It’s a beautiful, sparkly December morning here in Vermont today, 26 degrees with a pretty powdering of new snow, and I’m live on LJ talking about “The Dragon and the Mistletoe!”
Here’s my view outside this very minute:
Live on LJ
Sad
Today, my dragons are mourning Anne McCaffery.
Gobble, Gobble
It’s Winter!
Yesterday, we had the first skim of ice on our pond that lasted all day.
This morning, we woke to several inches of snow.
This created a blizzard of Black-capped Chickadees around my feeders. Don’t you love the tail shot? And peeking in on the right hand edge is a Tufted Titmouse. They’re a bit shy.
I’m really glad I don’t have to go anywhere today. I’d love snow, if it wasn’t for having to drive in it. I am a TOTAL WIMP when it comes to winter driving, and I live on a road that is a nightmare to get up and down. But on days like today when I get to photograph it, watch it come down while I write, and do some holiday cooking in peace with gentle music playing, yeah, I’m okay with snow.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Shifting Steam in Print
I received my copy of Shifting Steam in the mail today. There’s something very cool about having a story in a print book and seeing my name on the back cover. That, and the check I got in the mail yesterday, made me think about how far I’ve come in a year and a half, from when The Glass Man was first accepted to now. It’s been an amazing experience for someone who has dreamed of being published for so long — thrilling and terrifying both. I’ve certainly done my share of laughing and crying. But really the best thing has been support and pride I’ve gotten from my friends and family who’ve been there while I’ve been laughing and crying. And the new friends I’ve made are a real gift. They have all truly kept me sane.
Well, as sane as I’ll ever be.
I have all next week off from school! And that means writing, writing, writing…
Notice — the Sequel!
Yes!
It’s official! “The Dragon and the Mistletoe” will be out December 7, 2011. Okay, it’s not another novel. It’s a short story. A long one, though.
Yes!
It’s about Varian and Josh.
Now he’s Sir Adrian Varian Kendall, lord of knights as well as of dragons, and he’s facing the greatest challenge he’s ever faced in his life: what to get Josh for their first real Christmas together?
His solution is…uniquely Varian’s.
And it’s got dancing (yes, Varian dancing!) and flying and romance and candlelight and Josh being, well, Josh.
Aww, I’m so excited!
And will there be more additions to the saga?
Maybe. Perhaps. *Shrugging with a little smile*
Okay, now I have to get back to my edits or it won’t be coming out. Deadline looming large.
Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About my Septic System
First the furnace a few weeks ago, then last night the septic system. I was in bed about midnight, sound asleep, when I heard my husband yell at our oldest daughter, “Get out of the shower!” She’d just come home from college for the weekend (which means laundry and a long hot shower, first thing.) Well, the water from both was all spraying all over the cellar. I knew the tank didn’t need pumping, so that meant another plug like the one I unplugged myself last summer. So, lying in bed after my husband and daughter had cleaned up the mess, I realized that if I didn’t go out there right then and see what was going on, by the time I got home from school, it was going to be too late in the day to call anybody, and that would mean all weekend without being able to flush. Or shower. And since I have distant mermaid ancestry, if I don’t get a shower every morning, well, it’s really not going to be a good day.
So at two in the morning, I went outside and dug up the tank. (Hey, I’m a rugged lady. I write fiction. I work with high school kids. I can dig up a septic tank by flashlight!) I found the little square cover on my first try. (I’m also a dowser, so no surprise there. I don’t know how it works, but it’s an awfully handy talent for this kind of thing.) I pried the lid up. Sure enough, the old iron pipe was well plugged again. Holding the light in one hand and a long stick in the other, I spent ten minutes of real unpleasantness getting absolutely no results.
So, sputtering, I went back to bed and lay there until the alarm went off at 5:30. Shower time. A couple weeks ago, I had several days of icy cold ones. Today I had a warm one, but I had to keep turning the water off between each soaping cycle, so to speak. And in a cold house, that got chilly fast. Urg.
We called our favorite septic people (I went to high school with the owners) and a nice guy showed up ten minutes ago and unplugged us.The system is working fine, just too much paper going down. Ah, teenage daughters. Oh, well, it could have been the leach field. And now I’m happily doing laundry and looking forward to a long, hot shower to make up for this morning.
But you know, it was kind of nice being outside at two o’clock in the morning in late fall all by myself. Orion was beautiful and sparkly, it was perfectly quiet, and no Bigfoot lurked anywhere. Heck, if he’d come by, I’d have handed him the shovel.
My Morning Nightmare
All right, so I’ve always been a little freaked out by Bigfoot.
It started when I was a kid and saw one of those quasi-documentaries about mystery creatures. I was mainly watching it because it had a segment about Vermont’s own lake monster, Champ, for whom I’ve watched diligently for years. But for some reason, the footage of Bigfoot really chilled me. Bigfoot doesn’t live in lakes. He lives forests, and so do I. And that was enough to give me nightmares of a fleeting black shape in the twilight, especially at the far edges of headlight beams, triggered, I’m sure, by a segment in the film about a man who spent a terrifying night trapped alone in his car while Bigfoot prowled outside.
Now, I haven’t really worried about Bigfoot a lot lately, I have to admit. But yesterday at school, a student showed me some new video footage of that old, familiar, dark, menacing shape. I was real cool about it, and went home and made sure my doors were locked and that all the cats were in. And nothing happened. No otherworldly sounds in the night, no sense of being watched, no glimpses of anything at the edge of the light.
Until this morning.
I leave for school about 6:30, and this time of year, it’s dark enough for high beams. I headed down my narrow dirt road in my trusty little car, dodging potholes, wondering what the kids had in store for me today, and trying to find my phone in all my various pockets. It wasn’t there. I was getting a vulnerable feeling just as I came to the bend, which is sharp, left-handed, and slopes downhill. And as my headlights swung around and lit up the darkness, I saw it.
A black, shadowy shape, hunched over, running across the road on two legs right in front of me.
I slammed on my brakes.
The shape came to a halt, turned, and looked at me. I could see its eyes, bright spots in the shadow. Yes, I screamed.
It was frozen, unmoving.
I stared at it in terror.
It still didn’t move.
And then I realized that the shadowy creature really looked an awful lot like a shadow. The shadow of the one tree limb over hanging the road just ahead of me that still, for some reason, had leaves. A shadow cast by my high beams. I eased off my brakes, my car rolled forward, and the creature slowly made its way off to the side of the road, its bright eyes fading as my headlights moved off two glistening pebbles.
Heart pounding, my throat burning from my scream, I drove on down the road. And I don’t care whether it was a shadow or not — you could not have paid me enough to get out of my car until I was safely in the school parking lot. And then I dashed inside, safe in a crowd of students who would be much more tender and juicy mouthfuls than me.
Happy Halloween a day late, everyone!
Shifting Steam
The Blurb:
Steampunk and shifters? Do they even go together? Of course they do. Steampunk is all about the possible, the magical and the otherworldly. Shapeshifters are all about bending the idea of humanity into new shapes. Combine them, and you get Shifting Steam.
The stories in Shifting Steam pave the way for a magical journey through space and time to alternate realities, where anything is possible. From dragons to birds, from Victorian era expositions to secret laboratories, these stories explore what happens when man meets beast in a world of airship captains and fantastic creatures. Whether it’s a Jekyll and Hyde style beast, a wolfman who would rather not be a wolf, or a man who wishes he could fly, every kind of creature gets its day in the steampunk sun. Step into the world of Shifting Steam and let it transport you to a sexy, fantastical new universe.
Shifting Steam features stories from authors Missouri Dalton, Ekaterina Morris, Rowan McBride, Lydia Nyx, M Raiya, Lynn Townsend and Emory Vargas
So guess who wrote one about dragons? Yes, that would be me.
No, it’s not about Varian and Josh. It’s about my other dragon pair, Justin and Wells. They first appeared about a year ago in my story “The Dragon and His Knight” in the Mine Anthology. But yes,”Origin” takes place in the same dragon universe that Notice does. The premise is that during the Dark Ages, some dragons learned to take human shape to survive the havoc that knights were inflicting on them. Roughly a thousand years later, their descendants are trying to live double lives and evade modern knights who know their secret. Varian Kendall in Notice is one of these modern dragons.
Justin, however, is a REAL dragon, though Varian would kill me for saying it. Justin is one of the original dragons to take human form. He is immortal (or at least, as a friend of mine pointed out, he hasn’t died yet). His way of surviving in the human world was to capture a human prisoner to use as a guide. He chose to ensnare a young knight named Wells. The system worked far better than he’d hoped, and he and Wells become partners in every sense of the word. After a thousand years, they truly are everything to each other.
We meet Justin and Wells at, of all places, the University of New Hampshire, which is where I did graduate work. (Yes, I have a Master’s Degree in English. You may all bow and applaud. No, seriously, it a breezy three semesters of reading and writing. The only thing that scared me was the public reading at the end. Picture me behind a microphone on stage in a huge auditorium packed with underclassmen who were required to be there, and reading one of my short stories. It’s one of those moments that if you can survive, you can get through just about anything later in life. My best memory of UNH is of the bagel cart outside Ham Smith, which Wells visits. And I wonder sometimes what my esteemed professors would think if they read some of the things I’ve published…)
Anyway, you’ll have to read “The Dragon and his Knight” to find out what happens when a lady knight surprises Justin and Wells while sitting in the auditorium where I did my reading. Both their mortality and their love are deeply tested.
Now, “Origin” is a kind of prequel, set in the late 1800’s in Liverpool, England. Justin and Wells are a kind of dragon police squad. When another dragon begins to misbehave in daylight over the bustling wharves, they investigate and find out there’s a whole lot more going on in Liverpool than a renegade dragon having some fun. The story also explains what planted the seed in their minds to cross the Atlantic and leave their native land.
Fans of Varian and Josh, don’t despair — I have a few more things planned for them. Perhaps even a story that brings all four of my dragonish heroes together. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from “Origin:”
“Good sirs!” A woman slipped out from a doorway into Justin’s path, forcing him to stop. From her scarlet gown with plunging neckline to her carefully groomed hair and sultry eyes, and from the dim lights and heady perfume drifting from the room behind her, Wells knew that she must be one of the “fallen women” as they were called now.
“This way, and all your needs shall be fulfilled,” she said, beckoning.
Wells seriously doubted it, but she didn’t know she was wasting her time as she slipped a well-manicured finger through Justin’s collar. In the mood Justin was in, Wells knew she had no idea of her danger.
“Madam,” Wells said, striding forward swiftly.
But he needn’t have feared. Smoky air and hunger might shorten Justin’s normally short temper, but his sense of honor wasn’t touched. As Justin gently removed her finger, Wells had to smile. In some ways, the dragon was more of a knight than Wells. Justin — tall and dark-haired and dark-eyed — knew how attractive he was to the opposite sex, and to the same sex, for that matter. Justin couldn’t help himself. It was the dragon just below the surface, in his eyes, in the lithe way he moved, in the cadence of his voice, which hinted of wildness and freedom and clean air. Wells would do anything to keep that dragon safe.
“I beg your indulgence another moment,” she said. “If this might perhaps be more to the liking of you good sirs?” From behind her in the doorway, she pulled forward a boy. He looked about eleven, thin, fair-haired and with wide, bright blue eyes, and he wore a white shirt open to the waist over dark trousers. His expression was terrified as Justin and Wells stared.
The woman dug her fingers into his arm. “Avery,” she hissed. “Your manners!”
“If it please you,” the boy stammered out, “I mean — I will — please you?” He flushed bright red and sent a desperate look into the woman’s face.
“Fortunately, he will not need words to serve you,” she said, giving the boy’s arm a sharp twist. He dropped, or collapsed, to his knees before them.
God Almighty, Wells thought, his knightly compassion for the weak stirring. What was humanity coming to? He was still human himself, though deeply changed by his relationship with Justin, but he felt the distance more each time he and Justin left their solitude.
When the Lights Go Out
Why is it so magical when the electricity goes out? I know it can be a major life disruption and create dangerous situations. But last night our power went off for two hours in the evening, and I sat in the candlelight sipping red wine, watching my daughter do homework and my husband reading in the tentative light, and everything had a quiet peacefulness that is so lacking most of the time. I could not check emails or even work on my new project, and it was all guilt-free. Nothing to do but sip wine and watch the candles flicker. Even the house rested around us. We could see stars through the windows.
It was nice.