Hugo Negron's Blog, page 10

What's next for Qualtan and company?

Well, here I am at roughly the halfway point with the rough draft for Book Six of Forging of a Knight, Darksiege Triumphant. The title right there gives away the premise, but what's involved?

How about a betrayal from the Arch-Mages (Readers of Book Five, Knighthood's End,  can you guess who it is?)?

How about the release and return of the other members of Those That Stand in Shadow?

How about an object the original Arch-Mages of the School had made, an object of evil, that was broken into many and sent off to different dimensions, that Qualtan, Vanessa, Cassandra, Bartholomew, and Glaive must now reclaim?

How about one of those dimensions being good ol' terra firma Earth, right here, right now?

How about the deaths of not one, but two recurring characters from the series?

How about a buildup to the big series finale which will be Book Seven when that comes out?

Finally, despite the many evils, despite the many dangers, how will Glaive handle the most evil of them all when he encounters...Fast Food?!  No, really...!

Pics from the 2nd Annual Authors Fair at Gail Borden!

Here are some great shots taken from the event that were posted on the library's Flickr page! There I am, along with another pic of me and my table buddy, Randall Allen Dunn​. I still say he should have worn his fedora...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gailbor...

Gail Borden 2nd Annual Authors Fair Sunday April 23rd

Come one, come all! Another awesome local event which will bring some great authors and even greater readers together! I'll be there and I hope you'll be too! From 2-4pm at Gail Borden Public Library 270 N Grove Ave., in Elgin, IL!

https://allevents.in/elgin/2nd-annual...#

The Contest Roundup!

Thanks to all the Forging Fans who sent in their answer to the gargoyle pen holder contest! Some had it, some did not, but Sean, Dana, and the mysterious "DagonLover" (who I'm assuming from that nom de plum must be a fellow HP Lovecraft aficionado) were the lucky trio to answer correctly and have the luck of the draw! Your gargoyle sets will be winging (get it, gargoyles - wings? Heh heh heh...? Ok, never mind...) your way - I have sent all three of you confirmation emails and requests for where to mail. Your new pets are dying to eat...that is, greet you!

And for those who didn't win, we'll have more contests a'comin'!

And the answer to where Vanessa the Kubare' was first mentioned? Book One, Forging of a Knight, page 107. Glaive is talking with Qualtan , regarding his past with Lord Thule. He discusses Thule's captains, M'Shua and Caurn, citing their abilities which though formidable, are not in Qualtan's uncle's class. Then he says the actual line:

"Still, they form a dangerous lot, especially if you add the creature Caurn enslaved to serve Thule."

And there you have it - the first mention of the Kubare' waayyy back in Book One of the series! Who says we don't keep track of continuity over here?!

Again, thanks to everyone willing to dig deep and join in the gargoyle adventure! It's because of you I have been able to keep the series going! As a matter of fact, get ready for Book Six... 8 )

IT'S CONTEST TIME!!

It’s CONTEST TIME! As I mentioned previously, there was a contest brewing behind the gargoyle pens/holder set pic I had shared, and this is it! Fasten that sword, unfold your best travelling cloak, and ready your horse!

A might quest like those of yore,
In search of wisdom, of knowledge more,
To travel back through misty time,
For honor gained, and glory thine,
Find its mention, hidden well,
Spoken by Glaive, for thoughts to dwell.

What does all that mean? Well, here’s an excerpt from Forging of a Knight Book Five, Knighthood’s End:


“Glaive, please continue,” urged Bartholomew. “Who is this captive you mentioned, and why was this conversation brought here?”

“What Glaive is proposing we do, Bartholomew, cannot be spoken of elsewhere, even in the guild house of the Red Swords,” Lord Pontus said, still pacing. “I could not trust even them.”

“It is a creature of Thule’s wizard,” said Glaive, “As I’ve said, there are many wizards here, of all kind and type, but few, if any, can truly hold themselves to that title. Caurn is one who can. He is the true power behind Lord Thule.”

“You mentioned this once before, I think,” said Qualtan.

Glaive smiled, appreciating Qualtan’s memory.


And thus was the introduction of said captive, Vanessa the Mah-Zakim, made to Qualtan’s world, a world that would soon become upside down, having the knight leave the Order of the Bearded Lion, a branded traitor and thief, on the run with Vanessa in a hopeful romance to find freedom for her before her own life-consuming hunger could bring his death. Could love survive between a mortal and such a being? Could a Mah-Zakim love back? Was their love true, or was there a sinister, hidden side to Vanessa’s intentions, as Qualtan’s former friends had insisted?

Those that have read the book will know what happens. And for those savvy readers who have followed the series through, a sudden bulb of memory may be starting to flash. The first mention of this unwilling Mah-Zakim servant of Thule and Caurn was actually made a long while back – in Book One of the series, to be exact! Not mentioned by name but definitely mentioned, as Glaive’s appreciation of Qualtan’s recollection above confirms.

Where did this happen in Book One? Well, that’s the reason for this quest! End of March, I will randomly select three of the correct answers to win one of these “lovely” (to a gargoyle, at least!) gargoyle pen holders and the two pens that come along with each! Simply email me at findthemahzakim@hotmail.com the PAGE NUMBER, and quote the SINGLE SENTENCE where Glaive first rather casually mentions the evil servant to Qual, and you’ll win!

https://www.goodreads.com/photo/autho...


Better get crackin’…these gargoyles are getting anxious to break free from their boxes over here…that constant scratching and growling is beginning to make me nervous…

Kindle 99 cent sale is on!

Just a quick reminder out there that in celebrating the release of Book Five in the Forging of a Knight series (which will be shared with the masses at Gen Con 50 this year!), I have the first book, Forging of a Knight, for the Kindle on sale for .99 cents through this Sunday.

So if you haven't had a chance to check out the series, .99 cents is the best way to kick the tires and see for yourself!

The Price of a Kiss and the Loathly Lady

With Forging of a Knight, Knighthood’s End, there is a wonderful part whose inspiration demands to be told.

When Qualtan faces off against the Kubare’ Queen in the hopes of freeing Vanessa, the Kubare’ Qualtan has fallen in love with, the Queen forces a choice (in effect a magical spell) to prove his love. To show his love was not based solely on the appeasing form of the Kubare’, Vanessa was forced to reveal the “other” side to her form – a horrible, demonic, monstrous form. Could he still love her then? Qualtan said he could, surprising all the Kubare’ present by giving Vanessa a kiss in her uglier, sharp-toothed shape, but the Queen was not convinced. The two halves of Vanessa’s personality were permanent, the Queen insisted, and could not be separated. He would have to choose – would he wish to see her “human” form during the day for all to see, and have her more horrid form visible solely at night, or the reverse? The Queen was sure his love would falter with this forced choice…how could it not?

So as not to spoil the result, I’ll leave it to the readers who will know what happens next.

This scene was inspired by the motif of the Loathly Lady, which seems to have been a hit back in old Irish and British tales. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, a version of the “Loathly Lady”, is a classic example. In a nutshell, King Arthur goes off on his own into a magical forest in pursuit of a white deer (white usually meaning an enchanted creature). He succeeds in hunting down the beast, but upon slaying it, is suddenly confronted by a knight. For the offense of killing the otherworldly deer, the knight gives a question, and demands that the King must return in one year with the answer. So what was the question?

Basically, it was this…“What do women want the most?”

The King ends up encountering a particularly nasty-looking hag, who says she can help him by providing the answer to the question. In return, the King would have to allow one of his knights, Sir Gawain to be exact, to marry her. With little choice, the King informs Sir Gawain of his predicament, and being his nephew as well as an honorable knight loyal to his King, the knight agrees.

So the deal is cast, the King is saved, and Sir Gawain brings to the royal court the evil-looking hag, humped, smelly, and drooling, as his wife-to-be. When those in the court began to point and laugh, he warns them to honor her as his bride, treating the hag with all the courtesy and respect he would give to any woman.

When the marriage is completed, and the couple retire to their bedroom chamber, the hag demands Sir Gawain fulfills his role as a husband (you can figure that one out!). Sir Gawain stands by his decision to be her husband in all ways and agrees. He’s suddenly shocked when the hag transforms into a beauteous woman! She states she is under a spell, and that he must choose when she can look attractive – at day or at night? He thinks on it, and decides it is up to her to make that choice. By doing so, he broke the charm over her, and she became beautiful permanently, for he had given her what the knight of the enchanted forest had asked of the King to answer – for a woman to have the control/freedom to make choices/decisions for herself.

This representation is usually based on one of two themes – the freedom of women, or the freedom of the land.

There is a similar (almost identical) story in the Wife of Bath’s Tale from The Cantebury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. And then there is the Celtic, “Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon”, where a future King-to-be and his band of brothers goes off looking for a source of water. They find it, yet again, guarded by an ugly-looking hag. In order to sample the water, the price would be a kiss. All of the brothers balk, except for the Prince, who kisses the hag and gains his kingship, as the hag becomes beautiful.

There is also per Wikipedia the European tale of the pig faced woman – where in similar fashion, a women is cursed to have her face become that of a pig’s and her husband must choose when to allow her to be seen in this porcine state. The husband gives his suffering bride the choice, and the curse goes away – although apparently this story changed over time and began to be taken as literal truth with actual “sightings” and such – just check YouTube or Google on this one!

For Knighthood’s End, I thought it would be interesting to reverse the plight – rather than an obvious ugly evil hag, it was an attractive woman, and thus the rather sad plight of the Kubare’ could be seen – their beauty easily fallen for, love initially gained, but then the rejection that would come upon seeing the darker side to their face, proving the love that had been given was false. This also played into their rejection of such feelings, preferring to lose themselves in darker hungers, as a way of self-denial and avoidance of the pain they felt because of their cursed state.

That switch, and the concept of the Loathly Lady isn’t just found in old Middle Age stories. There are modern versions that are quite familiar. Beauty and the Beast (reversed to the male vs. the female) is one, where professed love to an evil looking Beast bring out a handsome Prince, as well as The Princess and the Frog (again, the modern version, since the old Brothers Grimm version didn’t offer such a happy ending) - even a certain Disney cartoon about an ogre named Shrek seems to have some roots to the Loathly Lady.

You can easily see references to feminism, to free will, or the basic adage of what’s inside being more important than what is on the outside in the themes related to the Loathly Lady, or perhaps in some of the above examples, of a Loathly Man. In Qualtan’s and Vanessa’s case, there was another aspect to the tale to be considered…one of hope, in the power that lies behind the emotion called love.

Here are some cool references to check out:

http://www.maryjones.us/jce/loathlyla...

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text...

An interview with author Randall Allen Dunn!

Action. Adventure. Infinite Possibility. These are the first words that greet you when you check out Randall Allen Dunn’s website. I met Randall at an Indie Author Day event hosted by Schaumburg Library. Impressed by his work, I finally nabbed him for an interview!



Hi Randall – thanks again for taking the time to be interviewed! Let’s begin with telling us a little bit more about who Randall Allen Dunn is.


When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

I was encouraged by a 2nd grade teacher for some poems I wrote in class, and I got good responses and laughs from classmates for some stories I wrote in grade school and middle school. I think I was in 6th grade when I knew I wanted to write.

How did you develop the idea for DEN?

I heard a tragic news story about a woman who was stalked and killed by a man she met through online gaming. They said she did all the right things to deflect his advances and keep things from getting dangerous, but sadly, she was still killed. I thought it would be intriguing to have a story in which a girl was made into a game, where someone tried to stalk her and trap her into playing the game in order to escape. I didn’t have a theme in mind when I started, but I quickly landed on the idea of people’s attempts to be perfect – to do all the right things – and be confounded by the fact that bad things still happen to good people, and we need to learn how to deal with that and keep moving through life.


Which characters were the most fun to develop? Which were the most challenging?

I loved creating the villain, Gunther Grater. I wanted a computer nerd villain, but when I pictured that type of villain, I remembered all the nerd baddies from old movies and TV shows, where they were scrawny and wimpy social outcasts who escaped into science or computer studies, then used them for evil purposes. I wanted my villain to be threatening physically as well as intellectually. So I made him tall and fat, but in a beefy way, with gorilla-like arms that could pin or strangle someone with ease. I’m really happy with the way he turned out, especially when he first appears, after Amy Raven muses over the reasons he makes her nervous. When he suddenly appears behind her, the description of his persona cement him as a very scary guy, and you can feel the same fear that Amy feels around him. It was very gratifying to create a more original villain and make him a serious threat.
I also really enjoyed creating the twin archers, Todd and Troy Dugan. Especially when I worked out some of their backstory. I was actually surprised and shocked to discover that they had three girls currently locked up in their tool shed back in Wisconsin. There were a few disturbing revelations like that, that came to me as I worked out details of who these people were and how they had come to this point in life, where they would participate in a manhunt to stalk and capture an innocent girl. So that was difficult, thinking through the backstory and discovering some unsettling things about these characters. Of course, I came up with those unsettling ideas, but I used them because they naturally fit, and they still disturbed me when I chose them and realized how much sense it made. I had an idea that the Dugans had kidnapped other girls in the past, but when I started working out their history, I was shocked to realize those poor girls were still there!

What are your plans long-term for your writing? Do you have additional/different works in mind?

I have a lot of plans, but too little time to write them all out. I’m publishing the sequel to The Red Rider this June, called Red Rider Revolution, and publishing the third novel in 2018. It’s a thriller series about a teenage Red Riding Hood fighting werewolves, kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Batman.
I’m also starting a children’s fantasy trilogy later this year and a second High Adventure book next year, which is an Indiana Jones-style action-adventure series based in Africa. Later on, I plan to start a spy series and a Twilight Zone-style series.

As a self-published author, I share the challenge of getting the word out on my works. What have you had to do to win broader exposure and branding for your books?

Fortunately, I’ve met some other authors who are very active in promoting one another and they’ve been great at reviewing my work and inviting me to several blogging events with other authors. So I’m gradually finding the right audience, and more and more readers who are really excited about my work.

This question will start off sounding like an old joke – a person walks into a bar (or convention or bookstore) and bumps into Randall Allen Dunn – what would be your elevator pitch to showcase your work?

If you find you don’t have enough time to read, try reading a movie! I write action thrillers that read more like blockbuster action films. Larger-than-life heroes squaring off against diabolical villains and facing deep moral dilemmas. Always action-packed, always fun, always filled with memorable characters and entertaining scenes of action, drama, romance, or comedy, or a little of each.

As an author, it’s sometimes difficult to finally say a product is finished, no matter how many times you review or edit. Is there anything you would go back and change in your stories? Where there ideas you had in mind and then decided NOT to include?

It’s funny how your ideas change when you’re actually writing the story. In The Red Rider, there’s a scene where the main character, Helena, attacks some bad guys in a barn. I originally pictured her approaching them from outside the barn, but when I was writing the scene, I realized it would make no sense for her to position herself there, so I changed it. I have a scene in Den where the bad guys are hunting the heroine, Amy Raven, through a maze, and I pictured it being a suspenseful slow-paced stealth scene. But when I wrote the story, the characters were all running so fast there was no way they could slow down, even in a maze where they weren’t sure where they were going. So it became an all-out action chase instead of a hide-and-seek tiptoe scene. I have a solid blueprint in my mind for what will happen in most scenes of my stories, but it can change instantly when I’m actually writing it out, especially if a character is real enough to make other choices than the ones I planned for them!

I have a 4 year old son, and structuring time around him can be challenging! I’ve lost count of the times he nearly pressed the delete button on something I was working on…how do you find time to write your stories?

Well … I don’t. Lately I’ve been doing so much promoting, while being busy at home with my wife and I both working, raising our kids and trying to limit our trips to the ER for one illness or another, and trying to get my kids to grasp that my writing time is actually important – it just gets hard to make time for it. At my former jobs, I would write during my lunch hour. Now I work from home, and my half hour gives me barely enough time to eat lunch and make any calls or other tasks I need to do before I’m back at work. To get anything done, I have to either stay up later – like between 10pm and midnight or later – or get up early, like 5am, when I can. It doesn’t help that my six-year old son keeps waking himself up at 6am, no matter how late he goes to bed.

Do you have a certain method you use when you write – i.e., a certain room, music, mood, etc., to help get you in the right writing frame of mind?

Sometimes I listen to music, but it usually distracts me. I only use it to tune out other noise, if I’m writing in the same room where someone’s watching TV. But my normal writing method is this: I write out notes of scenes and plot ideas for the story I’ve come up with. As I get more invested in the idea, I listen to movie soundtrack CD’s for music that helps me picture certain scenes of the story. I can mentally map out a lot of the action while I’m driving and listening to the music. When I feel I have enough material that I’m comfortable to start writing the story from the beginning, I jump into it, and I add in scenes that are already written out from my notes, when they come up in the story. When I finish my writing time, I always leave off in the middle of a word, typing enough of it that I’ll remember what the word was. The next time I resume writing, I can continue writing out that sentence as if I never took a break from it, because I’m instantly back in the flow of my previous thoughts.
I write out my first draft, then start on the drudgery of creating backstories for all the major characters, and some details for the minor ones. I have to figure out details of the characters’ history and what dates or events are significant to them, such as their birthday, death of a close relative, their wedding anniversary, etc., so I know exactly how they feel at certain times of the year and how they relate to other characters, who also have significant events that might coincide.
Once that’s finally done, I write the second draft. Having done the backstories, I now have a much clearer and more believable portrayal of the story characters and everything becomes much more concrete. I can then submit the second draft to beta readers for feedback, to tell me about any typos or story problems. I take their feedback, decide what things need to be adjusted and what things can stay the way they are, and then I publish it. This is based on Stephen King’s instructions in On Writing, where he says to write two drafts and a polish.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a fellow author’s story draft to give him some feedback. We agreed to help each other out that way, and he gave me outstanding feedback on Den. I’m also reading some library books about how to draw comic book superheroes, for a coloring book I plan to create soon.


Where can readers go to find out more about Randall Allen Dunn?

You can find my books online at places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, as well as Goodreads. I’m active on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and you can follow my Packing Action blog and subscribe to my newsletter at www.RandallAllenDunn.com.

Thanks Randall, for sharing some of your time!

Thanks to those readers who entered my giveaway!

The results are in - and the three lucky winners will be sent a signed copy of Book Five in the Forging of a Knight series, Knighthood's End. Thanks to Sheila, Sean and Deanna, the lucky winners, and of course, to everyone else who participated! Hope you enjoy!

Upping the Ante!

All right - to make this even more fun, adding some very nifty looking dragon pens to our gargoyle pals for the upcoming contest. Actually I thought these pens were no longer in stock, but luckily they were!


https://www.goodreads.com/photo/autho...