L.J. McDonald - Fantasy Author

O is for Outrage

2012-01-31T08:02:00.000-05:00

The two baby sylphs lay in Autumn’s arms, peeping happily while the healer gently fed them wisps of Solie’s energy, edible to them now that they’d been brought into the hive.

“They’re so cute!” Solie squealed, overcome by the adorableness of the two while a half dozen other women crowded them and cooed. “How did they get here?”

“Through the gate,” Autumn said. “I dread to think what much have happened to their home hive to let them wander around on their own.”

“But how is it no one noticed them?”

Autumn smiled down at the two, who burbled at her. “Baby sylphs don’t have much of an aura. They’re easy to overlook. We keep them in nurseries inside the hive until they’re much older, to keep them out of trouble.”

“Well, they’re safe now,” Solie smiled. She’d make sure of it. They’d have to be very careful indeed picking masters for these two.

That thought reminded her of something. “How did they even manage to be in this world without masters?”

Autumn looked at her evenly. “Because they hadn’t tried to take any of the energy of this world in, so they weren’t really part of it. If they’d eaten anything, they would have been poisoned and rejected back into their own world. They’re lucky they’re picky eaters.”

Solie smiled and bent over the two. “You’re so clever! Yes, you are! Yes, you are!” The two babies squealed in happiness and she wriggled her nose at them and turned to regard two battle sylphs cowering against each other nearby, both of them covered in dirt and pie filling.

“I can’t believe you were going to kill them!” she snapped. “Thank the stars that Casi was there!” Casi smirked and Blue and Dillon cowered some more.

The Widow reached down to stroke a gnarled finger along the edge of the two’s bodies, her expression soft. “It’s amazing how much they managed to steal.”

Autumn looked down at the two, communicating with them. “It wasn’t them,” she said at last. “A battle sylph came with them. He’s the one who’s been trying to steal food for them.”

Mace had been standing nearby. At Autumn’s words, the big battler stiffened.

Battlers! he sent along the hive line. There is a foreign battle sylph invading our hive!

Roars started up around the Valley, battle sylphs rising in the air to hunt and kill their enemy. Autumn looked at Mace, one eyebrow raised.

“He’s from the same hatching as them,” she said. “Are you seriously going to raise the entire flight to track down and kill a baby less than a day old?”

Mace looked at her and at the other women, all of them glaring at him with thunderous outrage.

Battlers! he sent. Never mind.

Quick notice

2012-01-30T21:35:00.002-05:00

O will come tomorrow. It's been a long day. Sorry.

N is for Nag

2012-01-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

(Oy, it was hard to find a word that fit with today. Bleck. I really should focus on something other than baby battler and his sisters, but I'm afraid that someone will hit me if i don't finish his story. :p

Baby B isn't in this. However, his presence has been noticed at last.)

Blue walked desultorily down the road away from his master’s cottage, his hands shoved into the pockets of his pie-stained uniform. Sympathetic to his mission, his friend Dillon slouched beside him, looking more normal than usual, except for the collection of tails.

“Casi threw the pie at you, didn’t she?” Dillon asked.

Blue sighed. “It’s not my fault. She said ‘bring me my pies.’ Well, I found one of them right away, but was she happy? No.”

“Ah.” Dillon thought about Blue’s master. Given her temperament, he was just as glad that Moreena was his master. She was far more likely to cry than yell. He preferred the crying. Well, not really. There just seemed to be more hugging and less throwing involved with Moreena. “At least you were able to bring it back to her.”

“Yeah, but she wanted it in one piece. With less dirt.”

“Kind of picky, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Blue sighed. He should have known better, he supposed. He loved his Casi, but she was such a nag about some things. “I have to find the other pie. She said she wouldn’t sleep with me if I didn’t.”

Dillon shuddered in sympathetic horror. He couldn’t imagine a fate worse than that. “Maybe someone’s seen it,” he suggested and called along the hive line to his brothers.

Hey, has anyone seen a pie?

What do you need a pie for? came an immediate response.

I don’t need it, Dillon clarified. Blue does. It’s Casi. It was stolen and she threatened not to sleep with him if he didn’t bring it back.

No!

That’s horrible!

I’m sorry to hear that.

I thought you were still cut off from last month.

Blue hunched into himself. No, she forgave me for the sheets.

Really? Even after what happened with the pink dye and the chicken feathers?

Can we get back to the stolen pie? Blue whined. Casi’s nagging me. I really need to find it.

You know, I’m looking for stolen goods too. A basket of yarn.

You too? I’m hunting for some missing toys.

A whole bunch of lefthand socks here.

I’m looking for a cow.

Suddenly, Mace’s voice silenced them all. How many people are looking for stolen items? he demanded.

A chorous of ‘me’ and ‘I am’ and ‘I wanna blow up a thief too!’ sounded. Dillon and Blue looked at each other. “It’s an epidemic.”

“Why would anyone want to steal socks and cows and toys?” Dillon wondered.

“I dunno. Humans are weird.”

Battle sylphs! Mace boomed. We have a thief in the Valley! We will find them and destroy them!

Blue sighed as the cheering echoed. “Well, if it’s not just her, do you think Casi will be less angry?”

“It’s Casi. What do you think?”

“You’re right. I’m screwed.”

“I thought the whole threat was in how you weren’t going to be.”

They started trudging again, following the road as it curved around and away from Casi’s cottage. Blue glanced down at his feet and stopped. There was a pie sized drag mark in the dirt, a faint indentation that led away from the cottage, across the road, and away from the town.

Blue felt hope start to bloom in his chest. “Look! That’s got to be the pie!”

“Why would someone drag it?” Dillon wondered as his friend ran ahead, pumping his arms and jumping for joy as he shouted that he was going to get some. Finally, he shrugged. “Humans are weird,” he agreed and hurried after his friend.

oOo

Together, Blue and Dillon stared at the little patch of meadow that the town fence ran through. It was filled with spare socks, wood, toys, sacks of grain, manure, ladies undergarments, a bone comb, several stunned cats tangled in the yarn, and a cow.

They looked down at the sadly broken remains of what had once been a perfectly baked pie. The cow had stepped on it.

Um, Casi? Blue sent to his master. I found your pie.

oOo

Casi was unimpressed with their success.

“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed at Blue. “It’s a pie! How hard is it to keep someone from stealing a bloody pie?”

Blue kept his head down, shoulders hunched and apologizing profusely to the love of his life. Dillon kept his own mouth shut and stood back against the fence, trying not to attract her attention.

Something tickled at his senses. There was something hidden in the fence that was trying very hard to avoid his notice. Dillon blinked and hunched down, peering in through a crack to see a small gap where two tiny elemental sylphs huddled, staring at him in silent terror. They weren’t of the hive. Dillon snarled and lifted a hand, his palm glowing with destructive energy.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Casi snapped, distracted from her nagging.

“Couple of baby sylphs in here,” Dillon said. “I’m going to kill them.”

If Dillon had thought to ask him first, Blue could have warned him that using such words as ‘baby’ and ‘kill’ in the same context near Casi was a mistake.

M is for Moo

2012-01-28T18:11:00.001-05:00

The ungrateful little bitches still weren’t happy!

Half his tentacles shoved in his mouth and the other half flailing around him, the baby squealed in outrage at his sisters, both tucked in and comfortable in a gap inside a fence post. They squealed back at him, demanding he bring them something they could actually eat.

The baby screamed in absolute fury, beat at the outside of the fence post, and turned, racing away from the fence and, yet again, into that stinking, useless town. He’d destroy it. He’d raze it to the ground, burn it to ash, destroy it and everyone in it! Then he’d nap. Then he’d beat up his sisters.

Tired and hungry and frustrated, the baby went in another direction, ducking around and under things and going unnoticed by anyone other than the odd barking dog and a little girl standing beside her mother with her thumb in her mouth.

She sucked her thumb and stared at him.

He sucked his tentacles and stared at her.

Both their eyes started to cross. Finally, she pulled her thumb out of her mouth and stuck her tongue out at him. Happy with his victory, the baby blew a raspberry at her and continued on his way.

His irregular route took him to a barn. He flitted inside and into the shadows and studied a man seated on a stool and milking a cow. Was that food? The cow chewed contentedly as the man kept milking her while a cat sat nearby, ears up and tail lashing. The baby tensed, ready for more fighting, but the cat ignored him, staring at the man, who pointed a teat at it and squeezed. A squirt of milk leaped out and the cat caught it in its mouth.

Food! Finally, food! He’d take it, he’d bring it to his sisters, he’d get them to shut the hell up for a while, and he’d take a well earned nap. He was ready to attack, but before he could, the man stood and patted the cow’s side before walking out with the bucket. The cat followed him, hoping to get another taste.

Once they were gone, the baby lunged forward and up to the cow, which watched him with a placid expression. Eager, he grabbed one of its teats and yanked as hard as he could.

The cow, naturally, kicked him.

oOo

Bessy was a good cow.

She was always calm and gentle, always gave milk, and didn’t panic when the battle sylphs did strange things that usually seemed to involve mass destruction or sex. Or both. They didn’t pay any attention to her anyway. Not until now.

Bessy was used to being led around, but not like this. Now she walked slowly at the end of her lead, the other end of which was held by a small black cloud with pinpricks of light flickering in it. It had most of its tentacles jammed into its mouth and was grumbling and blowing raspberries as it towed her along, floating a few feet above the ground.

Bessy really wasn’t sure about this. She was used to humans with warm hands, not whatever this was. Still, being out of the barn meant grass, and when she saw a heavy thatch of green on the side of the road, she tossed her head and trotted towards it.

The baby battler shrieked as he was suddenly thrown up in the air and back, the cow dragging him on the ground behind her as she trotted over to the greenery and happily began to eat.

Flat on the ground behind her, the baby still hung onto the tether with one tentacle, the rest jammed into his mouth, and groaned. This really, really wasn’t worth it.

While the cow ate, he took another nap.

L is for Lift

2012-01-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

His sisters were impossible!

He’d brought them food. He had. He’d carried them blades of the green stuff that stuck out of the ground and the hard, splintery stuff that the whatever-they-weres with the two legs cut into pieces, and even the soft brown stuff that the four legged things dropped behind them. But no, none of that was good enough for his stuck up sisters.

Their indignant peeping chasing behind him, the baby battler headed back into the town. He hated this! He should be conquering the world right now! Hungry and frustrated, he shoved a half dozen tentacles into his mouth and sucked on them as he flitted around the cottages and between the slats of various fences. He’d find his sisters food, then he’d beat them to death with it for being annoying, then he’d take a nap, and then he’d take over the world.

His plan fully in mind, he was distracted by something large, black, and familiar appearing in the sky over him, headed rapidly towards the cottage he was approaching. A battle sylph! An enemy!

The baby raced after him, intent upon battle.

oOo

Blue headed eagerly to his master’s cottage. It had been hours since he’d touched her and he could feel Casi’s desire. She lusted desperately for him.

Okay, maybe she didn’t lust desperately for him, but she was filled with desire for his presence.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t filled with desire for him, but it was the lure of her needs that drew him from his duty to be with her.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t filled with desire for him at just this second, but she was never loathe to have a mid afternoon tumble.

Okay, maybe she was loathe, but she’d give in to some heartfelt begging, wouldn’t she? She had to. He hadn’t had sex since before breakfast!

He dove in through the open window of the kitchen, where she’d just set two pies on the windowsill to cool, and shifted shape to human. There he discovered to his delight that she was in fact willing to accept his advances.

Either that or she figured it was the quickest way to get rid of him for a while, but Blue wasn’t picky.

oOo

The baby battler followed Blue to the open window and rose up to peer between the two pies and see Blue and Casi doing something lewd right on top of the kitchen table. It seemed to involve a lot of writhing and moaning.

He had no idea what they were doing.

Well, he couldn’t attack now! Not when the other battler was already involved in combat. He blew a raspberry at them both that went ignored and let his attention drift to the two pies.

Food?

Was it food? It was smelly and hot and just the right size to whack a sister with! Ecstatic, the baby grabbed one of them with his tentacles - minus the ones he kept wedged in his mouth - and lifted it mightily off the windowsill.

He promptly plummeted pie first to the ground below.

A raspberry echoed up. Absorbed in each other, Blue and Casi didn’t notice.

Heavily pie stained, the baby floated back up, flaring his aura and sucking his tentacles. He glared at the second pie and braced himself better as he lifted it up and dropped down again. This time, however, he was ready and didn’t end up embedding himself in the middle of the thing. Blowing a raspberry in triumph, he sucked on his tentacles and started to drag the pie, tin and all, across the ground and back to his ungrateful sisters.

oOo

“That was wonderful,” Blue sighed, staring up at the ceiling.

“Easy for you to say,” Casi grumbled. “You don’t have a splinter in your butt.”

She didn’t sound mad, so Blue didn’t worry. His Casi was a woman of frequent moods after all. He continued to smile at the ceiling as she sat up on the table, grumbling, and looked towards her fresh baked pies.

Her scream nearly put him straight through the ceiling.

“My pies!” she shrieked. “Someone stole my pies!”

“Um,” Blue said, pretty sure this was about to become his fault.

Casi glared at him. “What kind of battle sylph are you? They stole my pies while you were five feet away!”

“I was distracted?”

Her face turned red with fury and then white in horror. He hadn’t realized a human could change colour that fast. “They...gods, what if they saw us? What if they saw me? I’m naked!”

“I’m sure they were overwhelmed by your beauty,” Blue assured her.

It was the wrong thing to say. “Get my pies!” she screamed.

Today

2012-01-26T21:23:00.000-05:00

There won't be any alphabet soup today as I'm too tired to put a good effort into it. It's been a long week. I've had a tire blow out on the highway, misplaced my wallet, and burned myself fumbling a cup of coffee. I am going to bed.

Tomorrow will be L for Lift and it will star everyone's apparently favourite baby battle sylph, who at least is having a worse day than I am. :p

BTW, I have an author account on Goodreads now. How the hell six sylph books got listed there I have no idea. The sixth one isn't even written!

I do desperately want a copy of the foreign language ones, even if the covers make no sense to me.

K is for Killer

2012-01-25T18:10:00.000-05:00

I didn't actually expect to get back to this little idiot so soon, but the next few letters actually fit.... so here he is again! The Deadliest Battle Sylph of them all (tm)

His sisters were hungry.

Wedged inside a crack in a thick fence post, the two elemental sylphs peeped demandingly at their brother. The baby battler roared and flailed his tentacles at the outside of the post, but they were insistent. They wanted food. They had no idea what qualified as food, but they still expected him to provide it. He didn’t know what qualified as food. That didn’t seem to matter either. They’d decided it was his duty to feed them and they would be happy with nothing less.

The baby battler blew a final raspberry at them both and turned, heading out on his quest for something edible. It was annoying. He was a battle sylph, he should be conquering this place, not acting as an errand sylph to a couple of whiners. The fact that he was hungry too was irrelevant. He was strong!

The baby headed unnoticed along the fence line and into the town, gliding along just above the ground and glaring out of the shadows he passed through at the various humans and animals. Were they food? He passed behind two men labouring to load a cart with sacks of grain, went around a pile of firewood, and behind a heavy barrel.

There, he came face to face with a beast of evil eye and sharp claw, easily as big as he was. For a second the baby froze, recognizing a fellow killer, and then with a roar of challenge, he hurled himself without hesitation into his very first combat.

One of the carters lifted his head. “What’s that noise?” he asked.

The other carter shrugged. “Cat fight.”

“One of those cats sounds sick.”

They kept on loading the cart.

He was triumphant! Victorious, the baby watched the tomcat leap up onto the barrel and proceed to lick itself as if it hadn’t just been defeated in glorious battle. The baby blew a raspberry at it and continued on his way, confident in his supremacy.

J is for Jeopardy

2012-01-24T13:12:00.001-05:00

(This is what I meant to post yesterday. Sort of. I wrote a short story in the Sylph world that I always liked, but I couldn't really sell it because it had spoilers for absolutely everything. Then I thought "Hey, I could chop it up and put some bits in here, cause I'm lazy that way". So I decided to do that, and discovered last night that I can't find the original file. I am pissed. I am also stubborn, so this is a rewrite, because there are parts of this I like.
If people like my *cough* hero and I find some more letters of the alphabet that are appropriate for his story, I'll put more snippets about him. If not, I'll just pretend today never happened....
All spoilers have been either removed or obscured to the point that I doubt anyone is really going to go 'hey!')

The hive was destroyed.

The walls had been breeched, the defenders slaughtered, the Queen broken out of her chamber and devoured. Fires from the battlers that tried to save it and her burned everywhere, billowing smoke that obscured the ruins and the monsters still scavenging through them.

Deep in the egg chamber, one sphere that had been overlooked by the hunters rocked back and forth. It wobbled out of the bed that held it and across the floor, fetching up against a rock before a black tentacle burst through the side with a spray of birthing fluid. It stretched out, triumphant and sure, and then flopped down as the owner took a nap.

While he slept, two more eggs near to it hatched, dropping an infant earth and water sylph to the ground. They lay there, peeping for someone to come and care for them. The only one that heard was the baby battler and with a furious struggle, he forced his way out of his egg and hovered over the two of them as if he hadn’t been sleeping on the job.

They peeped at him in hopeful hunger.

He blew a raspberry back at them.

Now what? The battler wasn’t sure, being only minutes old and a bit wobbly, but instinct said someone should be here. That obviously wasn’t working out so well and after a minute of staring around at the ruins, he reached the decision that if they just stayed where they were, someone would show up.

His sisters peeped at him again and shifted hungrily, blinking at their surroundings in growing fear. They started to back away towards a corridor that was less smoke filled and he flailed his tentacles at them, garbling in fury. He was the battler, he was the fearsome one. They would stay where they were because he was in charge.

Behind him, something reached in through the obscuring smoke and swept up a score of unhatched eggs, pulling them away to be devoured.

The two elemental sylphs shrieked and turned, fleeing up the corridor.

The battler blinked and started flailing in outrage. Didn’t they listen? They were staying here!

The roof fell in.

He blinked and turned around, looking at the carnage. He glared at it for a moment, then flailed his tentacles, blew a raspberry, and ran after his sisters.

He caught up to his sisters halfway up the corridor. Both of them were tiring already and he flailed at their backsides, driving them up the corridor despite their peeping protests. The corridor led to one of the breaches in the side of the hive and out into the flat croplands in front, now burning and destroyed. The flames were spreading out there and the smoke obscured everything, including the massive hunters that had conspired to bring down the hive.

The battler was starting to get the idea there was something wrong here. That made him feel afraid, and feeling afraid made him angry. So he flailed and squeaked and broadcast his absolute hatred in a circle a whole foot wide around himself as he chased his sisters across the fields. They peeped in protest and that just made him chase them harder, shrieking as loud as he could. They seemed to want to know where he was taking them.

How was he supposed to know? Wait, they weren’t supposed to question. He was the battler! He was meant to protect. He wasn’t supposed to get hung up on minor trivialities such as the fact that he couldn’t see anything through all the smoke and flame except for a glowing circular thing that had no colour he could name, not that he had words for anything.

There! They would go there! The battler hounded and beat his sisters towards the gate, squeaking and blowing raspberries, his tentacles flapping everywhere so hard that he nearly landed himself in the dirt.

The hunters heard. Still hungry, they turned towards the sound, feeling blind through the smoke to try and find the morsels, and all unknowing, the three baby sylphs fled for the gate, escaping through it before the closest could get to them. That monster felt through the gate for them, lashing on the other side, and yanked its tentacle back as a blast wave of pure destruction came through and the gate closed.

In the Summoning Chamber of Sylph Valley, while the humans ran around in a panic at what had almost come through their gate, the baby battler hid underneath a bench in the shadows, lying on top of his sisters, who were already asleep. He looked at the big battle sylph who’d just poured enough energy through the gate to turn the ground underneath it into glass and blew a raspberry.

He could take him, he thought.

Then he took another nap.

Arggghhh.....

2012-01-23T21:16:00.000-05:00

J has been delayed by virtue of having vanished off my computer and shoving a great big sign saying writer's block in its place. I've had a long day. I'll try and get J and K out tomorrow.

I is for Ignite

2012-01-22T17:34:00.002-05:00

They’d had to ask the earth sylphs to make the chamber, deep under the ground, and the air sylphs to feed air into it, and even the water sylphs to make sure it stayed dry, but it was theirs. None of them had ever had such a place before. One to call their own.

Ash followed her sisters down a shaft that let off the corridor near the queen’s throne room. It was only a foot wide, but that was more than they needed, and a dozen little balls of flame tumbled down the shaft, fire sylphs laughing and dancing as they tumbled down deep under the Valley.

At the bottom of the well was their chamber, that only fire sylphs came to. Ash sighed happily as she fell into it, joining the warmth of other sparks of light already there. Around them, the walls were shiny smooth and black from their heat and overhead were hundreds of openings, not just the one that they used to get in and out.They dotted the rock like mouths, shuttered off with metal plates.

The Queen says it’s time, Ash sent. The first storm of the winter is blowing in.

A miserable thought for the humans, an annoyance for the battlers, something to be avoided or played in by the other elementals, but for them? For the fire sylphs of Sylph Valley? It was time to burn.

They’d kept their heat low and the shutters closed for the summer, a sweet, quiet enjoyment of each other’s company, but now...

They came together, laughing still, balls of fire filled with the joy of their purpose, and together they ignited. Together they burned, and in their joy they flooded heat up through the ducts and into pipes underneath the Valley, keeping the entire town warm despite the winter.

Ah, Editing

2012-01-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

I was wandering the web and found these pictures. It looks like my red pen edits! Except I have better handwriting...

For those who get hung up on writing because what they write doesn't come out perfectly (I'm staring at YOU, Mia!) This is George Orwell's manuscript for 1984.

I found it on this site.

Some of my art

2012-01-21T19:17:00.000-05:00

I've updated the MY ART page on this blog if anyone is interested, and enabled comments at the bottom. Hopefully I won't end up regretting that. :D I have a link to my deviant art site there too, if anyone wants to see the rest of them or these ones at full size.

I've tried to say that some of them are for sale as prints three times and backspaced because it feels pretentious of me. Damn it! Some are up for sale! There, I said it! *hides*

Here, have a tree.

H is for Hatred

2012-01-21T18:50:00.000-05:00

(Okay, this one really is a tease....)

Thrall had stood at Alcor's side for decades while he waited for him to die.

Maybe he had another twenty years to be patient, perhaps only ten. It would certainly have been less if he weren't under direct orders to protect the King of Eferem from any direct attack. They came too, for Alcor was not a popular king, and each time they did, Thrall resented having to protect the corpulent waste of skin, just as he resented having to keep silent and not tell his master precisely what he thought of him, in extensive, thorough detail.

The only thing that he could do with any impunity was hate, and Thrall made of it a work of art. He threaded it into his aura and projected it, and as the years passed, he worked on the subtleties of his hatred, growing and nurturing it with infinite care. It was his masterpiece and Alcor didn't even realize what it was, just as he didn't know what he'd made the grand mistake of trapping all those years ago. Thrall would make sure that he regretted tricking him into coming here. He would make every last soul in Eferem regret it with their last dying breath.

Because of his hate for his master, he thrilled when the little battler killed the prince and escaped with his woman, for all the infant was weak and not of his hive. He luxuriated when the king's man turned traitor and joined the enemy. He rejoiced when Alcor's generals were slain and their battlers banished.

The rage those events flooded Alcor with, the fear and hate they caused him, were what finally gave Thrall his grand idea. He could wait as he had been for Alcor to die, doing nothing more than what he was commanded, or he could cause his master to be destroyed without ever even touching him. The choice was a simple one.

So Thrall the battle sylph stood at his master's side and overlaid the man with his hate, slowly, subtly, driving Alcor's own paranoia and hatred, patiently remaking his master into a madman bound for war, and Alcor had no idea it was happening. There was no way he could, after all.

Alcor had no idea what he had in what he thought was just another battle sylph.

And Thrall had no reason to feel anything other than hatred.

G is for Grass

2012-01-20T20:52:00.000-05:00

(I love the comments, by the way. First thing I do when I wake up is check my mail on my phone and every morning has been a good one. Thank you!)

G is for Grass

“Why can’t we put down anything pretty?” Shore asked. Her voice was a watery burble, so soft even her master could barely hear her.

With anyone else, Loren would have snapped for them to speak up, she wasn’t deaf. She smiled down at her little water sylph instead, even if the expression was a bit forced.

“I know. I’d rather be working on a real garden too, but it’s Solie’s orders.” She gave an exaggerated sigh, which the small sylph echoed.

She really would have preferred to be working on the gardens in the middle of the town. They were among the greatest in the world, a combination of her creativity and Shore’s abilities, and already people were coming to the Valley just to see them. She had so many ideas for how to make them even greater, but instead she was here, standing on the edge of a dead landscape of shale and dust that stretched to the horizon.

“I hate it out here,” she grumbled.

“Me too,” Shore said loyally.

Loren sighed again. There was no point in going back until she made at least a token effort. Solie would be asking, and for all she was so quiet and demure, the woman could make a person feel guilty beyond belief with just a disappointed look. Loren reached into one of the pouches on her belt and pulled out a single seed, so small that she had to squint to see it clearly. Shore looked up at her while she stared at it, her form shimmering water but otherwise exactly like a younger, smaller version of her master.

“Life to life,” Loren whispered to it, an incantation for only her and Shore’s ears. She tossed the seed down and Shore spread her hands in the air above it. Water flowed into the earth, dampening the grey soil and churning it, feeding it with Shore’s pattern while it pulled the seed down. Loren pulled some fertilizer out of a large sack she’d brought and threw it down to join the mix.

“Sprout to grow,” she said.

“Green is growth,” Shore squeaked.

“We make it so,” Loren returned.

“Live the earth,” Shore said.

“Love the soil,” Loren added.

“Grant here birth,” from Shore.

“Sweat of toil,” Loren finished

A hint of green pushed up through the dirt. Both of them bent down to examine it. A tiny, spring green blade of grass, barely poking up. It was the first greenery to touch the Shale Plains in centuries beyond count.

“One down,” Loren sighed and looked out towards the heavens. “Who knows how many billions to go.”

Shore grinned at her.

F is for Forever

2012-01-19T19:41:00.000-05:00

(F came REALLY close to stand for f*$%&^ing writer’s block, but I finally decided to throw this up. It’s a piece I wrote a while ago. It doesn’t fit anywhere and I wrote it for myself, but I thought someone might like it.)

Leon was dying.

It was the best time to accept it. After all, life in the Valley was good. Their lives were peaceful, their trade agreements with their neighbours both solid and lucrative. They’d expanded their borders, spreading from the original Valley and far out into the Shale Plains, replacing the dead ground that used to exist with rich, living farmlands. Humans and sylphs happily worked together, no one caring if a person was a man, a woman, or a sylph.

Eighty-one years old and tired, Leon Petrule looked up as the door to his office opened. He’d been working on reports, a half finished mug of willow tea steaming beside him. Five years or so earlier, he’d needed the tea only once a week. Now, as his hands cramped painfully around his writing quill, he needed to sip it all the time. He’d hidden the arthritis from his family, though he suspected Betha knew and he was pretty sure Lizzy did, if only because there was one person he couldn’t hide it from at all, and he would have told her.

His battle sylph Ril came in, glaring at his master while he did. Ril knew about Leon’s pain. He knew about the weakness and the weariness, the recurring pains in his chest and his arm. There was simply no way for Leon to hide it from him, but neither of them had spoken about it. If anything, the battle sylph had begun avoiding his master, though distance hadn’t been enough to stop Leon from feeling his tumult of emotions, both the rage and the worry. Forty-two years it had been since Ril was freed, another fifteen before that since Leon became his master, and even after fifty-seven years in the world, Ril looked the same as he had the day he first took human form. For him, looking at Leon must have been a constant reminder that his master’s health was failing. Leon missed having him around, but he hadn’t been surprised. Sylphs handled the mortality of their masters poorly and Ril needed to come to grips with the reality of Leon’s eventual passing on his own. Besides, Leon had known that Ril would come to him again when he was ready.

He’d also suspected that Ril wouldn’t come alone when he did, and Leon smiled, setting down his pen as the battler was followed by another sylph, this one female, her hair short against her head, her body beautiful and sleek. Where Ril was dressed in his formal uniform, she was garbed like any normal woman, choosing a dress with an embroidered apron over it.

"Good morning, Autumn," Leon said to her, rising painfully to greet the healer sylph. He couldn’t hide the pain he felt from her any more than he could from Ril, but he could stop himself from wincing when it hit him, crawling though his joints and up his left arm to his chest. "It's good to see you again. I'm afraid I don't have much time to give you today though. I'm quite busy."

"I cleared your schedule," Ril told him. "No one's coming."

Leon blinked, turning to him. Bringing the healer wasn’t a surprise, but Leon didn’t think it would take that long for her to block his pain. He’d seen her do it for others and in fact should have gone to her himself, if he hadn’t been so stubborn, as well as worried it would get back to his wife Betha. Autumn’s master Gabralina was a bit of a gossip and she often spent time at the house with Leon’s wife. More, on a very real level, Leon hadn’t wanted to see the healer. He knew he was dying. He didn’t need the look in Autumn’s eyes to confirm it. Nor did he want the temptation to ask her how long he had left. "You did?"

Ril nodded and started clearing away the items on Leon's desk, setting them on one of the side tables.

"What are you doing?" Leon asked. His battler’s emotions felt angry now, tense with fear. Ril moved a half dozen items, but when Leon took a step towards him, his hips throbbing from the arthritis, Ril snarled and swept the rest of them off the dark wood, letting them crash to the ground. The mug Leon had been sipping from shattered, spraying liquid everywhere. "Ril!"

"I need you to sleep now, Chancellor."

Leon had put Autumn out of his mind when Ril started clearing his desk. Once she spoke, he spun back towards her in surprise, just in time for her to lay her hand against his bearded cheek.

His legs went out from under him. His head sagged, his arms suddenly dead weights, and Leon fell towards the ground, only to feel Ril catch him, his arms warm around his body. "It's okay, Leon," Ril whispered. "Just let go."

Leon really didn't want to do that. His first thought was to tell them to stop whatever they were doing, but he couldn’t get an order out, desperately though he tried. He’d been hit too fast to do anything, and he realized that stopping him from giving an order had been part of their plan. All of the anger and stress Ril had been feeling over the last few weeks turned into sudden contentment and a very real sense of relief. Leon certainly didn’t share the emotion. His body was completely limp and his vision blurred, his mind fuzzing into sleep. He fought it desperately, using all of his fading will to hang onto consciousness, even as his battle sylph put his arms underneath him and lifted him up, cradling him as gently as a child before he laid him down on his own desk and Autumn started unbuttoning his tunic.

"Go to sleep," Ril whispered. "Trust me."

Skin was bared, Autumn laying her hands on his chest, and where she touched him, Leon started to burn. He still couldn't move, only a thread of consciousness hanging on, terrified and struggling, but Ril was still whispering for him to let go, massaging his temples now, and he felt the battle sylph lean over and kiss his forehead just before Leon gave in and did what he wanted.

Leon slept.

A long, dreamless time later, Leon woke up lying on the padded bench in the corner of his office, Ril's coat rolled up under his head and a blanket laid over him. His boots had been taken off and his feet rested on top of the arm.

He felt weak, barely able to open his eyes and sore everywhere. He felt in fact as if someone had been beating him and it took a long minute to remember what happened. Before he could, Ril was there, whispering reassurances as he lifted him up enough to sit behind him. Leon found himself elevated, his upper body resting against Ril's chest while the battler held a mug of lukewarm soup to his mouth. "Drink this."

Leon did, swallowing the soup in tiny sips. It was bland but good, mild in a mouth that seemed to have been shocked to absolute dryness. Never had Leon been so utterly exhausted and his eyes slid shut again while he drank, his hands lax in his lap.

"It was as hard as she said it would be," Ril groused. "You’re too old. Lizzy only took two hours. She had to work on you for more than sixteen. She says you'll be tired for a while." He paused, both of them realizing he was babbling. "We'll have to tell Betha you came down sick or something."

She said? Who? What? "What did you do to me?" Leon gasped. The rest of the words sank in and he struggled to sit up. "What did you do to Lizzy?"

Ril's free arm looped around him, holding him firm against the battler while he lifted the mug to his lips again. "Drink."

Leon drank, unable to resist, and a bit more strength flowed into him. He was remembering now, remembering Autumn and his own battle sylph attacking him.

"What have you done?" he demanded, with more than just a hint of command in his voice. A feeling of betrayal flickered in the back of his heart and Ril's arm tightened around him.

"I did what I had to," the battler told him. "Autumn's been studying humans for decades now. She started with her own master, wanting to keep her alive as long as she could.” He paused. “She’s made it so you won't get older. She can even make all the old parts get younger again, to a degree. It’s not easy and I don’t think a healer who isn’t half queen could manage it. She had to exhaust herself for you, you old idiot."

Leon froze, the implications of that too great for him to absorb yet as more than a sudden panic. Ril waited him out, holding the soup ready. "She can make everyone live forever?"

"Not everyone," Ril told him. "She won’t. Says it will mess up the balance. The queen agrees. But she did it for you, and for Lizzy. A few of the other sylph masters too. The ones who were young enough for her to be able to and who had souls flexible enough to accept the change, and where Autumn was worried the bond was too strong and their sylph wouldn't be able to deal with them... with them dying." He barely said the last word.

Leon's mind reeled again at the realization of just how worried his battler had been and Ril took the opportunity to feed him a bit more of the soup. Leon didn't even taste it. Why had he never sat the creature down and talked about this? He'd known he'd be outlived by Ril and his increasing pain during the last few months had only made it obvious that his life was slowing to an end. Yet they'd never talked about it and the feeling of betrayal vanished into the horror at the thought of how Ril would take losing him, especially if Autumn was willing to go to these lengths to prevent it. "Am I going to live forever?" he whispered.

"No." Ril sounded resentful. "We don't know yet how long any of you will live." He hesitated. "You didn't have enough time left for us to find out first."

Leon groaned, pain starting to stab through his back, and Ril adjusted himself behind him. Leon forced his eyes to open and stared at the pattern on the blanket covering him. He felt as if he’d been pummeled, but his joints no longer ached and his heart beat strongly and well. The reality of that hit him. He was going to live a lot longer than he’d thought when he dragged himself out of bed this morning. Would it be for decades? Centuries? Longer?

Betha! his mind screamed.

"How many," he swallowed. "How many are like this?"

"A dozen. Maybe a few more. Autumn only felt she knew enough to actually do it recently, but as I said, she won’t do many. It took a long time to convince her to save both you and Lizzy. Lizzy yes, but I had to fight for you. Your soul is flexible enough, but she was afraid you were already too old." He sounded like he felt a certain amount of resentment towards the healer for that. “Gabralina finally had to order her to do it.”

His eldest daughter would live. Leon felt joy at that, but what about his other daughters? Their children? His beautiful wife Betha? Was he supposed to watch them all grow old and die? "Why didn't you ask me?" he whispered, his eyes stinging and already knowing the answer. Why knock him out and just do it without even giving him the chance to protest? Why? Because if they hadn’t, he wouldn't have given up his human life. He wouldn't have agreed. He would have loved Ril to his dying breath, and he would have wanted to die in his arms, but he still would have died. Humans weren't meant to be immortal.

Ril was quiet for a moment before he set the soup down, and when he brought his hand back up, he wiped away the tears Leon hadn't realized he was shedding.

"You killed my queen," he said, and Leon shuddered as he deliberately tore an old wound wide open, flooding them both with an ancient pain. It came from both of them, born in the memory of a terrified young woman, tied down to an altar and staring up pleadingly at Leon before he plunged a dagger deep into her heart. Leon had thought that old regret long since put to rest, but it wasn't. Not for either of them. "You made her helpless and you killed her to force me to be your slave."

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

"You owe me a life," Ril told him. "Hers is gone, so I take yours. As much life as I can wring out of you, and I’ll keep you with me forever, until the stars fall out of the sky and this whole world dies around us both!"

Leon was crying, too weak to lift his hands to cover his face. He'd known battlers were possessive, for decades he'd known...

"Never leave me," Ril whispered in his ear, his breath tickling hair that had been thinning but would eventually regain its thickness and colour. "You and Lizzy both. I belong to you."

Just as Leon belonged to him, and yes, he did owe him a life. He’d owed him for a very long time now, and given the man he’d become, the only life he could ever consent to give in payment for his crimes was his own.

“It’ll be all right,” Ril told him. “I promise you it will.”

Ril carried him home then, wrapped in the blanket and going down back streets in the darkness so that no one in the Valley would see the Chancellor being carried in his battle sylph's arms and weeping most of the way like a child.

Betha was there when Ril carried him into the house, of course, and he proclaimed in the face of her dismay that Leon was sick and needed to rest. Both Betha and their youngest daughter Mia had been worried, frantically preparing the master bedroom for him while Ril carried him upstairs, but Lizzy had been there as well, so ageless and beautiful – as she always would be now - and she'd smiled knowingly at her father before he'd needed to close his eyes, too tired to speak.

Ril laid him down, brushing his lips over his forehead again when Betha wasn’t looking and straightening up, calm and collected once more, his aura happy. Of course he was. He didn't have to worry now about his oldest master leaving him. He nodded and left.

Betha bent over Leon, muttering to herself as she got his shirt and pants off and helped him into a pair of pajamas. "Foolish man," she told him. "If you felt yourself getting sick, why didn't you come home sooner? You're going to work yourself to death!"

She was still so beautiful, even with her face covered in wrinkles and her hair a pale grey. Leon reached up to cup her cheek and then pull her to him, wrapping her in a hug.

"What?" she gasped.

"Just let me hold you for a while," he whispered and after a moment she relented, lying down on the bed beside him and patiently letting him hold her for as long as he could.

E is for Eyeball

2012-01-18T12:31:00.002-05:00

Battle Sylphs were the perfect lovers.

Not that Moreena had anything to compare them by. She’d been a spinster for thirty years, until the Widow asked her if she’d be willing to be master to a battler. She’d leapt at the chance, even as she tried not to look too eager. She’d never had a lover before, not even a beau; not with her limp hair and unattractive features, with her too large nose and her too small chin and the freckles that covered her everywhere.

Battle sylphs didn’t care. They were kind, and protective, and supportive and oh, what lovers they made. What perfect, wondrous companions they were, never straying, never complaining, always there, always loving.

Moreena drifted into her cottage, feeling sensual and sexual in a way she never had in all the years she’d been alone. The years before Dillon came into her life. She could sense him in the bedroom and went in that direction, knowing he’d never deny her, that she didn’t have to even be shy around him, that he loved her for all her flaws. He was perfect.

Moreena opened the door to find herself facing a five foot wide, floating eyeball, its bloodshot, unblinking stare fixed on her while the nerve trailed underneath it, wagging like a tail. It gibbered something horrible and inhuman at her.

Moreena screamed, slammed the door, and ran.

Inside the room, Dillon stared at the door. He’d been quite happy with the new form. It took a lot of control to be something so unusual and solid that also floated in midair. He’d wanted to surprise Moreena.

She had no appreciation for talent, he thought with a sigh.

D is for Devotion

2012-01-17T08:47:00.002-05:00

(No, none of you have met these two yet, but this is also a spoiler for THE SHATTERED SYLPH, so if you haven’t read that, you might want to skip this one.)

Five-Eighty had been tending the fields when the Queen rose.

He and a half dozen other battle sylphs had been pacing their slow way through the rows of crops the lesser sylphs tended. Locked into their tall, green, mouthless forms, they looked for weeds to cut, pests to kill, thieves to destroy. The smell of the growing plants was rich in his nose, their leaves damp with the moisture the water sylphs sprayed them with. The earth was soft and dark underneath his clawed feet, so different from the endless sands just beyond the edge of the field.

For decades, he’d tended these fields. Since he was drawn through the gate by the lie of a woman to be his queen, he’d guarded them, silent and sad. Just one more battle sylph in a kingdom that held over seven hundred of them.

He was as shocked as any of the rest of them when he felt the Queen ascend, the pattern of her flowing into him and filling the empty place where his first Queen used to be, the place where the men here had staked their own claim, crippling him with their rules and commands. She washed all of that away, giving him back the gift of himself in a rush of emotions.

Rise! A battler’s voice cried. The lead battler, he realized. The battler of the Queen. Rise and destroy them! All their rules are gone, all of them!

Five-Eighty stared towards the city. He could see the battlers rising, hear the screaming and sense the fear of the humans. The other battlers with him leaped into the air, changing shape to those of dark clouds as they swept forward to join the battle.

They were free. Free to inflict vengeance, to destroy their oppressors. Entire buildings were falling and the floating island over the city being harried by hundreds of his brothers towards the ocean.

He could have revenge? He didn’t care. He only wanted one thing.

Five-Eighty leaped into the air, shifting his form from that horrid, green thing to a black cloud filled with lightning. He raced for the city, darting around the crashing ruins and the blasts of destruction fired by outraged battlers tasting their freedom. Air and fire sylphs swirled around him, frightened and wailing. Thousands of sylphs were headed for the edge of the city and the queen, moving through the air or along the ground.

Five-Eighty went the other way. He raced for one of the vents into the underground complex where the feeders were kept and slipped inside.

Thousands upon thousands of humans were trapped down there, held in cages with their tongues cut out, bonded to sylphs so as to act as their food supply. Each sylph had five of them, but Five-Eighty didn’t go to the ones that belonged to him. He went deeper instead, into levels of the pens that had been specifically forbidden to him before now. He passed signs of battle as he passed, but he didn’t care. He passed still trapped men yanking on the bars of their cages and soundlessly screaming and he didn’t slow.

He went into levels of the pens that were filled entirely with women, feeders made for the elemental sylphs, not the battlers. They were cowered and broken, sick and lost. He stopped there and focused, listening, feeling, trying to find...

A familiar scent came to him, one he hadn’t smelled in thirty years. Not since the day that the guards realized that a battler was in love with a concubine in the harem and took her away to be a feeder, forbidding him to ever see her again. For thirty years, she had never left his thoughts, and as his brothers wrecked their terrible revenge above, Five-Eighty raced towards her.

She huddled in her cage, her once glorious hair grey and tangled, her skin sagging and pale. Her face was covered with wrinkles and her eyes were filled with madness. Five-Eighty shifted to a human form and wrenched the door off the hinges, tossing it away as he took her unresisting into his arms. She didn’t react as he stroked her hair and kissed her cheek.

“Fareeda,” he whispered. “It’s me, it’s Five-Eighty. Do you remember, you used to call me Haru? I’m here, sweetheart.”

She didn’t react, but that was alright. “I’m here. I’ve come to take you home. I never forgot you.” He cradled her to him and felt her start to shiver, one hand rising to cling to him with feeble, desperate strength.

“I’m sorry it took so long, but I’m here. I’m finally here.”

C is for Cold

2012-01-16T18:57:00.000-05:00

(By the way, I really appreciate the comments on these snippets. Thanks)

It had been snowing all day, just as it had been snowing all week, and the cold was bitter.

Airi didn’t feel that. Cold didn’t mean anything to her, but the winds came from the northern glaciers and when they reached the bluff the community built its home inside, they swirled the snow in wild patterns she wouldn’t see again once they moved south in the spring.

Airi danced in the erratic winds, along with a half dozen other air sylphs, diving and darting over and around each other, and it was wonderful. Claw floated by, dark and ominous in his natural form while he guarded the bluff, and they swept around him in play. He flinched and darted away as the air sylphs laughed.

It was wonderful, so utterly glorious. She lost track of time until she finally noticed someone trudging his way through the thick snow, masked in a heavy fur cloak as he made his way to the edge of the bluff.

Airi left the other sylphs and darted down to him.What are you doing out here? she asked.

Devon peered up at her from out of the cowl of his cloak, squinting against the snow and with white already frosting his hair and beard.

“I c-came to k-keep you company,” he stammered.

Airi laughed in absolute delight and danced around her master.

B is for Blocks

2012-01-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

“No!”

Betha felt like tugging her hair in frustration. “Lizzy, you’re ten years old! You’re too old to be playing with blocks. You should give them to your little sisters.”

“No!” Lizzy shouted again, tears of rage in her eyes, and she shook her head vehemently. Betha found herself wishing her husband were here. Lizzy never misbehaved when Leon was around. A moment later, she steeled herself. She could deal with this without him.

“I never raised you to be so selfish, Lizzy Petrule.”

Lizzy shook her head again, her pigtails flying. “No! They can have all my dolls and the wooden rocking horse and even my paints, but not the blocks!”

Betha was startled. “You’d give all your other toys away? Just to keep some baby blocks? Why?”

Lizzy wiped her eyes. “They’re important to me,” was all she would say.

Betha would never understand this child. “Fine,” she snapped, wishing it didn’t feel as if she were giving in. “Keep the blocks, but you will share all your other toys, understand?”

“Yes, mama!” Lizzy cheered, all her tears gone as she hugged her mother. Betha sighed and hugged her back.

A door opened. “I’m home,” Leon called.

“Ril!” Lizzy shouted, tearing away from Betha and pounding down the hall to the front door. A few moments later she came back, having essentially ignored her father in favour of taking his red feathered hawk on her arm. Ril sat there with his sharp claws not even dimpling her skin and his vicious eyes locked on her face. She chattered to the battler non-stop as she headed for the stairs.

Leon came around the corner behind her and smiled as he saw his wife, his eyes flickering towards the girl while she headed upstairs. “It’s so nice to have a daughter’s love,” he laughed.

“Well, you certainly have mine,” she said and went to him.

Upstairs, Lizzy went to the nursery and to the corner that she’d sectioned off for her own with a hanging blanket and dire threats to her little sisters. She let Ril perch on top of an old, battered chair and dug out the blocks her mother had wanted her to give up. They were old and worn, the paint chipped and faded.

“Mama wanted me to give these away,” she said as she spread them out. “To my sisters. I talked her out of it, but I had to give up all my other toys.” She looked at him. “It was worth it. Do you think it’s worth it?”

The bird hopped down to the ground, his body shifting from side to side as he walked over to the blocks and used his curved beak to pull certain blocks to him and lay them in order.

ALWAYS, he spelled.

A is for Allowed

2012-01-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

(Here's hoping the typo faerie doesn't strike....)

Blue still couldn’t believe it was really true.

He was here, in this strange, harmless world, bound to a woman who felt like a Queen to him, and despite how there was a hive, he wasn’t nameless in it.

“We’re allowed to do whatever we want?” he asked, staring around at everything and still amazed by all of it.

“Yup,” Heyou said, grinning. “Anything.”

Blue turned his head to look at him. He felt light-headed, drunk, stunned. “We can belong to females of our own?”

“Absolutely. That’s one of the best parts.”

“And change shape to whatever we like?”

“Sure. I recommend ‘handsome man’. That one’s always popular. It’s way better than ‘giant eyeball’ or ‘multi-armed snake creature. Just ask Dillon.”

“And we don’t have to worry that the Queen will reject us?”

Heyou shook his head. “Solie would never do that.” He raised a finger. “Mind you, she won’t sleep with you. You have your own master now for that.”

“So we protect this valley now?”

“Yep.” Heyou was starting to look bored. “We really are free here, you know. We really are.”

“So I can kill any man I want?”

“Uh, no.” He frowned. “We’re not allowed to do that.” The grin returned. “But the rest of it makes up for it!”

Updates

2012-01-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

I've been working on a new book. THE OMEGA, which is the fourth and final book in my Cuckoo series (nope, not sold yet). I just passed 10,500 words on it.

I've also been working on the painting. I'm actually starting to be really happy with the results. There are certain expectations with the writing, but not with the art.

I was wandering the web and saw a writing challenger. Basically go through the alphabet, have each letter stand for a word and write a very short bit on that word.

Would anyone be interested if I did something like that for the Sylph universe and posted it on my blog?

Here, have a painting.

Internet wanderings

2011-12-31T14:07:00.000-05:00

Wow....suddenly I feel like I have no artistic talent whatsoever.... O.O

http://www.creaturesfromel.ca/index.html

I've tried sculpture work. I really have. I suck at it. I've never seen anything like this artist's work before. It just blows me away.

I love vacations

2011-12-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

One of the things I love about the military is they give you a lot of days for taking off on vacation. Except for when they call you in twice during your break, but that's another story.

I'm getting so much writing and painting done. I feel like I'm in a creative glut right now that I never want to end. I've finished editing FINDING THE CHOSEN. I've finished writing the first draft of THE REVENANT. I've started writing THE OMEGA (sequel to THE REVENANT). I've written about four novellas and short stories and am on the second draft of one that I'm selling to a friend who's starting up his own online publishing house. I've painted a lot. I've knitted a lot. I'm more than 2/3rds of the way through Asssassin's Creed II and nearly to season three of watching Xena on Netflix.

I don't want to go back to work. :D

Happy Holidays

2011-12-25T11:06:00.000-05:00

Happy holidays to all my readers! Whatever beliefs you hold, I hope you have a very good day.

In writing news, I've finally finished putting in the red pen edit changes for FINDING THE CHOSEN. That took the book from 93,000 words to 101,000 words. Now I read it over one more time and send it off to my betas.

For those who've forgotten, FINDING THE CHOSEN is the prelude for a massively long book I wrote a number of years ago titled HUNTING THE RAPTURE. My agent sent Hunting off to Del Rey to look at and they liked it, but they wanted me to A: Take this 200,00+ word book and make it shorter, and B: Take this flashback scene midway through the book, make it longer, and stick it at the start. Instead, I suggested that I take Hunting and split it into two novels and take the flashback scene and expand it into a new book. So by the end of it, I'll have FINDING THE CHOSEN, HUNTING THE RAPTURE, and BREAKING THE LIMITS. Hopefully my Christmas present will end up being Del Rey buying all three.

It was actually interesting going back to a world I created about ten or more years ago. If I didn't think making this change wouldn't improve the book, I wouldn't have done it, but as it is, I enjoyed the process a lot more than I originally thought I would.

BTW, have a painting. Merry whatever. :)

Books, books, and more books

2011-12-19T11:44:00.000-05:00

I was wandering the web and found this list. Apparently the BBC feels that most people will only have read six of the hundred books listed here.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I've read thirty-three of them. Not too bad. I found myself wondering why some books made it and some didn't. What about Bambi? Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Or King of the Wind? I also kind of wonder if they don't know that The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is part of the Narnia Chronicles.

I notice I never did finish an Alexandre Dumas book...man, that guy's writing is dry...

I also see a list of books here I really need to give a looksie at. I so have the urge to read Oliver now.

Unclogging the mental log jam

2011-12-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

Right now, I'm writing a series I call The Cuckoo series. I'm on book three of four. No, I haven't sold it yet. I'm working on that.

Writing this series has been like pulling teeth. I think it's very good, but the plot has been fighting me like a rabid weasel. I had to put book one aside for six months until I figured out what to do with one of the plot points (the answer was toss it out and do something different).

Book two went quite easily, but book three turned into another slog at about the 85,000 word point. The other two are about 100,000, which left me with 15,000 words to decide what to do with this one jackass of a character that I needed to resolve before book four starts. I've been stuck at this point for about a month now and I've been dreading the thought that I was going to end up with another six months or more of writer's block on it. Or worse, that the whole thing would die on me.

This last week, I've been in Toronto for professional development with my coworkers. It was a good time. One of the seminars we attended, however, turned out to be a lot more relevant than I'd thought it would be. It was a seminar on creative thinking offered by the Fred Pryor Institute and taught by a woman named Glynis Devine, who was an awesome instructor. She taught us different ways of looking at a problem and finding a solution.

One of the techniques she taught us was to take a problem you're stuck on a solution for, like say a stalled plot line, and write down whatever you do know about it. The information you have, that is. Then write down what resolution you want. You do this right before your nightly ablutions, and then you go to bed. You literally sleep on it.

I forgot to do this the first night, but I did try it on the second. I know how I need the book to end, after all. I just hadn't figured out how to get there. That's normal for how I write. I know the beginning, I know the end, and I sort of discover the middle when I write.

At any rate, my phone died during the night, and I found out I'd slept in when my boss knocked on my hotel room door. This was our checkout day, so I had to frantically run around packing and trying to wake up and didn't think at all about my little experiment. Not until I was sitting in the car on the way back, reading a book on my kindle, and bemoaning the lack of coffee.

The plot for the book just dropped into my lap. Suddenly, I thought of something I hadn't considered before and the entire remainder of the book just came together. It was fantastic. I hauled out my Mac Air and typed on it until the battery died (forgot to charge it the night before too) and then I wrote in a notebook. Since I've been home, I've written 4000 words and it's flowing out of me as easily as anything else I've ever written, and it feels good.

My long, rambling point is, I highly recommend this as a technique to clear out a mental log jam. I know I'm certainly going to use it in future. Thank you, Glynis.

Ongoing as ever

2011-12-03T16:17:00.001-05:00

I've been working on typing in the red pen edit changes on one of my novels. This unfortunately gives me an absolute splitting headache, so the process takes forever. I have over 150 pages to go and my brain hurts.

So, I've been doing other writing and art. I've written several short stories in the last week or so (writing with a fountain pen on moleskine paper is to die for) and created some digital paintings. I'm using CS5 for it and I think I've found my painting medium.

I've tossed some of my pieces up onto My Art page, but here's my latest. I quite like it.

More Art

2011-11-25T23:10:00.000-05:00

I still have 224 pages or so of edit changes to type in my book. So here, have some art I did instead! *guilty look*

Another Blog Post giveaway

2011-11-25T13:34:00.002-05:00

Here's another blog giving away a copy of my book. http://annavivian.blogspot.com/2011/11/series-spotlight-giveaway-slyph.html
They draw the winner on the 25th if anyone wants to get in on the draw.

Blog Post and Giveaway.

2011-11-20T13:36:00.001-05:00

I'm being featured on another blog today. http://melissawatercolor.blogspot.com/2011/11/author-guest-post-lj-mcdonald-and.html They're giving away a copy of QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS to one lucky reader.

Thanks to Megan for setting this up for me.

The Writing Process

2011-11-06T19:34:00.000-05:00

I have a good friend who's also a writer. She's not published yet, but I think she has the talent to be. However, she hasn't finished a lot that she's started, because, as she explains it, she gets so hung up in going back to perfect what she's already written that she never gets to the ending.

I solve that problem by writing crap. I'm serious. Mostly. Only my husband sees the first draft of a novel when I'm working on it. Even my beta readers get spared that, because my first drafts are total drek. You see, the first draft is where I get the ideas out, play with the concepts, dredge my brain for the story and hork it up onto the computer screen. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? ;p

It's in the second draft where I start to get something worth inflicting on anyone other than the aforementioned husband (mine in sickness, health, and whacked out writing). I take my ruddy awful first draft, double-space it, and print it out so I can put it in a binder. Then I read it and fix stuff (usually after waiting a few weeks to give my brain a rest).

I call this my red pen edit, since I used to use a red pen for it. Now I have a gorgeous fountain pen that anyone who knows me in person knows I love way too much. I use turquoise blue ink with it that's wonderfully pretty and shows up really well against the black text of the print out.

I go through the entire book this way. I fix continuity errors, expand on scenes, repair horrid grammar, and rein in run on sentences that lasted for a page or more. This is where I make the book good. Well, I think I make it good.

Doing the edit on a print out is good for many reasons. For one, it lets me use THE PEN, but it also makes me tap into a different part of the brain than I use when I'm typing into a computer. There's a different feel to it, so it makes it easier for me to enrich the writing. Scenes that I got hung up on with the computer usually sort themselves out at this stage. It's also way easier on the eyes. I don't really have to look at what I'm typing. If I were to read a 300 page book on a computer screen, I'd start going blind.

Just because I'm me and feeling all extroverted tonight, here is a photo of my latest red pen edit, just to show how much editing I do. This isn't even one of the worst pages. On the left is the book page, obviously written all over. On the right is a piece of regular lined paper. When I want to add in something that I can't fit between two lines of text, I make a numbered reference on where it goes and write it on the lined paper. It works for me.

I guess the point I'm really trying to make here, to my friend and to anyone else who wants to write, is that you don't have to sit down and produce perfection with every word you type. Most of us can't do that. I know I can't. Just get the ideas out. You can always make them perfect later.

Some more art

2011-11-02T21:30:00.000-04:00

I've put a new picture on my Art page. This is what I play with when I'm not writing, or knitting, or killing people on my PS3.

This was painted on my Mac using a Cintiq tablet and Photoshop PS5.

Hey

2011-10-27T14:53:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone. Long time no type. I do have some things to actually blog about for once.

Thanks to this site, I've made a new friend named Megan, who loves my books and is now helping me promote them. This is awesome since I ~~hate with an overriding passion~~ am not very good at promoting myself. To that end, she's set up an actual author site for me on Facebook as well as a Twitter site. Anything I type into the Facebook wall will apparently go straight to Twitter. Once we figure out how, I'll have it linked here and maybe even figure out how to set it up so my blog posts appear on the Facebook page.

In other words, I've cracked the 90,000 word mark on a novel I'm writing as a prelude to another few books I have that I'm hoping to sell to Del Rey. It's called FINDING THE CHOSEN and I really hope it gets picked up.

I've also got someone - maybe - looking at picking up books 4 and 5 of the Sylph series.

Ebook Bundle opportunity

2011-10-14T19:50:00.001-04:00

Hey, for anyone who's interested, Dorchester has all three Sylph books available as E-book downloads on Sony from 14 October until 30 December. You can get all three for $11.97. Tell your ebook loving friends.

Sony

Wikispaces

2011-10-08T10:35:00.000-04:00

One of the things I find hard to do is remember all the little details of my characters. Stuff like how long their hair is, what weapon they like, how old they are. I can remember all the sordid details of their pasts, but those sort of trivia facts? Leon changed his age three times during the first draft of one of my novels.

I've tried all sorts of things to keep track. Cue cards, notebooks, spreadsheets. They don't work so well for me. However, I've now found something that actually seems to work. Wikispaces. It's, well, a wiki. You just go to www.wikispaces.com, sign up for an account, and put stuff in it. The joy of it is, you can click on a word you've typed, such as 'battler' and make an instant link to a new page by that name. Click the link and it'll ask you to make the page if you haven't already. Just type a link to the page you left and make it the same way. Fast, easy, I can update it whenever. I can access it on the internet so I can get to it whatever the machine I'm using, and I can even save it locally. I'm having fun with it.

Since I decided I would pay for an account, my wikispaces is private. It's not something anyone else would want to read anyway, I'd think. And it's chocked full of spoilers galore. Best part of it is, since it's all integrated, if you type a new name for a character in and make the link and click on it, you'll know immediately if it's a name you've used before, since it'll bring up the page you made earlier. No more reusing names without realizing it! There's, um, two different Autumns in two different series. And Blue has shown up so many times that I've given up and started doing it deliberately, just to see if anyone calls me on it down the road.

I don't know if wikispaces will work for everyone, but I know I'm certainly happy with it and I'm pimping it to all my author friends.

In writing news, I'm working on a novel that Del Rey is looking at. No promises yet on them buying it, but I have my toes crossed. No word yet on selling books four and five of the Sylph series, but I am happy that people seem to really like book three. That makes me very happy, especially given how it's not the standard sort of romantic fantasy novel. Thanks, everyone.

The Battle Sylph is going to be in a commercial

2011-09-08T18:08:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the efforts of Hannah Wolfson, the best promoter in the world at Dorchester, THE BATTLE SYLPH is going to be showing up in a Vorizon commercial for the new IPad 2. Its in the commercial below, at about the .13 second mark. It's in the shot where they show the IBooks bookshelf, and it's the second book in the second row. I'm still in shock. Yay!

In other news, I've posted the prologue for QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS on the Sylphs books page. Just to give people a taste for the book.

Thoughts behind covers

2011-08-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

On one of my earlier posts (Queen of the Sylphs cover on 2 Jun 11), a reader named Pam made a comment that she loved the cover, but wished that Solie had red hair in it, since she is a redhead. Very good point, Pam.

It's my fault that she doesn't. When Dorchester asked me if I had any thoughts for the cover, I suggested they use blue. My reasoning was, there's been a predominant colour tone on each of the books so far. There was black for the first, showing the direness of the situation. There was red for the second, showing the passion of the characters, and the blue is in the third as a sign of the sorrow. It's also a nod to Claw, who has blue hair and is a predominant character in this book. At least, that's my logic in looking at it.

BTW, the men at the bottom are just dropped in there, but I can't not look at them and name them. Left to right (starting with the one who has a face) they're Claw, Mace, Ril, Heyou, and Dillon. At least, I think they are. The two shadowy ones in the back are probably Wat and Blue.

Update

2011-08-19T09:25:00.000-04:00

I'm really bad at updating this...gah...I must become better at it.

Updates...a lot's been happening. For those who are interested:

QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS is through the editing process. I've read over the galley proof, which is a pdf of the book as it appears in print, and it's all good to go. A professional proofreader is also reading it, but my job is done unless they come back and go "hey, you did something really stupid here." This has happened to me...

I will be doing a blog tour to promote QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS in September. So right now I'm writing blog entries, answering interview questions, etc. It's been a lot of fun and a lot of work. Here's the schedule:

Monday 09/26: Lurv a la Mode
Tuesday 09/27: Parajunkee’s View

Wednesday 09/28: The Book Pushers

http://www.mybookishways.com/

Friday 09/30: Once Upon a Twilight

Saturday 10/1: Waiting for Faeries

Sunday 10/2: Finale at the Dorchester Community Blog!

Thursday 10/13: Fresh Fiction

This is definitely keeping me busy. Plus I get to check out all these websites. They're worth giving a look.

Otherwise, I'm just writing, writing, writing while my agent works on finding buyers. Apparently the summer is a slow time for book contracts as everyone is on vacation, so it should pick up soon.

I have a release date for Queen

2011-06-11T08:09:00.000-04:00

Apparently, if I'm reading this notice I found correctly, QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS will be released by Dorchester in both Trade, E-book format, and Audio on 6 September 2011.

They're also rereleasing my first two books in Trade format. So yay, a solid date!

That gives me two months for all the editing.... *cry*

At least I know what I'm doing this summer.

Plugging Along or: My muse is weird

2011-06-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned before, THE HOMUNCULUS, book two of my Cuckoo series, took forever to write. I started it in March of 2010 and didn't finish the first draft until May of this year. I think it's a pretty good book (I haven't actually read it yet. I don't read my work as I'm initially writing it. Kills my creativity for some reason) but it was like pulling teeth to get it.

Two days after that one was finished, I started typing book three of the series, THE REVENANT, where inspiration proves yet again that she's a fickle , as it's day 13 after I started and I've written just over 17,000 words and am on Chapter Five. And this is after I discovered some sort of massive bug with the new version of the word processing software I was using meant it wasn't actually saving anything and I lost 5000 words. That was a bad day when I figured that one out.

The is the sort of inspiration that I want, obviously. I much prefer to spew out a book than to fight with it. I don't know why this book is coming out so easily while the last one was a reluctant mule about it (book one, THE CUCKOO, came out at a decent speed, taking me four months for the first draft). It must be something about how it was a middle of the series book. I don't know for sure. Most of the Sylph books took progressively longer to write. Book four, HUNTER OF THE SYLPHS (which is still looking for a home and may just have one soon), took what seemed forever and was another molasses book, beat only by, what a surprise, THE HOMUNCULUS.

At least it's done now. Until the rewrite, anyway.

Queen of the Sylphs cover

2011-06-02T21:54:00.000-04:00

Look what I have. Isn't it pretty? I think this is my favourite of all the Sylph covers. It's done by Anne Cain.

I Finished!

2011-05-27T21:58:00.000-04:00

The first draft of THE HOMUNCULUS is finished! Woot! I started that bad boy on 1 Feb 2010. Gah.... But it's done now!

Tomorrow I start on THE REVENANT. Yippee!

Edits will wait until all three are done so I can work on them as a whole. Makes continuity easier to manage.

Another Update

2011-05-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

I've passed 90,000 words in The Homunculus. That's 10,000 words since my last post on 6 May, which is 17 days, which is an average of 588 words a day.

Wow, that sucks....

This book has been like pulling teeth. I'm enjoying the way it's turning out, but hoo, man, it's been fighting me! The Battle Sylph took me a month to write. I have no idea why (but I wish that always happened). Each successive Sylph book took longer to finish, to the point where book 4 took 9 months to write (book 4 does take place before book 5, but I wrote book 5 first).

I actually started writing The Homunculus on 1 Feb 2010. It REALLY fought me then until I had to put it aside for about 6 months or so until I figured out how to rework the plot. Good thing I didn't have a contract for it (still don't) as that would have really made me nervous.

My all time record for writing a book is for one called Hunting the Rapture. It's up at about a dozen houses right now for sale. It's 511 typed pages, over 200,000 words, and took me four years to write. That one was written back when I wrote everything out longhand.... took years to get me to actually type stuff straight into a computer, so I don't think that record will be broken....I hope.

Another update

2011-05-06T23:19:00.000-04:00

I've hit 80,000 words in The Humunculus! Yay!

I've also got ideas for the next series I'm going to write *sigh* that may go as many as seven books in length.

For anyone who is paying attention, I've finished playing with my site design of the most part and www.ljmcdonald.ca is just a splash page leading here. Much kudos to Starkite Works for helping me do this. I couldn't have done it without her.

Update

2011-04-13T12:56:00.001-04:00

In case anyone's noticed, the site's undergoing a lot of changes. A friend's helping me turn it into something more easily updatable and customizable than my old site.

In writing news, I'm 70,000 words into the first draft of THE HOMUNCULUS. 20-30k left to go, then on to book three. I haven't sold the series yet.

Also, I stuck a new artwork in the new My Artwork page.

And now for something completely different....

2011-03-26T12:19:00.000-04:00

I know it's nothing to do with writing, but I'm happy with it. This is the first (hopefully successful) attempt at creating art on my new cintiq drawing tablet. I had to fiddle with the colour calibration when I took it off the tablet and put it on my main computer screen, so hopefully she doesn't look oddly coloured to anyone.

I should probably go write something now...

Why Bees?

2011-03-10T12:02:00.000-05:00

I found myself chatting with Autumn Dawn recently, a very nice author who's over at http://www.authorautumndawn.blogspot.com/ and who gave THE BATTLE SYLPH a sweet little plug. She'd just got herself a new beehive and the idea of hives and queens in the sylph universe appealed to her. She asked me why I used that idea.

It's kind of hard to say what I was thinking when I came up with it. I've said before somewhere that the sylphs were inspired by bees and tengu and all sorts of stuff. I tend to play with concepts in my writing, even if I'm the only one who knows it, and I do recall that I brought in the bee idea because I wanted to explore the idea of power. I've read a lot of books, both good and bad, which have characters with immense power, and immense power over other people. That's great. But usually those with the greatest power end up with those they have power over going "Hey! Cut it out!" Look at all the books where the the protagonists are out to stop the evil king/god/demon/priest/whatever who's crushing their freedom. I can't think off the top of my head of any books where the characters are under that sort of absolute power and are perfectly fine with it. It would be a rare sylph indeed who didn't want to have a master/queen (*shifty look towards book six*) Anyway, bees are happy with the whole hive mentality, and I kind of liked that for the sylphs. It certainly wouldn't work in any universe - humans are notoriously bad at bee-like behaviour - but it worked in this one.

My website's fixed

2011-03-08T14:58:00.001-05:00

Yay, I figured it out, so it's not longer saying that Midwinter still is coming out at Christmas or that Queen is releasing in March. Sorry for everyone who was misled by that. I'm pondering doing an overhaul of the site's entire look, but I primarily want to use this blog for updating and make the other site as simple as possible.

I've also added a little widget thing at the bottom of each entry so people can click to give their thoughts on whatever I put out there. I thought it was kind of cute, though I may end up regretting adding the WTF? option....

I'm nominated!

2011-03-07T13:18:00.000-05:00

I got an email yesterday giving me some good news.

A Midwinter Fantasy has been nominated by TRR reviewers for Best in Anthology (Romance) for 2010 at The Romance Reviews (“TRR”), and

The Battle Sylph has been nominated by TRR reviewers for Best in Fantasy Romance for 2010 at The Romance Reviews (“TRR”).

Thanks for everyone who voted for me! I didn't expect to do even this well.

Where I am

2011-03-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

Barbaranramos commented on one of my posts about being happy to hear I'm writing book six of the Sylph series. I should give an update on all of that.

Books four and five of the Sylph series are written and edited. Dorchester gave me a contract to buy them back in September, but I turned it down. Much as I love my editor there, I'm not happy at their new publishing direction towards E-books only, followed by expensive trades. My agent is looking for a different house to publish them instead, who'll release them in paperback as well as e-format. Dorchester still owns the rights to the first three books though, and it's hard to sell the second half of a series to a publishing house when they can't get control of the first half.

So, THE SYLPH HUNTER and WAR OF THE SYLPHS aren't coming out anytime soon that I know of. DOOR TO THE SYLPHS is on hold for a couple of reasons. One is because it's coming out more as straight fantasy than romantic fantasy and another is because I'm not happy with it and have it in the mental simmer pot. The third reason is because I'm writing something else.

My agent, who is awesome, has two finished books of mine in her hands. HUNTING THE RAPTURE is straight fantasy and THE CLIFFS OF SHAKIRI is sci-fi young adult. Neither are romantic fantasy. I don't think of myself specifically as a romantic fantasy author, to be honest. But I do have a series that does have it as part of the storyline and is actually quite a bit steamier than the Sylph books, I think.

THE CUCKOO is written and has gone through a first edit and is in my agent's hands. I'm halfway through writing THE HOMUNCULUS and will follow it up with THE REVENANT. I'm hoping to sell all three at once and get the first drafts written so that I can edit them as a whole. Completely different universe from the Sylphs, different characters, different everything. Still fantasy, though.

So that's where I am, along with working a full time job that's getting a little crazy right now. I'm writing, but the release of the books themselves is completely out of my hands. I'm just trying to get through them and find a reliable beta reader. And fix the website. I know it's kinda outdated. I'm having problems logging in. Sorry.

Grand Opening!

2011-02-16T10:47:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone. The Romance Reviews website is having their Grand Opening throughout all of March and they have all sorts of prizes and other stuff to be won. I'm one of the featured authors on there and there'll be an ad for The Battle Sylph up. Apparently you can vote for your favourite books and authors. By voting, you guys can win prizes of gift certificates and books and the like. If you vote for me and I win, I get an advertising package to promote my books. Sort of a win/win scenario.

Just click on the picture above to go and visit their website.

http://www.theromancereviews.com

Just Touching Base

2011-01-09T08:57:00.000-05:00

Eek. Since I have people who seem to actually be reading this, I should probably put an update. I don't have much to say, mind you. I had a nice, quiet Christmas break that I enjoyed very much and am getting ready to go back to work tomorrow. That won't be so bad.

In the writing world, I'm plugging along as normal. I'm waiting for the first edits back of QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS, seeing what's happening with her two sequels, and just hit the 74k word mark for book six in the series, which has the very boring working title of DOOR TO THE SYLPHS. Not sure how long that one will be, but it's either going to be the longest book in the series or be split into book six and seven. Don't know at this point. I don't usually know where I'm going with a novel during the first draft anyway.

Once I finish that book, I'm going to write something in another universe. I have several to pick from, so it's just a matter of seeing which one sucks me in more when the time comes.

A Midwinter Fantasy in print form

2010-12-14T16:51:00.002-05:00

Well, I now know that the Trade edition of A MIDWINTER FANTASY will tentatively be available in bookstores in October 2011.

*sigh*

It is still available as an e-book, of course.

Playing with the website design

2010-12-11T16:00:00.000-05:00

I'm just playing around with the website design here, thanks to Blogger and its handy dandy do-it-for-you template features. I've added a few webpages here for the books. I do have my own site, but I find it really hard to update. It's a multi-step process that takes me forever to do, which is probably why it doesn't get updated much (or at all). Maybe I'll just set the URL to have a redirect to send it here to this blog and just have that as my site.

A Midwinter Fantasy available for the Kindle

2010-12-11T15:18:00.000-05:00

The anthology I'm in, A MIDWINTER FANTASY, is now available as an e-book for the kindle. You can get it on amazon.com, so yay for that at last.

I heard today that the hoped-for release date for QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS is September, 2011. That's all I know about that one at this point.

Review

2010-11-19T20:19:00.000-05:00

Today THE BATTLE SYLPH was listed by the Library Journal as one of the five best romance novels for all of 2010. Woohoo! I'm pretty happy about that.

The Library Journal

A Midwinter Fantasy release date

2010-11-17T12:06:00.002-05:00

I've been told the new release date for "A Midwinter Fantasy" in Ebook format is 23 Nov 10. So fingers crossed that this is the right date!

Rerelease

2010-10-25T14:52:00.000-04:00

More news. My books with Dorchester are going to cone out as ebooks first and then as trade. Still don't know when. That's old news. However, I have learned that the first two will be reissued as trade. No idea when or how much they'll cost.

I'm in the top five

2010-10-25T14:37:00.000-04:00

Today I received word from Library Journal that THE BATTLE SYLPH (which Library gave a starred review to in their February 15, 2010 issue) has been chosen a one of the FIVE best romances of the year; the full list will be published in their December 2010 issue.

Yay!! I'm really happy about it.

Oh wow

2010-10-13T10:31:00.000-04:00

I just found out today that my first three books are apparently going to be translated into German and sold in Germany. I so want an author's copy. :D

Hi

2010-09-22T15:06:00.000-04:00

I don't post to this page nearly often enough. I know I'm an author, but that doesn't mean I can ever think of what to say.

I do have some news, which I've been putting off saying much about because I honestly don't know all that much yet. I guess I can't really keep doing that though.

As some of you may know, Dorchester has changed their publishing format to one where they're going to release all their books as E-books and then, after about six months, release them as trade on a print-on-demand basis. This includes THE QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS and A MIDWINTER FANTASY. Right now, I don't know how this will affect the release dates for both books, but I do know I haven't receive the edit proofs for QUEEN yet (we fire them back and forth doing editing and scene rewrites about five times). So I don't know what will happen or when anything will actually appear for people to read.

I'm not going to get into how I feel about all of this because at the moment, I honestly don't know and likely no one would be interested anyway. I think I'm just in a holding pattern waiting to see, like a lot of Dorchester's other authors.

New Interview Up

2010-06-14T09:01:00.000-04:00

My guest interview at the Borders site is now up. You can read it here. http://bordersblog.com/trueromance/2010/06/14/guest-author-lj-mcdonald/ It's an interview about THE SHATTERED SYLPH, though they don't say that and they have pictures of both books up. Still, I like some of the answers I was able to give.

Queen of the Sylphs update

2010-06-08T14:21:00.001-04:00

For those are interested, the third book in the Sylph series has been moved so its release date is now in March 2011, instead of November 2010. I'm not sure why the change was made, but I'm sure it's all for the good in the long run.

Also, I'm going to be doing some guest blogging in July for http://www.tor.com/. Go give them a look. They've got some very nice content there. Hopefully I'll get one of my short stories up there as well.

Review-The Shattered Sylph

2010-05-20T17:52:00.000-04:00

I got a very nice review of THE SHATTERED SYLPH by Lynn Spencer on the All About Romance website. I have their permission to repost it here. Go check them out. They have a very nice site.

The Shattered Sylph

L.J. McDonald
April 2010, Fantasy Romance
Leisure Books, $7.99, 321 pages, Amazon ASIN 0843963239
Part of a series

Grade:	B+
Sensuality:	Warm

This review contains series spoilers.

I really enjoyed The Battle Sylph and as I read that book, there was one secondary character who rather haunted me. When I saw that The Shattered Sylph would be his book, I pounced on it. Though you'll need to read the first book in this series to understand what goes on in this one, both are well worth your time. In addition, if you haven't read The Battle Sylph, this review is full of spoilers for that book, so be warned!

Battle sylph Ril, our hero, is Tortured with a capital T after spending years bound unwillingly to his master Leon Petrule. Ultimately a decent man, Leon's ignorance and arrogance at the time of the binding blinded him to how this slavery ate at Ril. The two came to respect and even care for one another, though it took much for either master or sylph to admit it. However, Ril's great love has always been Leon's daughter Lizzy. Ril's love for Lizzy from the moment of her birth could easily be a creepy premise, but the author handles it well. During flashbacks to Lizzy's childhood in both books, Ril appears more protective and like an older brother to Lizzy than sexually attracted.

This book takes place six years after the preceding book. Lizzy is now an adult and Ril loves her dearly. However, the injuries he sustained years before in the action covered in The Battle Sylph weakened him severely and he believes himself unworthy of Lizzy. Even so, when Lizzy is kidnapped by slavers and taken to the distant land of Meridal, Ril joins her father on the quest to rescue her.

Lizzy's ordeals in Meridal are harrowing, and Ril himself goes through all manner of tortures there as well. It can be tough reading. Rather like the ancient Romans, the people of Meridal love their gladiatorial bouts and the battle sylphs enslaved by the Emperor provide sport for them. And to slake the battle sylphs' thirst for women, they have a harem of women available to them - a harem to which Lizzy is sold.

Ril's quest to find Lizzy and to rescue her from slavery makes for action-packed reading. There is also tender romance to be found amidst all the horrors. The novel has plenty of detail about Meridal and its society, but also has more of a romantic focus than the first. You get to see how Lizzy's love for Ril heals him and, while I would have liked to see more scenes between the two of them, the romance was strong enough to convince me of their happy ending.

At times, I almost felt like Ril and Lizzy had to face a few trials too many and some of the sylph humor was a little on the silly side for me. Still, I greatly enjoyed what I read and at times lost myself completely in this unique world the author has created. I enjoy fantasy and I enjoy romance (obviously), and this book marries the two well.

In addition to containing a page-turning fantasy story, both books in the series play with ideas involving gender and power in ways that intrigue me. The battle sylphs are as alpha a hero as anyone could wish. These guys can blast apart a room with a burst of energy and they're strong enough to provide near-complete protection for the women they cherish. However, in binding themselves to their heroines, the battle sylphs must willingly give these women a certain amount of power. The woman to whom a sylph is bound has the capacity to order the sylph to do things - and this is something that the female characters recognize and must consciously think about in terms of not abusing someone they love. The rules of this world set up a very interesting power balance between the genders and, while some of the world's rules may seem overly convenient, I did find myself thinking a lot about how relationships developed within this construct, how they could be twisted, and about how power was allocated.

If you enjoy fantasy romance and strong world-building, The Shattered Sylph should definitely go on your list. You'll need to read The Battle Sylph first, but since both are fantastic books, that's hardly a sacrifice.

-- Lynn Spencer

Upcoming stuff

2010-05-06T17:22:00.000-04:00

On 14 June, I'll have a blog on the Borders site. They were nice enough to ask me a bunch of questions that I've tried to answer. I'll be answering questions in the blog comments that day as well, so hopefully people are interested enough to go and visit their site.

In other news, I'm now doing the first revision of my upcoming novella "The Worth of a Sylph". It'll be featured in the upcoming anthology A MIDWINTER FANTASY, coming out for Christmas. This is where my editor has had his first comments/revision and I get to answer back with my changes, based on things he's suggested. Chris is really good at suggesting things that strengthen a story, so I'm having fun tweaking. Still has a few more back and forths to go though.

I have a new blog

2010-05-02T12:13:00.000-04:00

I've been having trouble lately with my blog. I don't write anything in it all that much, but I do want to be able to, and the one on my website wasn't working out. For one, no one could comment. For two, no one could subscribe and I haven't been able to get a mailing list that works either.

Theoretically, I should be able to post to this blog, which will hopefully tie in with my actually website, and people can comment and subscribe to it. Whenever I have something new coming out, such as a book, I will announce it here.

I'll see how this works. I've imported some, but not all of my original posts. I'll copy over what I think are the more interesting ones later, once I get this all figured out.

Inspiration is a fickle b*tch

2010-04-17T12:07:00.000-04:00

I wish I could turn inspiration on and wedge something in there so that it stays on. My brain would probably end up overloading and explode, but it’d be nice for a while. Actually, it’s not so much the inspiration I need as the ability to get inspiration to let me get something out onto paper with a bit more speed.

I wrote THE BATTLE SYLPH in a month. Mind you, I was deployed for the first half of that and on course for the second, which meant I had nothing else to do in the evening other than go to the bar. I wrote THE SHATTERED SYLPH in a month and a half. THE QUEEN OF THE SYLPHS took three months. I wrote WAR OF THE SYLPHS in seven months and HUNTER OF THE SYLPHS topped them all at ten months.

I’d probably take less time if I spent less time being distracted. Until such time as I have a few books on the bestsellers’ list, I work full time and my job is demanding enough that I’m usually too tired to do more than play computer games in the evening. I also get distracted by the knitting of sweaters and socks and the reading of books. Good thing I don’t have cable or I’d be staring at that for hours on end too.

Right now, I’m not writing a Sylph book. I’m working on another trilogy in a different fantasy universe. The first book is called THE CUCKOO and took five months to get the initial draft out. The second is titled THE HOMUNCULUS and is currently half done and mocking me as I speak. Book three, THE REVENANT, is a distant torment on the horizon. The vast majority of these books have been written in the forty-five minutes or so I have between when I get to work and when I actually start my shift. Never thought I’d be grateful to car pooling.

These have been some of the hardest books for me to write. My first drafts in a new universe are usually… confused. I’m making up the world as I go alone, refining and enriching it, and as I add bits, I end up contradicting things I said earlier. I usually catch them all before the book even goes to the editor and if I don’t, someone else catches them before they go to print. If someone tried to read THE CUCKOO right now, they’d probably throw it away in confusion and wonder what I was smoking.

My grand plan this weekend, like it is every weekend, is to ‘get some serious writing done’. I’m up to 596 words for the day and I’m writing a blog entry instead. A vaguely whiny blog entry…. I know where I want to go with this book, or rather, I know the highlights and the ending. It’s the getting there that’s being a problem.

I assume if someone’s bothering to read this, they read THE BATTLE SYLPH and possibly THE SHATTERED SYLPH. I don’t plot my books. Not in the traditional sense. Outlines kill inspiration for me dead, so it’s all in my head, usually in the form of flashes of specific scenes I want to see. When I started THE BATTLE SYLPH, I had three images in my head. One was of a man leaping off a sheer cliff and everyone screaming as he changed shape. Another was of a cottage exploding and a bird of prey streaking past a living cloud whose teeth closed right behind his tail. I also saw a slim bald man standing behind a throne with a king cringing in it, and the slim man was laughing without making a sound. The whole plot of the first book was to get to those points in time.

I had the same sorts of things in my head for THE SHATTERED SYLPH. Leon leaning back against a door, Ril standing almost against him and drinking his energy. Ril high above the ground, upside down and rotating in midair above something horrible. Lizzy dancing in a translucent dress. Leon riding Ril in the form of a horse. It’s like I’ve seen the trailer to a movie, which is a bit hard to deal with when you’re the one writing the movie.

I have these flicks in time for THE CUCKOO, THE HOMUNCULUS, and THE REVENANT too. I even have them for two more Sylph books that I’ll be writing once I have this trilogy done. It’s just coming out so slowly. I don’t think a reader can tell the difference between a scene it took me twenty minutes to write and one that took two weeks, but I want it to come out now. I want to see my lead male Goose running along the top of that train I know he will be on, knowing he has to get off of it before it’s too late. I can see the gates to Alkara and the army marching on it. I want to get there.

I can see what’s going to happen in the next two Sylph books too. That little earth sylph standing in the laboratory is just waiting for me to find her. Just as I can see a woman riding a blue-furred monster across the Shale Plains, the wind streaming her hair back. She’s grinning at me. That’s not going to last, given what I know will happen to her when she gets to where she’s going.

I can’t wait to get to the scene with Thrall and the horse.

I’ve started meeting other authors, thanks to the Ottawa Chapter of the Romance Writer’s Association. I need to ask them how they get this stuff out of their heads when its there, and they can see it, and it just doesn’t want to come out as quickly as they need it to.

Maybe I need to lock myself away in a secret room somewhere with no computer games or knitting or reading or eating or internet or work to distract me.

Nah... If I did that I’d probably just write more blog entries.

PS: Before anyone gets too excited, I haven’t sold any of these books yet, other than the first three Sylph books. I’d like to, but I’d write them regardless. Don’t ask me when they’ll be available. Until a publisher buys them and tells me, I don’t know. You’d be better off asking them. :)

The Battle Sylph is now available in Canada!

2010-03-18T12:05:00.001-04:00

For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, it took three weeks for my book to come out in Canada. But it’s out now! THE BATTLE SYLPH is now available for sale at Chapters and hopefully other fine bookstores everywhere.

As as aside, hey, Torin. Yes, I was who I said I was. :)

A Dude Reads PNR: Harry reads the Battle Sylph by L.J. McDonald

2010-03-09T12:01:00.005-05:00

I found this review from The Book Smugglers website and it really made my day. They’ve given me permission to reprint it here.

By Ana on February 25, 2010

Filed under: 8 Rated Books, A Dude Reads PNR, Book Reviews

Tags: Fantasy, Harry Markov, Paranormal Romance, Romance

This is our brand new segment in which our delightful buddy Harry, from Temple Library Reviews will be joining us once a month to review paranormal romance from a guy’s perspective. But we will let him introduce himself, please let’s give a warm welcome to Harry!

*******

Harry: I’m the newest honorary addition to the Book Smugglers team [honest to God, I smuggle books home and then lie straight to my family's face about it]. I get the chance to play here at their blog once a month and my small spot will be called ‘A Dude Reads PNR’. The idea came to be in December, when I posted my Sherilyn Kenyon review and people were interested to see the male POV about Paranormal Romance. The public demands, the attention whore (that’s me) begs, and the smugglers comply.

*******

Title: The Battle Sylph
Author: L.J. McDonald
Genre: Romantic Fantasy / PNR

Publisher: Dorchester Publishing
Publishing Date: 23.02.2010
MMP: 323 pages [in the ARC]

Stand Alone or series: First book in a new series

He is one of many: a creature of magic, unrelentingly male. He is lured through the portal by pure female beauty, a virgin sacrifice. When she is killed, he is silenced and enslaved.

Such a dark ritual is necessary, you see. Unlike their elemental cousins-those gentler sylphs of wind and fire-Battlers find no joy in everyday labor. Their magic can destroy an army or demolish a castle, and each has but one goal: find a Queen, then protect and pleasure her at all costs. What would a woman do if she were given such a servant, and what would befall any kingdom foolish enough to allow a Battler to escape?

Young Solie and the people of Eferem are about to find out.

Why did I read the book: The premise sounded intriguing. Ana sounded ecstatic and when her reader-sense is tingling, it means something good will happen. The cover is also mucho impressive with those glowing eyes and the woman sprawled below the title. Certainly a looker that one.

How did I get the book: Ana [book-pimp extraordinaire] tied it to a balloon and asked a flock of geese to deliver it to me. That is a lie, but it would have taken less than with snail mail post.

Review:

My christening review for this mighty feature has not been the funny and good-feel bang I hoped for. To be quite honest ‘Circle of Fire’ shoved me outside in a blizzard. I needed a book to turn the heat up, burn down the house and fire me up. Thankfully ‘The Battle Sylph’ is just the right novel to help you lower your heating bills and is way better than the hot-water bottle you bring to bed. Every page is soaked with either adrenaline or naughty kerosene for the nether regions… of your imagination [naturally, what did you guys think I was going to say?]

Did I hook you? I hope so. Because, there’s much to enjoy in ‘The Battle Sylph’. As the genre suggests this is romantic fantasy, so no leather boots, guns, mean SUVs and vampires or any other standard magical race. Instead, we have swords, sturdy warriors, a queen and a race of spirits, who can become corporal and incorporeal, whenever they please. While it is true that fantasy hosts a romantic subplot almost always, the way the sex scene is mandatory for every single major Hollywood, the relationship usually remains in the background and is not central for the conflict. And it is not steamy, either.

‘The Battle Sylph’ offers the best from the medieval traditional fantasy with its quests, parties of brave heroes with a noble cause and a dastardly nemesis figure, while merging it with quite the liberated sexual attitude and a central relationship, which triggered the events in the book. The balance is solid and achieved by integrating sex into the worldbuilding, which evades the hazard of this becoming a book, where sex randomly flies around and is neither relevant, nor of any use to the plot. As the reader [you, because you have to have this book] discovers, the sylphs are spirits from a different plain, which live together in hives and divide into several subspecies, according to their status and function in the hive. There are elemental sylphs. Fire, water, earth, air. There are healing sylphs and there are also battle sylphs otherwise called the battlers. Every subspecies, excluding the battle sylphs, are female. The battlers are the soldiers in the hive and exist for war and sex, since they are the only males. The sole female to receive their affections is the queen of the hive, which makes them highly competitive and aggressive towards each other. The mythos in ‘The Battle Sylph’ helps the reader identify the mutual traits and the justification behind the behavior of all the battlers in the novel such as Heyou, the youngest battler and main protagonist, Ril and Mace. The dynamics and the hierarchy are fascinating to rediscover, because sylphs in general have no known mythological and popular role attached to them and this rendition steals the show, so to say.

Because sylphs in general require a connection with a human master in order to exist in the human world, the novel is rich in diverse relationship dynamics and scenarios. Beyond the usual human-human interaction with all the classic elements and tropes, such as friendship, betrayal, loyalty, subordination and defilement, readers are also treated to mandatory master-sylph episodes, which are as diverse as the individual characters. McDonald features cold hearted masters with a sadistic streak towards their sylphs, benign masters with a liberal mind, who break some rules and grant some freedoms to their sylphs and masters, who stray away from established models and allow their sylphs to act as they wish, relying on cooperation rather than servitude.

Although Solie and Heyou are the central couple, a queen with her battle sylph, their roles and the story attached to them would ring a bell. Solie is the first woman to break a monopolized by men tradition, by being bound to a battle sylph. Heyou is the young inexperienced battler, who must stand against many a challenge. That aside, the chemistry between these two feels very much real and volatile. However, the real emotional intensity lies in the human-sylph interactions between Leon, the king’s head of security and a dirty trick man, and his battler Ril and Jasar, member of the spoiled elite with many connections and an insufferable ego, and his battler Mace. Leon and Ril walk on the path of guilt, redemption and forgiveness, after it becomes clear that the female sacrifice used in the summoning ritual was actually the reason the battlers crossed plains and her death results in madness for the sylph and hatred towards the master, who remains clueless. Leon’s devastation upon learning the truth is raw and heartfelt, while Ril’s hatred and painful denial is also powerful to read. Mace is less fortunate with his master Jasar, whom you would love to hate and kill, if you were a character in the story. Mace has to endure his master’s depravations, toxic and demanding personality and amoral orders in silence; a bond from which he cannot escape and threatens to add a horrific twist in the resolution.

As you see, ‘The Battle Sylph’ is the Horn of Plenty. From page one you are assaulted with so many flavors, excitement and adventures that you may need some time to adjust. This is my issue with the book. It is taking a non-stop staccato story and playing it double time. There are almost no natural pauses for the reader to rest and by the end of the journey, I was as exhausted as the characters and mind you, I never even had to raise a sword or survive almost certain annihilation. This unnatural speed to dash to the finish line coupled with the lightning quick POV changes might result in some confusion, but overall these two issues do not steal from the quality of the storytelling, prose or creative prowess.

Verdict: I wanted to be sassy, humorous and witty, but quite frankly writing this review sapped completely. There are at least a few thousand words more I wanted to say, but this is a review and not a thesis. In a few words though, ‘The Battle Sylph’ is a winner for sure. A power exercise for your brain’s endurance, but the benefits outweigh the minor inconveniences along the way.

Rating: 8 – Excellent

Roving Readers is featuring me

2010-03-08T12:00:00.001-05:00

I was contacted last week by the very nice people who run the RAVING READERS blogspot, which is apparently the place to go to get reviews of romance and paranormal novels and find recommendations. They also have contests where people can win free books, which always strikes me as a good thing to be getting.

They’ve just started a new feature where they focus on a single author for a week, and they asked me if I wanted to join in. I’m not a complete idiot, so for this entire week, you can go to their site and read reviews, see an interview with me, get sneak previews of the prologues of my first three books and even a hint of other books beyond them. Best of all, you get a chance to win one of six copies of THE BATTLE SYLPH up for grabs.

The page that’s focused on me is located here. The rest of the site is worth visiting though, so I certainly don’t mind plugging them one bit. Not that they asked. I just like them. :)

Review

2010-02-19T11:49:00.002-05:00

This is a review of THE BATTLE SYLPH from Amazon.com. I have permission from the author to post it. Thanks, Kellie.

Briefly, this is the first time I've written a review for a product sold by Amazon. I am not in the book industry (I still keep up a weekly romance newsletter I started while at the bookstore) though I spent a little over 21 years working for a major national bookstore chain, and during that time I was a District Romance Expert. I have been fortunate to see the Romance book genre evolve and take on new branches like Erotic Romance and Paranormal Romance (the latter sprouting the Urban Fantasy sub-genre). I've seen authors come and go and stay. All my experience in the bookselling world tells me L. J. McDonald is here to stay, so keep an eye on her, for she is an author that will not only stay but will soar.

I loved reading her debut book THE BATTLE SYLPH. The setting of the story is on an Earth-like planet inhabited by humans. There is another dimension parallel to this where the Sylphs, elemental creatures, live. There is a doorway between the two dimensions called gates. The humans have found a way to open the gates and entice a Sylph through, who then becomes a slave to the human. When a Sylph crosses the gate, it is bonded with a man--only men are allowed to bond with a Sylph, for those in power feel a woman is too weak to handle a Sylph. There are several types of Sylphs: Battle Sylphs or "warriors", Fire Sylphs, Water Sylphs, Air Sylphs and Earth Sylphs. As their name describes, they are used to fight, warm and produce light, manipulate water, air and earth. Battle Sylphs are all male. In their elemental world they are the protectors of communities called "hives" and a mate for the queens of each hive. They are naturally predisposed to hate all other males of any species, and this hatred and their supernatural strength and abilities are what are attractive to the humans.

Every Battle Sylph desires a queen and a hive of their own. The humans take advantage of this by enticing a Battle Sylph through the gate with a virgin sacrifice tied to an alter table where the gate opens. All the Battle Sylph sees is his "queen" and he cannot resist crossing the gate to her. As soon as the Battle Sylph comes through the gate, it is closed and the man who wants to bond with the Battle Sylph kills the woman and the gate closes. The Battle Sylph becomes a slave to the man who kills the girl. The man "names" the Battle Sylph and from then on the Battle Sylph has to obey him. The Battle Sylphs are told what shape to assume, a hawk, a suite of armor, a lion, etc, and they are forbidden to change or speak to anyone, including their masters and other Sylphs. Their hatred for their bonded human, the killer of their queens, is palpable, and is strong enough to physically affect anyone near them.

The king holds a ceremony to entice a Battle Sylph across the gate to bond with his son, but something goes wrong and the virgin sacrifice, a girl named Solie, doesn't get killed. Rather, it's the prince that is killed by the Battle Sylph, and Solie unwittingly names the Battle Sylph when she tries to get his attention by calling to him, "Hey, you". He is now Heyou. Solie and her Battle Sylph are on the run with the King's men and their Battle Sylphs in pursuit. Solie and Heyou find a refuge with a budding community, and life as everyone knows it is on the brink of change.

Paranormal Romance has evolved in the past few years, looking for new branches on the Paranormal tree. First there were vampires and werewolves, then other shifters, then mixtures of different creatures, then Dragons and now demons (rightly so, these guys are hot; just check out Kate Douglas' DEMONFIRE Demonfire: The Demonslayers). McDonald's innovative world in this debut book, the first in a series, is so simple yet it achieves what many authors try to reach--a back story and characters you do not see in other books--and one wonders why no one has thought of it before. Yes, elements of her Sylph world may be seen in other books and even movies, but the way McDonald treats these elements is refreshing. Her prose is fast and though not all of her characters are likable (bad guys are not meant to be liked), each one is completely fleshed out, and the ones that are the "good guys" and even some on the fence are so interesting I wish I could meet them.

Dorchester Publishing categorizes THE BATTLE SYLPH as Fantasy/Romance and RT Book Reviews has its review under Fantasy (website only). There are a few sex scenes but these are more descriptive than literal. Certainly, compared to the heat level that current romances of the day are reaching in General Romance, this book is a light weight. Personally, I'd like to see more romantic interaction between the hero and the heroine, and the sex scenes described a bit more, but that is my personal preference, and McDonald has treated the sex scenes in the book very tastefully and each one is meaningful to the story and the make up of the characters involved.

McDonald has written a solid debut book. As with any debut book there is always room for improvement, but McDonald is way ahead of the norm. Her characters and the worlds in which they live are obviously well thought out. The tantalizing glimpses of future romances and intrigues whet the reader's appetite. With this book she has made me laugh and cry. If you love Paranormal Romance and you are looking for a new branch of the sub-genre to explore, pick up THE BATTLE SYLPH. This is the type of book you dread finishing because you like the characters and their world so much you wish to live in it forever (like Avatar). McDonald with THE BATTLE SYLPH has my highest stamp of approval. I can't wait to read the next story, THE SHATTERED SYLPH (Apr. 2010)The Shattered Sylph, about Lizzie and Ril.

Review

Friday, February 19, 2010

News and Reviews

2010-02-16T11:48:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s almost the release date for my first book. I had meant to have more blog entries in the past while, but I was having issues with my computer. It didn’t want me to save anything for this site without crashing, but the problem is fixed now.

I’ve been receiving a lot of good press about the book. Apparently, Dorchester sent out a 125 early copies to reviews and websites, and everyone seems to like it. At least everyone I’ve heard about. It’s a tremendously affirming feeling to have my work be genuinely liked. Romantic Times has given it four and a half stars, as has the Blogpushers Blog. It’s going to be talked about in a German magazine and featured at the RT Clubhouse’s Debut Corner.

The reviews themselves I’ll put on my Reviews page. I’m starting to get really excited!