Emily June Street's Blog, page 5

Goals : March : 2017

February seemed to pass too quickly! Even so, it is a great relief to have the days growing longer and to see the sun a little in the morning and the evening.

Though I worked and worked, I didn’t quite manage all my goals this past month, due in part to work and to transportation difficulties caused by landslides. Both of these sucked up some of my writing mornings. I had to let my last two goals go by the wayside entirely just to make any progress on my first two.

February goals:

FINISH ToB...

Deleted Scene: Laith describes a mage’s view of pregnancy

This little scene is mainly interesting for a mage’s perspective on the magical theory of pregnancy in the Lethemian world. It turns out that neither this particular pregnancy, nor the magical facts about it presented here, remain valid. It was a wrong turning in magical theory and in story that I eventually had to cut.

The mage Laith Amar is the narrator for this scene:

As I descended into aethertrance, I swept my magestone over my hand on Lujayn’s abdomen. And there it was: a pinprick of ma...

Deleted Scene: Palace and Pillar Description

Last week’s deleted scene was very long, this one is just a couple of paragraphs. Fun fact: the material described here for the Black Star Pillar is based on a two different minerals  I saw at the American Museum of Natural History: stibnite and a meteorite.

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This scene is actually from Book 4, Mage & Source, and so I will refrain from telling who the narrator is. Suffice it to say, the narrator was greatly affected by the Fall of Magic in Lethemia, and is examining the Palace’s crystal pilla...

Seven Questions: Mark A. King

I am very happy to welcome Mark A. King to my blog for a round of seven questions, featuring his debut novel Metropolitan Dreams. Mark is one of the founders of FlashDogs, a global community of talented flash fiction writers. His flash fiction stories have been published in a number of anthologies and magazines. Mark was born and raised in London, works in Cambridge, and lives in Norfolk, England.

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1-Pitch your book in three sentences or less. M.A.K.: In the aftermath of a violent crime we fo...

Deleted Scene: Leila and Miki after the shipwreck

I missed Deleted Scene Monday last week because I didn’t have enough time to sort through my material and find an appropriate snippet. Here’s a piece cut from a very old version of The Gantean.

This scene takes place after the shipwreck that separated Leila from her daughter, Tianiq, and the other Ganteans. In this older version, Leila, Miki, and Tiriq ended up on an island instead of being picked up from the wreckage by a following ship. They think the island is where a group of refugee Gant...

Goals: February 2017

January was long and cold, which is generally good weather for accomplishing writing goals. I progressed pretty well, despite feeling a bit mentally distracted by political issues and discontent.

My goals for January were:

FINISH ToB&L Book 5 revision– CHECK. Book 5 is now stewing nicely. REVISE River Running with Tamara based on beta reader feedback.- CHECK. We just finished the revision this past weekend. START musical magic co-write:  No CHECK for this tentative goal, as Tamara and I couldn’...

Deleted Scene/Lethemia side story: The Writings of Lord Ronin Entila

One of the sometimes-frustrating things about creating a multi-book fantasy world is how much extra world you build that never actually ends up in any book at all. This excerpt is one of those situations. Lord Ronin Entila made a brief appearance in Tales of Blood & Light Book 2, The Cedna, in a flashback explaining how the Cedna herself came into existence. Lord Ronin Entila was her sayantaq father, an explorer/conqueror from the southern lands. At some point in my writings, Lord Ronin wante...

Deleted/Reworked Scene: Sterling Prologue

My friend and reader Christine requested a deleted scene from Sterling, Tales of Blood and Light 3, and so this next one is for her. Book Three had fewer purely deleted scenes and many more “reworked” ones, so this scene may have familiar bits, for those of you who have read Sterling. This was the Prologue I had in the first draft, which was reworked and rewritten and massaged into the shorter and less wordy Prologue I used in the final version.

Sterling, of course, is the narrator, albeit a...

Deleted Scene: Laith and Miran in Muscan

Here’s a scene that was cut because the book from which it was drawn was entirely rewritten (ToB&L Book 4) and the young boy character “Miran” (Laith Amar’s nephew) was cut. This was a scene from Book 4– and so you see a big give-away about one of my narrators for that book, who happens to be Laith Amar, Lethemia’s top mage and Leila’s half-brother. There is another big reveal about something that happens at the end of this scene that may relieve some readers, however, since this scene was cu...

Deleted Scene: Miki becomes a Dragonnaire

Here’s my first deleted scene. This one takes place in the series timeline right at the end of The Gantean, after Leila has left Costas and her son, Tiriq, to go after Laith and the Cedna. As you will see it is told from Miki, her Gantean brother’s, point of view. Leila left Miki on the ship with to take care of Tiriq while she was away, but there was some lingering animosity between Miki and Leila’s husband, Costas Galatien. This little scene was part of a prologue I had originally written f...