Y’all will have seen the post I put up yesterday for Cindy Lynn Speer (and if you haven’t, you should check it out).
Now, here’s the master post for all the summer-themed posts for this month’s blog tour! Y’all go check ’em out and see what my fellow Drollerie authors have to say on the topic of summer.
Folks, it’s that time of the month again: the Drollerie Press Blog Tour! This time around our topic is summer, and I’m hosting Cindy Lynn Speer, the author of The Chocolatier’s Wife and other works. Y’all say hi! Cindy has the following to say about her post:
I am working on a new book, so Minerva Corvae, one of my main characters, wants to take over today’s blog post.
She’s a summer girl. And now I shall tell you why…and try to explain why I’m now a summer girl, too.
Enjoy!
Folks, I have decided to hold a companion contest to go along with the poll to name my iPhone! This one will be for everybody who did NOT get a name into the poll. However, what makes it a companion contest is that I want to see supporters for various names campaign for their favorites!
The original poll post is here. Check that out for the full list of names as well as the current voting results!
Rules as follows:
So get cracking, people, campaign season is ON!
* Good fandoms to invoke: Great Big Sea, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Elfquest, Pern, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Star Wars, Star Trek (TOS), Temeraire, Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, zombies!
I think probably all of y’all who will be voting on it have already done so, but just in case there are any of you who haven’t voted yet, the poll to name my iPhone is still open and will be running until the 27th.
Those of you who have names in the running, be sure you yourselves have voted! And feel free to put forth shameless campaigning in the comments to sway any last minute deciders. Be creative. I may well be tempted to give a consolation prize to the most creative campaign attempt!
So as of Friday I started slowly poking away at the new story I’ve been asked by my editor to write: the Civil War one set in the Faerie Blood universe. Only a tiny pittance of words so far, but it’s a start, and I have a soft deadline of August 10th and a hard deadline of August 30th to shoot for.
I do at least have the rough sketch of the plot worked out, so hopefully this should just be a question of whipping through the words. (She said, being long out of the habit of actually producing regular new words, and seriously needing to get back into it… so here’s hoping this thing will get me back in gear.)
The story is tentatively titled “The Blood of the Land”, which ties into the whole Warder thing with making blood ties to the land they’re protecting. And it’s a tie that can be broken or tainted, which is something I didn’t get into in Faerie Blood. This promises to be a darker and spookier story. I’m going to have fun with it.
Written Friday night: 90
Written today: 79
The Blood of the Land total: 169
After chugging through Phaedra Weldon’s Wraith, I was definitely in the mood to go right back to good ol’ Tanya Huff, so I went for Smoke and Mirrors, Book 2 of her Tony Foster series.
And really, Tanya Huff just continues to solidly entertain. It’s less rare than it used to be to have an urban fantasy series with a male protagonist, but it’s still very, very rare to have an urban fantasy series with a queer protagonist. So just being able to read one is cool.
It helps of course that the Tony Fosters are entertaining reads as well. This installment follows up some months in time to the events of Book 1, when the TV production Tony works for goes to an allegedly haunted house to shoot an episode on location–and, surprise surprise, the house is of course actually haunted. Huff delivers some decently creepy haunts in the story, and the two young children who are the most significant ghost characters bring a lot to the story. Tony’s secret magical ability also leaks to his coworkers in the progression of events, nicely advancing his arc with that and forcing him to start taking more charge of his gifts.
I won’t say much about the progression of Tony’s love life as I would run into the territory of spoilers, but I was at least simultaneously pleased and disappointed by events on that front herein. Still though it’s a refreshing change of pace to see a relationship cease between a previous book and a subsequent one, and yet have the involved parties remain on good terms. More situations like this, please! Let us cut down on the angst.
I will of course be reading Book 3, which is already on my To Read shelf. For this one, four stars.
Any book with a blurb on it that name checks Tanya Huff and the Vicky Nelson series is a book that’s going to get my immediate attention. And after reading the summary on the back cover of Phaedra Weldon’s Wraith, I was quite prepared to give this one a shot.
Turned out to be a solid read overall: Zoe Martinique is a young woman who’s developed the ability to have her spirit go out of her body. That this is the result of the traumatic experience of being raped when she was younger is handled with a surprising amount of deftness; a darker book might have lingered on that, but one of the things I appreciated about this is that Zoe was presented in a position of strength dealing with the experience. I’ve read novels wherein the heroine was raped and wherein, quite justifiably, she was shattered by the experience–but in this case, while it was certainly traumatic for Zoe, it was more of a case of being a defining moment in her life where she first developed some magnificent ability to deal.
She’s since learned to take advantage of her ability by hiring herself out to use her ability for private investigation, and the story starts off with a bang when she astral-projects herself right into witnessing a murder. When she tries to learn more about what happened, she starts learning very quickly about layers of the supernatural world she knows nothing about (not surprising in Book 1 of a series), and gets disturbing hints about where her ability may have come from (her mother is a witch and there are Mysterious Hints about her long-vanished father).
Other plusses in this story are that the obligatory Handsome Cop Love Interest this time around was described in such a way that I instantly thought “David Tennant with a Southern accent and blue eyes”. This was a plus. It helped as well that the actual character, Daniel Frasier, is likable, and the chemistry he has going with Zoe seems lively without going over the top like so many urban fantasies and paranormal romances do these days.
About the only weird note for me was that as a narrator, Zoe was often very chattery and a little scatterbrained, which I found distracting at first. On the other hand, as the story progressed and the situation got darker, her narration actually was a bit of a welcome contrast. Towards the end, it helped ground the story with a bit of reality for me, in a way that going over the top with the darkity darkness would not have done.
Definitely looking forward to reading Book 2. Four stars.
ETA 7/16/09 12:16pm: Adding new text and splitting the second paragraph into two to amend some deeply stupid wording on my part! Thanks to for calling that out.