uuuughhhhhhh!

I swear I published FAF yesterday!!!

Fan Art Friday

I'm extending the due date on the competition by another week. The last two weeks have been really busy and irritating and difficult for me. But I'm here to do a little bit of positive at the end of the week, and hopefully bring you a little bit of sunshine to carry you through the weekend.

Welp, it's Fan Art Friday, and once again I am short on fan art... However! Never let it say that I shall be deterred!

I've had some requests on reference photos for a couple that I absolutely love: Josh and Gabe. I revealed them briefly about a year ago, thinking at the time that the very next book I would be writing would be Shifter Centric... come to find out, I have a lot of work to do before I can start writing SC - which is intended to be to HBL what the Ender's Shadow series is to the Ender's Game series. So! For your entertainment, and reference, here is more of Josh and Gabe.

Josh

Gabe

My original version of Josh and Gabe

Andrea Hatch's version of Josh and Gabe

I hope you love them as much as I love them. ;) You get to meet them in the last parts of Hard Bank Left.

Sneak Peak!

First things first! I recently watched Jack the Giant Slayer  and you must tell me...

Would she or would she not make an excellent Krys? (Green eyes aside) Just looking for your thoughts.

Speaking of which, I feel inclined to share with you a small snippet of what I've been working of in Tailslide. So, without further ado, here's a sneak peak at Tailslide:

My foot landed squarely in his face with a loud and satisfying crack. Blood began to gush from his nose, spilling all down his shirt. He doubled over, screaming and cursing and howling in pain. Without hesitation I snatched my dagger out from his belt and dodged toward the pile of crates. Above the crates was a zip line. The plan had barely started to formulate before I realized just how much this was going to hurt. But, it wasn't like I had many other choices.

With one great bound the zip line handle was in my left hand, but I wasn't free yet. Swinging my leg as hard as I could, I managed to clear a large stack of crates to my left, but not without sending my body careening sideways. The burning in my shoulder and wrist bit deep into the muscle and refused to release, but I couldn't let go, not just yet. The ground was still too far away and I was still recovering from my last great leap.

Legs swinging and flailing every which way, arm cramping, and knife held overhead, I sped toward the bottom of the line where a rather intimidating man waited, arms outstretched. My options flipped in front of me like a possessed Rolodex. One in particular stuck out and I went with it. It all started with swinging my back leg forward. The man below laughed at this. He wouldn't be laughing for long.

A split second before landing, tucked in my extended leg, forcing the excess energy into extending my other leg into a kick which landed smack in his xiphoid complex. The resulting crunch was not a pleasant one. No sooner did my foot make contact than I let go of the zip line bringing me hammering down on his already crushed sternum. As if that wasn't enough, I rammed my knife into his neck.

There was a time that I would have cared that I'd just taken a life, when the blood spilling across the deck would have troubled me to sickness, but that time had long since passed. These people weren't human. They kidnapped, experimented, treated my kind as animals all for the sake of aether. If us nightlings had to die for them to get their fill of aether, then by all means, I'd kill them first.

“Two down,” I muttered, pulling my knife from the man's jugular with a putrid spray of dark blood. “Who's next?”

Fan Art Friday

I really don't have much for you this week. I've been very busy trying to coordinate this character competition. YOU HAVE ONE MORE WEEK PEOPLE! Please spread the word. So, for you, here is what I have for FAF.

In a word:

OHMYGOSHITSDOWNTOWNCHICAGOINTHELAST FEWCHAPTERSOFHBL!!!

I know... not really one word... and I missed an apostrophe... but still; that's pretty much it. Hope you guys have a great weekend!

My Obsession With the Insane

As you may know, I seem to write a lot of crazy. And by "a lot" I obviously mean every other character...The list seems to include at least one character per chapter that's a little bit off their rocker. And, though it might not be obvious at first, you'll quickly see exactly what I mean.

 Let's think... who are some of my special crazies?...
Elicith, Ero, Ve, Fes, Constantine, Drystan, Cassandra, Caps, Alasier, Maggie, Asper, and even Krys and Cadence are all various levels of mentally unstable.

So why? you may ask. Do you want the simple answer or the complicated one? Because the simple one is that aether affects the mind. A human mind can only handle so much aether at a time, overusing it, overdoing it, can cause a sort of psychosis, split personality disorder, or even drain your life.

You want complex?

Let's take the Dureri from my novella Adrianna. Obviously there's something unnatural about them, their actions seem to be outside the realm of normal human behavior. And yeah, sure, you can write that off as it being a simple matter of them not exactly being mortal in the strictest sense. But there's more to it. You can only torture people for so long without going just a little bit mad. Drystan is the best example of this.

In the first novella, Adrianna, the character of Drystan is explored a little. He's described as obsessive, clingy, and impulsive. He's described as hating who and what he is. At first glance this is brushed off with an explanation that may seem a little too easy: he views the body as sacred and doesn't like seeing anyone hurting - let alone doing the hurting himself. If you haven't read the book yet, please do so. Just keep in mind that this description of him isn't a cop out, I'm just holding out on you. ;)

Later in the series Drystan's psychosis deepens as he becomes more obsessed with Adrianna and goes down a... questionable path.  I try to make it a little unclear as to why this is (after all, I have to keep challenging your mind, don't I?), however I will say this, being Dureri isn't all that it seems. Sure there's the glamor and the immortality and the inability to feel pain, but there's a little bit of a side affect that most Dureri don't even notice: split personality disorder. (This is explored in Adrianna, so if you have questions, go read the novella.)

The mind doesn't have the capability to deal with the whole new set of input, heightened senses, all the goodies of being Dureri. So, the mind creates a divergent personality that can cope with the entirely new life. Over time the two personality sets merge - usually as the trauma of being changed lessens - sometimes this creates a super genius like Renee, Gilgamesh or Nereida. And sometimes you get a messed up jumble of a person like in the cases of Cassandra and Drystan.

For other cases, you're just going to have to read through the stories, aren't you. ;)