You might also be wondering about the winner of Juliet Blackwell‘s  Erotic Cozy Title Contest, all in honor of her release of Dead Bolt. Because of the time difference and people joining the contest late tonight (it’s Thursday as I write this), Julie and I thought it was only fair if she judge Friday, so we don’t miss anyone who enters after I go to bed. All this means is that she’ll be announcing her wiener on Monday, instead of today. So check back here Monday, and sorry about the confusion. It’s hard to organize a contest with someone on the other coast!

BEING A WOMAN

Philip Palmer

I had the idea for Artemis a few years ago, very soon after getting a book deal for my first novel Debatable Space.  Looking back at my notes, I see there are many major plot differences between my original concept and the finished novel. But the biggest difference of all is: Sex.

In other words, originally this story had a male protagonist.  But by the time I came to write it, Artemis McIvor had come along.  And instead of being a Guy story, it’s very much a Grrrl story.

There may be deep psychological reasons for this preference for female protagonists. Or it may simply be that I’m accustomed to the presence of strong females in my life. I am in fact the only male in my house, which I share with my wife Sally, my daughter Bess and my female dog Lucy (you’ll appreciate that I would not dare call ANY of these ladies a bitch.)

And I have fond memories of an SF novel I read in my teens called I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, one of the all time great writers in the genre, who wrote the story a dying millionaire who pays a fortune to  have his brain transplanted into a new body; and ends up in the body of a woman.  It’s years since I’ve read this book, and the critical consensus is that it’s not that well written (since Heinlein was very ill during the writing process.)  But I remember being blown away by it at the time, with its amazing concept of a man becoming a woman. (Hey, I was a teenager in South Wales, and I’d never heard of gender change surgery back then.)

Up till that point,  you see, I’d been reading space operas featuring white Anglo-Saxon blokes exploring strange alien worlds.  But this was the first time I’d felt what it was like to be someone very different to myself; someone female.  THAT felt stranger than being yet another white bloke zapping aliens.

I tried to push this ‘being someone different’ approach to its limits in Hell Ship, where the main character Sai-ias is not only female,  she’s alien – with tentacles and a carapace.  And I have to say I felt very at ease being in her body. Indeed, for weeks after finishing the book, I yearned to go back to having tentacles and a cape.  Oh, the joy of being able to fly through the air, coupled with the ability to drink eight pints of beer at once!

Obviously all writers have to inhabit the bodies of the characters they create; and all readers do the same.  And indeed, one of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of Nicole’s Jane True books is that it gives me a chance to feel what it’s like to be HER, to be Jane – female, empowered, sassy, shamelessly sexual, and a selkie to boot.

If you’re a typical shy male writer however, it’s not often you get a chance to actually act out this fantasy – of being a Someone Else, who happens to be a woman.   But I did have that very experience a few months ago, during the script editing process for a movie I’ve written – a film noir called Inferno.

Now film noir is the home and origin of the concept of femme fatale – the double-crossing, ruthless sexy woman who stalks those means streets, screwing over men.  Kathleen Turner in Body Heat is a classic sexy femme fatale. And Linda Fiorentino, in the brilliant and very funny The Last Seduction, is just as sexy and even more fatale. She is in short an evil ruthless scheming bitch! And I love her to bits, even though she has NO redeeming qualities.

The femme fatale  in my movie, Elaine, is Welsh (don’t laugh! Welsh people can be evil and scheming too!) and in order to get a firmer grip on the character, I did a ‘hot seating’ exercise with my director, Marc.

Hot-seating is a technique I learned about many years ago when I was running writers’ workshops at the Royal Court Theatre. It’s an actor’s technique in which the actor sits in the aforementioned ‘hot seat’  and has to answer questions about his or her character, but always in the first person.

For some years, I’ve been using an adapted version of this technique with writers, of varying degrees of experience. It always works, sometimes astonishingly well; even shy people can be transformed by this exercise into the very incarnation of the character they are channelling.  And it’s therefore a great way to create a character when developing a screenplay.

Oddly though, I’d never had this hot seating technique done TO me (it’s by no means a standard script editing tool – I’m pretty much the only drama script editor I know who does it.)  But I briefed my director on how it worked, and away we went.

And boy, I became that evil scheming bitch.   Every question I was asked, I knew the answer, in infinite detail.  I discovered truths about my character’s childhood. I knew all about the lies she had told, including those that weren’t in my actual story.  I knew how she was able to get her way by playing mind games and exploiting her charisma.  I knew her vulnerabilities and her fears.

I had by this point written Lord only knows how many drafts of this script; but it wasn’t until I did the hot seat that I TRULY knew the character.

I even, at one point, got a little bit flirtatious with my red-bloodedly heterosexual male director.  Luckily he called a halt to proceedings, before things got out of hand.

Ahem. Moving on.

It was, in short an extraordinary and empowering experience. Yes of course, as a novelist I do this all the time – every character I create I ‘inhabit’ and feel and know.  And as a reader I do this too; when I read one of  Nicole’s books I BECOME Jane True; when I read a Lilith Saintcrow book I become, in the same way, Dante Valentine, or Jill Kismet. And when I read George R.R. Martin…it’s out with the winter woolies.

But the vicarious experience of writing or reading a character is not quite so intense as actually acting out the role.  Bear in mind I’m the world’s worst actor; I’ve never had the experience of standing on stage and pretending to be someone else. But by means of this hot seat exercise, I was able to make like a Method Actor, and BE my character.

And boy, I miss being evil, and sexy, and scheming. (Almost as much as I miss having those tentacles.)

Artemis herself has a few things in common with the character from my character in my movie;  namely, she’s ruthless and scheming.  But she’s very different in one major respect; she never lies.  Artemis is a rare example of the ‘reliable narrator’.  When she does bad stuff, she tells you about it; she may lie to get her way in the story, but she never lies to her reader.  That makes her a more complex and more unexpected character than my Welsh femme fatale. 

And if at some point I write another novel featuring Artemis, maybe I should hot seat her too;  to feel the unique joy of being Artemis McIvor at first hand…

What a great post, and what great advice for aspiring writers. I tell my students something similar about knowing their character’s ins and outs… even the things that would never come up in a book. But I’ve never thought about how productive it could be to actually workshop this idea. Needless to say,  I’m thinking about how I can incorporate this idea into my undergraduate Writing Urban Fantasy course next semester.

If you have any questions for Philip, please ask them in comments.

And see you back here on Monday for Julie’s wiener!

But we’re trying something new.

In spending a lot of time with Juliet and Sophie Littlefield, one of the things Juliet often jokes about is that she’s jealous of us, with our genres’ flexibilities. For example, Sophie gets to write a lot of violence (and does so beautifully). Meanwhile, I get to write a lot of sex.

Juliet and I were joking that one of the reasons her genre–the Cozy Mystery–doesn’t get to do much sex-writing is because of their titles. If you’re at all familiar with the genre of the Cozy, you know they LOVE their puns. Here are some great examples:

The Long Quiche Goodbye (CHEESE SHOP MYSTERY) by Avery Ames

Affairs of Steak (A White House Chef Mystery) by Julie Hyzy

The Gingerbread Bump-Off: A Fresh-Baked Mystery by Livia J. Washburn

Liver Let Die (A Clueless Cook Mystery) by Liz Lipperman

One Foot In The Gravy: A Nashville Katz Mystery (D… by Delia Rosen

Due or Die (A Library Lover’s Mystery) by Jenn McKinlay

The More the Terrier (A Pet Rescue Mystery) by Linda O. Johnston

Shoe Done It (An Accessories Mystery) by Grace Carroll

You Better Knot Die (A Crochet Mystery) by Betty Hechtman

Ghoul Interrupted: A Ghost Hunter Mystery by Victoria Laurie

These are absolutely adorable titles, and they represent everything that’s great about the genre. Cozies are cozy–they’re delightful openings through which readers can escape into a world here nothing too bad is going to happen and where everything will be solved in the end. Juliet and I both love cozies and we both love their punny titles.

But can you imagine the amazing, car-wreck-happening-in-front-of-your-eyes nature of ….

AN EROTIC COZY MYSTERY’S TITLE?????

Just the thought had Juliet and me in absolute stitches, and that’s when we came up with the idea for this contest.

We’ll each be giving away a prize. Juliet will offer a copy of her latest Haunted Home Renovation mystery, Dead Bolt, and I will up the ante by offering to Amazon you a copy of one of Juliet’s other books, of your choice. So you get two books for one pun.

But that’s the catch. We want you to come up with your own Cozy style, punny title . . . but for an EROTIC MYSTERY. The raunchier and more ridiculous, the better. I’ll be facilitating the contest, but Ms. Juliet Blackwell, herself, will be judging. We’ll announce the wiener next Friday, December 9, 2011.

To enter, just tell us your best Cozy Erotic Mystery title or titles (you can enter as many as you come up with) in comments, and Juliet will decide from those.

Best of luck! Or whatever other appropriate word you can think of, that rhymes with “luck.”

Xalivar: Deposed? I was not desposed! I was violated!

BTS: Sorry. So Mr., Xalivar should I call you?

X: I prefer, my Lord.

BTS: Uh, ok, my Lord…that’s weird for me.

X: Yes, that’s what my enemies said and now they’ve written that scandalous tome of lies about me.

BTS: Well, I wrote it, actually, just as they told it to me.

X: So you’re a co-conspirator! Why should I trust you?

BTS: Well, I really did want to get it right, so if there’s something you’d like to set the record straight about, I’m listening.

X: (clears throat) It didn’t happen like that.

BTS: It didn’t happen like what?

X: I thought you said you were listening.

BTS: I am.

X: No, you’re not. You’re interrupting. It’s not the same thing. I am the High Lord Councilor of the Borali Alliance. Interrupting me is tantamount to treason!

BTS: Actually, you were deposed…

X: Shhhhhhh! LISTEN!

BTS: OK, sorry.

X: My family served the Alliance for generations. With honor! We have always done what was best for the Alliance and her people.

BTS: Some would argue with that.

X: Because they’re fools! Fools who don’t know what’s best for them. That’s why they need leadership. Wise leadership, like I have always provided.

BTS: I see.

X: Stop interrupting or my LSP men will arrest you.

BTS: Oh, well, I don’t want that.

X: (laughs) No, you don’t. Anyway, as I was saying, the accusations made against me were made of ignorance, from a total lack of perspective.

BTS: Allegations of abuse of slaves? Enslaving fellow humans? Trying to usurp the Council?

X: Lies! Why are you spreading them? I already told you these were lies.

BTS: But the existence of slavery is documented—

X: Yes, but I did not enslave them. My grandfather did. I merely preserved the system. It was working just fine for both of our peoples.

BTS: The slaves might beg to differ.

X: Slaves always do, but they are not intellectually capable of making such statements with any accuracy.

BTS: They’re human beings.

X: That’s your opinion. Not a fact.

BTS: But they came from Earth to colonize the stars just as your ancestors did.

X: Earth has many species.

BTS: But only one species of humanoids—humans themselves.

X: Evolved from apes. Some of us evolved longer and more advanced than others.

BTS: So there are levels of evolution?

X: There are levels to everything. It’s the natural order of things.

BTS: The Vertullians don’t believe in Evolutionary theory. They believe in creation by their God.

X: See? They haven’t intellectually evolved enough to understand Evolution. And here you and everyone else go writing their story as if it’s history, as if it’s truth. It’s a total sham! Slander! I should sue you all!

BTS: They just wanted the same rights as your own people. Is that so bad?

X: You have to earn rights. They are not inherent.

BTS: Well, the workers believe differently.

X: Because they’re inferior.

BTS: I see. Anything else?

X: I did not betray the Council. The Council listened to lies told them by my sister.

BTS: I heard you two were very close.

X: (laughs) I thought so once. I was wrong. It’s clear our family had some weak genes which she was victim of.

BTS: So she’s not evolved?

X: She’s lesser evolved than I am, yes.

BTS: Wow. Ok. And Davi Rhii? He was raised as your nephew and heir, yet you betrayed him.

X: I did not. He betrayed himself. He set out to destroy our superior Alliance and was revealed in his ignorance.

BTS: You didn’t send men to kill him?

X: I did not. And I never abused the slaves. They were treated as slaves deserve—like property, herded and directed, incapable of making proper decisions on their own and born to serve their masters. It’s natural, not abuse.

BTS: I see.

X: It’s a matter of perspective. Creatures of their level of low intellectual ability are prone to exaggerating because they don’t fully grasp reality.

BTS: But the Council and many of your citizens agreed with them?

X: Low intellects all.

BTS: So anyone who disagrees with you is less intellectually developed?

X: Isn’t that obvious? They replaced me with one of their own, tried to arrest me. They criminalized me by slandering my reputation. It’s all a manipulation and distortion by inferior minds.

BTS: Some might regard your attitude as arrogance.

X: Only intellectually underdeveloped persons would think so.

BTS: I think we’re done here.

X: I have not even begun to give you the correct story.

BTS: You believe I’m too intellectually inferior to understand it.

X: Ah ha! You’re on their side, despite your earlier denials.

BTS: I tried to be a neutral third party but they seem more credible.

X: Credible? Ha! Barely more than apes!

BTS: I have a headache.

X: I’ve worn out your inferior brain. Told you!

BTS: Thank you very much for your time.

X: It’s really sad you can’t handle the truth.

Tomorrow The Worker Prince blog tour continues at www.graspingforthewind.com. A list of tour stops can be found at: http://bryanthomasschmidt.net/2011/09/15/the-worker-pri…e-introduction

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the forthcoming space opera novel The Worker Prince, launching at Conclave, the collection The North Star Serial, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat every Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. He can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog.

Xalivar Rhii, once the High Lord Counselor of the Boralian Alliance, the continuation of an honorable line of fine leadership, now spends his days fighting to redress the injustice done to him by others. An innocent victim, he and his minions hang at their favorite secret hideaway preparing to enact revenge with great vengeance and restore balance to the Universe.

The Versatility of Urban Fantasy

Do you remember the first urban fantasy you ever read? It may not have been labeled urban fantasy at the time, but I bet you liked it. A lot. I know I did. And I wanted to read as much of it as I could get my hands on.

What’s so great about this subgenre of fantasy is that it’s versatile. You get your fairies and elves or your vampires and witches, and you can have your urban setting with all its contemporary trappings, too. Talk about imagination. Wow, there are so many combinations of the weird and wonderful that the possibilities are endless.

This is what drew me to writing the genre. My head is filled with strangeness most of the time anyway, and to pour it into a story within a world of my own making is like paradise for me. Combining real emotions and familiar situations with the fantastic couldn’t be more satisfying.

That’s how Chalice was born.

Chalice is the heroine of KNIGHT’S CURSE, the first book in my urban fantasy trilogy being published by Harlequin Luna. She’s not so magical as she is powerful by virtue of super human senses that enable her to be an awesome thief. Chalice doesn’t even like magic, at least not at first. She’s kidnapped by a sorcerer and forced to steal cursed and charmed artifacts. She’s a different kind of urban fantasy heroine with an unusual sort of problem. She’s bonded to a homicidal gargoyle as a way for her kidnapper to keep her in line. She can be a slave, or she can die. Her choice. And there are times when death seems the better option.

It’s her ancestry that intrigued me when I began writing the first book. The story sprang from Chalice’s heritage and the mythology I created to go with it. She’s descended from an order of female knights who fought in the Crusade Wars of the eleventh century. All the knights had special talents because they were the progeny of angels, and that gave them an edge over the enemy. They kept the knighthood strong over the centuries by mating with their guardian angels to procreate new knights for the order.

Chalice is adverse to magic because she blames it for everything bad that’s happened in her life, yet she’s forced to confront it every day. Magic is all around her, in nearly everything she touches, even in the man she falls in love with.

I had great fun putting Chalice in harm’s way every chance I got because I knew she would learn from the experience and use it to her advantage. Which she does. The second book explores her knighthood of sisters and the danger that comes close to exterminating them all. The third and final book takes Chalice on a perilous journey that seals a circle of trust, family and love. From the beginning, magic is the constant glue that holds everything together.

If you could create an urban fantasy, or have one custom made just for your reading pleasure, what would make it different from other books on store shelves? How would you make it special?

Thanks Karen! What a great post. And now I’d like to do a contest for Karen. The prize will be any two mass market paperbacks of your choice that are available on Amazon (totaling about $15, or the equivalent in your country’s money). You can enter by answering Karen’s question. You can also earn extra points by reviewing Karen’s debut on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, etc (one point for each entry); adding Karen on FB and Twitter (one point each);  and/or by adding me on FB or Twitter (one point each). Just be sure to add up your entries for me, as i’m no good at math.

The Contest Can will pick a wiener in two weeks, on October 14th, to give you reviewers a chance to read and write. Buen suerte!

, came out this week. There’s information about that book in this post, and there’ll be information on how to enter a contest to win one of Juliet’s books after she’s done talking.

But first of all, let’s have Juliet’s very awesome bio. She’s done so much and she’s definitely one of my heroes.

Nationally bestselling author Juliet Blackwell writes the Witchcraft Mystery series (Secondhand Spirits, 2009; A Cast-off Coven, 2010; Hexes and Hemlines, June 2011; Obsidian). If Walls Could Talk launched the Haunted Home Renovation series in 2010; Dead Bolt, the second in the series, comes out in December. As one-half of the sister duo dubbed Hailey Lind, Blackwell wrote the Art Lover’s Mystery Series–including Agatha-nominated Feint of Art and the most recent, Arsenic and Old Paint (September; Perseverance Press). A former anthropologist and social worker, Juliet has worked in Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Italy, the Philippines, and France, and is now a painter in Oakland, California. She served two terms as president of NorCal Sisters in Crime.

Contact her through her website, www.julietblackwell.net, and join her on Twitter @JulietBlackwell and on Facebook!

Misunderstandings and Magic: Why Bring the Paranormal into the Mystery Genre

It’s such a pleasure to be asked to write for the blog of a good friend…and Nicole’s the best! Do we have conference tales to tell…;-) Thanks for having me, Nicole!

I’ve been asked many times: why muck up the mystery genre by adding the supernatural? Why bring witches and ghosts into a classic mystery story?

(Besides the obvious, of course, which is that paranormal themes are cool, and fun, and interesting. And you get to hang around extraordinary people like Nicole Peeler…)

But as a writer, the very best thing about bringing the world of the “paranormal” into the mystery genre is that it opens up a whole new world of mysterious possibilities in fiction.

It couldn’t have come at a better time: The advent of modern technology has killed off a huge chunk of old plot stand-bys.

Cell phones are a particular bane. Consider the free-floating angst that motivates so many storylines, all those misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with a simple phone call: In Casablanca, what if Ilsa had just been able to call Rick and explain why she didn’t meet him at the train station? Or in An Affair to Remember, if Deborah Kerr’s character texted Cary Grant from her handy Blackberry to tell him she’d been hit by a taxi?

In a mystery novel, let’s face it: anyone investigating a murder these days would probably make sure they had their cell phone with them, and that it was charged. How often can you manage to get your protagonist stuck somewhere without the possibility of calling for rescue, or back-up, or a simple clarification? There are only so many dead zones.

And don’t even get me started on the internet…what happens to all those wonderful scenes where characters used to need to track down reclusive experts or ancient libraries to dig up arcane information? Now so much of that info is available with a few clicks of a mouse…and unfortunately, to paraphrase author David Sedaris, “tapping at a keyboard is not an inherently dramatic activity.”

It’s boring. And boring has no place in genre fiction.

A little magic throws a fabulous monkey-wrench into the banality of modern life. The cell phone doesn’t work because…um, yeah, it throws off a witch’s vibrations, so she won’t use one. That’s the ticket! Besides that, maybe someone cast a spell to bend time, and there are a few ghosts and maybe a demon or two lurking, and they sure as heck don’t adhere to conventions of modern physics. And there’s only so much information available on Google when it comes to things like that.

Suddenly, a person finds herself with a plot.

Often in novels that feature so-called “amateur detectives”, one doubts motive: normal people don’t often get involved in murder investigations, and if they do, they work with the police, and/or wisely halt their snooping as soon as they’re threatened/ shot at/beat up. But bring magic into the mix…and suddenly there’s a crime that the all-too-normal-human police can’t figure out, and maybe a hex or two left on doorsteps, and what’s a witch to do but step in and take care of matters?

In my latest Witchcraft Mystery, Hexes and Hemlines, natural witch Lily Ivory steps into a murder investigation that has the police stumped: the leader of a local rationalist society is murdered amidst symbols of bad luck: a black cat, a broken mirror, on the thirteenth floor. As someone with special paranormal talents, Lily is in a unique position to help suss out whether the man’s death had anything to do with tempting the fates. And when the main suspect turns out to be someone Lily knows, and a friend is threatened by an evil practitioner, and an aging Satan worshipper enters the mix…a witch might be compelled to use magic to find the murderer before everyone’s luck runs out.

Lily may not have a cell phone, but she’s got a direct line to ancient powers. In fiction, as in life, that’s a lot more interesting.

How great is this post? As an urban fantasy writer, I’ve thought a lot about what bringing the supernatural into “our” world does for writers, but I’ve never thought of it from the “genred”-perspective of the mystery writer. It’s so true about how much technology has mucked up the author’s job, and I love Juliet not only for applying this to the paranormal-trend in today’s fiction, but also that she effortlessly quotes Sedaris’s “Nutcracker,” one of my all time favorite essays.

So Juliet rocks, her books rock, and I hope that this post not only made her fans smile but also made some new readers want to pick up her books. To facilitate this call to Juliet, I will hold a contest to win any one of Juliet’s books, including the new one, Hexes and Hemlines. The winner chooses!

To enter, please comment below with one thing you like about adding paranormal elements to fiction! I’ll choose a wiener at random next Friday, June 17th. I know you’ll love Juliet’s books as much as I do!

I’m updating you from a hotel room in Baton Rouge. Snark-La-Tex has been a BLAST. Seriously, it could not have gone better. We had fun turnouts in awesome bookstores, and we’ve had so much fun together. Everyone’s asked, “Have you killed each other yet?”, which couldn’t be further from the truth. We’ve had an awesome time, laughing our way through everything.

There has been a lot of eating, a lot of snarking, a ridiculous amount of swearing, and a tattoo. Whose? Where? You’ll just have to wait if you don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

I’ll blog the whole tour soon enough, when it’s over. Tonight we have our last signing in Shreveport, at the Barnes &  Noble on Youree, at 7pm. Be there or be square.

But now I’ve got a special treat for you, a guest post from Kat Richardson who has done a very cool walking audio tour for her books. Kat’s books are set in Seattle, so if you’re a visiting fan these tours have to be a must-do on your list!

Here’s Kat!

Playing Tourist in Harper Blaine’s Neighborhood

Nikki, being the fab human that she is, asked if I’d say something about the walking tour I put together recently for YodioTours.com. Well, OK, because I’m always one to toot my own horn if someone is fool enough to ask.

Which is kind of how the whole thing started—Clay Loges asked me if I’d like to make a tour based on my Greywalker books for his new service and since it was a chance to get some more exposure in a new way, I said “sure!” Clay had been referred to me by the staff at Seattle Mystery Bookshop who are the best book-pimps money can’t buy. I just love those guys.

So I walked around, took photos, wrote the script, edited the script with Clay’s help and then recorded the audio once we’d got all the photos and the script set to our satisfaction. It was fun to take a look around the neighborhood again since it had been a while since I’d spent much time in Pioneer Square. The books had started out there, but the later ones had often gone out on vacation to other parts of town or even other towns and I’d almost forgotten some of the things that had made me love the historic district to begin with. So I guess I’m back in love with my character’s old stomping grounds. It’s nice when a new project reminds you how much you loved the old ones.

If you want to take a look, the tour is up at YodioTours.com (http://www.yodiotours.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=35&Itemid=164) and you can view it online or download it to your phone and follow along, when you visit Seattle.

Thanks to Nikki for letting my squat in her blog like this—she’s the best!

I AM the best, Kat. But seriously, thanks for posting and this walking tour is such a great idea. In fact, I’m so psyched about this idea that if you comment about which other series of books you’d think would make a great walking tour, and why, I’ll enter you into a contest to win the book of your choice from Kat’s Greywalker series. Sound good? So comment on this blog post, and if you win then you can pick any of Kat’s Greywalker books and I’ll have it Amazoned to you. If you’ve never tried this series, I think you’ll love it. I’ll draw the winner next Friday, May 27th.

So comment away and thanks for blogging, Kat! I’ll blog myself soon about the tour (the tats and the plans for Poonstache 2012). But if you miss me that much, you can finally see my debut post at Pens Fatales, on carpeing your diems.

See all you Shreveporters shortly!

Well hello there, Atticus Sexy Pants! I like your mighty broadsword.

Without further ado, here’s Kevin!

Whiskey, feh!

(okay, I, Nicole, made up that title)

Nicole Peeler is one o’ my favorite people. Not only does she write really endearing and laugh-out-loud funny urban fantasy, but she cracks me up on Twitter and teaches newbie authors like me how to deal with the many demands of the publishing business. It’s actually a detailed and thoughtful philosophy, but it can be summed up like this: “Let your agent handle most things. For everything else, there’s whisky.” (For me, it’s whiskey, but this is Nicole’s blog, so we’ll leave out the e.)

Nicole also wrote a blurb for my debut, Hounded, and then she invited me to join The League of Reluctant Adults! Today I’m appearing on quite a few of their blogs as a guest, since it’s my release day and the League is just the coolest bunch o’ people I know. If you’d like the full list of where I’m at today on the Internet(s), pop over to my blog. But since Nicole has done so much for me, I’m doing some special stuff here.

First, I’m going to share with you a side project I’m working on, inspired by fellow Leaguers Allison Pang and Carolyn Crane. Allison and Carolyn have made some neato trading cards featuring their characters to give out to their fans at signings and such. Being a bit of a turbonerd, I had to take it a step further. I’m creating a dueling card game based on the world of The Iron Druid Chronicles, and it’s been a complete hoot so far. The mechanics should be familiar to anyone who’s ever played Magic: The Gathering or similar games, but the cards feature quotes and characters from my first two books, from goddesses to faeries to werewolves. There will be thirty different cards in the deck when I’m finished, though you’ll need to use multiple copies of some cards to play, and I have 24 of them designed so far. Here are three:

Aren’t they hella cool? I’ll be talking more about the Iron Druid card game on my own blog sometime in June after the release of HEXED, but I wanted to debut the project here.

The second thing I’m doing is this: Nicole’s gonna run a giveaway of Hounded—her rules. But if you win, you’re not just going to get a copy from Amazon, you’re going to get a signed author copy made out to you specially! I hope you’ll all go for it, and while you’re waiting to see if you won, click here to read the first six chapters for free and get to know Atticus! Of course it’s available at all the usual places you buy books, and if you dig it, you won’t have long to wait for the next two: Hexed comes out June 7 and Hammered on July 5! Cheers!

Nicole is back! I thought for the contest we’d do something bawdy and funny, because I’m all about the bawdy/funny. This is completely random, and you can enter just by commenting anything (except NICOLE SUCKS, which is just mean, really). But if you want to play, in comments try to come up with a playing card that would be appropriate for Kevin’s game, but also completely inappropriate as a double entendre. For example, instead of Demon Rams we might have a card that’s “Ramming the Demon,” with an appropriately ridiculous summary. As I said, you don’t have to play (this one’s kind of hard), and you’re entered by commenting anything. But if you want to play, I know there are some crafty little fuckers amongst you.

I’ll pick a winner, at random, next Monday. Bonne chance, demon rammers!

Sophie is brilliant, outrageously talented, and hilariously funny. Her Bad Day crime books are gritty and riveting, and she recently came out with a YA  novel, Banished. Now, however, she’s coming home to mama with the release of her own urban fantasy novel, Aftertime.

So let’s welcome Sophie to the Emporium! Here’s her guest post, and she’s been generous enough to offer a contest, the details of which I’ll post at the end.

Welcome Sophie!

Sophie’s Post

I was at Target today with my daughter, waiting in line to pay and listening to her describe the essay she is writing for her English class titled “The Use of Metaphor in Ayn Rand’s ANTHEM”, when I received two emails in a row. **

The first was from Nicole, inviting me to be a guest on this blog (yay!)

The other was from my friend Meredith Barnes, a fantastic young agent I’ve gotten to know in the last year or so. I’d been whining to Meredith that I didn’t feel very inspired lately, so she wrote me back a list of words meant to inspire me (“you might use these as metaphors in the pithy posts you’re about to write” she suggested). The list included: Onion, Horse, Gastrointestinal Tract, Fate, and Shopping. ***

So here, without further ado, courtesy of Nicole and inspired by Meridith – “Metaphor in AFTERTIME.”

Onion – In the book AFTERTIME, most of the nation’s crops and plant species have been wiped out by bioterrorism. The failing government seeded the land with an engineered plant called kaysev, which provides full-spectrum nutrition and keeps people alive – but an all-kaysev leaves people hungry for variety. When, after several months, plants from Before (including the humble yellow onion) begin to return, they are met with great joy as a symbol of rebirth. (Incidentally, the second book in the series is titled REBIRTH and will be out in August ’11.)

Horse – Interestingly, I don’t care for horses. Horses and chickens. I grew up rural so I can tell you with authority that these are not smart creatures. Give me a pig, a goat, a dog any day, but horses – no thanks!  One of the cool things about writing fiction is that you can make the world WHATEVER YOU WANT. Ergo, in the fictional world of AFTERTIME, there are no horses.

Only…as often goes with my kneejerk reactions, I started to feel a little guilty about my rigid stance. My kids like horses. Horses are pretty. It’s entirely possible my attitude about horses goes back to a certain unfortunate episode involving a pony ride in 1974. So…when I started the third book in the series (HORIZON! Out in March ’12! Look at me, doing promo!) I put in a horse, as a sort of nod to my own hypocrisy.

In this case, the horse bears a rider with news from the east. That’s plenty evocative of legend, right?

Gastrointestinal Tract – So when you’re living in a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic world, medical care is hard to come by. When I sat around imagining this world, I kept thinking about all the ways that modern medicine has improved our lives. My daughter’s burst appendix and a blood clotting episode would have been mortal without it. My husband’s kidney stones would have literally killed him.

In the third book, I’ve introduced a character with an unknown but worsening malady that affects her stomach and appetite. Because there are few doctors, no equipment, and little medicine, all she can do is wait and see what happens to her. So her gastro tract has become a symbol for the greater unknown, which leads us to…

Fate – I have some fun with religion in the series, if you can call evil cults and power-abusing priestesses and ever-present crises of faith “fun”. The truth is that I was playing a lot with ideas about destiny and how we, mere humans, can choose our own. Fate and faith are, for me, irrevocably intertwined. (Blah blah blah – I do go on so.) So what symbolizes the Hand of God in the books? Perhaps a little giant sequoia seedling that Cass and her lover stumble on early in AFTERTIME – it’s vulnerable, and yet inevitable.

And finally…

Shopping – After civilization falls and Beaters start eating people, there’s no money, no banks, no stores, no commerce. And yet, the human spirit is unquenchable, so before long, commerce renews itself in various forms. In the Box – a walled city where Cass takes refuge – you can trade valuables (nonperishable food, water, medicine, clothing) for drugs, alcohol, sex and more. A form of shopping, yes? – so I suppose that shopping represents the immutability of human behavior: you can give folks kaysev, shelter, even love, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to want to make a deal.

**My daughter wants me to point out that if she actually called an essay “The Use of Metaphor in Ayn Rand’s ANTHEM” she would get docked for a lack of originality. The essay in question was eventually titled “The Middle Ground: An Achievable Utopian Society.” I stand corrected!

*** I sure hope I’m not giving out FinePrint Literary Agency trade secrets!  Oh wait – if you do want to know their trade secrets, look no further!

Thank you so much to Nicole for inviting me, and join the discussion if you’d like your own copy of AFTERTIME – signed by the author!

Thank YOU so much, Sophie! To win an autographed copy of Aftertime, I want you guys to come up with your own “original title” for an imaginary essay of your choice. For example: “Nomming Towards Destiny: Images of Eating in Tempest Rising” or “A Pretty Day For Female Empowerment: How Sophie Littlefield Imagines the Feminine Capacity for Violence.”

Don’t worry, the essay title is just to enter and to make me giggle, so they can be as silly or ridiculous as you want to make them. I’ll pick the winner, at random, next Friday, March 4th.

And if you haven’t read Sophie’s books, believe me–you are missing out! I couldn’t put down her Bad Day series, and I’m so excited for Aftertime! Yay Sophie!

Richelle Mead, Dakota Cassidy, and Juliet Blackwell ALL have new releases that YOU MUST BUY NOW. NOW I TELL YOU.

Go to web sites, peruse, and then GO BUY. I can’t wait to read Richelle and Juliet’s latest, and Dakota’s coming out with something totally new with her first Contemporary Romance. Imagine how funny she is with the supernatural? Now take all that snark and apply it to the idea of an ex-trophy wife? Seriously? Wear diapers, people. You have been warned.

As an added layer of pimpage, the lovely Mario Acevedo has graced my blog with a guest post. Yay! For his graphic novels are coming out today, too! FUN!

Say hello to Mario!

Mario’s Guest Post

I’ll admit, I got lucky. A lot of us fantasy writers dream of getting our stories picked up as a comic book or graphic novel. Well, it happened to me.

Last year, I was contacted by IDW Publishing. They had read my urban fantasy novels and asked if I would like to have a comic book treatment of my detective-vampire Felix Gomez. Would I?

The interesting part was IDW didn’t want an adaptation of an existing story but a spin-off with an all-new tale. In fact, they even picked out a line from my first novel, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, and suggested we build a story around that.

This is an excerpt describing Felix’s first assignment between the time he became a vampire and then arrived at Rocky Flats.

“Besides the Blanford case, there was another assignment that told me you were the man for this. The Han Cobras.”

Chinese heroin smugglers. Ruthless. Invincible. Killed three Federal Drug Enforcement agents, not to mention dozens of foreign cops. Invincible. Except against a vampire.

The next step was pulling my literary agent into the conversation and hammering out a contract. In the meantime, the publisher offered the portfolios of several artists for the panel and cover art. As an artist myself, I thought it was presumptuous of me to pass judgment on artists with professional credential far better than mine. The publisher made it easy, and the two artists he suggested– Alberto Dose for the panels and Pinturero for the covers–were perfect.

Here’s another sample, Elf Embryo, that demonstrates Pinturero’s freaky awesomeness:

I was contracted to write the scripts for four comics and since the concept was mine, to provide guidance to the project. IDW provided sample scripts and comics for reference. Additionally, I had to turn in an author’s bio, promotional copy, and a detailed synopsis of both the overall story and each comic book story. My editor did a thorough job picking through the synopsis and offered suggestions to improve the story. Comic scripts are different from screenplays in that the artists want a lot of detailed descriptions and you can include interior dialog (“thoughts” which are shunned in screenplays). The script can be as long as you feel necessary but you’re limited (in most cases) to twenty-one comic pages to tell your story. The most fun was writing classic lines such as:

BLAM! Ka-POW! BOOM!

Another difference from my previous writing experience was how collaborative the process was working with a comic book publisher versus a traditional book publisher. With traditional book publishers, sometimes it seems that even as the author, I’m out of the loop in a lot of what happens with my novels. That wasn’t the case with IDW as they were constantly cluing me in. They would submit pencil drafts of work-in-progress for my comments. (Which were minor. Alberto Dose in particular has been doing comic books for a long time, and I respected his interpretation of my script.) Another difference was the brisk production schedule. In traditional publishing, you can expect a year–or longer–from the time you submit a manuscript and publication. IDW wanted the first comic on the street in less than six months after I’d turned in the script. And another big difference between comic books and novels publishers, IDW asked for cover ideas and actually ran with my ideas!

For example, for the cover of issue #2, I suggested that the artist incorporate a crow (used by vampires as messengers), Hei Men Dao (a rogue vampire shaman), Qian Ning (the love interest), and separately, Felix involved in a shoot-out.

Here’s the first draft.

We kicked the concept around and Pinturero came back with:

Closer but Felix wasn’t there yet.
On the third try, Pinturero nailed it. Awesome. My favorite. Felix at his bad-ass best.

Here is a sample of panel art in pencil form.

Alberto Dose was also contracted to provide alternative covers for all four issues. Here’s his take on issue #2.

And what’s the point of having vampires and ruthless gangsters if you can’t include a little kinkiness like topless bondage gear and ball gags?

The four issues of the comic book have been bundled into the graphic novel, Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop, and is out December 7. The embossed cover is amazing!

On sale at your local comic book store, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.

Thanks Nicole. Give my regards to Jane True.

Happy fanging!

Mario Acevedo

http://www.marioacevedo.com

http://www.biting-edge.blogspot.com

Will do, Mario! now all y’all, get to shoppin’!

The lovely Jaye Wells and I are still going strong over at Border’s Babel Clash. We’ve talked about all sorts of interesting things involving heroines, humor, and urban fantasy. In my last post, I talked about why I added hedonism to the list, or why I chose to write a female character who’s so unapologetically self-indulgent.

In other news, I want to send out HUGE congrats to one of my fave UF authors, Carolyn Crane, whose sequel Double Cross just received a starred review from Romantic Times. I absolutely adored Mind Games and I can’t wait to read Double Cross. Carolyn’s created a world that’s truly unique in UF, and I find her books thrilling to read.

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Check out Carolyn’s books if you haven’t already. The first one was great, and the second looks like it’ll be even better.

All rightie, folks, with that I’m off to write more Jane. I’m at over 25.000 words on Eye of the Tempest and it’s going great.

I’m leaving you with this video about Newport, in Wales, that Dr. Ruth showed me and that I find endlessly entertaining. Ohhhhh how I love a Welsh accent.

See y’all back at the Emporium, soon.