Aldrea Alien's Blog, page 20

Rainbow Snippets: Clumsy little soot

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

Tracking Trouble will be taking a little break for the next few months as I share snippets from my upcoming novella, Someone Else’s Shoes. It’s a retelling of Cinderella set in the spellster universe.

This snippet continues on from last week, where Alla was rudely informed by her stepsister that she’d missed a spot in her cleaning…

Tamara narrowed her dark eyes. They gleamed in the midday light. Not as sharply as Alla’s stepmother, but with an echo of the same cruelness she reserved for those she considered beneath her. “Right here.” With a deft kick to the nearby bucket, Tamara upended the contents.

Cold, silty water splashed Alla and washed out onto the tiles.

Even knowing it was too late, Alla scrambled to her feet. The water had drenched her from top to bottom. Her hair was sodden. The skirts of her dress clung to her legs like seaweed. “What—?”

“Oh dear,” Tamara gasped, poorly concealing her smirk behind her fingers. “Just look at the mess you’ve made, Little Soot. How clumsy of you. One would think, what with your muddled background, that you would be at least reasonably graceful.”

Alla bit her tongue. Being elven—or even half—was not a guarantee of grace.

Alla will return next weekend with more of Someone Else’s Shoes. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: Snap those fingers one more time…

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

Tracking Trouble will be taking a little break for the next few months as I share snippets from my upcoming novella, Someone Else’s Shoes, which releases on the 26th of November. It’s a retelling of Cinderella set in the spellster universe (roughly five generations back from the modern timeline of the A Tale of Two Princes duology and the Spellster and the Hound series).

The last time I shared a snippet from this novella, it was from about halfway through the story. This time, we’re starting at the beginning…

“You missed a spot.”

Alla’s humming died in her throat. Had someone spoken? To her? Blinking out of her trance-like daze, she lifted her attention from the marble tiles she had almost finished polishing. All around, the foyer floor glistened with her efforts.

Fingers, glittering with silver and jewels, clicked in front of Alla’s face. “Did you hear me?” Tamara demanded, continuing to snap her fingers even though they were almost nose to nose. “Answer me when I speak, girl.”

“I heard you,” Alla retorted, cupping her ears. The dead could likely hear her stepsister, what with how abysmally loud each one of Tamara’s snaps was. “It would help if you pointed out where.” She spied no flaw in her work, not even when she sat back on her heels and gave each tile a critical eye.

Still, perhaps her stepsister saw something Alla couldn’t.

Alla will return next weekend with more of Someone Else’s Shoes. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: Demarn law is firm…

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

This month, the snippets will be from my current work-in-progress, Tracking Trouble. It’s a prequel to In Pain and Blood starring Tracker, a King’s Hound from Demarn, who is also the elf responsible for the massive rewriting haul that has become the Spellster and the Hound series. Unlike a lot of my other stories, this isn’t a romance.

This week’s snippet continues from last week’s with Tracker describing how he senses the spellster’s magic…

Not tearing his gaze from the alleyway, he considered his options for attack. Chaser had left no clues as to the type of person this spellster was, not even if they were elven or human, only that they were an adult. With their choice of hiding spots, it was best to assume his prey was the flighty sort. Perhaps willing to listen if not first startled.

He couldn’t risk them slipping through his grasp, though. After decades—centuries—of the kingdom corralling strong spellsters, discovering one unleashed and outside of their little pen was a rarity. Interesting. The strength of this particular spellster rivalled much of what he had sensed in his handful of escorts to the spellster tower.

To have such power here, so far from where he would expect them to be, smacked of foreign origins. Had the spellster been a stowaway? Some fleeing slave or beggar from a kingdom that allowed magic to thrive unchecked?

Not that it mattered. Demarn law was firm in her stance. Spellsters belonged in the tower or in pieces.

Tracker will be taking a bit of a break for the next few months as I share snippets from Someone Else’s Shoes. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: A hound’s senses…

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

This month, the snippets will be from my current work-in-progress, Tracking Trouble. It’s a prequel to In Pain and Blood starring Tracker, a King’s Hound from Demarn, who is also the elf responsible for the massive rewriting haul that has become the Spellster and the Hound series. Unlike a lot of my other stories, this isn’t a romance.

This week’s snippet continues from last week’s with Tracker’s arriving at the alleyway his fellow hound labelled as the spot before vanishing…

The alley bore the same sorry stack of rubble—crates of dubious contents, a single broken barrel and scraps of cloth that could’ve been sacking or canvas—along with the birds and, no doubt, rats. All common fare for a port city.

The difference was one only a King’s Hound could tell.

Magic.

The same luck of birth that granted all of the King’s Hounds immunity to direct magic also gifted them the ability to sense it.

Tracker breathed deep. He never felt the presence of magic the same way. It was a voice, a fingerprint, unique to each spellster. It vibrated through the air, catching his every sense.

This one was the strongest he had felt in a long while.

Tracker will be back next weekend to share more. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: A rare blessing…

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

This month, the snippets will be from my current work-in-progress, Tracking Trouble. It’s a prequel to In Pain and Blood starring Tracker, a King’s Hound from Demarn, who is also the elf responsible for the massive rewriting haul that has become the Spellster and the Hound series. Unlike a lot of my other stories, this isn’t a romance.

This week’s snippet continues from last week’s with Tracker’s simple statement that the spellster he hunts has likely killed the hound who went before him…

At least the man had left a point of reference for Tracker to begin his search. If the spellster was still within Stonebay, he would find them regardless, but not needing to scour every shadow and hidey-hole for a clue was a rare blessing.

Tracker halted at the mouth of an alley. He had followed the trail of a missing guard unit to here. Sergeant Ceri swore a spellster was to blame. He’d been wary of her assessment. So many villages blamed the disappearance of this and that family member on spellsters and none but the King’s Hound had the means to be truly certain.

His attention darted from one shadow to another. In looks, there nothing to single out this alley from the slew of others. The back section of a brick building made up one side of the alley, the other side consisted of a crumbling stone wall cordoning off what he guessed used to be the yard of a storehouse.

Tracker will be back next weekend to share more. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: No body, no hope..

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

This month, the snippets will be from my current work-in-progress, Tracking Trouble. It’s a prequel to In Pain and Blood starring Tracker, a King’s Hound from Demarn, who is also the elf responsible for the massive rewriting haul that has become the Spellster and the Hound series. Unlike a lot of my other stories, this isn’t a romance.

We’ll start off at the very beginning…

Tracker hated hunting in the rain. Never mind that it dulled his senses or left him soaked from head to toe. The shivering trickle of water along his ears was the most aggravating. Each droplet that ran off his earrings left him wishing he’d as much sense there as a human.

A cloak would see him dry and warm, more or less. He had one, although it currently sat balled up in his rented inn room. He refused to gift his prey any chance to set his clothes on fire, especially when this one was cunning enough to have already taken out a fellow King’s Hound.

He hadn’t seen a body, of course. No one had. But Chaser had set off on his task days ago. When it came to hunting down rogue spellsters, lack of contact with a hound for so long meant one thing only.

Chaser was dead.

Tracker will be back next weekend to share more. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: Lively for a dead man..

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

This’ll be my last snippet from To Poison a Prince for a while. Next month, I’ll be posting bits from my work-in-progress, Tracking Trouble.

For those of you who are new or catching up… Darshan and Hamish are a pair of thirty-something princes from two vastly different lands. Their tale starts with them travelling through the ginormous Udynea Empire that Darshan is from on their way to the capital. This piece carries directly on from last week where Darshan’s half-sister is speaking ill of Tirglasian cuisine…

“They do indeed,” Katarina piped up as grumbles of distaste trembled along the table. “And the stomachs of cows and pigs.”

“There’s little from an animal we dinnae eat or use,” Hamish added, ferocious pride for his homeland’s self-sufficiency puffing his chest. “And what’s left goes to feed our dogs and pigs. We dinnae let a thing go to waste.”

“Clearly, trade relations with a superior people isn’t listed as one of those things.” Onella sipped at her wine, her gaze boring into him. “But I suppose you’re not privy to such matters, being dead and all.”

A woman part way down the table flung her head back and guffawed.

“He seems very lively for a dead man,” pointed out the woman sitting next to her as her neighbour continued to wheeze.

“Clearly not in the literal sense,” Onella said, her gaze remaining firmly on Hamish. “But it would seem that the news of how the current queen of Tirglas disowned her younger son hasn’t reached all present company.”

Darshan straightened in his chair. “Has it not?” He took up his glass and tapped his forefinger against it, waiting whilst a servant topped up the wine. “What is the rumour mill coming to if it cannot keep up with such trivial concerns?”

I’ll be back next weekend to share from Tracking Trouble. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Rainbow Snippets: Passing up food..

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

Even though To Poison a Prince is out, I’ll be posting bits of their story for the rest of the month.

For those of you who are new or catching up… Darshan and Hamish are a pair of thirty-something princes from two vastly different lands. Their tale starts with them travelling through the ginormous Udynea Empire that Darshan is from on their way to the capital. This piece skips a chapter from last week to a formal dinner, his half-sister is speaking first…

“Do eat up, brother dear,” Onella purred, jolting Hamish from his thoughts. His sister-in-law gestured to the plate before Darshan, the rings adorning her fingers glittering in the candlelight. She had changed gowns, or at least the filmy topmost layer, and her arm showed no sign of Darshan’s attack. “All that dancing must’ve worked up quite the appetite. I can’t imagine the poxy inns you’ve stopped at during your travels had meals sufficient for a man of your power. You must be ravenous.”

Darshan smiled. Hamish wasn’t sure how his husband managed to seemingly detach the expression from his face, but the sight prickled his skin. “I think I’ll pass, dear half-sister.”

“But isn’t quail your favourite?” Onella pressed. “Did all those stodgy meals up north affect your palate?” She leant closer to one of the men flanking her and continued on in a loud whisper. “I hear they do ghastly things like stuff sheep stomachs and eat them.”

I’ll be back next weekend to share more. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!

Big Overhaul Announcement Time!

You might’ve noticed the disappearance of a particular set of books from Amazon, mainly the very one that brought the spellster universe into being. A certain slow-burn romance about a closeted bi-sexual and his journey towards finding love with a cocky self-assured elf via tragedy and lots of people dying.

Yes, I’m talking about In Pain and Blood.

Almost six years have passed since my Muse first brought me Dylan’s tale as I was still working through my own self-realisation of being a non-binary bisexual. In Pain and Blood took me two years to write and was close to a whopping 310,000 words. The first 10k or so was also lost to a corrupted file, which caused many tears and frantic typing.
A lot has changed since then. The world it’s set in has been fleshed out, particular lines have been drawn and, as I laid out the prequel starring Tracker, I realised that there are quite a few things I would like to fix. And some other points I would add.

Namely, Tracker’s pov.

The idea was always for me to take it through my new editing method because, despite the number of people who worked on it, I find another error every time I open a chapter.

My original plan was to wait until I’d time to tackle the beast once again. It likes to throw in a mean left hook every so often and it doesn’t pull its punches. But with the appearance of Tracking Trouble I went in a different direction.
Now that, with the case of human error on my end that I’ve mentioned here before, that led to releasing Tracking Trouble’s pre-order early, rather than in the New year as I intended… it means the rest of the plan must step up. And, with it, one major change: splitting a behemoth of a book.

I will stress that this wasn’t an easy decision to come to. It requires far more work from me than I had originally allotted (and several new covers), but I strongly believe these changes will improve the story, give certain points in the tale space to breathe, etc. It’ll also mean the paperbacks will have room for the companion novellas.

Even in casually plotting the beats of Tracker’s pov scenes, back before I was certain, I saw how it gives the tale a different flow. It’ll still be Dylan’s story, but the spellster-hunting elf will have scenes set before they meet.

And after?

There are already scenes I half wrote when In Pain and Blood was first forming and I did it with an eye towards adding Tracker’s pov: pieces of him searching for signs of his fellow hounds, of him reaching out to Dylan before they were together. I didn’t add them because anything more would’ve made it unmanageable as a single story and…

Well, when I first started writing in the spellster universe, the idea was to have each book centre on one couple. That changed slightly with the addition of the companion novella, An Unexpected Gift, but I still thought I could contain them.

Then To Target the Heart came to me and I knew it couldn’t be one story. Combined, the books that make up the A Tale of Two Princes duology sit at 496k. Making Darshan and Hamish’s tale two seemed the only logical choice and it came with a natural break.

In Pain and Blood also has a spot that makes it possible to become two stories (if you’ve read the book, you might even guess where that is). Having it break anywhere will require work, but it really should’ve been two at the beginning.
Alas, stubbornness is a deeply ingrained trait in my household…When it comes to the story itself, I don’t see myself changing major plot points. However, I am, as yet, unsure just how much Tracker’s pov will alter things (I am announcing this months before I had planned to tackle it, after all). I do know the additions will account for around another 40-60k overall.

So, to make it clear, the Spellster and the Hound series is plotted to become five books:

Tracking Trouble  (the prequel I’m in the middle of writing) Currently coming Jan 31st 2022 In Pain and Blood  (the first half of the original behemoth) Re-releasing Aug 16th 2022 And the World Crumbled (a companion novella that I’ve been meaning to write for years, but held off because it was set in the middle of the story)In Love and Death (the second half of the original behemoth)An Unexpected Gift (the extended, erotic, epilogue to the behemoth will likely remain unchanged)In Fear and Darkness (a fresh tale that’ll no longer need to explain so much of Tracker’s past with it being in the rest of the books)

Rainbow Snippets: It’s called a war..

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

Even though To Poison a Prince is out, I’ll be posting bits of their story for the rest of the month.

For those of you who are new or catching up… Darshan and Hamish are a pair of thirty-something princes from two vastly different lands. Their tale starts with them travelling through the ginormous Udynea Empire that Darshan is from on their way to the capital. Last week, Hamish met Onella, one of his new sister-in-laws. In this snippet, Darshan meets a face that might be familiar to those who’ve read In Pain and Blood…

He sipped at his wine, considering the distance between Nulshar and the neighbouring kingdom. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to travel through Demarn in the first place, Madam Hedgewitch?”

The woman snorted. “You don’t need to call me that, vris Mhanek. Katarina will do fine.” She grinned, a little sheepishly. “And you are correct. But my original plans were to return to Dvärghem—and I was on my way home from a sadly fruitless search in Stamekia—but one of your imperial scouts alerted his superiors of something dvärg in nature hidden in the forest.” Her eyes widened, revealing their hazel hue; a common colour amongst the dwarves. “The Coven thought it might be the remains of something rare and best left alone, although the reports are promising on it appearing to be quite safe.”

“Do be careful. As I understand it, there’s a dreadful scuffle going on near the eastern border.” There had been for as long as he had lived. Even beyond his grandfather’s rule.

Katarina wrinkled her nose. “I believe the Demarners call it a war, vris Mhanek.”

And there you have it. I’ll be back next weekend to share more. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!