Roberta Trahan's Blog, page 9

Amazon Launches Short Story Imprint – and I’m celebrating (ask me why)!

I’ve been holding my tongue about something really exciting for a while now, and I am SO relieved to say that the big news broke today, and I can finally share it with the world!

I am so pleased and proud to announce Storyfront, a new Amazon Publishing imprint dedicated to the short story! Even better, my post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure story AFTERSHOCK is a part of this new venture, and will be released January 8th. I’ll be revealing the cover and hosting a fabulous giveaway later this month. But for now, here’s the breakdown:

From best-selling fantasy author Roberta Trahan comes a post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure about a young woman coming to terms with survival in the aftermath of a cataclysmic seismic event that is not at all what it seems…

AFTERSHOCK

Stranded with a random band of travelers at an isolated roadside rest stop in the North Cascades, climatologist Daria Black finds herself a reluctant refugee in a harsh reality she no longer recognizes. It isn’t long before Daria realizes that the cataclysmic earthquake that destroyed her life has also altered the world around her. The climate is growing more hostile by the moment, and help still hasn’t arrived.

While the survivors haggle over how to save themselves, Daria discovers the unthinkable. The massive quake was not a natural disaster. Something else is reshaping the earth.

When the survivors come face to face with an inhuman threat, Daria has no choice but to confront her grief and guilt and find the will to fight. But first she must decide who to follow, when to lead, and how to stay alive.

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Roberta Trahan’s AFTERSHOCK  is a little taste of post-apocalyptic perfection. Equal parts chilling, heartbreaking and suspenseful, it’s a definite page-turner!  

– Tara Bennett, best-selling author of Fringe: September’s Notebook and Lost Encyclopedia

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The story is now available for pre-order. To reserve your copy of AFTERSHOCK, click here.

While you’e waiting, enjoy these great stories from some of my author friends:

Faith & Fantasy – Twelve Days of Deliberation

Let the Yule Tide begin! Starting today, fellow 47North fantasy author Melissa F. Olson (Dead Spots) is hosting a series of twelve guest posts on the subject of religion and speculative fiction. Click the logo to visit Melissa’s blog, and the kick off feature – my article on the role of faith in fantasy fiction:

Going Medieval – A Guest Post

Join me and fellow 47North epic fantasy authors Michael Tinker Pearce & Linda Pearce on their blog, where I tell the story of how I fell in love with history – medieval history, that is. Naturally, there is a book involved:

Going Medieval – by Roberta Trahan (www.michaeltinkerpearce.com)

And then be sure to check out their contribution to the epic Foreworld Saga

Guest Post ~ Medieval Zombies?

In celebration of this All Hallow’s Eve, I invited fellow 47North author Roberto Calas over to talk about the Undead…

~~~

Zombies are a modern-day thing, right? A quirky invention of our contemporary imaginations?

Everyone knows that George Romero gave them stardom in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead,” and that they have been with us ever since. Except that’s not quite right. You have to go back a little farther than 1968. Some of you zombie aficionados may know about William Seabrook’s novel, “The Magic Island,” from 1929. Seabrook’s story was probably the first to mention zombies. But the idea of zombies goes back even farther. Farther than colonial Haiti. Farther than pre-colonial West Africa.

I argue that zombies have been around for much, much longer than that. Like, Medieval longer. And I’m not just saying that because I wrote a novel about zombies in the Middle Ages. I’m saying it because it’s true. And I have proof.

Let me start with a little background on medieval people: they were really religious.

I’m not talking Tammy Faye Baker religious. Or even Reverend Al Sharpton religious. I’m talking, go-to-services-for-hours-a-day religious. Give-ten-percent-of-their-money-to-the-church-despite-barely-having-enough-to-eat religious. They went to confession whenever an impure thought crossed their minds. Christ, I’d have to rent space in a confessional if I did that. Sure, not all of them took it to that extreme, but a great many of them did. And so religion ruled their lives and thoughts.

So when the church said that animals and flies could be possessed by demons, they believed. And when their priest told them that if they swallowed a possessed fly the demon would transfer to them, they kept their mouths shut. And when a person who everyone thought was dead woke up . . .

There were many cases where a person in the Middle Ages was mistakenly pronounced dead. They were anointed with oils and given the Last Rites by a priest and that was the end of it. Until it wasn’t.

When people who weren’t *really* dead (but appeared to be) woke up, it became a crisis of faith. You see, their souls had already been commended to heaven, and they were absolved of all sins (remember that last one, I’ll get back to it). The Catholic Church was not known for its gracious acknowledgement of mistakes. When dead people woke up, it meant the priests were wrong. And priests were never wrong. So the explanation? The poor victim was an abomination, no longer human. One of the walking dead. A zombie. Panicked villagers often attacked these abominations, and the poor victims swiftly regained their *dead* status.

Those victims who lived usually fled their village and sometimes took jobs as “sin eaters.” The priests had already absolved them of all sins for eternity, remember? So they made their living in a sort of moral loophole, eating the sins of people who had died.

Families would pay sin eaters to eat a meal for their departed loved ones. Sounds easy enough, no? Except the food was often placed on the cadaver of the deceased. Yes, sin-eaters were paid to eat food from a large, pink, rotting plate. By eating this food, the sins of the deceased were transferred to the sin-eater, who was already absolved of his or her sins forever. The sins, caught in a sort of infinite moral loop, apparently imploded or spent eternity in a quantum farm somewhere with herds of other sins. Remember that tank where the Ghostbusters kept their captured ghosts? Think of it like that. It helps.

In book two of my Scourge trilogy – The Scourge: Nostrum – I introduce a man who was once a sin eater. His name is Praeteritus (Francis, really) and he couldn’t bear eating food off dead bodies anymore. So he became a killer. And I can’t say I blame him.

While abominations like Praeteritus made people nervous, there were other “zombies” that were far worse. Zombies that terrified medieval peasants. Demons wearing corpses and roaming the land. Evil spirits that sought to drag you down to hell for an eternity of torment. They were called revenants and they could possess any dead body.

So how did demons get into these corpses? Usually the same way the flies did. Through the mouth. This may explain the terrifying graves found in Ireland recently. Two 8th century corpses were dug up in Loch Key with black stones shoved into their mouths. One stone was pounded so violently into the mouth of a man that it almost dislocated the jaw. Seems like there was a whole lot of fear behind the hand that jammed the stone in.

It is one thing to believe that corpses could be possessed. It is quite another to jam rocks into the mouths of dead men. It makes you wonder what evidence these Irish peasants had to believe the two cadavers might return to life. Maybe these Irish peasants had evidence of revenants. Maybe there was a Romero-esque struggle in Loch Key.

Probably not. Zombies are a modern day thing, after all. A quirky invention of our contemporary imaginations.

Aren’t they?

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Roberto Calas is an author and lover of history. His serial trilogy ( The S courge ) is about a 14th century knight  fighting his way through a zombie-infested England to reunite with the woman he loves. And every bit of it is true except for the made up parts.

In addition to The Scourge series, Roberto has written The Beast of Maug Maurai (fantasy), and Kingdom of Glass (historical fiction in the Foreworld universe). He lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, with his two children, and visits the United Kingdom on a monthly basis to be with his fiancée, Annabelle. Sometimes he fights zombies to get to her.

You can learn more about Roberto on his website: http://robertocalas.com. He’d be most appreciative if you liked his facebook page, too: https://www.facebook.com/RobertoCalasAuthor. And if you feel you can only take 140 characters worth of him at a time, his twitter handle is, @robertocalas.

Ode to Autumn

I recycle this post every Fall. Even after all these years it still speaks for me. Autumn has always been my favorite season.

This piece was selected by the actor Rutger Hauer  for his Soap Box Poets page long ago, and still resides there…

(image courtesy of Sarah Chorn Photography)

Simple Pleasures

 

Ordinarily,

I would never

 

Hold rain-washed river rock

just to feel the cool smoothness

of edges dulled by merciless scrubbing,

 

Breathe frost laced fog vapor

just to see icy mist crystals

hanging in the sky melt from my warmth,

 

Follow wind swept maple leaves

just to watch them scatter randomly

in complicated dances across the road,

 

Stand rooted to the sidewalk

just to taste coffee essence, French roast,

served on the breeze outside a café,

 

Or smile at strangers rushing past me

just to acknowledge the hue and grain

they have added to the landscape of my day.

 

Ordinarily,

I would take the bus.

 

copyright 2008 Roberta Trahan, all rights reserved.

The Library of Pages

Fellow 47North author and devoted father Stant Litore and his wife are creating a loving and unique gift for their little girls (one of whom suffers from a host of medical issues). Everyone can participate in this project – it won’t cost you a thing except a few minutes of your time. Click on the image below to read about the project, and then add your personal contribution to this wonderful collection:

And after that, take a minute to check out Stant’s Zombie Bible series:

Happy Release Day, J. Lincoln Fenn – POE is now available!

Congratulations to fellow 47North author J. Lincoln Fenn, whose award winning novel POE was just released! In celebration, I’m featuring her article on Mary Shelley, one of my favorite genre pioneers:

MARY SHELLEY, GENRE-BENDER

by J. Lincoln Fenn

It’s the summer of 1816, Switzerland, although it doesn’t feel like it—the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora has cast the world into a long volcanic winter. What’s a bored girl to do?

If you’re 19-year old Mary Shelley, you decide you’re going to win a bet about who can come up with the scariest tale, this although you’re up against Percy Shelley (you’re not married to him yet) and Lord Bryon. And a classic novel that bent, blended, and invented genres, is born.

Although Frankenstein most obviously checks the horror genre box, it carries romantic and gothic elements and is considered by many to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction too. That genre mix was popular with readers, not so much with critics. The Quarterly Review called Frankenstein, “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity”.

Apparently they hadn’t read the Monsanto prospectus.

As if mixing horror, gothic, romance, and sci-fi wasn’t enough of a feat, Frankenstein also sprinkles in some Greek mythology. Five second quiz for all you horror aficionados this Halloween—what was Frankenstein’s alternate title?

Not so Warm Bodies


Dawn of the Newly Re-Assembled Dead


The Modern Prometheus 

You’re right, it’s C (can’t fool you none).

Prometheus was more than a bad prequel to Aliens. In the Western psyche, Prometheus serves as the epitome of bad things that happen when you pursue science without understanding its dangerous consequences, interesting because at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, experiments were being performed on dead flesh. These experiments included the electro-stimulation of executed prisoner George Forster’s limbs at Newgate in London. “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”

Don’t even ask me about the frogs.

So now we have horror, gothic, romance, sci-fi, Greek mythology and the moral implications of contemporary issues. Let’s add some personal experience, shall we?

Shelley did what any good writer of her, or any time, would do, which was to mix bits of her own life, her experienced horror, into the story. Frankenstein, (the scientist, not the monster who had no name), loses his mother to scarlet fever, then his brother and wife are murdered by the creature. Shelley’s own mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, leaving an epic void in her life. She lost one of her children shortly after giving birth, and lived through the suicide of her stepmother and stepsister. Not exactly a stranger to death’s sting. And it’s quite probable that the emotional impact of her personal experience is what gives Frankenstein its longevity and contemporary relevance.

Do audiences still want that kind of genre blend?

When I first started to shop my novel POE, everyone loved the writing but no one knew where to sell it. And they told me that if, miraculously, they did find a publisher, where the heck would the bookstores shelve it? All would be better if POE colored inside some genre lines. It couldn’t be horror and new adult and dark urban fantasy and literary. It couldn’t span Russian occult practices in the early 20th century, the séance craze during America’s gilded age, a contemporary and economically depressed New England town, magic squares, ghosts, angels/demons, my own horrific hospital experience plus my parents’ deaths, and, for god’s sake, be irreverent too. I tried, but I just couldn’t write it any other way. It wouldn’t let me.

Through sheer, dumb luck, I finally entered POE into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest where it placed first in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror category. Then, through an even bigger stroke of dumb luck, Amazon’s 47North was publishing the winner because they were looking for genre-bending work.

I’d finally found the island of misfit toys where I belonged, in a cadre of other authors who don’t fit into boxes neatly either (you can see them here – buy all their books, please). Maybe Shelley should be our patron saint.

Because if Frankenstein is any example, one should be careful about underestimating the market for books that defy easy categorization.

Here’s to new latitudes, odd genre blends, and virtual shelves you can call whatever the hell you want.

POE is now available for your virtual (or physical) shelf: http://www.amazon.com/Poe-ebook/dp/B00CQC9O5M.

“A delightful, bravura piece of gothic pop…fans of Neil Gaiman and the aforementioned Buffy will be immediately taken, but there’s a literate edge to the pyrotechnics that makes for an unlikely and welcome marriage between the spook story and literature of altogether less ectoplasmic substance.” Publisher’s Weekly

IT’S HALLOWEEN, AND LIFE IS GRIM for twenty-three-year-old Dimitri Petrov. It’s the one-year anniversary of his parents’ deaths, he’s stuck on page one thousand of his Rasputin zombie novel, and he makes his living writing obituaries. But things turn from bleak to terrifying when Dimitri gets a last-minute assignment to cover a séance at the reputedly haunted Aspinwall Mansion.

There, Dimitri meets Lisa, a punk-rock drummer he falls hard for. But just as he’s about to ask her out, he unwittingly unleashes malevolent forces, throwing him into a deadly mystery. When Dimitri wakes up, he is in the morgue—icy cold and haunted by a cryptic warning given by a tantalizing female spirit. As town residents begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, Dimitri must play detective in his own story and unravel the connections among his family, the Aspinwall Mansion, the female spirit, and the secrets held in a pair of crumbling antiquarian books. If he doesn’t, it’s quite possible Lisa will be the next victim. 

Learn more about the book and the author at www.jlincolnfenn.com

Setting – The Unsung Character

Today I am guest blogging and hanging out with the gang at Murder She Writes – a co-op blog by a group of supremely talented mystery & suspense authors. Special thanks to author pal Kendra Elliot for hosting me!

What makes setting come alive for you? What’s your favorite fictional world?

Come on over an join the conversation!

Setting: The Unsung Hero

Happy Book Launch, Kate Danley – “Queen Mab” is now available!

Today we are celebrating the release of fellow 47North author’s latest book, Queen Mab, which is now available for your reading enjoyment at Amazon.com!

Click the book cover to go to the Amazon purchase page for QUEEN MAB!

About the Book:

“Oh then I see Queen Mab hath been with you…”

Everyone knows Romeo & Juliet, but what if it isn’t the whole story?  What if Queen Mab, mentioned in only one speech in the entire play, is actually responsible for all the tragedy about to strike the Houses of Montague and Capulet? And her love for Mercutio is the key to everything…

Weaving Shakespeare’s original text into a new story, fans of The Woodcutter will love this latest retelling by award-winning author Kate Danley.  Experience the romance of Romeo & Juliet from a different point of view - through the eyes of the bringer of dreams… Queen Mab.

About the Author:

Kate Danley’s debut novel, The Woodcutter (published by 47North), was honored with the Garcia Award for the Best Fiction Book of the Year, the 1st Place Fantasy Book in the Reader Views Literary Awards, and the winner of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Other titles include Queen Mab, the Maggie MacKay: Magical Tracker series and the O’Hare House Mystery series.

Her plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and DC Metro area. Her screenplay Fairy Blood won 1st Place in the Breckenridge Festival of Film Screenwriting Competition in the Action/Adventure Category. Her projects The Playhouse, Dog Days, Sock Zombie, SuperPout, and Sports Scents can be seen in festivals and on the internet. She trained in on-camera puppetry with Mr. Snuffleupagus and recently played the head of a 20-foot dinosaur on an NBC pilot.

She lost on Hollywood Squares.

To learn more about Kate, or to connect with her online, visit her website: www.katedanley.com

Visiting with Steampunk Author Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

Steampunk author (and fellow 47North writer) Richard Ellis Preston Jr. (The Pneumatic Zeppelin Series) invited me over to his blog “A Bag of Good Writing” for a little chat. We talk about creative process, things that influence us, and all sorts of interesting stuff:

An Informative Q & A with Fantasy Author Roberta Trahan