Jouberts of Sisterhood

I pretty much could use my entry from two years ago for this, since I think I also used the Joubert family then.

Anyway, the Joubert family stars in the unofficial Tales of the Scarlet Knight prequel Sisterhood.  It's a story about a family of witches and the trials and tribulations they face from about 1500-1900.  It's narrated by Sylvia, the youngest, who is an old, grumpy woman by the time of A Hero's Journey.  Like all prequels we of course have to overexplain how she got that way.

Sylvia's mother moves her young family to the south of France (outside of Marseilles) around the year 1500, when Sylvia is three years old.  She has two older sisters:  Agnes and Sophie.  For the first couple hundred years Agnes is kind of a scatterbrained bimbo, who has a number of affairs with "mortal" (ie nonmagical) men over the years.  That is until she finally finds the love of her life and settles down.  Sophie is a know-it-all bookworm who comes to a bad end in a town called Salem, MA--or does she?

Sylvia walks a rougher path than her sisters.  Her skills are uniquely suited to "offensive magic," so she becomes a hunter of demons, bogeymen, vampires, and so forth.  Interspersed with this she has a couple of love affairs that both end tragically.  She travels all over the world from France, through Europe, into Egypt, and later even to the Old West.  But all the time she spends alone helps her to see the value of her sisters.

A lot of the material for this book came from the first draft of the 5th Scarlet Knight book, later to be known as Betrayal Begets Blood.  The flashbacks to Sylvia's old life were really too long, but I always thought they could make a good novel on their own.  So eventually when I got done with the first drafts of the Scarlet Knight series I wrote that book.  It has some of the weaknesses you'll find in any prequel, but I think it's still a good standalone book.

The second tragic love affair for Sylvia I pulled largely from Possession by A.S. Byatt, which I bought from a library sale for like $1.  There was a movie from about 2002 with Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, which I bought on VHS a while back because I don't think I could get it from Blockbuster or Netflix at the time and the DVD was expensive, though now it's only $10 on Amazon or you can rent it for $3.  Anyway, both the book and movie are pretty decent.

Because I felt lazy I pulled a couple excerpts from this book to put into the revised Betrayal Begets Blood, which looks kind of weird because Sisterhood was the first book I ever wrote in first-person present-tense while the Scarlet Knight ones rely on old-fashioned third-person, past tense.  I didn't feel like going through to change all the tenses and stuff because what the hell they're flashbacks to Sylvia's life, so why not let her narrate it in first-person?

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Impostors, The

The second novel of the Girl Power series is called The Impostors.  It has a very simple concept:  what if the heroes turned into girls in the last book had to fight the male versions of themselves?  Imagine what it would be like if Superman had to fight Supergirl or Batman had to fight Batgirl (or Batwoman) or Aquaman had to fight...um, yeah that one doesn't work.  Or the Flash one since I don't think there's a girl Flash.  Why not, DC Comics?  Get to it.

Anyway, it's been about a year since the world's greatest heroes became heroines and the public starts to grumble that these girls aren't quite as good as the men were.  So when the men suddenly appear on the scene, everyone's overjoyed--except the female heroes.  Soon it becomes clear the world ain't big enough for both teams so they have to have it out to decide who's real and who's the impostors.

A little problem came up when I was working on this.  I was watching a Slim Jim commercial that showed "Imposter" sticks.  It was one of those weird moments where I looked at the word and wondered, Is that how it's spelled?  Well according to the dictionary you can spell it either way:  Imposter or Impostor.  I decided I liked Impostors; the O just looks classier to me.  Maybe because Imposter makes me think of posters.  So if some future jerkoff "reviewer" wants to declare there's a typo in the title, there is not.

And if you followed this blog before you know what a devil of a time I had with the cover.  I knew the concept I wanted but gods forbid there be any pictures online I could use.  I think in the end I spent $25 to acquire both faces.  Worth it!  (Probably not.)

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Hazards of Love

Another title that could be more appropriate for a romance book, though it's actually the title of an album by the Decemberists that is sort of like a romance novel, complete with a rake.

Anyway, this the third book in the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series and it's the one that really starts to up the stakes by introducing the evil goddess Isis, who is the power behind the Black Dragoon.  In volume 0, Dark Origins, Isis was imprisoned by Merlin back in about 2000 BC or BCE or whatever they use these days.  In the prologue of The Hazards of Love, Isis is freed thanks to meddling Egyptologist Dan Dreyfus.

When Dan returns to Rampart City, to Emma's horror he has Isis on his arm as his wife.  Soon bodies begin to be found all over the city with their hearts cut out, leading the media to dub the murderer the Heartbraker Killer.  The situation gets worse for Emma when she's fingered as the killer and has to go underground.

Meanwhile Emma's witch friends and Marlin the ghost undertake separate journeys to find a way to defeat Isis before it's too late.  But if you read the E post then you already know there's just one way to defeat Isis.  How Emma survives this involves a little deux ex machina.  I don't feel bad abut that because there have been lamer resurrections in comic books over the years.  Though in my original notes Emma and Becky were both going to die.  In the epilogue we would have featured a park a few years later where two little girls are playing--the reincarnated Emma and Becky!  But later I decided against that, which is good for the reading public because it allowed me to write five more books.

The title not only refers to a Decemberists album but also how dangerous love can be.  Dan falling in love with Isis puts him (and a lot of other people) in danger.  Becky's love for her fiancee leads her to do some terrible things.  And Emma's love for Dan distracts her from the threat Isis poses.  Not that love is bad; you just need to be careful who you fall in love with.

Besides Isis, this is the first one in the series to talk about the "astral plane" where Merlin lives and introduced the coven outside of Mrs. Chiostro and her sister.  Though the depiction of the coven had to undergo some serious edits after I finished the series so it would align with stuff I wrote in later books, as well as the Sisterhood prequel.  The same happened with the revised second book, Time Enough to Say Goodbye.  For instance originally the coven was a bunch of old ladies who met at a motel somewhere like any normal convention.  But then later I created the secret lair for the coven when they all want to get together, so I had to go back and do some retroactive continuity.  It was good no one had published the series to that point so I could futz around with it for a while.

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Girl Power

This post is being simulcast on Indie Writers Monthly.

When a supervillain's weapon turns Earth's greatest male heroes into its greatest heroines, they enter a whole new world. Can Apex Girl, Velocity Girl, the Mermaid, and Midnight Spectre come together in time to save the world?

The idea behind the story was combining a superhero series like Tales of the Scarlet Knight with the gender-swapping of the Chances Are series.  Basically the point was:  what if Superman, Batman, Aquaman, and the Flash all became girls?  While they have to fight supervillains, they also end up dealing with other issues.

Someone complained it wasn't as "deep" as Watchmen, but I would say it's deeper than he gave it credit for.  Maybe not in terms of geopolitical situations, but the smaller, personal situations.  I designed it so each character has something to overcome:

• Apex Girl (Superman) first has to deal with a very sexist new boss.  Later it becomes awkward for her when the woman she pined for over the last decade becomes her best friend--and yet not the best best friend ever.
• Mermaid (Aquaman) and Velocity Girl (Flash) kind of flip-flop.  Before Mermaid was a gay man and Velocity Girl was straight and married with a daughter.  Afterwards Mermaid goes home only to find her boyfriend no longer wants her because she has a vagina while Velocity Girl's daughter doesn't recognize her and her wife isn't comfortable around her.
• Midnight Spectre (Batman) loses all the strength she had spent years building, to the point that she's thrown off the team.  So she has to find other ways to make herself useful, with the help of a geeky boy at her new school.

These issues are not wrapped up all nice and neat in the first book.  They continue on into the sequels, the first of which is featured on my blog in two days.  But if there aren't enough plot twists for some people, well excuuuuuuse me.  I ain't no M. Night Shymalan, which at this point is probably for the best.

You can get the book FREE from Amazon or Smashwords.  The paperback is $8.99 from Amazon and $9.99 from B&N

Forever Young

Forever Young is the story of Samantha Young, a 10-year-old girl who wakes up with no memory on an island called Eternity that's stuck in the 17th Century.  The island is populated by other kids who are ruled over by Reverend Crane and his henchman Jonas Pryde.  The reverend employs a strict system known as "The Way" to keep the children in line, all except for Samantha, who finds herself constantly getting into trouble for breaking the rules.  Samantha also begins to remember things and places that are unlike anything the other children have known.  But who is she and where did she come from?

Actually if you want the answers to those, you need to read the fourth and final book, When You Were Young.  But along the way we add pieces to the puzzle about Samantha and her past.  Also we start to fill in the blanks about the island's history and that of people on it.  I can tell you that the island while it's called Eternity is not Purgatory and the children are not already dead.  Me > Lost writers.

One of the main issues for Samantha and a big reason she can't fit in is that her skin is darker than anyone else's on the island.  The mean kids refer to her as a "savage" referring of course to Native Americans.  In truth she's more likely Hispanic, though I never explicitly say one way or the other.

Anyway, there's no sex and only a little violence, so it's one of my few books that's safe for the whole family.

You can get it FREE through Smashwords.  It'd be nice if at some point I could get it to be free on Amazon, which YOU could help with by reporting to Amazon that it's free elsewhere.  I'm just saying.

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Emma Earl, The Heart Of

The Heart of Emma Earl might be appropriate for a romance novel, but it's actually the name of the eighth and final novel in the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series.

In that novel the evil goddess Isis has finally triumphed over the Scarlet Knight and is expanding to bend the world to her will.  Emma's friend Tim Cooper has to travel to another dimension in order to get the weapons they need to free her from Isis.  That's only the beginning of what is an epic story.

The heart of Emma Earl is more than a metaphorical reference.  The actual heart of Emma Earl is the key to defeating Isis.  This is first referenced in the third story, The Hazards of Love, when Isis first appears.  The evil goddess literally consumes the hearts of people to sustain herself.  But when she eats the heart of someone as good and noble as the Scarlet Knight, it gives her a really nasty case of indigestion.

Thus the only way for the Scarlet Knight to defeat Isis is to give her heart to Isis again.  And since people can't live without a heart, it means she would have to die.  Emma does actually die, but of course I cheat on it in such a way that will probably piss people off.

This is the longest book in the series because it's a "kitchen sink" book where I throw all kinds of stuff out there.  We have action in at least three parallel worlds (take that Offutt and your only TWO worlds!) plus the astral plane.  There's a Pegasus, Greek gods, Egyptian goddesses, witches, vampires, mutant rats, robot suits, a cowboy trucker who in the movie version would be played by Sam Elliott, and even people raining from the sky at one point.

It did take a while to figure out how to approach this book because I'd kind of painted myself into a corner when I had Emma, Ms. Chiostro, and Akako all captured by Isis.  Then I remembered a Wingman book I'd read where the first half of the book is some of the secondary characters searching to find the main character.  Or you could think of Star Trek III if you want.  That seemed a good way to do things, so then I only needed to find someone to do the searching and it occurred to me that since he'd gone to prison at the end of book 5, Tim Cooper would be far away from Rampart City.  And it all started snowballing from there.  My philosophy on "last" books is go big or go home, so I pretty much did whatever the hell I wanted.  I'm not sure anyone but me has gotten up to it yet.  Maybe you'll be the first!

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Dagger Lake, Virgin Territory

Today is the first entry where I'm fudging it, though I suppose I could have used Dark Origins, Tales of the Scarlet Knight #0.  But I didn't feel like it.

Anyway, Dagger Lake is a town featured in my novel Virgin Territory and also referenced in one or two other books like The Naked World.  Virgin Territory tells the story of Gary, a young man who's fled to northern Michigan after losing the love of his life.  One night he finds a naked young woman washed up on the beach.  The young woman has no memory of who she is or how she got there, so Gary takes it upon himself to help her.  In the process he and the girl start to fall in love...

A real Michigander would point to it on his hand!

Located a little north of Houghton Lake, Michigan, Dagger Lake is mostly a tourist town.  Once the temperatures drop, not many people stick around the area.  Only a few locals like Gary hang around the place all year long.  The reason Gary finds the girl is that he frequently walks along the beach in the off-season to pick up any trash that ends up on the shore.

The town is not a real place.  It's not even really based on any real place.  It's more of a composite of various small Michigan towns I've been to like Freeland, Harrison, Cadillac, and so forth.  Had I felt like it I could have come up with a whole backstory for the town, how it got its name and all that, but I didn't, because it's not really important.

Other than the lake there's not much going on in Dagger Lake.  There's a diner, a secondhand clothes store, a print shop, and a park.  Most people go to the nearest larger town, Pine Cove, that has a Wal-Mart and such to stock up on groceries and other stuff; you only shop in Dagger Lake when you don't have the time or inclination to drive a ways away.

So basically Dagger Lake is a sleepy little town where nothing ever happens--until that naked girl washes up on shore.

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Chance of a Lifetime & CCR

Chances Are (I never get tired of that pun) if you followed this blog previously you know all about Chance of a Lifetime (Chances Are #1).  It's the story of a grizzled detective named Steve Fischer who gets injected with an experimental drug that causes him to become a young woman who adopts the name Stacey Chance.  While she struggles to adapt to her new life, she tracks down those who did this to her.

It's free on Amazon, Smashwords, and B&N and has many positive reviews--and a couple negative ones written by morons, like the one who said he prefers books with political intrigue or treasure hunting.  Does the description above mention anything about political intrigue or treasure hunting?  Nooooope.  So maybe, just maybe, you should have read the description first!  Dumbass.

Anyway, since it fits perfectly in with a 'C' post, Steve's favorite band is Creedence Clearwater Revival, or CCR.  Why?  Mostly because Steve is about 50 years old and thus I needed a band popular in the early 70s or so when he'd have been a teenager.  Plus in the 4th Die Hard movie Bruce Willis yells at Justin Long for trying to turn off CCR on the radio and since Steve is a John McLane type character it makes sense.

At other parts in the series this creates some fun moments because a girl Stacey's age shouldn't have even heard of CCR let alone actually like their music.  Her ignorance of the modern music scene puts her at odds with her friend (and daughter) Madison who's a big Lady Gaga fan and equates the time she had to spend listening to CCR in the car with her dad to a trip to the dentist for a root canal.

Later Stacey ends up getting into music that's even older, Cole Porter songs, which hey that starts with a 'C' too!  Serendipity!

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

And now ladies and gentlemen, some CCR:

Rock out Steve Fischer style!

Best Light

For day 2 of my narcissistic, self-serving posts about my books comes The Best Light.

The Best Light is the story of Frank Hemsky, a grizzled nature photographer who goes to a small New Mexico town to find out about the death of the love of his life, whom he left about 30 years earlier so he could pursue his career.  He meets the woman's daughter (spoiler: she is not his daughter) and as she shows him around the place they start to develop a May-December romance.

The character of Frank Hemsky appears in two short stories you can find in The Carnival Papers.  I liked the character enough that I thought of making a novel centered around him.

Of all my books this might be the one I did the most research for.  I bought a book on the nature photography business so I might not sound like a complete idiot.  I also read a biography on Ingrid Bergman, who's the idol of the girl in the book.  I watched a lot of her movies too.  And I walked around a lot with my digital camera to take pictures of scenery.  Some of the locations in Maine were based on a trip I took there while the town in New Mexico is based on Tucumcari, which I visited a year after the fact but I did plenty of research on Google and stuff.  Tucumcari is on the old Route 66 so there's a lot of stuff dedicated to that and also a lot of tacky souvenir stores and such.  I didn't visit too many of those, but I did walk through some residential areas to kind of see what the neighborhoods were like and I had to stop at Radio Shack for some batteries for my camera.  The big box store there is still KMart, where I was lucky to find a DSL cord for my laptop because for some reason in 2006 all the motels in New Mexico used DSL hookups not Wifi.

Anyway, so the town in the book is called Little Mesa (which is actually a town from the Robotech books) and it similarly has a lot of tacky souvenir stores and such.  Though the big attraction is a giant hole in the ground.  People speculate on what caused the hole, whether it was a meteor or erosion or maybe even aliens.  The woman Frank loved dies by falling in the hole.  Frank spends a lot of time interviewing people about her and trying to decide if she fell or if she jumped.  Then kind of like Hollywoodland it's left for you to decide.

After all that research all I have to show for it is a review by an idiot saying, "Duh, this isn't my kind of book..." You know, cuz it ain't got no pictures in it.

While I have pictures of Tucumcari, the one I used for the cover is from a weird sunset in Williams, Arizona (a town a little south of the Grand Canyon) because it was higher resolution owing to a slightly better camera.  This funky sunset came after a thunderstorm had blown through, which I'm pretty sure that storm happened right as I got to Williams and then of course it probably cleared once I'd gotten all my stuff from my rental car.  You know, because that's how my life works.  BTW, Williams sucks.  It's a rundown shithole from what I saw when I walked around for a couple of hours before the train showed up.  Though not as bad as Detroit, maybe one of those suburbs right outside Detroit like Hamtramack or something.

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site! 

Awakening

This is not an April Fool's Day joke!  It's a real live blog post.

The first year of this blog I did the A to Z challenge on my then-forthcoming novel A Hero's Journey, Tales of the Scarlet Knight #1.

The next year I only half-ass did the A to Z challenge.

This year I wasn't planning to do anything.  Then I saw my book sales had been skidding the last couple of months and I thought, "Huh, maybe this blog stuff actually does something."  So then I thought maybe I should start blogging again, at least on a limited basis.  And the best way to get started seemed to be with this A to Z thing.  Plus people might figure out the new old blog address then.  At least anyone who bothers to look down to #1000-something on the list and click the link.

Then I thought, "Hurm, what can I do for 26 days?"  And then myself answered, "I have like 40 books out..."

Great idea, self!  So for the month of April I will focus each day on a different book of mine.  What I soon realized is while I have a lot of books, many of them start with the same letter.  So in some cases I'll talk about a character or fudge it some other way.

Today I did not have to fudge anything.  Appropriately for a first post this is called Awakening.

It's the tale of a young witch named Stephanie who finds out a human engineer named Ethan is creating a "magic wand" that would let ordinary people use magic like witches.  Stephanie isn't the only one interested in the magic wand technology; the Nazis are also keen on getting their hands on it.  So Stephanie and Ethan have to try to escape from the Nazis and keep the wand out of their hands.

Originally this novel was supposed to take place in present day with my witches from the Scarlet Knight stories:  Sylvia Joubert and her sister Agnes.  But for whatever reason that just wasn't working for me.  I think in part because the villains were kind of blah.  So I decided to spice it up a little by setting it in the mid-30s with Nazis.  Maybe I'd got my Indiana Jones DVDs around that time, or maybe not.  Whatever the reason it worked better, so I could at least finish it.  Then later I changed the names to differ from the Scarlet Knight stories.

It's one of those where it could have been a series, but I never got around to writing the sequels.  Mostly because I got involved first with The Night's Legacy and then the Chances Are series, which took up the rest of the year.  Three of those four books will be featured in the coming days!

You can buy it and all my other books from the new Planet 99 Publishing website!