Retirement

Hey, y'all. It's been obvious for some time now that I don't really post on here anymore, so I'm finally making it official: This blog is now retired. I'm keeping it up for old posts/reviews, but I won't be adding to it anymore.

I'm still contributing to Across the Board once a month, and of course, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Find me there!

Farpoint Schedule!

I’m super excited to be retiring to Farpoint this weeken! Here’s my con schedule:

FRIDAY

10PM Book Fair

Hunt Valley Foyer

SATURDAY

11AM The Ladies of Star Trek: Enterprise

Salon A

12PM Icons and Mantles

Salon C

3PM Crazy 8 Press

Salon C

4PM Autographs

Autograph 1

SUNDAY

11AM Autographs

Autograph 1

Between panels, you can find me hanging out at the Crazy 8 Press table!

ANNOUNCING BAD ASS MOMS!

Hey everyone! I've partnered with the Crazy 8 Press crew to put together BAD ASS MOMS, an anthology featuring 20+ stories spanning multiple genres. As the editor, I gave authors only one criterion: that their story be about a bad ass mom or mom figure, whatever that means to them.

We just launched our crowdfunding campaign, and we need your support! Any amount will help, plus we've got some great rewards for backers. Get signed books! Your name in the acknowledgements! A character named after you! Click here to check out our Kickstarter page.

Or, if you're not a fan of Kickstarter, click here to see the direct PayPal alternative.

For more about the impetus behind this project, see my post on the Crazy 8 Press blog.

We're off to a strong start, but we've got a long way to go. Please help me spread the word :-)

Thank you!!

COVER REVEAL: Song of the Spirits (and other tales of curious and forgotten lore) / T. Damon

Today, I'm helping to reveal the cover of T. Damon's SONG OF THE SPIRITS! Isn't it awesome??

Title: Song of the Spirits (and other tales of curious and forgotten lore) (A Forest Spirit  Short Story Collection)
Author: T. Damon
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Cover Designer: BetiBup
Cover Reveal Date: February 5, 2020
Release Date: March 17, 2020

About the Book

An enchanting collection of stories and poems from T. Damon, author of the Forest Spirit series. Included are her short stories featured in the Snowy Wings Publishing anthologies: "Little Rue" from Magic at Midnight and "The Desperate Warrior and the Beast Who Walks Without Sound" from Perchance to Dream. Also included is the exclusive, first-ever Forest Spirit series short story: "Song of the Spirits," as well as many other surprises. Lose all sense of time and embark on a journey through the magical worlds of T. Damon!

Add it on Goodreads

About the Author

T. Damon has been imagining new tales and bringing them to life through her writing since she was a young girl growing up in Burlingame, California. Though oddly enough, most of her professional life has been in the zoological field, where she volunteered at the San Francisco Zoo and worked as a tour guide at Safari West in Santa Rosa for many years. T. Damon always assumed she would make her career in the animal field, as she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Zoology, but her passion for writing was a fire within her heart that was not to be ignored.

Aside from writing, in her spare time she enjoys studying astrology, tarot, and anything magical or mystical. But since having any free moments with a toddler is rare, T. Damon mostly spends her days raising her young daughter, Lenore, and tending to her husband Mark and numerous pets at their home in Santa Rosa.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: HL Fullerton

Hi! Welcome to Zigzag Timeline. Can you tell us about your background as an author?

I thought I wanted to be a novelist, but after several false starts and abandoned projects, I decided to switch to short stories. My first fiction (Don't Look) was published in 2010, and I've been writing and submitting speculative fiction ever since.

What got you into writing?

Books. I'm reader who goes through books like a kid binging Halloween candy. And I think it's natural that at some point, after reading hundreds, thousands, of stories, you say, "I could do that." It took me awhile to actually attempt it and then a ton of tries until someone bought something I wrote.

What was the first idea you had for your book, and how did the story grow from there?

I first imagined a flash length story about a human boy who kept getting mistaken as fae. So my initial idea eventually became the title of this much longer tale—The Boy Who Was Mistaken for a Fairy King—but I knew the story's length was going to be much longer than I planned the moment I wrote the first paragraph.

Among your characters, who's your favorite? Could you please describe them?

I love them all, but if I had a favorite it'd be the narrator. The hidden teller of the tale. Who isn't in the story, but tends to insert themself in the narrative and becomes less and less objective as the story progresses.

What's your favorite scene from your novel? Could you please describe it?

This is a hard one. But there are a series of scenes where Carl, a perfectly normal human boy (except for the antlers on top of his head), is greeted by some not-so-human creatures with some strange requests and yet he's pretty relaxed about the whole preternatural world existing alongside his and happy to be of help. In these odd meetings, Carl is just Carl. He's like, I have antlers, you're a tree in the shape of a man, why wouldn't we have a cordial conversation? And it never, not once, occurs to Carl at any point that the reasons all these fae beings approach him is because of his antlers. He assumes it's because he's a good listener.

SCENE EXCERPT:

“Hello,” Carl said as he took in his visitor’s appearance. Although, as with the troll, he wasn’t sure his first impression of ‘man’ was correct. The man was slender but solid, his build burly. Bones bowed under his skin like weighted branches. His multi-colored hair was prickly as a crew cut. As he approached, Carl realized the bristles weren’t strands of hair, but pine needles in shades of orange and green, representing all stages and hues of a pine needle’s life, from new growth to forest floor, and that his skin was scalloped like a pine cone’s seed scales, which, up close, made his flesh seem shattered.

“Greetings,” the pine man said and his voice echoed with silence the way all pines did. For Carl, who had heard trees talk all his life, it convinced him the stranger was not a man, but a tree in humanesque form, which he hadn’t realized they had. He wasn’t sure if this was a trick of his pine or all pines.

What's your favorite part of writing? Plotting? Describing scenes? Dialogue?

The first bit. First line, first paragraph, first page—the part where I go from idea to words. The part where it starts to get real. Or as real as fiction gets.

How long does it take you to write a book? Do you have a writing process, or do you wing it?

There is a lot of winging it involved. The Boy Who Was Mistaken for a Fairy King took me about six months to draft. I haven't ever thought about describing my writing process before, other than, I sit down and type out words. But it goes something like: get idea; think about idea; make up some characters with traits that make idea work; have fake interactions between characters in my head; figure out how to make all those interactions into a story; maybe scribble down some ideas for scenes or dialogue on scraps of paper and forget about them; brainstorm titles — I can't start a project without a title (Boy, With Antlers, was the initial title for this project); stare at a blank Word doc; spend more brain time germinating words until I get a first sentence good enough to type out. That first sentence gives me the style and mood of the story, and, once I have the first bit, I know the rest of it will eventually work. Sometimes it takes longer to figure out how it's going to work. If I get stuck, I spend more time writing sentences in my head or making up more scenes until I come across something that will work.

What is it about the genre you chose that appeals to you?

I tend to hover under the umbrella of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, horror…  I like making things up, imaging things that aren't real but could be.

Are there any books or writers that have had particular influence on you?

All of them. Every book and every author I've ever read—which is a lot. I piece together patterns I've seen elsewhere and stitch them together to make something a little different. I love authors who give good voice. And there are a lot of them out there. I'm very much a sucker for style over substance.

Did you ever surprise yourself when you were writing your book? Characters who took on lives of their own? Plot elements that took unexpected turns?

So much yes. I think I mentioned I originally thought this idea would be under 1000 words. And a light, fluffy story. Something cute. But then I wrote the first bit and thought, oh, it's going to be longer. And the teller of the tale snarked their way in and I thought, oh, it going to be darker. I initially hadn't planned on Evangeline's character and yet she became the backbone of the story. Oddly enough, I ended up in the same place at The End, so the story was both full of surprises and ended exactly the way I thought it would.

Thanks for stopping by!

Author's Twitter: @ByHLFullerton

Book webpage: http://annorlundaenterprises.com/books/the-boy-who-was-mistaken-for-a-fairy-king/

Book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46799426-the-boy-who-was-mistaken-for-a-fairy-king

Publisher’s Twitter: @AnnorlundaInc

Publisher’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annorlundabooks

BRAVE NEW GIRLS submissions are now open!

Damn, how is it October?? The weather here in Jersey City certainly doesn't seem to know it, with its 90-degree heat and its summer-style cloudbursts. But October it is, and y'all know what that means? BRAVE NEW GIRLS SUBMISSIONS open up! A couple days late, admittedly. My bad. As y'all may have surmised from the opening of this paragraph, this month caught me quite by surprise.

Also, can I just say, how amazing is it that we're getting a FIFTH anthology??? This whole thing started out as one little book, and Paige Daniels and I thought it was literally one and done. That was 2014. Now here we are, looking at 2020...

Anyway, details and submissions form here: http://bravenewgirls.weebly.com/submissions.html

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2020. The criteria are that stories must be:

• About a teen girl (14-18) with an interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math)
• Geared toward a tween/teen audience (10-18)
• PG in content, as many of our readers are very young, and we want parents/guardians/family friends to be comfortable giving these books to the children in their lives. No graphic sex ("sweet" romance with kissing and hand holding and such is fine), no graphic violence (bloodless comic-book-movie-style violence is fine), no swearing (biblical curse words, i.e. "hell" or "damn", and made-up sci-fi cursing, e.g. "frak" or "gorram", are fine)
• In the sci-fi category. We're open to any and all sub-genres (space opera, contemporary with speculative tech, historical with speculative tech, dystopia, cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk, dieselpunk, biopunk, silkpunk... all the punks)
• Between 2,500 and 10,000 words in length

We strive to be as inclusive as possible and encourage authors and characters from the whole range of human backgrounds, across race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, religion, national origin, ability, socioeconomic status, and more.

Each story selected will be accompanied by an illustration, and each contributing author will receive a complimentary paperback of the anthology, which will be released July 2020.

Surprise release: A Girl Called Firedragon!

Guess what, y'all? I have a new book out! Just in time for the Halloween season comes A Girl Called Firedragon, a collection of dark fantasy stories about teen monster slayer Aurelia "The Firedragon" Sun.

If that sounds familiar, it's because this isn't a 100% new release. Back in 2014, when the first book of my YA fantasy series Flynn Nightsider was under contract with Glass House Press, the publisher asked me to write two e-book-only novellas to promote the book. These were The Firedragon and Firedragon Rising. For various reasons, I ended up taking my rights back from Glass House and publishing Flynn Nightsider and the Edge of Evil with Crazy 8 Press instead. I'd always wanted to see the novellas in print, and so I decided to release them together in a compendium, along with "The Firedragon's Hunt," a short story I'd originally published in the anthology Missing Pieces IX, and an all-new novella, The Firedragon Strikes, exclusive to the collection. In addition, I commissioned illustrations from the talented Fauzy Zulvikar Firmansyah to accompany each story.

A Girl Called Firedragon features Aurelia's standalone adventures prior to the events of the first Flynn Nightsider novel, following her journey from government-trained cadet to underground revolutionary. Available in e-book and paperback formats.

Cover design by Key of Heart Designs, featuring photography by Tom Castles of model Angel Fan.