James Erich's Blog, page 6

“Dreams of Fire and Gods: Fire” has been accepted for publication!

I just signed the publishing contract for Book Two of my Dreams of Fire and Gods YA fantasy trilogy with Harmony Ink!  This one is simply called Fire.  I don’t exactly have a blurb yet, but here’s the description I included in my cover letter:

While Sael and his father, Vek Worlen, attempt to keep their respective cities from coming apart under the strain of frightening magical influences or being destroyed outright by the gods, Koreh is informed of an extremely dangerous plan that the Taaweh have to rescue their goddess from the Stronni:  a plan that only he and Sael can carry off.

In the meantime, a young man named Donegh begins to piece together what happened in Harleh Valley, as he makes his way through an increasingly alien landscape, intent on carrying out his mission to assassinate the Dekan of Harleh, Sael dönz Menaük.

Book One (Dreams) entered the editing queue last week and the cover is also being worked on now.  I’m dying to see what the art department comes up with!

Of course, this also means I have to finish Book Three.  I’ve begun it as a NaNoWriMo project this month, but so far I haven’t written much.  The problem is, I just finished (and submitted) an adult novel last weekend, so I’m a bit worn out creatively.  But hopefully, I’ll perk up and get moving on Book Three this coming week!

Great review for “Seidman”!

Jessica Chambers over at Rainbow Book Reviews has written a wonderful review for Seidman!

The thing that struck me as particularly good about this novel was how we get to see Kol and Thorbrand grow up, following their progress from carefree boys interested only in each other, to mature young men with their own responsibilities. Though the story does have a strong fantasy element, the developing relationship between the heroes is incredibly realistic, taking into account the attitudes towards homosexuality at the time, and is in fact one of the most poignant I’ve come across in a while.

Read the whole review here!

“Dreams of Fire and Gods: Dreams” has entered the editing queue!

Book one of my YA fantasy trilogy has now entered editing!  I just approved the blurb today:

A thousand years ago, two factions of gods, the Stronni and the Taaweh, nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Dasak by warring for the land and the frightened humans who lived there.  Then suddenly the Taaweh vanished and the Stronni declared victory.

Now, as tensions escalate between the emperor and his regent, Vek Worlen, the Vek’s son, apprentice mage Sael dönz Menaük, finds himself allied with a homeless vagabond named Koreh. Together they flee the capital city and make their way across a hostile wilderness to the Vek’s keep, mere steps ahead of the emperor’s assassins.

But Koreh has dreams—dreams of the ancient Taaweh—and he knows the looming war between the emperor and the Vek will be nothing compared to the war that is about to begin. The Taaweh are returning, and the war between the gods may destroy the kingdom once and for all.

I talked to my publisher this weekend about changing the title of the first book from Awakening to Dreams.  This is because it occurred to me when I finished book two that the first book does focus on Koreh’s dreams a lot — they frequently occur at chapter breaks.  And the second book features fire in the form of fireballs being hurled at the city by the Stronni, while the last book has the gods (the Stronni and the Taaweh) finally confronting each other on the field of battle.  Therefore the titles will be:

Dreams of Fire and Gods: Dreams

Dreams of Fire and Gods: Fire

Dreams of Fire and Gods: Gods

Not particularly brilliant, perhaps, but I think it works.

Book one should be released this December!

National Coming Out Day!

In honor of National Coming Out Day, I’ll be giving away a free eBook copy of my historical gay Viking novel, Seidman!  Just post a comment here between now and Sunday night and I’ll pick a winner at random!

In Viking Age Iceland, where boys are expected to grow into strong farmers and skilled warriors, there is little place for a sickly twelve-year-old boy like Kol until he catches the eye of a seið-woman—a sorceress—and becomes her apprentice. Kol travels to the sorceress’s home, where her grandson, Thorbrand, takes Kol under his wing. Before long Kol discovers something else about himself that is different—something else that sets him apart as unmanly: Kol has fallen in love with another boy.

But the world is changing in ways that threaten those who practice the ancient arts. As Kol’s new life takes him across the Norse lands, he finds that a new religion is sweeping through them, and King Olaf Tryggvason is hunting down and executing sorcerers. When a decades-old feud forces Thorbrand to choose between Kol and his duty to his kinsman, Kol finds himself cast adrift with only the cryptic messages of an ancient goddess to guide him to his destiny—and possibly to his death.

More than Getting Better, Let’s Make it Better, Starting Right Now

More than Getting Better, Let’s Make it Better, Starting Right Now.

A wonderful video by Ann Evans at The Priestly Chapel in the Susquehanna Valley, PA.  She’s stepping up and offering a place for GLBT teens to go, if they need help or someone to talk to.

“Dreams of Fire and Gods: Book 2 (Fire)” is finished!

Well, almost finished. I’m working on the final draft now and about a quarter done with that. Of course, if my beta readers come back with, “My god, what were you thinking? Were you drunk when you wrote this piece of crap?” then I may have to rethink things.

But so far, I think it’s pretty good.  I even teared up at the end.  Because the end was sad, I mean.  Not because I was crying about how awful it was.

Book One (Awakening) is supposedly going out in December, which means I probably won’t go into editing on it until November.  By then, I’ll probably be working on Book Three — ROBOT ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!

That’s a joke.  Book Three isn’t called Robot Zombie Apocalypse.  Don’t get your hopes up on that point.  It will probably be called Dreams of Fire and Gods: Gods (in keeping with the theme).  Maybe.

Maybe I should have called Book One Dreams of Fire and Gods: Dreams or Dreams of Fire and Gods: Dreaming.

I really suck at titles.

Anyway, I’ll probably be taking a short break from the trilogy after I turn this one over to my publisher on Friday. I promised a fan that I would get back to work on another story.

"Dead End Street" by Rick R. Reed

Dead End Street by Rick R. Reed

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Very well-done YA horror novel, beginning as a group of five teenagers deciding to meet once a week in an abandoned house where a mysterious mass murder occurred fifteen years ago, in order to tell each other horror stories they've made up. But is the house really abandoned?

The individual horror stories that the friends come up with are all pretty good and that novelty carries us through the first half of the novel, providing a wonderful sense of creepy atmosphere. I was very impressed by the author's ability to create five vivid characters with distinct personalities without bogging the novel down with too much description or back story.

When the friends begin to sense that something is wrong in the house, beyond its disturbing history, there is a bit of stupid horror movie character behavior. Although it's mostly on the part of one character -- the others have more sense. But I liked the way everyone banded together to help each other, rather than running around screaming and getting picked off one by one, the way most horror stories tend to go.

A very nice horror story with great atmosphere (which, if you read my other reviews, you know is extremely important to me)!



View all my reviews

Interview with YA author Robbie Michaels!

YA imprint Harmony Ink Press (which released my first YA novel, Seidman) has been getting off to a great start since kicking off in January! They’ve had nine wonderful releases so far (which means I’m behind on my website).  New YA author Robbie Michaels talks about his experience getting not just one novel, but an entire trilogy, released!

Author Biography:

Robbie Michaels grew up in rural upstate New York, the same setting as the beginning of The Most Popular Guy books. It was not always easy growing up thinking he was the only gay person in the world. He felt like a stranger in a very strange land for most of those years, always having to act a part, play a role, until he later met other gay folks and found out that he was not alone. He was teased and bullied when others suspected that he might be gay. But he survived those days and found that life does get better, even though at the time it sure didn’t seem possible. He wants first and foremost to tell others to hang on and to have hope for a better tomorrow. Life is a wonderful, marvelous thing to be embraced and celebrated. Don’t ever give up. You are the only you there is. You are not alone. There are many, many, many others like you out there and some day you will meet them and together you will change the world in a wonderful, positive way.

Interview:

Is Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover your first YA novel?

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover is my first YA novel.  It is in fact my very first book, YA or otherwise.  I had written another book and had submitted it to another press the previous year.  That book was accepted and contracted for publication, but the YA book was the first to actually be published.  The other book, although contracted many months earlier, was published AFTER Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover. So even though this wasn’t the first book I ever wrote, it was the first book to be published.

What inspired you to write Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover?

I never set out to write a YA novel.  Never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect to write a YA novel.  It just wasn’t even remotely on my radar.  The way this book sprang to life was that something made me remember an event from nearly thirty years ago.  It wasn’t complicated.  It was a very simple memory.  But when it came back to me it hit me with such force that it was as if it had happened just yesterday, not thirty years ago.

Nearly thirty years after it happened, for some reason I suddenly remembered something that happened to me when I was a senior in high school.  High school was not the happiest of times for me so I have deliberately not thought much about it in all the years since.  I moved away and lost track of everyone I knew in those days – deliberately.

Enough time had passed that when this memory returned to me, I decided to try to write it down so that I didn’t forget it.  I started to write just a line or two to capture the gist of that memory.  Instead of stopping at a line or two I just kept writing and writing and writing.  The first chapter all happened, nearly word for word like I wrote in the book.  The rest is of the book is a fictionalized work that brings together a great many things that actually happened, just not in the sequence in which I record them in the book.

Is Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover much like your personal experience of High School?

Yes, very much so.  I grew up in upstate New York, which is where this story is set.  The story starts with something that really happened.  It was a cold Saturday morning in the fall of my senior year.  My class had been selling all sorts of things to pay for a class trip to Florida in the spring. Our latest ploy was to sell chocolate.  I didn’t have a lot of relatives so I didn’t sell enough chocolate.  Our senior class advisor offered those of us who hadn’t met our quota a chance to earn some “points” by helping to unload the chocolate truck that cold Saturday morning.

My mother dropped me off at the school super early.  As I describe in the book, my mother didn’t like to be late for anything so she was always super early for everything. So I was outside the doors of the school before anyone was there to let me in.  As I describe in the book,  only four of us showed up that cold morning to unload an entire truck full of chocolate.  To say that we were overwhelmed would be an understatement.

But it didn’t really matter to me because one of the four that showed up was a man I had lusted after for years.  One of my absolute hottest classmates came in and, passing by the two girls who’d come to help, sat down beside me!  I was floored that this god among men knew who I was and was sitting next to me, talking with me.  This had never happened in all the years we had gone to school together but I was determined to make the most of the experience.

As I described in the first chapter of the book, Bill was dressed in torn, tattered jeans that had a few enticing rips that caught and held my attention as we worked to unload the truck that cold morning. Sadly that was where the experience ended.  He wasn’t gay and he didn’t fall madly in love with me, even though he should have!

Once I had written the first chapter I found that I just couldn’t walk away from the story.  It seemed to me that the two main characters were just calling out to me to tell their story the way it should have happened.  Most of the different things in the story have roots in things that happened, just not in the sequence that I weave them together in this book.

Without giving away too much of the story, one of the characters in the book is an abusive parent to their child.  Sadly, all of this part of the story is true and really happened.  My mother and her siblings were abused by her father whenever he’d been drinking.  When he was sober he was a wonderful man, but when he drank he became a monster. I was afraid my mother would be mad that I told so many personal events from her life, but when she read the book she said she love it.

Do you plan on making writing a career, or do you have other career plans?

Five days a week I drag myself out of bed in the morning and take the subway into downtown Washington, DC where I work in an office that’s about two blocks from the White House.  I spend eight hours a day doing Information Technology project management.  All that means is that people get an idea and some funding and they turn to me to translate their needs into technical requirements, help them find the best software fit for what they want to do, and then make it happen.

I have a great office with great co-workers (well, mostly) but I’ve been doing the same thing now for years.  Quite honestly, I’m bored beyond belief, but they’ve got me handcuffed in place because they pay me a lot of money, have fantastic benefits, and give me a lot of flexibility.  In this economy it would be hard to replicate that.  But, with all of that said, I dream of leaving my job and writing full time.  Who knows?  Maybe if I did that I’d come to view writing the same way I view my weekday job now, which would be a terrible thing.

A few months ago I made a list of all of my story ideas/thoughts/dreams.  In some cases it was a couple of pages of notes with a lot of detail.  In other cases it was just a phrase, a quote, or a memory, waiting to be fleshed out into a story.  When that list went over 30 items I knew that I could easily keep myself busy if I made writing my full-time occupation.  The only problem is that writing doesn’t pay enough to live on.

And then there’s that terrible problem of health insurance.  I am legally married to my partner of 29 years.  When the District of Columbia legalized marriage for same sex couples, we were one of the first couples in line to get a license. There was such a huge number of people applying that the usual option of getting married at the courthouse was off the table – the wait for three months long. So we found a really progressive church we knew of.  I wrote to them and found that they had decided that they would take a stand and marry anyone to came to them with a license to be married.  This puts them in direct opposition to the rules of their denomination, but the entire congregation discussed the issue and voted UNANIMOUSLY to put their beliefs into action in this way. A week later we were married by two wonderful United Methodist ministers in a small ceremony attended by a few friends, including another couple who have been together for 37 years.

So where am I going with this?  Simple.  We are now legally married but I cannot get my health insurance through my spouse’s employer since he is a federal employee.  The option to even get insurance and pay for it is not available.  The federal government is bound by one of the worst laws ever enacted by the United States Congress, the Defense of Marriage Act, otherwise known as DOMA.  The real benefits of legal marriage are still unobtainable for same sex couples, although I believe that a challenge to DOMA will make its way to the United States Supreme Court in the next term starting in October.  There are a number of cases making their way through the system and are all about to hit the Supreme Court together.

I dream of a day when DOMA is overturned and all couples, gay or straight, will be treated equally.  At the moment, straight couples have a huge number of special rights.  All I want is the same thing they have, I want all couples to have equal rights with no special exceptions or privileges for anyone.

So, this is a rambling answer to your question.  Yes, I would love to make writing my full-time profession.  Some things will have to change first before that is even remotely a possibility.

How long does it usually take you to write a novel?

I’ve heard some writers talk about laboring over a story for years.  My approach is quite different.  When an idea grabs hold of me and I start writing, the characters start talking to me, telling me their story.  It almost feels as if I can’t type fast enough to get what they’re telling me down into words. What this means is that when I start writing a story I write very fast.  I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I typically take about 14-18 days to write a 150 page book.  The voices in my head (my characters) just keep talking and I very much want to know what happens to them.

When I start writing a book I tend to shut out the rest of the world and simply write.  I got to work as well and do my day-time job so that I can pay the mortgage and buy dog food, but time at home is devoted to writing.  When I was writing Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover, my partner came to me at one point about a week into the project and said, “Are you mad at me?”  I assured him that I was not mad, but just had a bunch of people talking my head.  When he read the book he understood why the story grabbed me so completely.

What I really need is someone to be my beta reader. A beta reader is simply someone who sees a story in its most rough form and points out the problems.  We’re not talking typos, but big gaps in sequence, characters who do something that is completely unbelievable.  Basically, a beta reader helps you to make your first rough draft into a stronger second draft. Beta readers are an unbelievable asset to a writer.

The sequel to Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover, Go West, Young Man, has just been released (Congratulations!).   Are you planning a trilogy or an on-going series?

Harmony Ink Press purchased the rights to publish a trilogy of books in The Most Popular Guy in the School series.  Book One, Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover was published on July 15th.  Book Two, Go West, Young Man was released on August 15th.  And Book Three, A Star is Born, is scheduled for release on September 15th.  A Star is Born ends with a number of lose threads still hanging, waiting to be pulled and woven into a new story.  I can easily see additional books in this series, although I’m not sure if they will ever be published.  If no publisher wants them I will still write them and post them free on my website.

How do you go about writing a trilogy/series of books?  Do you write them one at a time, or do you write several at once?

I view the three books of The Most Popular Guy in the School as one story.  It was written as one continuous story.  The only problem was that the complete story was so very, very long that it couldn’t possibly fit into one printed book.  So I broke it up into three books and that is the way it is being released.

Do you have a favorite genre?

This is a tough question to answer.  If I have to pick one, I guess I would have to say that my favorite genre is contemporary romance.  A close second, however, is science fiction.  I’ve read sci fi since I was quite young.  Writing good sci-fi is a challenge.  I dream of someday writing a science fiction novel with gay characters but at the moment I do not have any ideas and do not have any specific plans.

How would you describe your experiences working as an author with Harmony Ink Press?

Harmony Ink Press has been absolutely awesome!  I absolutely love and adore all of the staff at Harmony.  Doing three books space one month apart was an unbelievable amount of work.  Not writing them – no, that was the easy part.  The most work for me came with the editorial process.  Harmony Ink has very high standards and puts every manuscript through several editorial reviews.

So, for months, every week I would get a new set of comments, questions, suggestions and the occasional compliment from another editor.  I turned all of those around as quickly as possible, but it was a lot of work.  The staff at Harmony was aware of this and held my hand all the way through the process.  When I was over stressed one day, nearly having a panic attack, Lynn got me on the phone and talked me through the problem and helped me to take a deep breath and see that there really was a solution to what I was seeing as an impossible problem.

They are absolutely top notch in my book.  Their cover artists, the blurb writers, the production people, the editors and the entire editorial staff are all first rate.  They really care about getting your book to be the best it can possibly be.  I couldn’t have picked a better publisher to start with than Harmony.

What advice would you give novice writers looking to break into the M/M Romance genre?

My advice is simple.  Just do it.  Start writing.  Even if you only start with a single sentence, write it.  One sentence can lead to another which can lead to another.  It could also be just a single sentence.  If so, write another one on a different topic.  Look at something, describe it.  Listen to the evening news to see what is happening to real people – real life is a great place to get hints of stories.

Watch people.  Everywhere you go, watch people.  Look at how they move, how they act, how they interact with others.  Look at their body language, the way they dress, the way they carry themselves.  Look at their hair, their face.  Look at everything about them.  Find good characteristics and write them down.  Write a description of a person.  It might be crap, but who cares.  Just write.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. If you want to write a story, you can write a story.  I started writing slash fiction.  For those who haven’t heard about slash fiction, what I did was to take characters from real TV shows where to me it was obvious that there was a strong homoerotic element that the producers were too scared to touch.  I touched it.  I took those characters, I took that suggestion of a relationship beyond a simple bromance, and I wrote it.

My first slash fiction story was probably terrible, but I wrote it and I uploaded it to a fan fiction community.  There are A LOT of slash and fan fiction communities out there with lots of readers craving the same thing and all eager to read stories that go beyond the story they see on their television. I’d watch an episode and then take the episode to the things they didn’t address.  I’d put two male leads into a relationship and let them do things that I thought they should do.

I wrote several dozen such stories, getting better with everyone of them.  When I exceeded 150,000 hits on my stories, I knew that I had something working right, so I decided to try writing a story with my own characters that were completely and absolutely my own.  And I did.   And you should too.  If you’ve got a dream, if you’ve got a story to tell, which we all do, give it a try.

Don’t Judge A Book by Its Cover (The Most Popular Guy in the School: Book One)

High school can be some of the best years of life—and some of the toughest. Mark Mitchell’s strategy for surviving is to emulate the mighty turtle: pull back inside his protective shell and keep a low profile to avoid trouble. And it works—nobody bothers him. Of course, nobody really knows him, either, even in a town so small it seems like everybody must know everyone else.

Mark certainly knows Bill Cromwell, whom he meets officially when his father volunteers him for manual labor at the school. Bill is his polar opposite: outgoing, gregarious, athletic. But when a massive snowstorm traps the two boys together for three days, Mark learns that being popular doesn’t mean you can’t be bullied or abused—or gay—and that bullying doesn’t stop at the school doors.

Mark isn’t naïve. He’s seen the news reports of gay teen suicides, and he’s determined not to become a statistic. But it’s not himself he’s worried about.

Go West, Young Man (The Most Popular Guy in the School: Book Two)

A few short months ago, Mark Mitchell was a shy nerdy kid who kept his head down and stayed off the radar. He had nothing in common with the in-crowd. But then he got snowed in with Bill Cromwell and learned not to judge a book by its cover. One thing led to another, and now Mark has a boyfriend. A popular boyfriend. A boyfriend who wants to go to prom with him. But Mark worries that Bill is risking too much—his popularity, his friends.

Then there’s graduation: caps, gowns, and a whole new world awaiting Mark and Bill in faraway California. They rent an apartment, join the workforce, start college. It’s the beginning of the journey of their lives, and they should be enjoying it—but amid uncertainty, temporary separations, and bad communication, Mark and Bill have to struggle to hold on to the fledgling relationship that grounds them when the outside world seems to move too fast. 

Another Excerpt from “Dreams of Fire and Gods: Awakening”

Okay, so last night I was in a romantic mood and posted one of my favorite scenes in the developing relationship between Sael and Koreh — something humorous, with a dash of sex thrown in.

This morning, I woke up and realized that this may have given people the wrong idea about the book.  It isn’t just a silly gay sex romp with a thin veneer of fantasy painted over it.  It actually has a very detailed world, with a complex mythos and warring factions of gods in it, along with a war between the emperor and Sael’s father, Vek Worlen.  (Vek is a title given to the emperor’s regent in the eastern half of the kingdom.)

So here’s a scene that hopefully appeals more to fans of the fantasy genre:

In the darkening twilight, the forest seemed to close in on him, until the sounds of Sael’s chanting grew muffled and far away.  He could feel what Geilin had talked about — that there was something wrong with this place.  But Sael’s spellworking disturbed him even more.  He’d as soon wait until it was over, before returning to camp.

Koreh smelled the creature before he saw it.  A rotten smell, as though he’d stumbled upon the carcass of a dead animal.  He screwed his face up in distaste, nearly gagging on the stench as he searched the underbrush with his eyes for it.  When he turned around, he saw something huge and monstrous lumbering towards him out of the shadows.

It creaked and rustled as it moved, like old bare branches swaying in the wind.  Its hide was a patchwork of matted, rotting fur — wolf, bear, elk, a dozen others Koreh couldn’t identify — held together with dirt, dried leaves and pine needles.  And as it drew nearer, Koreh could see bones jutting through in places.  Its head was the skull of a bear, with great hollow eye sockets and monstrous fangs, yet it was crowned with the antlers of a great stag.  From somewhere deep within its hollow chest, came a rasping, menacing growl.

Koreh backed away, aware that the thick brambles behind him would make it impossible to run in that direction.  He wondered for just a second how the dried, dead thing would fare against one of Geilin’s firebolts.  But the old man was too far away, even if he were up to fighting the creature.  Koreh would have to save himself.

But there seemed to be some kind of…force emanating from it — an almost palpable aura of dread.  Koreh felt certain that it wasn’t just his own fear holding him rooted to the spot.  He’d never felt terror this intense in his entire lifetime; it was paralyzing him.  He wanted to drop into the earth and escape, but he was unable to make his mind obey.

He knew he was about to die.

Would the thing eat him?  Did it even have a stomach?  Perhaps it would somehow incorporate him into its body.  Koreh had heard tales of demen with animal bodies, but the heads or faces of men.  If he hadn’t wanted to scream before that thought passed through his mind, he certainly did now.  But no sound would come from his mouth.

Suddenly two things happened at once.  The beast charged, letting out a horrible bellow, and the leaves on the forest floor in front of Koreh swirled upwards, as if caught in a whirlwind.  Within the leaves was a dark shape, like the figure of a man, but impossible to see clearly.  It seemed to be wrapped in a cloak made entirely of shadows.  Koreh couldn’t tell if he was looking at something solid, or not.  In places, it seemed almost transparent, and the leaves seemed to pass through it, as they fluttered through the air.  The figure slid silently up out of the ground, whirling around to strike at the monster with a shimmering staff.

Frozen, Koreh watched the butt of the staff thud against the beast’s skull.  The staff, at least, was solid and there was a resounding crack that sounded far too loud to be mere wood against bone.  The creature’s skull blazed with a shimmering blue fire.  It roared in pain, swinging its great antlered head in a deadly arc.  But there was nothing for the antlers to strike.  The sharp, jagged points swept through the shadowy cloak without ever tearing or snagging it.

In the next instant, two other figures rose up out of the forest floor, in swirls of dead leaves and twigs and dark cloaks.  They surrounded the beast, striking at it quickly, as it thrashed about in pain and anger.  Wherever the staffs struck its mottled, patchwork hide, blue light flickered briefly.   The light lapped upward like flame, but left no scorch marks.  The creature was clearly suffering great pain and as it writhed and thrashed about, Koreh felt a momentary flash of pity for the thing.

Then its legs gave out beneath it and, with a great rasping exhalation, it tumbled over and lay still.  Just as quickly as they had appeared, the shadowy figures spiraled down into the leaves and dirt, and vanished.  They might never have been there, save for the corpse they’d left behind.  And that looked as if it had been dead for weeks, if not months.

Koreh was shaking.  Somehow he’d managed to hold onto the wood he’d been gathering, though he hadn’t been conscious of clutching it.  It was rapidly growing dark now and he wanted nothing more than to run back to camp.  But some perverse sense of curiosity made him approach the dead thing.

It lay absolutely still.  Cautiously, Koreh kicked the massive bear skull with one foot.  The head came loose from the neck with the sound of rotted parchment tearing and rolled away from him, coming to rest with one of its antlers propping it up.  Empty eye sockets stared back at him.  But apart from that, the creature did not move.

 

Trying to Finish Book Two of “Dreams of Fire and Gods” (and an excerpt from Book One!)

So this is my first official writing deadline, since I became a published author.  I promised my publisher that I would have Book Two of my Dreams of Fire and Gods YA fantasy trilogy done in two months.  It’s coming along, and I haven’t run into any serious stumbling blocks (having an outline really helps!), but it’s not going as quickly as I’d hoped.

The day I stayed home sick with a migraine this week was my most productive day, yet.  (And yes, I really did have a migraine.)  I think it’s becoming clear that I can write at a good pace, as long as I have the time.  But of course, all writers with day jobs lament the lack of time they have to write.

But it just occurred to me that I haven’t posted any excerpts from the first novel yet, so just to whet everyone’s appetite (I hope), here’s a short scene from Dreams of Fire and Gods:  Awakening, which I believe is going to be released some time in December.

In this scene, our two young heroes — Sael, who is the son of a nobleman, and Koreh, a peasant — have to pretend to be married in order to get a private room in a tavern, rather than sleep in the common room.  They are with Geilin, the sorcerer to whom Sael is apprenticed.  There are two words in this scene from the language they speak in the kingdom:  nimen, which can mean a spouse of any gender, and ömem, which refers to a special type of seeress (and a healer, in the context of the scene).

Married!  Sael realized, of course, that Koreh had just said that so they could have a bed to sleep in, in a private room, and for that he was grateful.  But now he couldn’t get images of him and Koreh sharing the bed – as nimen – out of his mind.

Not that Sael really had any idea what that was like.  Some of the girls back in the capital had flirted with him on occasion, but he’d never had any interest in pursuing anything with them.  No doubt Koreh had plenty of experience.  And Sael also had no doubt that Koreh reveled in coming up with ways to embarrass him.

Will he try to…do something?

Sael’s stomach was in knots, just thinking about it.

The innkeeper had noticed that Koreh was injured, which wasn’t much of a feat — the entire right side of Koreh’s tunic and breeches, from his stomach to his knee, was soaked with blood.  He knew of no ömem who would take kindly to being dragged out of bed, at this hour of the morning.

“Me wife, though,” the balding, grizzled man told them, “ain’t so bad wi’ a bandage.  She kin fix ya up – leastwise ’til mornin’.”

The man’s dialect baffled Sael, but Koreh and Geilin seemed to understand him.  His wife came out of the kitchen, when he called for her.  She then clucked over Koreh’s wound for a few moments, before dragging him out to the kitchen, where she could clean it properly.

Koreh returned with the bloody tunic in one hand and a fresh linen wrapping about his middle.

“Goodwife,” Geilin said with a bow, “We are indebted to you.”

The woman smiled warmly and replied, “No’ at all.  But I hope ye know better than t’ go near them ruins, now – ‘specially at night.”

Geilin raised his eyebrow at this, no doubt wondering just what Koreh had told her.  But he smiled and replied, “I think we’ve learned our lesson.”

The woman led the three companions upstairs to a small room with two beds, and left them, after lighting the tallow candle on the nightstand.

The beds were small, but large enough to accommodate both young men in one, and the blankets looked fairly clean.  The single nightstand between the beds had a chamber pot under it, which Sael desperately hoped nobody would use in front of him.

His anxiety at sharing a bed shot up sharply when Koreh shucked his breeches, tossing them onto the floor with his tunic.  Since he had no undertunic, that left him stark naked, yet again.

“You aren’t sleeping with me like that!” Sael practically shrieked.

Koreh had been about to crawl under the blanket, the night air being a bit on the brisk side.  He stopped and glanced over at Sael.  “Why not?”

“Don’t you have any modesty, at all?”

“No,” Koreh replied, sounding irritated, “And I have no intention of sleeping in those blood-soaked breeches.  They’re sticky and they’re already getting stiff.”

Sael turned to Geilin with a pleading expression, but the old wizard merely shrugged.  “He does have a point.  I suppose you could loan him your undertunic, if his nudity makes you uncomfortable.”

“But then I’d be naked!”

“Well, yes,” Geilin agreed.  “I suppose it’s a matter of which makes you more uncomfortable:  Koreh being naked, or you being naked.”

Sael wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

“I suppose,” Geilin went on, “that I could loan him my undertunic.”

The thought of seeing Geilin naked was even more disturbing to Sael than either of the other possibilities, so he grudgingly replied, “Nevermind.  He’s been running around naked half the time, anyway….”

Koreh slipped under the blanket and gave Sael a cocky grin.  “Come to bed, nimen,” he said, patting the mattress beside him.  “Help me warm up.”

“Drop dead.”

Geilin stripped down to his undertunic and lifted the covers on his bed.  “Sael, it’s very late.  And we’re all very tired.  Get into bed, please, so I can blow the candle out.”

Sael removed his outer tunic and breeches, glad that his linen undertunic went down to his knees.

“He’s probably going to grope me, while I’m sleeping,” he muttered, as he climbed into the bed.  Koreh shook his head and sighed, then rolled away from him.

Geilin said, sleepily, “Koreh, keep your hands to yourself.”

Then he blew out the candle.

The room wasn’t completely dark.  The rippled glass panes of the solitary window let in a pale gray light from the Eye of Druma outside.

The bed was already warming up from Koreh’s body and Sael had to admit it felt good.  He was exhausted.  But just as he settled in, Koreh said quietly, “What?  No goodnight kiss?”

Sael groaned.