This is a fun, lighthearted read. You delve into the strange world of Fairy Entertainment, which was a neat concept. There were places where I wish the author would have slowed down and allowed us to really live in the world she had created for a minute. I mean, we read these things to escape but I barely got an impression of what the backstage elements were like.
The characters were all colorful and it was interesting to see them reacting to different things. I will note that these were also bare impressions at times, like the bigger personalities were simply that and I wished there was more to explain why they behave as they do, but many of them are creatures of Fairy so perhaps they are meant to be caricatures instead of characters.
All in all, it was a fun, popcorn read. Go into it expecting a fast pace and some Fairy weirdness and you’ll have a good time. There are no major explicit scenes but stuff is implied in places, it might not be suitable for the youngest among us.
This month the lovely people at Round Robin are having a conversation about POV. The question is which we prefer to read and write in, and boy do I have some things to say here!
Somewhere, some way, I grew into the belief that it wasn’t a professional book unless it was written in Third Person. Limited or Omniscient didn’t matter, but it had to be third person. I have no idea where this came from, I just know that it stuck and for a very long time I focused on Third Person exclusively.
I shied away from First Person Books even if they were on the NY Times Bestseller lists.
Except for Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, which I fell in love with. But I told myself it was a fluke and really, she broke the rules in book 2 of that series and sort of hopped between First Person and Third Person and it worked really well. So well that I might give that a try.
Most of my books are in Third Person Limited, and I do enjoy writing in it. Some of my favorite books are all in Third Person as well, The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare or Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo or His Majesties Dragon by Naomi Novik, just to name a few. I do have to admit that I prefer Limited to Omniscient. I do not enjoy hopping from one character to another in a scene, it feels like cheating and – at least to me – I feel like the real motivations/emotions get skimmed over for the characters.
I prefer when the author digs in like a tick and unearths those really big, core things about each character.
And then…
And then I read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sara J Maas.
This is, for most of the series, First Person POV.
And I loved every second of that journey.
Suddenly my very shallow understanding of POV was challenged. I don’t know what teacher impressed upon me the need for Third Person, but it had to have been someone influential in my younger years to implant this in me for so long, and I must admit now that this is an entirely WRONG standpoint.
With that in mind, I approached Nora and the Werewolf Wedding from a First Person POV. This was my first real foray into that POV, and I loved writing in it.
As in, I blew through the first draft of Nora’s second book in three months. And the third book is looking like it’ll take just about the same amount of time. There is a flow to the narrative that I haven’t been able to catch with Third Person POV, and it limits what I’m writing to precisely what Nora feels/sees/tries. This adds a sense of immediacy to the story.
This isn’t to say that I am abandoning Third Person limited. Last Child of Winter was written in Third Person and I deeply love that story. What this does say is that POV is a tool, just like all the other tools at a writer’s disposal, and everything is going to come down to the story the author wants to tell. A good author can make any POV work for them to enhance the story.
Check out what my fellow authors have to say about POV!
Advanced reviews have been amazing and I sincerely hope everyone continues to enjoy Nora and her adventures. I’ll point to the graphic on the side for some quotes from reviewers because they are all awesome! These are direct quotes from Goodreads and Amazon reviews!
In celebration, I thought I would make a couple of notes about what makes this story unique and some of the plans I have.
#1 – Nora is a guilty pleasure of mine.
She is quirky and funny and I adore the world she lives in. With all the terrible things happening in Real Life these days, I find it an absolute joy to escape into her realm where magic literally lives next door.
#2 – Nora is inspired by Deanna Troi from Star Trek the Next Generation
We can thank my mother for being a Star Trek fan and raising me to be one as well. The empathy that guides Deanna Troi was yoinked and given to Nora – in a magic sense instead of a biological science sense. So I have to tip my proverbial hat to the writers of her character on the show and to the lovely actress who portrayed her for so many years.
#3 – Yes, this is another series
The second book is already written and the third is under way. I can note that there is also a fourth book, and some smaller stories I can pepper throughout for funsies, and yes, I am focused on getting them completed right now. With the exception of Last Child of Winter, Nora’s stories are at the forefront of my work schedule until the series is completed.
I am so excited to show you what happens next in Nora’s story, but for now, I hope everyone enjoys Nora and the Werewolf Wedding. And if you DO enjoy it, I would go absolutely banana-ecstatic to hear about it in either a review or a comment or email.
I absolutely love Nora and her books. She is a lot of fun. And the world she is in is a lot of fun to write. Writing her first book took longest because I was worldbuilding a lot, but her second book took me 4 months to draft. And because I’m editing in preparation for next year’s publication date, I just re-read it and still love it.
These books are like Jim Butcher’s Dresden files meets Sarah J Maas’s Court of Thorns and Roses and I really am having a blast writing them. And it’s showing in the work. I know because of the feedback I have been getting from readers. They are having fun reading Nora, which tells me I’m doing something right.
I don’t know how other writer’s work but for me, if I’m not having fun then the work crawls along and I often don’t finish. I move on to something else that is fun and then I dissect the old book and implement the elements I enjoyed into the new work. Which is a legitimate means of morphing your craft, but the point still stands — You have got to be having fun.
If you’re not having fun, if you’re not engaged and lying awake at night wondering how your character is going to make it through the obstacles in front of them, then I can guarantee that your readers won’t be either.
This isn’t to say there have been no roadblocks.
I spent four days grouching about a menu because I had no idea what to serve on board a dirigible.
I spent a week trying to figure out the ending of Werewolf Wedding. (My husband helped me brainstorm during one of our drives. You guys can thank him for like… everything that happens there.)
I spent two months revising Werewolf Wedding to make it steampunk 1890’s, and then another 4 months returning it to contemporary urban fantasy.
But from start to finish, I have been having fun with the story. Even in the middle of the roadblocks. And I am excited to see what comes next, which motivates me to be at the computer long after I should have closed it for the day.
There are some books that I’ve written that were a grind from the mid-point to the end. Some halted completely for months. In these cases, I have to start from the beginning, remind myself why I started the story in the first place, and ignite that joy again before I start writing. Because readers can sense when you’ve lost your way too and no amount of professionalism is going to cover that.
So here is me, diving back into Nora’s world to get Book #3 Drafted. In the meantime, the first book is out August 9th! And here’s the placeholder cover for Book #2.
This month we’re looking at how we breathe life into the characters on the page.
Or, as I like to put it, how we make pretend people seem real.
Without sounding completely unhinged… Or, well. I suppose it’s going to sound completely unhinged no matter how I put it, but the majority of my characters show up in my head with voices and mannerisms intact. That isn’t to say I know everything about them, but that their behavior is there, and the process of writing the first draft unveils the why of that behavior.
If I were smarter, I would design a character from scratch, but I’m afraid that’s just not me.
The best way to make the character come to life and feel like a three-dimensional, honest to goodness human being, is putting them in a situation that everyone can relate to. In Sedition, the opening pages have my main character Trenna in a bar-fight-duel thing, which is a lot of action and not many people can really relate to that. Her mannerisms are clear, her desire to maintain neutrality in a highly tense political setting is seen, but she doesn’t come to life until she is standing with her ex-boyfriend saying goodbye.
Because everyone has an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever.
We’ve all been there. We know that unsettled pang that hits when you see that person fresh after a breakup. Everything that happened hangs in the air and everything that might have been taunts you. Giving Trenna that moment is what made her come to life.
In Tapped, we have Devon Barlow trying to fix hauling equipment on an interstellar ship. Again, not something a lot of people can relate to. But we have all worked somewhere that has faulty equipment because the powers-that-be haven’t coughed up the cash to fix it proper. His frustrations hit a familiar chord, which brings him to life.
Last example, I promise…
In my upcoming novel Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, we open with Nora waiting for a vampire and an elf to talk to her. Not precisely something we can experience in real life, but sitting in an uncomfortable chair, listening to a clock ticking, and getting a knot in our shoulder is a bit more common. Focusing on the immediate details and allowing the character to share not only what they see, but how they see it, brings that character – and the story itself – a vibrancy it otherwise would lack.
Nora doesn’t just see a vampire. She sees a svelte, opulent woman with more poise in her fingernail than Nora possesses in her whole body. And this tells us more about Nora as a person than three pages of backstory ever could.
So that is my trick, I guess, for bringing fake people some realness.
I take real stuff that people can relate to – a breakup, a cheap boss, feeling frumpy – and I put it front and center. Check out what some of my fellow authors do to breathe life into their characters by following the links below.
This month we’re unveiling the topic of Character Backstories, why they’re important, and how we manage to get the information onto the page without a snooze-worthy info-dump. Because nobody likes an info-dump. Even if it’s told in a snarky voice in the narrative, readers recognize an info-dump when they see one.
So… how do I convey important information on the page?
First, let me express that not everything in a character’s backstory is necessary for the narrative to move forward. So the very, very first thing I have to ask is if this information is relevant. If it isn’t, it’s tossed. Maybe one day it’ll come out in an anthology somewhere, but if it has no bearing on the current storyline it can be set aside.
Yes, even if it explains why Character A is so emotionally closed off.
The truth is, sometimes a little mystery is good. Readers are smart, and creative, and allowing them to wonder is a good thing.
The character of Johanna Rorry – also known as Jorry – stars in my Tapped series and she is complicated: she’s commanding, overbearing, and too sharp for gentler company. Granted, she’s in charge of a starship and everything in outer space is designed to kill humans. She is also a veteran who has been through a galactic war. Just knowing those two pieces is enough to explain some of that overbearing behavior away, without diving into a major info dump.
You know there’s trauma hiding behind her, even if it isn’t expressly explained.
What I do give are small snippets of memory.
People are the sum total of their experiences. Memories crop up in the natural course of the day. It’s no difficult thing to imagine such happening for our characters on the page. So if the information is relevant, if it hints toward something I’m going to unveil later on, I go ahead and put something in the way of my character that brings out a memory.
For instance, in my upcoming novel Nora and the Werewolf Wedding we see an empathic wizard coming to terms with how different the cultures are between living in Boston and living in Fairy. There is some trauma in her past, which I reveal through tiny snippets of memory, the first of which can be seen below.
–SNIPPET — Nora and the Werewolf Wedding —
Except for the occasional hairdresser, no one had brushed my hair since I was a child and for a heartbeat I was distracted by the gentle scrape of bristles across my scalp. Memories uprooted, unbidden but clear, and I could almost hear the melodic hum of my mother’s voice as she helped prepare me for bed. I could not have been more than seven, hugging a doll whose name was something like Regina, and basking in the attention. She was all warmth and light and gentle teasing, with a soft chuckle that seemed to echo into the quiet room.
But on the tail of that memory a dark staircase leading down, my own voice sounding small as I called for mother. I could feel the chill of the basement reaching for me, long shadows pooling at the bottom of the stair, and dread crept up my spine.
Grief pricked fresh and I blinked back the burn of tears, shoving hard at the memories. Meredith was not my mother, she was performing a service, not providing comfort, and I needed my wits to survive whatever dinner was waiting downstairs.
SO!
Readers can glean that Nora remembers her mother a little, but thoughts of her mother turn to a shadowy staircase and a strong sense of fear. We know something important happened in the basement, and there’s the promise that eventually this part of her backstory will come to light, but we keep a little mystery in the mix because there are things happening and Nora needs to concentrate.
Memories like these are an organic means of adding backstory into a narrative without clogging the page with an info-dump. The majority of my books use them and until I learn how to be better at it, I’ll probably keep adding them.
Check out how my fellow authors manage Character Backstory!
I have long held the dream of recording one of my books on audio. It’s why I bought a fancy microphone years ago – which loitered on a shelf collecting dust until I started producing this blog into a podcast. I love audio books. I listen to them often.
Or, well, my husband listens to them more than I do now based solely on his use of the car. I am blessed with the ability to sit down and read and call it “work” because authors must also be readers. It’s the single best means of learning how to tell a story effectively. I am also blessed with a husband who works very hard to permit me the time to do all that reading and writing.
But not every is as blessed as I am.
And in fact, it wasn’t all that long ago when I relied on audiobooks to get my reading in because I was a single mother and there just weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, let alone read.
So when I say I understand the value of audiobooks, I mean it.
Now we come to the nitty-gritty of recording an audiobook, which… isn’t as nitty-gritty as I feared it would be. I walked into this fearing the worst, that I would not be able to afford the programs to help me record and that I would not be able to understand how to edit an audio file.
Well, there are other fears too. Such as the idea that people would wrinkle their noses at the sound of my voice, and I’m sure some people will. My pitch and tone could remind them of a hateful person from their past, or they might just dislike it in general, but those are issues that are outside of my control. So while there’s a small portion of me screaming in self-conscious dismay, I cannot let the things I have no control over hold me back.
If you hate my voice, I’m sorry.
Happily, you can pick up the stories I tell, or even this blog, and read it without having to hear me.
Circling back to the nitty-gritty… I found a lovely site called Podcastle that has helped me immensely with recording Nora’s book. I’m still working with it because, quite frankly, it got super cold for a little while and you could hear my space heater rumbling away in the background. The choices were to hear my teeth chattering away as I read the manuscript, or wait until the weather was more amenable. And because I’m already a bit of a baby when it gets too cold, I chose the latter.
For editing the audio files… I confess I am still working on that. Thus far it seems alright? But I am also not an audio-master and I suspect before I’m done I will be reaching out to try and find someone who is more familiar with the task. They will probably hear things/catch stuff that I haven’t been able to.
Regardless, it’s been a brave new adventure for me and I’m excited to see the finished product.
Alright, so we all know I loved the first book in the Crescent City series. I got it for Christmas and lived in that book for three days, so it should come as no surprise that I picked up the second book in the series, House of Sky and Breath.
Now, I don’t give spoilers in my reviews because I don’t like being given spoilers myself, so I’m going to hedge the line a little here and say it does end on a cliffhanger. I don’t mind cliffhangers occasionally, I really don’t, but given the length of these two books I wouldn’t have made that choice. There comes a point when you’ve crossed a threshold of several thousands of words and people deserve a HFN ending so they can sleep better at night. And I am still quite nervous about how this cliffhanger came about, but I can’t get too much into the reasons why without shoving spoilers at people. Suffice, I will walk into the third book with no small amount of trepidation.
However, I understand this is my personal opinion and thus it doesn’t count for much beyond my preferences when I’m reading, so don’t let it deter you from reading the book.
This book comes with a STRONG CONTENT WARNING for those of you with young adults who like to read. Admittedly, there were some conversations between the romantic characters that left me feeling awkward, but I am also a blushy-conservative-prude. Which, hey, my husband finds endearing and really he’s the only one who matters when it come to those sorts of conversations. I only mention it as a warning to those of you who might be like me. Reading is cool in that you can glaze over the spots that make you blush a lot.
For the plot of the novel… There is quite a lot of it.
I did enjoy this book, but it felt like we were keeping a breakneck pace and there just wasn’t enough room for Bryce and her companions to actually, truly, sit down and process everything that had happened in the first book. What made me fall in love with this author was the SECOND book of Court of Thorns and Roses series, when her main character had to sit down and actually deal with what she had done in the first novel. Trauma wasn’t just shouldered, it was confronted and eventually overcome. This wasn’t the case in House of Sky and Breath.
Sure, we’re told that the two main characters cried on each others shoulders, but you don’t really get to feel it.
For those of you who have been along for the ride, you know that I have been writing a series of books that revolve around a supernatural counselor. Or rather, a counselor who counsels the supernatural who live amongst us.
Both work, really. She is a wizard, after all.
In any case, I have fought with the defining genre almost since the moment of the book’s inception. I thought at first it was straight Paranormal Romance, but as the story grew I became convinced it was Urban Fantasy because, quite frankly, the love story isn’t the main focal point of this first book. In fact, it isn’t the focal point of the second book either. However, when stepping back and looking at the whole of the series, the love story written there actually is the focal point.
There’s just a lot of world/setting/stuff to get through in order for that love story to come to fruition.
I will be honest and say that I thought it couldn’t be Paranormal Romance unless there was a vampire-killing group who all wore leather pants and kicked some serious batoosh on the page. But I am also honest in that I am basing that assumption on a bazillion book covers. It isn’t a genre I normally read, which is weird because internet algorithms keep flashing their covers at me. The books I frequent are marketed as Fantasy Romance.
Which…
Yes, as a matter of fact, Nora’s books could feasibly be called Fantasy Romance as well. The only issue being that it is set in contemporary times and in our world, which lends itself to the Ubran Fantasy genre.
However, the setting is not a major player, which my research tells me is one of the defining elements of an Urban Fantasy. Something about that setting has to be made into a plot issue in order for the book to qualify, and I’m afraid it’s all just trimmings insofar as Nora’s books go. The main driving force behind Nora’s books are the relationships between the people.
Because she’s a counselor. And an empath.
This is what leads me to the idea that it is Paranormal Romance, even if we don’t have the love story as the focal point. Nora’s story is complicated. We learn a lot of things about bright folk living amongst humanity, the existence of Fairy, and the policing force set out to keep bright folk in line.
We’ll put it this way: it bends genres.
It mixes and matches.
It’s the beginning of a love story.
It’s an adventure.
And it has werewolves.
So it’s a lot of fun and in the end, don’t we want to have fun when we read?
For those of you who haven’t been following along, I am doing this because my up-coming novel Nora and the Werewolf Wedding features a character inspired by Deanna Troi from the Next Generation series. Deanna as an empath had a lot of power in that series, she brought to light that even the Captain of a starship sometimes needs some guidance navigating emotional waters, and the importance of confronting those emotions.
I wanted to make a story where an empath was the centerpiece instead of on the sidelines, and I fear Star Trek First Contact reinforced that desire in me. Unlike Star Trek Generations, where Deanna had a lovely scene with the Captain discussing mortality, in this next movie she is more of a backdrop character. We see she is there. She has a small scene with a drunk character where Riker is highly amused to see her in an equally drunken state, but otherwise she has nothing to do.
It is a little sad because there were a couple of opportunities in there where she might have been able to shine, but for pacing/storytelling purposes it seems she got the back seat in this one. That said, having Picard apart from Deanna, who might have been able to confront him sooner about his behavior, left some space open for Picard to have a bit of a tantrum. He got to go a little crazy precisely because Deanna wasn’t there to check him, so I can see why it was done.
I still think Deanna could have been given more opportunity to shine down on the planet’s surface with the rest of the crew and all of the stuff going on down there, but, hey, such is life. I still enjoyed the movie and the Borg Queen Lady is still creepy enough to make me squirm.
