K.M. Shea's Blog, page 62

Raffle belated but released!

Greetings, Champions! Thank you to everyone who participated in the poll–I’ll be discussing the details below, but first, I’m announcing a new contest! From today (Monday, June 8) through Thursday, (June 11) I’m running a raffle to give away five free copies of Enlightened. The rules are simple. Just enter via the rafflecopter link below, and you’ll be in the drawing to win one of five copies of Enlightened. On Friday, June 12 I will randomly select and announce the five winners! I was supposed to get this contest out yesterday, so I apologize for the delay, but here it is!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Sadly, I can’t get the java coding to work on wordpress–my host. I’m hoping to get something up later, but for now you’ll have to click on the link to go to the raffle form. This is the first time I’m running a raffle-contest, so I apologize in advance for any additional bumps and hiccups we experience in this learning process. (Speaking of bumps, rafflecopter forces me to ask you guys to do something in order to enter. Just click on the “comment on the blog” option and then click “I commented!” to enter. You don’t need to comment, it was just the easiest way to get the raffle up.) Ahem…yes…thank you for your patience!

I closed the “Ideal Hero” poll, and I have to say it was a ruthless race! The Strong and silent men won with 121 votes. Pranksters/Deviants were in second with 115 votes. Earnest and sweet came in third with 108 votes. Sarcastic and opinionated took fourth place with 96 votes. The Loyal flirts swiped fifth place with 58 votes. Bad Boys strong-armed their way into sixth with 37 votes. Best Friend/Boy next Door claimed seventh with 28 votes. Heroic types trailed close behind with 25 votes, and Loveable idiots trailed in last with 18 votes. (Although it seems most people think Loveable Idiots make excellent secondary characters, and both of the examples I have listed are secondary characters, so I feel like I might have pushed those guys into the wrong playground.)

The top three winners were a tight race. The Strong and Silent guys commonly fell back and pulled ahead, but they managed to pull off a win! Anyway, thank you to everyone who voted. I enjoyed your explanations and reasoning, and your opinions are valuable to me. Please enter the poor guinea pig raffle, and have a fantastic day!

Feeling Curious–a Hero Poll!

Greetings, Champions! I’ve been puttering around my office, getting ready to plot out my next book. (For those keeping track, Enlighten is on the brink of its release, and Puss In Boots is at the chopping block with Editor #2, which means I have a bit of free time! Woohoo!) Plotting is a lot of fun, and it stretches my creativity and imagination as it’s during the plotting that I come up with my characters, world, and story.

This next hero has been a joy to plan out–think Mr. Darcy with his mouth unhinged–but it got me thinking…what kind of heroes do you prefer? I know that there are a lot of differing opinions out there. Some of you love the quiet but affectionate Severin of B&B, others love Callan of The Little Selkie for his sweet but introverted personality, and so on and so forth. No matter what hero I create, some of you will love him and some of you won’t be terribly impressed. It’s not a reflection of there is only ONE kind of Prince Charming/Mr. Right, but the opposite. As we’re all different we’re all going to have our own preferences. (Which is good news, because it means that somewhere out there is someone who will appreciate and love your quirks and personality traits!)

BUT! I’m still curious. You see, I am terribly unloyal as an author, and I love a huge variety of male personalities. I can’t even say I like any male character as long as he’s smart because I ADORED Prince/King Toril of Rumpelstiltskin, and he is an idiot. This is good, because it means you will find all sorts of different personalities in my books, but I’m curious to see what kind of male the majority of you like reading about.

So I’ve created a poll! I decided to use my characters as reference because I know you’ve met these guys, or you wouldn’t be here. (There is nothing more disappointing than waxing on over a character only to discover your conversation partner has never read the book. Yes, it has happened to me. More than once.)

VOTING RULES: If I designed it right, it should allow you to vote more than once, which I’m all for. However, please try to limit yourself to your absolute favorites and please DO NOT vote for the same type of guy more than once! Also, PLEASE comment on this post if you have an additional type you like! Or comment to explain why you voted multiple times, or just comment! I take your responses seriously, so this is a bit of market research for me. Because of that I would really like to see some good discussion take place!

Take Our Poll

So…cast your votes and get to the comments; it’s time to see who wins!

Enlighten: Pre-order

Enlighten is twelve days away, but fret not, Champions! It’s now available for Pre-order on Amazon! Its Goodreads page is also up and operational, and, as you might have guessed, the official description is out. In fact, here it is!

It took Britt two years to be crowned King of Britain, raise Camelot, and establish the Round Table. It takes only a moment to bring everything crashing down on her. With the reveal of Britt’s biggest secret–her true identity and gender–comes the revelation that her knights might never forgive her. While Britt flees for the safety of London and her knights wallow in anger at Camelot, help comes in the most unexpected of forms.

Right. So I’m going to flee now, whilst you ponder the implications. Enjoy your day, Champions!

Cover Reveal: Enlighten

I hope everyone had a lovely and meaningful Memorial Day! Mine was filled with family fun, and an abundance of good food.

We’re launching into the remainder of the week with a cover reveal for Enlighten! Enlighten, Book 6 of King Arthurs and Her Knights, is slated to release June 11–just two and a half weeks away!

Myrrhlynn lived up to her reputation and created another beautiful and meaningful cover. But. BUT. The cover and the title are not spoilers per say, but big, huge warning lights of what happens in this book. Enlighten. Just think about it. Notice the crown, which for the first time in the series is actually girly and not masculine/neutral. As for the sheep…a few super observant readers might remember who has a remote tie to sheep….

I’m not going to say anything more because once people learn what happens in this book there is going to be a storm of comments, and I would rather be underground when that happens. Thanks again, Myrhlynn, for another fabulous cover, and thank you, Champions, for reading! Stay strong–only two and a half-ish weeks!

Memorial Day Freebie

Monday–May 25–marks Memorial Day. Memorial Day is an American holiday in which we honor those who died while serving in the US armed forces. As the day is about honoring soldiers, I decided to put one of my stories that has military characters in it up for free. In the May newsletter (which was released May 1) I asked subscribers to vote on the following options: Red Rope of Fate, for Captain Arion and his men; Beauty and the Beast, for Commanding General Severin; The Wild Swans, for Defense Department heads Nick and Mikk; and Cinderella and the Colonel, for Colonel Friedrich and all of his men.

Red Rope of Fate won with 15 votes. C&C was in a close second with 14 votes, The Wild Swans had 5 votes, and B&B had 2 votes. So, mark your calendars. On May 25, Red Rope of Fate will be free! If you want to vote on freebies like this one, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter. I use my blog for big polls–like last summer when I asked which book I should write a sequel for–but specialized stuff like freebies and give-aways I pose to my newsletter subbers.

Happy Memorial Day to all, and to those who have served this country, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your sacrifices.

Ringsted Inspiration

Today marks our last Little Selkie themed post. Usually I don’t have a fourth discussion post, but I put so much work into my research for this part of the book, I can’t NOT speak of it! As some of you caught on, Ringsted is inspired by Irish and Scottish cultures. I mostly relied on Irish resources, but a few Scottish aspects crept into the story as well.

The decision to base Ringsted off Ireland was a tough one. Usually I try to base the cultures of my fairy tale lands on the cultures that launched the original stories. That’s why Arcainia of The Wild Swans has a German feel to it, and Trieux of Cinderella and Loire of B&B seem more French. (The story of Rumpelstiltskin is so widely told its origins were much harder to track down, but there was a Norwegian version, hence the Norwegian culture of Verglas.) The original Little Mermaid was written by Hans Christan Andersen–who was from Denmark. Normally I would have gone for a Danish culture, but while the bones and arrangement of the story followed the original story, Dylan was so different from her mermaid counterpart. I felt that the change in cultures was necessary to embrace the selkie side of the story, and to make a land that would embrace Dylan as their queen.

What parts of the culture are Irish? The most obvious bit (besides the names) is the scene when Dylan first arrives in Easky, where she sees dancing villagers and hears music that sounds foreign to her. I did a fair bit of research before deciding what instruments to use in Ringsted. While Loire has the harpsichord and many stringed instruments–as mentioned in B&B–the “core” Irish historic instruments are: the fiddle, tin whistle, flute, pipe, wooden drum, harp, and mandolin. Below is a sample I used as part of my research.

Besides the music, the dancing was like nothing I’ve ever had to describe in any of the books. See a sample here! I found a bunch of traditional dances (Like the hornpipe and Ceili) but I did have to fudge my timeline a bit. I try to use aspects of the parent country from roughly 1100-1500 AD. It was the hardest to dig up info on Ireland because of its history, so I had to borrow a few things from as late as 1700 AD.

The food was loosely based off Irish and Scottish foods, but I added a lot more seafood than you would find in the typical ancient Irish/Scottish diets because Ringsted is far more dependent on the sea. Ringsted’s colors–saffron and emerald–are also traditional Irish colors. While most people associate emerald with Ireland, that’s a “new” concept. For centuries saffron was the most worn color by those from Ireland, so much so that during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (that’s in the 1500s) the use of yellow dye was prohibited.

Whew! And there is your crash course in the inspiration of Ringsted. There was a lot more, but these topics were the most fascinating! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend, and enjoy your Monday!

Happy Mother’s Day

We have one more Little Selkie related topic to cover, but today we’re going to take a break from that. For those of you who aren’t from the USA, today is Mother’s Day. It’s a modern celebration that was created to honor mothers, AKA a holiday the card companies came up with to increase sales. But even if its roots are not made with the best intentions, I feel it’s an important holiday.

I am not a mother–unless Perfect Dog qualifies as a child–but I have a wonderful mom who, in addition to being a patient woman (raising a child as imaginative and sensitive as me was no small feat) continues to advise and teach me to this day. My mom is one of my beta readers. She catches editing errors, but she has a special knack for noticing when I accidentally let a character drop from a scene. She also poses as a sounding board, and lets me talk out my ideas with her. (Her friends would be shocked to learn the high percentage of our conversations that revolve around make-believe people and places.)

As my mom is very special to me, and I know quite a few of my readers are mothers, I wanted to honor the day by giving away a new short story: A Summon for the Seas. CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF FILE!

No matter your status–grandparent, parent, child–when you boil it down, today is about celebrating love. I hope you enjoy the day, and the short story! Thanks for reading.

Themes of Sacrifice

The Little Selkie has been out now for about two weeks, so it’s theme time! Whenever I adapt a fairy tale I study the original (which we have done) and decide where I will depart from it (which I discussed a little bit in the previous post) and I take a look at the original fairy tale’s theme. NOTE: BEWARE, SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Hans Christian Andersen tale is conflicted. The “moral” happens in the last five lines of the story, when the Little Mermaid turns into a daughter of the air and is told she can perform good deeds to earn her soul. Morever, there’s a fair bit of manipulation as the other daughters of the air tell the newly transformed mermaid that her years of service can be shortened/lengthened by the behavior of children. (Clearly this was supposed to motivate kids to act better.) This is somewhat set up by the conversation the Little Mermaid has with her grandmother, when they discuss how mermaids cannot go to heaven because they lack souls.

It feels a little slap-dash in its delivery, so some readers believe the Little Mermaid is a cautionary tale, and that it is meant to show people that they should remain in their station and not love above their level. As the Little Mermaid was written in 1836 and published in 1837, this probably mirrored society at the time. However, others say that the Little Mermaid is meant to encourage risk on behalf of love, as it is the Little Mermaid’s selfless actions that give her the opportunity to earn her soul as a daughter of the air.

The Little Mermaid is the first fairy tale I have adapted that didn’t have a clear or even hidden moral–besides the attempt to bribe kids into good behavior, which I wasn’t going to even try to pull off. Needless to say, I was more than a little at loss for the theme I would paint with my story. I read the Little Mermaid several times before it finally hit me that I could take an aspect of the story that is often glossed over, and enlarge on it: sacrifice for the sake of love.

The Little Mermaid is filled with small, glancing references to sacrifice for the sake of love, but the big two I’m going to go over today are found in the same part of the story–almost in the same paragraph. Example 1: The Little Mermaid’s sisters love her so much they cut off their hair in order to purchase an escape for her. Remember, this was 1837. Fantasy or not, women simply did not have short hair. Sheering off their hair would have been a major social no-no, but they did it for their sister. Example 2: The Little Mermaid refuses to use the dagger to kill the prince–which would have let her turn back into a mermaid. Killing a guy because he doesn’t love you might sound drastic, but remember that the Little Mermaid is playing with fire. Since the prince loves another she is going to die, and because she doesn’t have a soul that means she isn’t just dying, she’s disappearing forever–unlike the prince with his human soul. Even with those steep consequences, the Little Mermaid refuses to kill the prince, sacrificing herself for his happiness.

Because I wasn’t interested in creating a story that had a sad ending, or a story that hinged on Dylan being obsessed with Callan, I couldn’t use those exact examples. Instead, I decided to borrow the spirit of sacrifice for the sake of love. From the start of the story Dylan is perfectly willing to sacrifice herself. She has her voice sealed so she cannot be weaponized–granted it was an impulsive decision and wasn’t the best option, but she does it because she wants to protect her family and the ocean. By the end of the book she has grown in character so while she’s still impulsive, she is no longer as arrogant, and she’s willing to make what is, in her mind, the greatest sacrifice ever and save the landers in the Summer Palace in exchange for Jarlath ruining her pelt. This is basically the second example I mentioned above, slightly twisted. (Think about it, instead of Dylan having the knife it is Jarlath who has it and uses it, forever exiling Dylan to her human body/making her unable to return to the sea in her sea lion body.)

The most important part of the original Little Mermaid is that she refuses to kill the prince and sacrifices herself. Dylan’s selkie story is quite different, but has a similar flavor because she also refuses to let Callan be killed, and in exchange sacrifices her life as she knows it. Still, there is a bright note in Dylan’s life. The kelpie is (reluctantly) grateful to her, and while such a creature cannot be tamed, it could be befriended…

And on that note be sure to check back in on a few days. As I know quite a few of my readers are mothers, I’m going to put up a new short story for Mother’s Day, and it may or may not be about Dylan and the kelpie. Enjoy the week, Champions, and thank you for reading!

Selkies, Seals, & Sea life

Greetings, Champions! It’s been a crazy week, but I’m thrilled to announce that The Little Selkie is dominating the #1 slot in the YA fairy tale adaptions category of Amazon. Woohoo! I’m not certain how long it will stay there–the charts move pretty frequently–but it has been in the top three positions of that category since its release last week. So! Thank you, Champions, for reading and reviewing The Little Selkie!

Keeping up with our Little Selkie theme, today we’re going to chat about selkies.  Selkies (also called silkies and selchies) are part of Scottish and Irish folklore. They come in male and female varieties and are said to live in the ocean as seals, and shed their skins to come on land in human bodies. Males are traditionally handsome, and stories about them often involve women who are dissatisfied with their life and/or marriage. Female selkies, however, are usually the victims. Most folklore about female selkies are about men who steal the female selkie’s pelt, which puts her under his power. Usually the man will make the female selkie marry him because they are said to make excellent wives. Sometimes they’ll have kids and a family, but if the selkie ever finds her seal skin she will take it and return to the sea–no matter how much she loves her human kids. To add further mental anguish/anxiety on the abandoned family, a selkie can only come into contact with humans every seven years–which puts a big cramp on visiting.

When I started my research for The Little Selkie, I looked over a few old poems and texts that are about selkies (“The Seal-Woman’s Croon,” “The Selkie that didn’t forget,” “The Selkie,” “The Selkie Song,” and more) and I was struck by two things. First of all, no one specifically mentioned how capturing a selkies skin put them in your power. (Think about it. If I were a selkie and a guy grabbed my skin/pelt, I would have thumbed my nose at him and ran off. Instead the selkies stay with their captors.) Secondly, quite a few historic texts mentioned that in addition to being great swimmers, selkies had beautiful singing voices.

The singing thing was great news for me–the Little Mermaid was supposed to have the most beautiful voice out of all the mermaids in the kingdom–but I needed to hatch a plan to keep Dylan on land, which is how I came up with the idea that Jarlath could threaten to rip her pelt to shreds. I took out the seven years of no human contact part–I never found an explanation for it, I think it was added to make the sad selkie stories even sadder–and I added the singing/water magic bit to give Dylan–and her people–an offense-based power. As my selkies were guardians of the sea, I wanted Dylan to be able to face down the sea witch. With the big fuss the original Little Mermaid kicked up over taking the mermaid’s voice, I decided her power needed to be voice activated, thus tying together the two main points of the original fairy tale–the sealed voice and the mermaid on land.

An artist’s rendition of a selkie.

There was just one problem. As I was researching Harbor Seals–also called “common seals,” they live many places but most importantly they can be found on Ireland’s shores–I learned that they are smart and quick-minded, but they don’t move very quickly. While they are considered curious they aren’t nearly as playful as other sea mammals…like the sea lion. Dylan needed to be brash and impulsive for the plot of The Little Selkie to work. If she had the same personality as Gemma from Rumpelstiltskin, she would have realized that getting word to her family about her predicament before getting her voice sealed was the wisest path. Seals are fun, but in no way are they impulsive. Sea lions, on the other hand, are always getting into mischief–they even move like pranksters. The California Sea Lion (which is what Dylan is based on) can reach a top speed of roughly 25 mph, and their cruising speed is 11 mph. Seals, on the other hand, have a top speed of 12 mph, and often cruise at much slower speeds. The sea lion is also much more flexible as it can bend in half, and it moves much more deftly on land because of its hind flippers–which it can rotate–where as  seals wiggle like caterpillars.

The sea lion was clearly the better choice for Dylan–which worked out great because it allowed me to strengthen her character. Because she has been different from her kinsmen all her life, Dylan is entirely unafraid of being unique. This gave her an edge as she lived in the Summer Palace. The majority of people would be apprehensive about being tossed into an entirely different culture and race after experiencing tragedy. Not Dylan.

Speaking of Dylan’s personality, many of you Champions have mentioned that you love how much Dylan adores food. I designed that aspect of her personality after learning that seals and sea lions can eat about five to six percent of their body weight in a day. As both of these creatures weigh well over 200 pounds, we are talking about some serious food consumption.

As you can tell, I did a lot of reading on ocean and marine life in preparation for this book, and I wove pieces of my research into the story. In example, otters really do have fuzzy baby fur, sea lions can bark under water, and sand sharks hide themselves on the ocean floor to catch prey. The one way I did fudge my facts, though, was that I decided to combine the different ocean zones. Normally you wouldn’t find a California Sea Lion in the same water as a Harbor seal. I considered trying to keep things scientific, but in the end I decided to take creative liberties. Dylan lives in a fictional world, and I would much rather put effort into making the story better instead of keeping the location facts perfect.

That’s covers everything I wanted to discuss. Thank you for reading, Champions! Have a splendid day.

The Original Little Mermaid

The Little Selkie has been out a for nearly two days now. It seems to be getting positive feedback–which thrills me! I look forward to hearing what you think of it, Champions. In the meantime, we’re going to take a look at the origins of The Little Mermaid. It was written by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, and was published in 1837. In comparison to the other fairy tale stories I’ve adapted, it is quite long.

The original story is about an unnamed mermaid who is the youngest the six daughters of the King of the Seas. The little mermaid has a garden and a marble statue of a young man that she is seriously smitten with. That’s not important to the story, but I feel that it accurately reflects this chicka’s problems. Anyway! The mermaid’s family has a tradition that she and her sisters cannot go above the ocean’s surface until their fifteenth birthday, after-which they can go up whenever they want.

So on the little mermaid’s birthday she finally pops above the water and sees a big ship, which is packed with people celebrating a rince’s sixteenth birthday. She sees him, and falls in love. A storm sets in and destroys the ship. The little mermaid saves the prince—who is unconscious—and hauls him onto a beach the following morning.

This image is of the Little mermaid swimming away as the “Holy Maiden” discovers the prince. I have no idea how she is holy.

The Little Mermaid then makes like a creeper, and spends a lot of time watching the prince at his seaside palace for an undisclosed amount of time before she goes to her grandmother and expresses a desire to be human. The pair get into a deep conversation, because mermaids don’t have souls but they are nearly immortal. Even so, the little mermaid says she wishes she could be a human for one day and die with a soul. The grandmother tells her they are stuck, and she needs to suck it up.

The little mermaid sighs with longing over the prince, of whom she “wishes to place the happiness of [her] life.” So she gathers up her courage and goes to see the sea witch. The witch—while not being truly evil—lives in a pretty gruesome neighborhood filled with sea snakes and skeletons that try to grasp and strangle people. The sea witch offers to give her the body of a human, but every step she takes will make it feel like she’s walking on jagged glass, and the witch in return will get her voice—which happens to be the most beautiful in the whole sea. Also, she won’t gain a human soul—securing salvation—unless the prince falls in love with her, and if he marries another she’ll die.

The little mermaid complains—because she was planning to seduce the prince with her voice—but eventually they strike the bargain. The little mermaid loses her voice but gains a human body. She wakes up on a beach where the prince finds her and takes her to his palace. There the mermaid shows off her beautiful dancing, in spite of the great pain she feels, and successfully enchants everyone, including the prince who calls her “his little founding” and allows her to sleep on a velvet cushion outside his door–because that’s not demeaning.

The prince and the little mermaid become jolly companions who spend all their time together, and the prince tells the little mermaid that he refuses to marry because he fell in love with a girl who saved his life, and he describes her as a holy maiden of a temple. The little mermaid realizes he is not referring to her, but rejoices that she is the one living with him.

The prince’s parents inform him that he will marry the daughter of a neighboring king. The prince goes to this neighboring country to give his refusal when—plot twist!—the king’s daughter is the holy maiden of the temple, and the prince is thrilled to marry her. (This jerk also informs the little mermaid that she will be happy for him because her devotion to him is so great. What a charmer.)

The day of the prince’s wedding arrives, and the little mermaid’s sisters come to her with their hair chopped, and explain that they made a deal with the sea witch—their hair in exchange for a dagger. If the little mermaid kills the prince, she’ll turn back into a mermaid. The little mermaid refuses, and when the sun rises she dissolves into foam. But wait! She hears beautiful songs and sees beautiful creatures! The little mermaid learns that she has been turned into a daughter of air, which means she can do good deeds and procure a soul for herself. Additionally, the length of time for which she is required to do good deeds can be shortened or lengthened by witnessing the behavior of children.

Out of all the fairy tales I’ve researched, the Little Mermaid was one of my least favorites. First of all, the prince she falls for is a selfish prat. He’s not unkind, but he treats her like a child when she is said to be beautiful and only a year younger than him. (Mind you, this is the same girl who initially didn’t understand that breathing was a thing, and he couldn’t live with her in the sea, so perhaps there is something to his actions.)

I did enjoy that a lot more of the story’s time was spent on setting the stage. The little mermaid is human for only a third of the story. The rest of it describes her home and family life. Also, I liked that the story took place over months—instead of days as most fairy tales.

That’s it for today, Champions! Sorry for the longer entry—as I mentioned it’s a much longer story. Thanks for reading!