Reflections--what the camera sees

I have terrible eyesight. So when I snapped this picture of the pond near my house, I didn't notice the reflections of the trees in the water. If I enlarge this photo on my phone, the texture and play of color is really something and I find myself wishing I could take Annie Leibovitz' MASTER CLASS on photography. There's so much I don't know technically, but I sold my SLR camera when I left L.A. and now I just snap pix with my camera phone.

I love taking pictures with my camera phone. An Instagram account is in my near future, mainly because I love looking at other people's photos too. (And yes, I'm on Pinterest, where one of my boards is called REFLECTIONS.)

A review of A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria Schwab

In Victoria Schwab's novel, a pickpocket and a mage must join forces to save the interconnected worlds in which they live. 

A lot of work has gone into building the world of this book, a flat-out fantasy adventure with several very engaging characters and enough treachery and magic to fuel a season of GAME OF THRONES. 

This is a book that’s suffused with magic—blood magic, elemental magic, you name it. The magic builds from the small to the epic, and the magic battles are very satisfying. (Fans of this kind of material may see some parallels to Katherine Kurtz’ fantastic DERYNI CHRONICLES, which are history-based and use an alternate Wales as their location.)

Even more free books!!

I love the cover of this paranormal boxed set. Like the tagline says, this is not your normal paranormal cover with its gray/blue/violet color palette. Get it free here.

The weekend of Free Books!

Like sci fi? Dystopian? Fantasy? Sci Fi and Fantasy Romance?  Then you're in luck. there's a 90-book giveaway going on this weekend over at Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Promotions. Click here and start downloading.

Free!!!Whipping Boy by Katherine Tomlinson

I'm getting ready to release the sequel to my short mystery novel Whipping Boy and thought I might whip up some interest by giving the digital version of the first book away free. You can find it on Amazon here.

Interview with Amelia Mangan

Amelia Mangan is a writer originally from London, currently living in Sydney, Australia. Her writing is featured in many anthologies, including Attic Toys (ed. Jeremy C. Shipp); Blood Type (ed. Robert S. Wilson); Worms, After The Fall, X7 and No Monsters Allowed (ed. Alex Davis); The Bestiarum Vocabulum (ed. Dean M. Drinkel); Carnival of the Damned (ed. Henry Snider); and Mother Goose is Dead (eds. Michele Acker & Kirk Dougal). Her short story, "Blue Highway," won Yen Magazine's first annual short story competition and was featured in its 65th issue. She can be found on Twitter (@AmeliaMangan) and Facebook.

You’re originally from London. What brought you to Sydney and how long have you been there?

My dad went to prison for fraud when I was seven, so my mum and I came over here to stay with my grandmother. I've lived here ever since (in Australia, not with my grandmother), so that makes twenty-six years come August.

You’ve published a number of short stories, was it hard for you to transition to longer work like Release?

Yeah, longer work's tougher, no question. First drafts of short stories usually take me about ten days to complete, which means it's out of my system quicker and I can move on sooner. The thing about longform work is that you really need to be sure you like these characters and this world enough to soldier on with them for months, maybe years at a time, and even if you do like them enough to do that, there's gonna be points where you get thoroughly sick of them and begin to cast longing glances at your notebook full of ideas for other novels. But if the idea is genuinely good - and bad ones will reveal themselves relatively quickly; they're unsustainable and blow over like cardboard - then it's worth pursuing to the end.

Was Release your first novel? How long did it take to write?

It's not the first novel I attempted, but it's the first I ever finished. I'm a little embarrassed to say it took eight years, mainly because I was at university and then did the postgrad thing and, basically, life and physical exhaustion got in the way for a bit. At one point I came dangerously close to just destroying the file and salting the earth behind it, but reason (I won't say sanity) prevailed.

Do you have a “process” for writing? A certain number of pages a day? Or words a day? Do you write on your birthday and holidays? Take weekends off?

I try to do at least five hundred words a day, but if I don't meet that, I don't sweat it (unless I'm on a deadline, of course). My feeling is that, even if you only get one sentence down in a day, you're a sentence ahead of where you were the day before. And I hate that whole "REAL WRITERS WRITE EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THEIR LIVES NO EXCUSES I DON'T CARE IF YOUR WHOLE FAMILY DIED" thing that's become prevalent in writing communities; I see how it can be useful to some who find it difficult to actually sit down and do the work, but too often I see it used as a stick for writers to beat themselves with when they fail to meet that self-imposed standard. And writers don't need any more excuses to hate themselves.

Do you listen to music when you’re writing? What’s most often on your playlist?

Not while I'm writing - I need silence for that - but adjacent to writing, absolutely. Everything I've ever written has a playlist; a few of the ones on Release's (Irma Thomas' "Ruler of My Heart", Wanda Jackson's "Funnel of Love", the folk song "In The Pines", Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight") made it into the text. The style and tone of the music on each playlist varies according to the style and tone of, and emotional state I want to evoke with, each individual story, but PJ Harvey seems to show up on all of them eventually - which, seeing as how she's my favorite musician, is not entirely surprising.

Character interview: Yalira of Bride of the Midnight King

Portrait of Yalira by Joanne Renaud

As part of the March Mayhem promotion, artist/rwiter Kat Laurange is hosting a "character interview" with Yalira, the heroine of Bride of the Midnight King. It's a lot of fun to answer questions in the voice of a character you've created, and I hope readers will enjoy it. You can see the interview on Kat's blog here.