, and again it seems to be a Funcom thing, is that they just haven’t got anywhere to role-play. World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes, they have areas where people can meet and chatter, and they are bright enough to set up a chat system which is useful for taling to other characters. Role-players, if they like an MMO, are a wonderful thing. They take longer to finish content, they stick around even though they have run out of content, they keep paying money to play when the gamers have left for the next big thing. Funcom appear to have no idea at all about role-playing and role-players (everyone else knows about us, they just treat us like shit).

I doubt I’ll be picking up the TSW when it goes live. I’d prefer it if they fixed the bugs. If you fancy being molested by a tentacle or two, you can findThe Secret Worldon Facebook.

Beauty in the Eyes

So, there’s a story behind this render and it got me thinking about beauty. That means you have to sit through the rambling monologue before you get to the good stuff. The good stuff is the render of Lily in a harem outfit, and the story goes like this:

There I was, checking DAZ’s web site, as I usually do, and they had a new clothing model, Katya, which is a nicely designed harem-girl outfit with a veil and head jewellery. Obviously I thought of Lily. Lily would love that outfit. I simply had to render Lily in that outfit (otherwise she would hear about it and hurt me). So, I duely purchased it for her and got her on the photo set and there she is.

However, since she gets rendered slowly, over the course of several hours, from the top and working down a block at a time. (The hair and faces take the longest; more edges to bounce light off, more calculations required.) I went into the little office at the back of the house to check on how she was doing and there they were; her eyes. They were looking out from the screen, deep and dark, from behind her hair and the veil. Awesome. Really, go to my Deviant Art page, click-through to the full size image and look her in the eyes. She’s smiling; you can’t see it because of the veil, but you can see it in her eyes. They’re beautiful.

So, back to the point. Beauty, what is it? Lily’s an attractive woman. I’ve rendered her in next to nothing and there’s a lot of flesh on show there, but really it’s the eyes that make the picture. I guess you’d call them “sultry” or “playful.” There are obviously a lot of other things about Lil that are attractive; I sculpted her that way. Lily was designed to be a little artificial, a collection of features designed to hit man’s built-in sexual triggers. Her hips are wider than average, her breasts larger (using a morph on the Genesis model called “Breasts Implant,” so while she’s all natural, she looks like there’s silicon in there). She’s a half-succubus, evolved to attract sexual partners. Of course, everyone has their preferences and Lily is not to everyone’s tastes.

And beauty is not always physical. Another thing I love about Lily is her personality. She’s a free spirit. She does what she wants and doesn’t care what others think of her. (Partially, I wish I could be the same, but I’m as insecure as the next guy.) An old character of mine in an MMO used to fall in love with people because of their personalities. It was a superhero MMO (City of Heroes) and everyone was attractive, if not stunning. If you just went by looks you’d be falling in love, or at least lust, with just about everyone you saw, so how can you really differentiate? A winning personality, or even just some little difference which seems attractive, can make all the difference. Even in real life that’s true. Relationships can start with looks, but they probably can’t keep on going without something else. Or can they?

Any thoughts, folks? What do you find attractive?

Oh yeah… I said you could have the good bit at the end. Enjoy.

Coming Up Behind Myself

If you’ve been reading the Thaumatology books (which would be very nice of you, I appreciate it a lot) then you’ll know that the first of them takes place in 2010 and then they proceed through time from there. Since I’m writing them relatively swiftly, I’ve been steadily catching up on myself until, at the moment, while writing book 8, Ancient, I’m actually more or less writing in real time.

It’s weird! On Sunday I was writing stuff that was happening on Sunday. Yesterday I wrote a scene which took place yesterday. Today I’ll be writing a rather big finale scene which happens today! I dunno, it feels kind of strange when I write in a date and I don’t have to check the calendar I have in my notes because it’s today. Today, Ceri and Lily are going to… Yeah, not going to say what they’re up to, but if I don’t think about it hard I can sort of imagine popping down to London and there they would be, walking into a club in Mayfair.

Oh well, I can dream.

A Ceri and Lily Pinup

I’ve been messing with this for days. I really mean days too; it’s an 11 hour render, and it’s taken me three runs at it before I was happy with the result. I was going for something erotic and romantic, and I guess both of those are in the eyes of the beholder. However, since it’s also got more flesh than usual, you can see the picture after the cut.

As usual, you can see a full-sized version of this over at http://tharcion.deviantart.com. Hope you like it.

This is Getting Tough

I’m having fun with Ancient. The villain’s gone and done stuff I didn’t expect him to and he’s changed the long term plot some. Now I have to decide whether to back it up and work through it again, or go with the new plotline, which I have to admit I rather like.

I think it’s down to the fact that the long term plot is sliding into home plate (to use a baseball metaphore, which I shouldn’t, I’m British!). It means I have to be extra careful about getting things right or the wrap-up will likely fall flat. Which sucks since I keep second guessing myself.

So, next weekend I’m going to go over Eagle’s Shadow again, preparatory to releasing it. I think it should be hitting the shops around the 23rd. Then it might be a longer wait for Ancient, but hopefully it’ll be worth waiting for and the result will be three books coming up which should work all the better for it.