Ari McKay's Blog, page 17

Ten Years and Counting

I’m not doing NaBloPoMo because July is going to be a bit hectic for me, and I’ve never make the daily posting goal. But I saw a post from someone who is participating, and today’s prompt grabbed me.

Do you think of a decade as a short or long period of time? (Is the century a 10th full or a 10th empty!)

This prompt jumped out at me because Ari and I are celebrating our 10 year anniversary of writing together next month. She jokes that we’ve lasted longer than some marriages. I’ve joked that we’ve become heterosexual life partners. But I never really been struck by the timespan until I saw that prompt.

Ten years. Dang.

In some ways, it feels like we just started writing together. We began by roleplaying together, and then we moved into writing fanfiction. I look at our stories and think, “It hasn’t been that long since we wrote that”. Then I look at the date on it, and I realize it’s been a lot longer than I thought!

In other ways, it feels like we’ve always been writing together. We’ve got this collaboration thing down cold, and our writing process is like a well-oiled machine. Well, except for the usual pitfalls, like when real life intervenes in some way. One of us is out of town, one of us gets sick, something’s going on with the family, etc. But we’re never lacking for plot bunnies or inspiration.

That’s not to say nothing ever goes wrong. Sometimes, an idea peters out, or we get distracted and lose our mojo for it by the time we get back to it, or the characters just aren’t gelling. We’ve got a trail of partial drafts and rewrites streaming in our wake. All I can say is thank God for folders in Google drive.

We don’t get to see each other in person except once a year, but we chat just about every night. Despite the constant contact, I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times we’ve gotten out of sorts with each other. We’ve never had a fight. There are plenty of times when one or the both of us are snarky or moody or pissy, but there’s always a reason external to our friendship, and we explain what it is. “It’s not you, it’s [family/work/general life stress]“. There’s no projection of whatever is really going on onto the other person.

Would that change if we saw each other more often? Maybe, but I doubt it. We joke that if we ever lived under the same roof, we’d sit in separate rooms and communicate through chat anyway or we’d just leave a cake outside the door and back away when we realize the other is in a bad mood. Neither of us are particularly extroverted, so we get each other’s need for space and privacy, and we communicate with honesty because we know we can. We have our own safe space.

So this particular decade has seemed both short and long, and while we won’t reach a centennial mark of writing together simply due to the limits of the human lifespan, I’d consider this  1/10th of a century full, not empty, and I’m hoping for as many more as possible.

New release day!

Blood Bathory: Absence of the Sun is now available! 312 pages / 96500 words for $7.99 for the e-book version or you can purchase a print copy from Amazon! (It doesn’t look like the print version has populated on Amazon yet, but you can check our author page to see when it goes live.)

Gaia’s theriomorphs may have gravely injured Elizabeth Bathory, but they face new challenges now that her daughter Anna has instigated a coup against her mother. An appeal for help from Antonio, Marielle’s European deputy, results in new revelations for the younger theriomorphs about the origins and nature of the enemy they’ve been fighting for so long — revelations which also change how Evan St. John sees his role in the war.

Tyr Gustavson — a theriomorph who has been feral since 1945, grieving the death of his partner Aaron — and Adam Carson — a fighter pilot who was turned into a vampire against his will — enter the picture, both of them still fighting the specters of their experiences in WWII. As the theriomorphs attempt both to block Anna’s moves against them and to find and destroy Elizabeth once and for all, Tyr and Adam are drawn together, despite Tyr’s hatred of vampires. When Tyr pushes Adam away out of fear, Adam accepts a desperate, suicidal mission to find Thrace, the original nosferatu. If their desperate plan works, the theriomorphs would have the opportunity to destroy not only Elizabeth, but the sire of all vampires. But if it fails, they might have unleashed a force which could lead to the destruction of them all — and perhaps even of Gaia herself.

And here’s a sample!

Tyr watched their server, wondering what lay beneath the choker around her neck. Did it hide bite marks? He was so caught up in curiosity as she returned with their drinks that he didn’t notice the man approaching their table until Adam began to growl.

“Well, well, fresh faces. And rather lovely ones.” Tall, black haired and pale skinned, the newcomer was slender almost to the point of emaciation, and attired in an outfit that looked like something out of a Victorian melodrama. His black velvet frock coat was closely tailored, and the white ruffles at his throat somehow didn’t make his skin seem any more colorful in comparison. As if that didn’t make it obvious he was a vampire, the smile he offered showed a hint of fangs.

Adam immediately leaned closer to Tyr. “Thank you,” he replied, not bothering to hide his American accent, although his deep tone definitely held an note of warning. “I’m sure our mamas, if they were still alive, would be glad you approve of their handiwork.”

The vampire’s smile broadened. “Well, one of them was particularly skilled, it seems.” He looked at Tyr, his dark eyes taking on a hungry gleam.  Drawing in a deliberate sniff, he licked his lips. “You, my pet, smell heavenly. I could just eat you up.”

Tyr withdrew as far as he could from the vampire and shook his head. Until recently, he’d only fought vampires, never been seduced by one, and he wasn’t interested in being seduced by this one. “I’m with him,” he said, making a show of resting his hand on Adam’s thigh.

Adam growled again. “That’s right, he’s with me.” Adam put an arm around Tyr’s shoulders, tilting his chin up and staring at the vampire piercingly. “Go poach elsewhere.”

“With you? Interesting… I don’t sense any marks.” Never losing his smile, the vampire stepped closer. “It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve claimed him. It would amuse me to lure him away from you.”

“He leaves his marks where only he can see them.” Tyr stared defiantly at the vampire, although he was careful to keep his gaze fixed on the vampire’s chin in case the vampire tried to mesmerize him. “I won’t leave him.”

“Hmmm.. you’re lying, pretty one.” The vampire’s voice became low and almost hypnotic. “You would be better off with me. I treat my dolls very well, if they please me.”

Adam’s hand suddenly covered the one of Tyr’s that rested on his leg, and he lifted it up, his thumb stroking the inside of Tyr’s wrist. “You’d better leave. Now.”

The brush of Adam’s thumb against his bare skin made Tyr’s body tighten in response. It had been so long since he’d been touched like that, and his skin woke up and cried up for more. Part of him was assailed by guilt at responding to someone who wasn’t Aaron, but there was a tiny voice in the back of his mind reminding him that he still had needs.

“I’m his,” he said huskily, and even though this was an act, something in him stirred and responded as soon as he said the words.

The vampire licked his lips, and Tyr felt Adam tense, like a spring coiling before snapping.

“Not really,” the vampire drawled, then raised an eyebrow at Adam. “You’ve been leading him on, you naughty boy. Mark him, or I’ll challenge you for him right now.”

For a moment, Adam was still, an unnatural stillness that no human could duplicate. His hand around Tyr’s wrist was like stone, and then Adam spoke, his voice soft. “Tyr… look at me.”

Tyr didn’t like taking his eyes off the other vampire for a second, but he had a role to play, and so he obeyed, turning his head to look at Adam. He met Adam’s gaze, surprised to see the conflicted, almost tortured look in Adam’s clear blue eyes, and then the full implications of the conversation sank in. Adam had to bite him, or the other vampire would try to take him away. There was no way Tyr could let things escalate to a challenge; Adam wasn’t an experienced enough fighter, and Tyr would likely end up the mesmerized thrall of the other vampire, the mere thought of which chilled him to the core.

The unspoken question hung between them, and Tyr knew he had to answer. Memories of Aaron being torn apart by fangs and claws rose up, but he pushed them aside. Their mission was in jeopardy, and Tyr wasn’t about to let it fail because of his own weaknesses.

Drawing in a deep breath, he lifted his chin and tilted his head slightly to offer his throat. Having a vampire bite into his wrist might be easier to accept, but it was also less intimate, and they were supposed to be lovers. With that role in mind, he mustered a smile.

“I’ve been waiting for this.”

Adam’s eyes held stunned surprise, then something far more complex. It seemed an eternity until at last, almost in resignation, he leaned closer. The hand still holding Tyr’s wrist trembled, as though Adam were fighting something within himself, then Adam’s lips were there, just above the collar, a hair’s breadth from Tyr’s skin. Another moment of hesitation, and Tyr wondered if Adam was going to go through with it… but then there was a soft caress of skin as Adam’s lips touched him and a sting as fangs pierced his skin.

Tyr’s breath caught in his throat, and he felt an instinctive urge to fight Adam off as old fears and memories rose up again, stronger this time, but he refused to give in. Instead, he slid his arms around Adam’s shoulders and drew him closer like an eager lover would.

There was a rumble, as though Adam had growled, then he began to suck. The mouth against Tyr’s neck grew warm, and Adam’s arms were around him in turn, as Adam pulled him off his stool and into his lap as though he weighed nothing. The sudden move startled Tyr; although Aaron had been taller, he’d never manhandled Tyr or indulged in such displays of strength. Tyr felt little flutters in his belly that had nothing to do with fear, and he ignored them too. This was a necessary part of the mission, not a seduction, but somehow, he still found it disconcertingly easy to press closer as if nestling into Adam’s embrace as he let his eyelids fall closed. There wasn’t as much pain as he expected, and deep down in his soul where his tiger-self lived, he felt an odd sense of satisfaction.

He wasn’t sure how long it was before Adam suddenly stiffened, pulling his mouth away from Tyr’s throat as he raised his head. “Go away and leave us alone,” he snarled to the other vampire. “He’s mine.”

Blood Bathory 2!

A week from today, the second novel in our Blood Bathory trilogy will be coming out from Torquere Press! The Blood Bathory series is dear to us because while the first book wasn’t the first original work we got published, it was the first  manuscript we finished (and submitted and got rejected) when we decided to try our hands at original fiction writing.

Book One came out last July, and we used it as a way to introduce the world we’d built, which involves a battle between shapeshifters who are the servants of Gaia and vampires, who are out to destroy the shapeshifters. The primary antagonist is Elizabeth Bathory, who is trying to establish a foothold in NYC and to track down Evan St. John, who risked his life to escape her.

Evan is one of the main characters of book one, a reluctant vampire who didn’t ask to be turned. He seeks help from his best friend, Will Trask, and together, they face the realization that the world is much stranger — and much more dangerous — than they thought it was.

Mild spoilers for book two ahead!

In book two, Elizabeth has been removed from the playing field, but there are other antagonists eager to step up and take her place, one of whom is her daughter, Anna. Evan and Will are still very much involved in the action, but our two leads for this novel are Adam Carson and Tyr Gustafson, two men who are displaced in time.

Adam and Tyr met during a rescue mission in WWII, but the mission went horribly wrong. Adam was kidnapped and Tyr’s lover, Aaron, was slaughtered by the vampires. They meet again seventy years later, but it’s far from a happy reunion.

When we were working on the rough draft of book one, I was having a hard time getting a handle on how I wanted to characterize Evan until I happened to hear a song that made me sit up and exclaim, “That’s him!”

I don’t listen to current music often, so I wasn’t familiar with Evanescence before hearing this, but this struck me as the perfect song for Evan. After being turned, he felt dead inside, and I imagined him asking Will to save him from the darkness within him that he was trying so hard to control.

For book two, I wrote Tyr, a shapeshifter whose animal form is a huge white tiger. In a way, he’s coming from a similar emotional place as Evan: grief and loss. After Aaron’s funeral, Tyr shifted to his tiger form and didn’t come out again until everyone began to believe he’d gone feral. He hasn’t moved past the trauma of not only losing Aaron but also seeing him killed in a horrific way. So when I was looking for musical inspiration to help me get into his mindset, I turned to Evanescence once again and found Tyr’s song.

 

Originally, I thought this might be a song for Evan too, expressing his grief over losing his sister, but once we started working on book two and I figured out Tyr’s back story, I knew this had to be his instead.

I even found a song for Aaron!

Aaron is a minor character who only appears in the first chapter, but his presence heavily impacts Tyr’s emotional journey throughout the novel. We don’t see much of him and Tyr together alive and well, but Tyr relates stories about their relationship and the kind of life they were building together. In order to understand and express Tyr’s grief, I had to build a sense of their connection, and for me, this song is Aaron’s farewell to Tyr.

Currently, we have the rough draft for book three in progress, and I did have an Evanescence song in mind for the character I’m writing in that one, but we decided to do a major overhaul on a particular plot point which made my first choice invalid. I haven’t picked a new one yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something. I want to continue my trend through the whole trilogy!

New Short Story!

Changing the Things You Can is now available at Dreamspinner Press! It’s 59 pages for $3.99, or if you’d like a new story a day from some of Dreamspinner’s fabulous authors throughout June, you can purchase the whole Mended package.

Devastated by the death of his best friend from a drug overdose, rock star Devon Bailey retreats to his hometown to grieve. When his fragile emotional state causes him to break down in a local bakery, owner Michael Behrman comes to his rescue.

Michael’s nurturing instincts prompt him to reach out to Devon, offering support and a comforting shoulder, and the two grow closer. Michael’s feelings for Devon deepen into something more–but how can he know whether Devon feels anything more for him than gratitude?

Music Shuffle Meme

YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT SOMEONE BY THE TYPE OF MUSIC THEY LISTEN TO. HIT SHUFFLE ON YOUR IPOD, PHONE, ITUNES, MEDIA PLAYER ETC. AND WRITE DOWN THE FIRST 20 SONGS. THEN PASS THIS ON TO 10 PEOPLE. ONE RULE: NO SKIPPING.

I didn’t get tagged; I just grabbed it because it looked interesting, and I’m not tagging anyone. REBELLION.

McKay’s iTunes Shuffle:

1. “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, The Mamas & the Papas

2. “Stand By Your Man”, Tammy Wynette

3. “King of Bohemia”, Richard Thompson

4. “Carolina in the Morning”, Brent Spiner (yes, Data. Yes, really.)

5. “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”, original Sound of Music soundtrack (movie version)

6. “Chow Mein and Bowling”, Michael Nesmith

7. “Beshighoozhi”, Wolf Spirit

8. “Waldo P. Emerson Jones”, the Archies

9. “Red and Black”, original London cast of Les Miserables

10. “Portrait”, Enya

11. “The Bells of Notre Dame”, The Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack

12. “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, Blue Oyster Cult

13. “Dancing Queen”, ABBA

14. “Over the Rainbow”, Glenn Miller

15. “Addicted to Love”, Tina Turner

16. “Old Joe’s Place”, A Mighty Wind soundtrack

17. “O Kurieh”, JoSH

18. “I Will Survive”, Gloria Gaynor

19. “Seven Days”, Sting

20. “Bob Robert’s Society Band”, Jimmy Buffett

Wow, could my iTunes make me look any less cool? But it’s a fair cop. I have a lot of movie/Broadway/TV soundtracks and music that predates 1980.

The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King

I lucked up and found a copy of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid in an indy bookstore last summer, and I finally got around to reading it this month because between work, family, and writing, my time for recreational activities is pretty limited. What time I do have is divided between reading, knitting, and gaming, so my reading list is pretty backlogged. But! I do hope to make some inroads this summer, and I started things off with this slim volume.

The brief, non-spoilery version is that I liked it a lot. I’ve been a Stephen King fan for decades, although I don’t love everything he’s written. Sometimes, he can get a little too… vulgar for my tastes. Dreamcatcher is a notable example, although reading it when I was suffering from a stomach virus was probably not the best life choice I’ve ever made. But when he’s on, he is on, and I consider him to be an amazing storyteller. Maybe he’s not a “literary” writer — although I think some of his works come very close — but he’s a brilliant storyteller.

The Colorado Kid is not a horror story. It appears to be marketed as a mystery/crime story, but… it isn’t really that either. For readers who are familiar with King’s work, I’d say forget trying to categorize it in a particular genre and think of it as a story that’s close in style and tone to works like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. This one is about people and about storytelling, and it’s got some really interesting things to say. And now I’m about to get more specific and spoilery, so I’ll put the rest behind a Read More.

The interesting thing about TCK is that nothing really happens. The framework of the novella is that three people — two older men, one younger woman, all of them journalists — are sitting around, talking about something that happened in town years ago.

That’s it. That’s the novella.

 

And yet, it’s so engrossing, I had to force myself to put the book down so I wouldn’t end up staying up until the wee hours of the morning and finishing it all in one go. At its heart, this is a story about storytelling. It’s King musing about why we like stories that are tied up in neat packages with a beginning, middle, and an end — and then denying us that. Some readers might not be satisfied with the ending because we, like the characters, are left without concrete answers about what happened to The Colorado Kid (and why and how). In the end, I’m not even certain whether the guy was murdered or not. Personally, I didn’t mind it. Yes, I would have liked to know the whole truth, but I find what King did so fascinating and effective that I don’t really mind that he left us all hanging.

I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? There are some questions that we’ll never have answers to. We don’t like it because we are curious and we like to know things. The unknown can be frightening, but ultimately, there are a lot of unknowns in life, and King makes us confront that and wrestle with our own need to know.

He also gets in some points about the media — how it’s produced, how we consume it, how the news is packaged in a way to be palatable for us. This is one of King’s most smart, insightful works, one that gave me things to think about after I closed the book. If you go in expecting a hardboiled detective novel or some horrific twist, you’ll be disappointed. But if you liked his other works that focus more on the characters and the human condition than on the jump scares and gross-outs, I think you’ll like this.

I know I did. I wasn’t expecting to come away with a new addition to my list of King favorites, but for me, TCK is right up there with The Green Mile, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and The Body as one of his best, most insightful works.

As an aside, fans of the Sy Fy show Haven will find a few familiar touchstones — the two male narrators are named Vince and Dave, for example — but when Sy Fy says the show is based on TCK, they mean “very very very very loosely based”, so don’t go in expecting to find Audrey, Nathan, and Duke or The Troubles in its pages.

Cover Art for Changing the Things You Can

Here’s the cover for our short story, “Changing the Things You Can”, which will be released next month as part of Dreamspinner Press’ Mended anthology!

Herc’s Mercs: Line in the Sand

Cover of Herc’s Mercs: Line in the Sand

Herc’s Mercs, Tom Hiddleston, and The Walking Dead

The interesting thing about the Herc’s Mercs series is that it basically steamrollered us. Ari came up with the basic premise quite a while ago, and we put it on The Plot Bunny List of Doom, but we didn’t focus on it right then. She mentioned it a few times as a possibility when we were casting around for ideas on what to write, but again, we didn’t latch onto it. A few months ago, a Herc plot bunny attached itself to her ankle and started mangling, and since it was inspiring her so much, I rolled with it.

I chose to write Jude in “Herc’s Mercs: The Bigger They Come” because action isn’t really one of my strengths as a writer, and I wasn’t confident I could pull off writing Herc. Once we hashed out the basic plot and started writing, the story flowed, and we’d scarcely reached the end of the rough draft before we were coming up with ideas for Herc 2.

“Herc’s Mercs: Line in the Sand” is coming out later this year from Torquere Press, and it focuses on Alec “Red” Davis (you were right, Macky!) and Jon Baldwin, an actor who has recently skyrocketed to fame thanks to his starring role in a summer blockbuster. Alec is Herc’s right hand man, and he hasn’t been in the field for a while, so Herc assigns him as Jon’s bodyguard to change up his routine and get him back in the action again.

We tossed around various ideas for the plot, and since we knew we wanted to avoid repetition, giving Jon a stalker was out of the question. Jon does end up in peril, and Alec has to call on all of his strength and wits to save him, but it’s a very different kind of peril than Jude and Herc faced.

Once again, I chose to write the client, but Jon is very different from Jude, personality-wise. I used things I’d gathered from interviews I’d seen with Tom Hiddleston to form Jon’s personality. The consensus seems to be that Hiddleston is this genuinely happy person

 

who is very kind and generous with his fans and who enjoys the hell out of his life

 

and he works hands-on for UNICEF.

 

And then I saw this

and I was like, “…I have an idea for the opening scene.” Well, after I was coherent enough to form words again, that is.

The funny thing is, the more I see of Hiddleston and his PA/handler (Luke), the more amused I am because some of the photos I’ve seen of the two of them remind me of Jon and Alec.

 

Jon: “OMG YAY! People! I love people! Hello, people!”

Alec: “Dear God, just let me get through this with his body and my mind intact.”

Plus the fact that Tom will tell Luke to “wait” while he’s interacting with fans. So yeah, there’s a heavy Hiddleston influence to the way I’ve written Jon. It was quite a shift from writing Jude, who is prickly and snarky and defensive, especially since we wrote the two stories back to back. In a way, writing Jon was like decompressing. Jude had issues out the wazoo, but Jon is pretty much issue-free, so writing him was a nice, angst-free break.

Somewhere in there, Ari and I binge-watched The Walking Dead. It was right after the second half of season 4 started. Back when the show first started airing, I watched the whole first season and part of the second before quitting, not because I didn’t like the show but because it literally gave me nightmares. I’d watch an episode, and it was inevitable that I’d dream about zombies that night. I think it was because I watched the show alone, and I didn’t have anyone I could really talk to about it to help me decompress before going to bed.

I remembering telling Ari at least a couple of times that I knew which character she’d fall for if she ever watched the show because we both like the same type. If there’s a snarky bad boy/anti-hero with Issues, we’re going to adore him. It never fails, and we are amusingly predictable about it. Duke Crocker from Haven, Sean Renard from Grimm,  Loki… and Daryl Dixon.

 

Ari started watching season 1, and again I said, “I know who your favorite character is going to be.” Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I was getting chat messages that basically translated to “Daryl “. I picked up watching with her toward the end of season 2, and we binged together on season 3 and as much of 4 as we could until we were caught up, and then we watched the new episodes and flailed at each other every week for the rest of the season. Fortunately, I remained nightmare-free this time around, and I think it’s because I wasn’t (technically) watching it alone this time, and I could babble about it to someone instead of having all the post-show thoughts and feels crowded in my own head with no outlet.

And out of that, Herc’s Mercs 3 was born. Daryl “D-Day” Greer is a snarky bad boy badass with Issues. He’s a huge risk taker, and he has problems with authority. He’s far more comfortable with flinging himself out of an airplane than with revealing his heart. He’s sent to rescue Emerson Winfield, who’s being held for ransom by terrorists, and sparks fly as soon as the two meet. On the surface, Daryl and Emerson are an unlikely match. Daryl is a rough around the edges country boy, and Emerson is a workaholic scientist from a socialite family in Boston. Emerson isn’t any better with soft words and tenderness than Daryl is, so the question is whether the two of them can learn to understand each other out of bed.

 

For Herc 3, Ari wrote Daryl, and I wrote Emerson, who is more snarky than Jon but doesn’t really have issues. His snark stems from the way his family interacts; they’re all more prone to poke at each other than offer hugs, so he was pretty much raised with the idea that snarking = caring.

Herc 3 is in the post-production stage, so to speak. We have a rough draft finished, and we let it sit for a bit. Just this week, we went in and added/revised some things that we thought needed work after a post-fridge read, and it’s now in my hands awaiting a final edit before we send it off.

“Herc’s Mercs: The Bigger They Come” has been more successful than we anticipated, for which we’re very grateful! We hope our readers enjoy the second and third installments of the series as well.

Happy Star Wars day!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Star Wars shaped me from a young age. I saw A New Hope in the theatre during its original run, and it sparked a love of science fiction and fantasy that has never faded. I like Star Trek too, but I could never love it as much as I love Star Wars, my first genre love and oldest genre flame.

I chose a gif of Han because Ari and I both adore the scruffy nerf-herding scoundrel. I… have to admit my first Star Wars crush was Luke. Give me a break! I was eight years old. I didn’t have the appreciation for scoundrels at that tender age. I developed it quickly, believe me! ;)