Steampunk Poe!

The annual Bellingham Steampunk Festival is coming up and as always, there are author appearances. This year one of the authors who'll be there is Lindsay Shopfer. I don't know his work, but when I Googled around, I found THIS collection, Merely This, which looks like all kinds of fun. (They had me at "clockwork raven.") I look forward to reading his work.

I like the playful thing the book designer did with Edgar Allan Poe's name. I also like the play of purple against the black and white. Not crazy about the way the title and subtitle are laid in. 

Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn...a review

Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kaeleen Donovan—her friends call her Kae—is a Theosian, a minor goddess created when her pregnant mother wandered into a patch of wild magic that altered her DNA. Bound to the goddess Hecate, and able to roam the Crossroads where all worlds meet, Kae has a mission to retrieve a stolen artifact that in the wrong hands, could mean TEOTWAWKI. That’s the setup for author Yasmine Galenorn’s latest book and it’s a romp through a Seattle altered by a cataclysmic magic storm unleashed by Gaia before the story opens.
The Portland of GRIMM has nothing on Galenorn’s Seattle, which is inhabited by creatures of both shadow and light, beings who can shift into hawks and work magic, spirit guides, and all manner of creatures that have come from the World Tree and through the various portals ripped in the fabric of space time.
Kae is a typical kickass urban fantasy heroine with her sword and dagger and whip, but though she walks “in flame and ash on a field of bones,” she is also recognizably human and profoundly grateful that she wasn’t bound to one of the death gods of Santeria instead of Hecate, Goddess of the crossroads and of dark magic. And her world includes a day-job (running a cleaning company), which grounds the fantastical in the mundane.
The author has done a lot of world building, which is a treat and as a special gift to her readers, she’s also added the playlist she used for the book, which includes everything from Android Lust to Tingstad & Rumbel. This is the first in a series, and it’ll be fun to see what’s next for Kae, who is known as “Fury” when she’s on the nightshift.




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An interview with C.J. Warrant

1    C.J. Warrant is the debut author of the romantic suspense novel Forgetting Jane. (Review to come shortly, but trust me, you want to get it!) She stopped by to talk about her book and her writing and her life. 

 You’re an Army brat?  Me too! How do you think that shaped you as a person? Growing up, it was hard to make friends. I had to learn to put myself out there if I wanted them, which helps me now with networking. Also, since we got to travel from Korea, to Japan and then to the states, I met so many interesting people along the way.

2.       If someone gave you an all expenses vacation to anywhere you wanted, where would you go? Bora Bora! Every picture I have seen about that place reminds me of paradise, and I want to retreat to it.

3.       Why is Forgetting Jane set in Wisconsin? I lived in Wisconsin for about a year when I was ten, which drew me to have this story in that state. And all the elements in this story melds together making it a perfect fit.  I knew from the start of Forgetting Jane, it had to be Wisconsin.

4.      You’re a wife and a mother and also have another career outside of writing. How do you balance writing and life? Do you have a daily schedule for writing or do you just fit it into the corners of your time? Actually, I quit the beauty industry and turn my focus onto my family, my writing and myself. It was very stressful and it was affecting my health and connection with my family. I’m a lucky one who has tremendous support from my husband and kids. They encourages me to write and have me time.

Do you listen to music as you work and if so, what was in your playlist for this book? I don’t listen to music when I write. For me, it’s too distracting. But when I’m character building, I do. Depending on the character, I listen to anything from AC/DC to country. I also a big fan of club music, and get a little exercise in when I’m standing by my tall kitchen table typing away my characters…with the blinds wide open!

Picnic by the Lake of Time...out next week!

I have been playing around with a time travel idea for a while, and this novelette is going to be my first in the series. Hare is the opening:

The fifties were not my first choice as a time to seek refuge and 1955 was not my first choice of year, but as I did my research and exercised my due diligence, it became obvious that 1955 was probably the best place to lie low. For one thing, though I needed to hide somewhen fairly low-tech, I didn’t want to go so far into the past that I had to grow my own food and build my own house.

I also needed to pick a year where I could blend in without too much explanation.

The fifties were perfect for that. The decade had telephones and television and indoor plumbing and air conditioning but it didn’t have facial recognition software or stoplight cameras or laws requiring you to prove your citizenship when looking for a job. You might get asked to show your social security card, but it was easy enough to forge one of those with a totally meaningless SSN because in the days before computer databases, what were they going to do, make a long-distance call to another state to check a birth certificate?

Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor...a review

The Scent of Death by Andrew  Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When London clerk Edward Savill sails into New York harbor on August 2, 1778, heh is not impressed. “I confess I expected a finer prospect,” he comments to a sailor keeping him company, “Something more like a city.” The British are occupying the city and like his cabin mate, Mr. Noak—an American who has been working in London for years—Savill is traveling on business. England and the United States may be at war, but war is good for business and opportunities for getting rich are everywhere. And in this atmosphere, everything is for sale, as Noak notes cynically. “For some people, sir, loyalty is a commodity, and like any other may be bought and sold.”

Margaret Atwood rewrites The Tempest

What can I say but "I can't wait to read this." It's on offer as an Early Reviewer copy at Library Thing, so of course, I signed up for it, along with 308 other people who are vying for 20 copies. Wish me luck!

THE HATCHING by Ezekial Boone... a review

An international disaster ensues when a strange species of spiders suddenly hatches in Peru and China simultaneously. This new novel by Ezekial Boone is old school and intense!  Who doesn't hate spiders?

Miguel was born in Lima, Peru, a city of seven million, but to stay close to a girlfriend he’s found a job leading “eco tours” into the jungle. His latest trip has been kind of a disaster because he hasn’t spotted any animals at all. His clients are complaining but Miguel is spooked. And then a bird simply falls out of the sky, And then the wave of spiders overwhelms one of the tourists in his party.  That’s a terrific way to begin a disaster story and the pace only picks up from there as we meet a beleaguered FBI agent in the US, a baffled seismologist in India, and a smart and tough spider expert who has a theory that the SPIDER glyph scratched in the Nazca plains of Peru is older than the other images there. And meanwhile…China sets off a nuke in its own interior.  This is a lot of fun, and it’s the start of a trilogy, so there’s more fun to come.