Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Spot the Handwavium Contest: Heart of the Volcano, out today.

See all those pretty covers on the front page of the Samhain site. And, ooh, look, for the first time one of them belongs to me!

Can we take a moment to worship Scott Carpenter, god of cover art?

I started writing Heart of the Volcano in late 2008. I’d won the Romantic Novelists’ Association Elizabeth Goudge Award with the first chapter of an as-yet-unwritten faery book, A Stolen Cloak of Feathers, and I was determinedly trying to write the rest of it. It stalled horribly at 37,000 words (I know, ugh) and I shoved it aside and decided to write something short, fun and shapeshifty instead.

Heart of the Volcano wasn’t quite as easy to write as I’d intended it to be. I had to ask people some actual science questions, which is always alarming (research, seriously?). But I worked it out in the end, and sent it off to my then-boss, Angie James. Who, in a spirit of pure evil, didn’t send me a formal acceptance letter, but just marked it as “accepted” on the submissions-tracking spreadsheet (which I manage) and left me to find it. At which point I may have screamed a little.

And now here it is, fresh and shiny and for sale today!

Caught between love and duty, can she make an impossible choice?

Five years ago, Aera was called away from everything she had ever known: her home, family, and Coram, the boy she was growing to love. She was given no choice. As the only living lava-shifter—able to transform her body into molten rock—she is destined to serve the volcano god as his fire priestess. Now, before she takes her ordained role, she must face her final test. Execute a criminal sentenced to death for the most unforgivable of all sins. Blasphemy.

She’s shocked to discover it’s no anonymous law-breaker waiting chained at the center of the labyrinth. It’s Coram. For the crime of being a gargoyle, a winged stone-shifter. A gift akin to hers…except his gift is unsanctioned by the temple, his powers proclaimed unholy.

If she refuses the test she will betray her god and condemn her family to dishonor. To pass it she must kill the boy she used to love…the man she still does.

Warning: Contains violence, tears, self-sacrifice, a little bit of I-can’t-bear-to-leave-you-but-I-have-to sex, and a heroine whose touch melts the hero—um, literally.

To read an excerpt click here

And to enter my release-day Spot the Handwavium Contest, email me at imogen AT imogenhowson.com and let me know which thing in the excerpt could have been equally well named “handwavium”. I’ll draw a random winner tomorrow, and send them an e-copy of Heart of the Volcano. Plus, in honour of the chemical dependency that makes me able to write at all, a delicious coffee-and-chocolate package.

The contest is open to anyone anywhere in the world, and the prize will be posted anywhere as well. Unless you live in a country where coffee and chocolate are illegal, I suppose, in which case you can’t have that part of the prize and will have to accept my sincere sympathy instead.

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