Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

The Dreamer Wakes

In lieu of an article today, I decided to write a quick bit of flash fiction for y’all instead. In my usual way, it’s a bit of myth and fairytale all cobbled together. Enjoy!

_*

The sleeper dreamed.

Monsters We Love to Love

No, this isn’t about Grover, the loveable, furry blue monster from Sesame Street.

This is more about the kind of monsters who used to keep you awake at night with the covers pulled up over your head, praying that if they ever did come through your door they somehow wouldn’t see you. Or at least if they did, that they’d kill you quickly.

To Fantasy or Not to Fantasy

Fantasy was one of my first loves in fiction. Long before I read romance or sci-fi, I was a fantasy reader. My definition of fantasy is pretty broad, and in a large sense, encompasses most of what we now call paranormal.

I suppose it comes as no surprise, then, that my favorite things to write are fantasy romances. Dead (or at least Not Quite Dead) heroes, vampire buddies, selkies and curses and werewolves and witches.

I’m delving even further into fantasy romance with my current work in progress and the most difficult and interesting part of it is the world-building. Trying to develop a society, a language, a culture — even a map! — from the ground up is absorbing work. Questions pop up at me with every step my characters take. What’s technology and what’s magic? What’s their word for this thing or that? Should I make one up or use one from a known language? Or should I just say it in English?

So for everyone here who both reads and writes fantasy romance, what helps make a fantasy world work for you? What details do you like to hear about? What’s the line on too much world-building?

Carolina Wolf is out today!

There are no wolves in South Carolina.

But no one ever said anything about werewolves…

Librarian Debra Henry is boring. And she’s okay with that. Really. It’s not as if the teensy amount of witchcraft that flows in her veins is worth getting excited about. Yet someone—or something—thinks it’s worth crawling out of the swamps to attack her. Those “somethings” are werewolves.

When one of them is hurt saving her, the least she can do is take him home and patch him up. Healing him stirs more than her senses. Maddox Moreau awakens the magic that sleeps in her blood. And suddenly, life’s not quite so boring.

A wildlife manager at Congaree National Park by day, Maddox likes being the BWIS—Big Wolf In the Swamp. By night, he lets his wild side out to play lone wolf. At least until he meets the one woman who can share his soul. Perhaps it’s best, though, if he holds off on sharing his preference for raw meat.

Rescuing her seals his fate—but only if he can protect her from a rogue of his kind. A werewolf with a nasty stalker streak…

Warning: This story contains hunky werewolves, librarian fetishes, Southern humor, smart-ass women and men who think that’s sexy, magic, medieval legends, disco music and flatulent Boxers. (The dogs, not the underwear.)

Read an excerpt from CAROLINA WOLF here!

And for more about where this story came from…

Looking ahead

Christmas is over. Thank goodness.

That probably sounds pretty heartless of me, but to be honest, Christmas is just stress upon stress. My routine becomes frantic cleaning between moments of Armageddon. Presents mean giftwrap scattered so far and wide that I’ll still be finding bits of it in March.

Speaking off all the detritus, Christmas throws off the trash pick-up schedule, which means I have to hang on to all the garbage for an extra couple of days, then I forget when they pick up, so I have to keep it all for another week by which time, there’s no room left in the bin for the remainders of the leftovers from the holiday dinner. And holiday dinners? buurrp I ran out of Pepto at the end of November.

I am so over Christmas, but New Years is totally my time.

Overnetworking

I recently blogged about a flood of e-mails I receive from a Yahoo group to which I belong. Switching it to Web Only didn’t work, but I think I finally worked it around so I’m only getting Special Notices.

Yes, it did take me several months to a) finally get around to doing this and b) figure it out. There’s a reason I’m not an IT kind of person.

But as it dawned on my how annoying this flood was, I started to look around at all the e-mails that I get. Very few individuals actually e-mail me, but I receive, not counting this particular group, well over 40 e-mails a day from various legitimate entities and groups.

Car Lust

I’m on the verge of something new, something bold. A ground-breaking new sub-genre of romance. Performance car porn. Where the story’s not about the sex you have IN the car, but about the car itself.

I’m going to posit that you haven’t truly lived until you’ve driven a car that prompted a mini-orgasm purely by the force of the sensual cushion of leather on the seat, the slide of the steering wheel under your fingers, the roar of the engine surrounding you, the vibrations of the mother road humming through you as you push the pedal to the floor in a car built by angels on earth: German engineers.

Heart of the Sea

I’m thrilled (thrilled, I tell you!) to be part of the Love & Lore anthology — my first print release with Samhain!

Here’s a little “behind the scenes” look at how Love & Lore came into being:

Back in January, Samhain sent out a call for submission to their anniversary anthology with a Celtic theme.

I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. I had another project in the works and didn’t think I had any ideas that would fit. Well, the other project foundered and I was frustrated, looking for a new story to work with. I found the anniversary project call again and trolled through my idea file. I had about two pages of an intro that featured Selkies, but it had never really gone anywhere.

Bang. I was off and running. In a month, I finished the 16K word short story — only a thousand words over the required word count. I thought I was pushing it a little, but I knew if it was accepted, I had plenty of room to move during edits.

Carolan, Gia and I were the only ones who submitted! But we all submitted shorts, as per the original word count requirement. Angela James, the editor of this anthology, gave us a choice. We could either leave the stories as they were and release them as e-books only, or we could lengthen them all to make the required word count for a print release.

Guess which option we chose?

We all jumped at the chance and soon we had our novellas ready to join the Love & Lore anthology. And now here we are!

One more tidbit before I go.

Make Mine Myth

I love myths. Fairy tales and folklore fuel my imagination.

I love mythology so much, I blog about it every other Friday at Beyond the Veil. I’ve covered Norse, Egyptian, Basque, Slavic and Irish, to name a few and I’ve barely scratched the surface of these fascinating cultures.

The question I’m addressing today is: What is it about tales that are thousands of years old that continue to resonate with us even now?

Have Coffee Will Write

Ah, caffeine. The lifeblood of writers since coffee became coffee.

As nice as it is to curl up with a book and a cup of tea on a rainy day, when it’s time to write, there’s nothing that gets the blood pumping and synapses firing like a good cuppa joe.