Double Whammy: 'Compline' Now Available and July Backlist Bonanza

Finally here! Compline is now available for purchase in e-book and print formats. Behold the blurb:

In a quiet corner of Prussia, late night peals of a ghostly bell summon select victims to a gruesome and otherworldly death. It's a dark event that's haunted the land for five centuries, and the truth behind it is made all the more elusive with superstition shrouding its history.

Lukas Geiger assists his uncle, a country doctor, and will do everything he can to unravel this mystery. It proves to be difficult, however, with doors being shut in his face while many young patients exhibit signs of physical abuse and neglect, and their tormentors succumb to the spectral bell's calls. Surviving adults simply refuse to speak and leave their doctors frustrated and helpless.

Herrick Shriver returns to his birth country after finishing his studies in England, reuniting with the beloved uncle who helped raise him. Wide-eyed hope, however, crosses paths with dark secrets that refuse to stay silent. A strange bell tolls, and the night feels wrong. A silent figure stands on the moonlit drive, watching the manor house. Occasional nightmares about a long-dead friend trouble his uncle—as well as the doctors who look after him, one of whom catches and holds Herrick's attention.

As their paths converge, Lukas and Herrick soon learn that the truth lies in a long-abandoned church and its eerie collection of statues. That every step toward discovery is guided by a faded journal once owned by a nameless priest. That past and present might be more hopelessly entangled than they believed.

Set in an AU 19th century Europe, Compline is a gothic reimagining of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin".

The book's very own gallery page is over yonder, and for a list of online stores, go here to the Books2Read page. The book is priced at 99 cents for the e-book and $9.00 USD for the print copy.

 

---

 

And secondly, here we have July's Backlist Bonanza titles:

DESMOND AND GARRICK

Book 1: It's 1815. Garrick Mortimer is a starving genius, who agrees to sign on as tutor to Desmond Hathaway, the youngest son of a vampire family living in Yorkshire. When Desmond's older brother returns from Italy for a visit and brings with him a small group of talentless poets, life in Dryden Abbey turns upside-down, mainly when Desmond meets Leigh Blaise Sherbourne, a sullen vampire poet.

Book 2: As the poets continue their campaign of destruction in Dryden Abbey, Garrick struggles in the classroom, with distracted pupils eroding all of his hard work. And an unexpected love triangle further complicates things for Desmond. Through all these, Garrick and Desmond will realize that the chasm separating them as distinct species will forge a stronger bond of friendship than they expected.

GOLD IN THE CLOUDS 

After his fifteenth birthday, Blythe Midwinter finds himself in a bit of a pickle. It's high time for him to be a productive member of his family, taking up work he detests in order for his older sister, Molly, to follow her dreams of success as a talented baker. Though the three orphaned Midwinter siblings -- Molly, Bertie, and Blythe -- are lucky enough to work, they still earn only enough to keep themselves clothed and fed. Blythe desperately wishes for more, and it doesn't help that his best and only friend, Jack Wicket, refuses hard, honest work in favor of good luck as the only means for quick success and instant riches.

Blythe's dreams of a better life get more desperate when he attracts the attention of another boy, the youngest son of a rebellious old artist, whose family rises well above Blythe's in wealth and station. Embarrassment and shame muddle Blythe's perceptions of luck, work, and the promise of love -- that is, until Jack Wicket's foolish decision to exchange his beloved cow for a handful of magic beans forces Blythe to look past castles in the clouds and understand what it is that truly measures a man's worth.

Both of these books are 50% off in e-book format throughout the month. Click the book title links to get your copies. I'll be posting some fun behind-the-scenes stuff for each book in the coming weeks. 

'Eidolon' Being No More

I do think writers should go back and reread their books after some distance of time. I recently did that with A Castle for Rowena and found I'm extremely proud of that book (despite spotting a handful of surface errors that escaped me during edits). On the other hand, I've also reread Eidolon and was immediately reminded of my difficulties writing that book, and things pretty much escalated from there.

You see, I had high hopes initially for my Curiosities collection because the idea of desperate wishes being made on cursed objects sounded really promising, and I was swimming in inspiration when I worked on Dollhouse. Then the well started to dry up when I got around to writing Automata until I had nothing left to work with afterwards. 

I was foolish enough to purchase the cover image for Eidolon and even putting together cover art for it BEFORE any work could be done on it. So I basically trapped myself into a situation where I felt obligated to write for that book cover, and the story ended up suffering through the most number of false starts of any book I've written since 2008. Eventually I shelved the document and grieved over the fate of Curiosities until some time later when the nugget of an idea tried to push its way out, and I grabbed hold of it in desperation. 

And so there it went, another revamping of the document, and I thought I finally had it worked out. The story got written, but over the course of it, I eventually realized it was a mistake to resurrect a plot that wasn't working out. But I stuck to it because pride was on the line, and I also didn't want to leave the collection barely populated with only two books. 

In essence, I forced it. Then I finished it and barely gave the file the attention it really needed during revisions and edits. By the time it was published, I didn't have much confidence in it but was still pretty deluded enough to leave it be and not acknowledge the mistake of forcing it into existence. 

It was a story that didn't want to see the light of day, judging from the number of times I had to start over. It certainly fought me all the way to the end five chapters in. But I didn't care as long as I had something to add to the collection. So when I cracked the e-book open and reread it, I was embarrassed by all those errors in logic (and mechanics) that I allowed to slide out of exhaustion from dealing with the book. 

And I've had enough distance of time to be ruthless about my own work, and this will be a book I'm not hesitating to delist in both print and digital formats. It's also getting deleted from my backlist via Draft2Digital. 

It's inevitable in any creative venture that you'll end up with one or two duds (rude, I know, but I'm blunt that way when it comes to my own work), and this is a sore lesson I need to learn. It's okay to throw in the towel at any point if something isn't working. Don't force it. Don't overthink it into existence. Don't come up with flimsy justifications for it. And if a collection only has two good books, leave it be.  

Maybe -- just maybe -- down the line I might be able to reuse the first five chapters for a completely different story for the Grotesqueries collection, but I know better than to hold on to that thought. It's a shame, though, that things didn't work out the way I wanted, but it's all for the best, and I'm not just saying that to make myself feel better. I've already moved on. 

'Children of Hyacinth' and a Fictional Rivalry

The fictionalized rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, when expanded and made all the more tragic in a play inspired by another play, can hit pretty damn close to home for many creatives. It's the idea of being talented and working one's ass off to reach the pinnacle of art, only to discover another who's a true genius and who seems to breeze through their work and have their stuff celebrated and honored. Everyone else sinks in the shadows in spite of their talent and their hard work, and over time, their reputation and their work fade. 

It sucks. 

So Children of Hyacinth was inspired by that idea, and the Salieri-like figure in the book is more of a twisted version of the character in the play. Well, it's my take on the character, that is, and it allowed me to really lose myself in themes that matter to me. Like the nature of talent, the commodification of dreams, the abuse of innocents whose trust is manipulated for someone's ambition. 

The link between talent and the soul is also something the book explores, in addition to the value of fame and immortality through one's work. The juxtaposition between wealth and fame in Iulian's half of the story and obscurity and poverty in Cosmin's highlights that theme -- along with the fate of those missing prodigies. 

The musical pieces that Iulian plays on his violin are descriptions of actual classical compositions for that instrument, and I had to listen to specific pieces repeatedly in order to find the words for them. The finale of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, for instance, is an example, and I kept rewatching Anne Akiko Meyers' performance for not only the music, but also the violinist's movements. Cosmin's music led me to look into earlier operas or operettas (18th century or earlier), which were a bit out of my comfort zone.  

And as a bonus detail: I used the younger Joshua Bell as inspiration for my physical description of Iulian. I felt Bell's look perfectly fit what I wanted to use in the book though I didn't have anything as specific as this for Cosmin. 

Children of Hyacinth is one of the two books featured in this month's Backlist Bonanza and is 50% off online sites.  

'Automata' and Creepy... Automata

I read E.T.A. Hoffmann's collection of short fiction ages ago, and "The Sandman" ranks way up there on my list of dark fantasy / gothic fantasy short fiction (second only to "Rappaccini's Daughter", another short story that's set the fire under the muse's feet a few times through the years). The idea of a mannequin coming to life and fooling people was an itch I couldn't ignore and ended up scratching it until Automata came out of it. 

Okay, granted a magically infused doll fooling people into thinking it's a real woman is a bit of a stretch, but that's a damn good prompt for a story. 

And Venice is back to being the ideal location for a darkly magical story -- I actually refer to it as something like folktale horror -- and in the Curiosities universe, it's still a city on the water with canals and palazzos and extravagant ballrooms while guarded by special supernatural protector knights (in a manner of speaking). The guardians in this book are the Maschere ("masks" in English), and they're dressed in all black with white masks -- the traditional Venetian costume of the bauto and the tabarro, and they stand well over six feet tall. 

They also hunt supernatural threats in their own way.

The automata are all part of a collection of inventions by a noblewoman. One of them goes rogue and comes after Alexej once he takes that fatal step of wishing for love after suffering humiliation in his efforts at forging connections with possible partners.  

Loneliness and the threat of death from a weak constitution and a lifelong dependence on medication make him vulnerable to making cursed wishes, which is the overarching theme in all three books I wrote for the Curiosities collection. Alexej and his adoptive family first made their appearance in Dollhouse, the book that debuts the not-quite-series, hence the book's opening referencing the fate of Alexej's best (and only) friend, Arthur. You don't need to read Dollhouse, though, to enjoy Automata as each book in the collection was written to stand alone despite events all taking place in the same universe. 

Automata is part of this month's Backlist Bonanza special, and it's on sale for 50% from online bookstores.  

'Compline' Gallery Page Now Up

Like the post title says. The gallery page for Compline is finally up and running, and it's actually a more serious page than the ones before it. All right, call it a very earnest page.There aren't any music videos included, alas alack, but I do get into enough detail about what I took from the original folktale and how it was worked into my version of it.

It was really tempting to reveal way more about the book, but I managed to hold back. You'll just have to wait till the book comes out on July 1 to see what it's all about. :D

Anyway, you can go here for the main gallery page, where pages to other books are also linked, and you can check them all out.  

In other news, I did flirt a little with the idea of possibly diving into gothic horror zines as a future project, but there are too many restrictions I'm already facing (time and physical space being the primary ones), so I'll settle for being a happy supporter of zines I can get my hands on. I've already purchased a couple from Etsy, and I love them -- especially the whole DIY nature of these booklets. Democracy in publishing, yeah!

As for me, looking into the future (past 2026, I mean), I am going to continue writing and publishing the stories I'm known for. 

The difference between now and the future is the output, i.e., the calendar will be reduced from three books to two per year. For good reason, y'all. While I'm easing my way to retirement from writing and publishing (not any time soon, judging from my recent time spent in introspection and the resurgent inspiration and determination that came from it), I'll just be balancing my time and will be engaging in more relaxed activities for myself away from the computer. 

I did say I'm one of the growing numbers who're moving back to analog -- as a Gen Xer, I'm more than comfortable with that as it was the world I was born into, and if I could, I'd ditch my phone and just limit online stuff to my desktop. But I need it for work. Anyway, I'm looking more and more into activities I can do in solitude that will help me find balance again (not to mention enjoy life like I did in my younger years). 

As a fun aside, I'm hoping to pick up my crochet hooks again and this time actually complete a sweater project.