What’s Cooking on the Creative Back Burners

I have nothing significant to report today on the progress for “City of Dis”, so I thought I’d jabber a little bit about a couple of other series projects I’ve got cooking on the back burner. It’s my intention to release three books in the Colbie Moss series, aka The Norn Convergence Series, before introducing one of these series as well.

The first is another urban fantasy series that takes place in Oregon’s Hundred Valleys and runs concurrent to the events of The Norn Convergence. For that reason, I will likely choose this series to introduce next, write the first three books, then alternate between this series and TNC until both series wrap up with their culminating events.

I’ve tentatively titled it The Twistwood Cycle (a little play on Irish lit there). The majority of supernaturals in this series will be Celtic. Here’s a rough blurb:

Ashlinn McKenna has been telling herself for five years that her missing parents are alive - the strange fates that always befall the McKenna’s will prove false this time. She doesn’t want to admit she knows better, as surely as she feels something not quite normal stirring inside her. Ash fights the sensation by staying away from everything that feeds it: her hometown, the woods and fields that dominated her childhood dreams, the bed and breakfast her parents built. But her sister’s plan to have their parents declared dead and to sell the family business is dragging Ash back home to Whitley Grove and Oregon’s Hundred Valleys to fight for her heritage and learn what she can about why there’s always been something different about the McKenna’s.

The second project has a distinctively urban fantasy quality but actually takes place in the Old West, an alternate Arizona isolated from the rest of the world by a deathly force that has taken possession of the land. The supernatural elements for this series will revolve around all things dead: vampires, ghosts, zombies, ghouls, death cults. I’m calling this one The Deadlands Series.

I’m especially excited about this project because my great-grandfather (like my heroine) was an Arizona ranger (from about 1908 through WW2). Back in the early 1900’s, rangers were part lawman, part natural scientist, part cartographer, part bureaucrat, part explorer. I found an old metal box when I was in college and opened it to find it was filled with my great-grandfather’s field notes, hand-drawn maps, official Forestry Department correspondence, drawings of Native American cave art (he ended up marrying a Native American women – the box also had a photo of them in formal wedding clothes in the woods).

Of all the things I found, the most interesting was a hastily scribbled note on the back of a land claim form that said something to this affect:

I have broken pursuit and camped for the night as the storm has made the river too dangerous to cross. The group I am following is already on the other side. I do recognize their leader and have encountered him before, smuggling transits from Old Mexico. He is Russian-born, educated in Paris. He is traveling with an Austrian. I believe the (Hoover) dam is their target.

The part about recognizing the Russian-born, Paris-educated smuggler always made me wonder what my great-grandfather did in the military -- he was born in the US but raised in Europe. He apparently never talked about his service, and I only know about it because I found a copy of his exam to enter the Forest Service and saw the military service points applied to his results.

How could I resist using this in a novel?

So that is what is in the pots simmering on the back burners while I actively work on “City of Dis” and TNC books. I hope they caught your interest and gave you something fun to think about on this wonderful Friday.

Check out the song I've posted to the right. :) That...with vampires. Heh heh.

Progress on "City of Dis"

I'm happy to say I've actually made some progress on "City of Dis", follow-up to the short story "Dis", which I released in electronic version near the end of May.

I'm still not feeling quite well enough for fiction writing most days, but I did get together with my diabolical plotting buddy last night. It had been my intention to get some help from him on researching The Ars Goetia for the story, but the evening turned into a full-fledged plotting session that radically redefined one character and changed my direction rather drastically. It also means the opening I had written will have to be scrapped, but it's a small price to pay to incorporate the ideas we came up with last night.

As I've mentioned before, "City of Dis" will follow Colbie Moss into the notorious T housing project as she tries to recover a magical blade entrusted to her by a Norse god. She's still concerned with keeping her loss of the blade a secret from her mentor, though it's becoming clear that the Norse fate of the past, Urd, is already watching the events. But is she just watching?

And when it comes down to a deal with a demon or a deal with the devil, which will Colbie choose? Especially since she used to be married to one of them.

This should be a lot of fun.

Happy Friday, everyone.

I'm Baaack...More Or Less

Well I'm back to blogging this week after taking a couple of weeks for medical leave. Unfortunately, I'm not feeling up to writing fiction at all. It could be as much as another five or six weeks before I'm feeling myself again. Meaning, of course, that my hopes of releasing "City of Dis" in early August are not going to materialize. I suddenly have even more respect for authors who manage to write fiction while undergoing chemo or dialysis.

I'm hoping, if a get a lot of rest this weekend, that I might feel like working on the plot outline for the first Colbie Moss novel. I had really wanted to name the novel Bad Blood, but there are so many urban fantasy novels out there with that name, I don't think it's a good idea. So for awhile I was toying with The Norn Convergence. There was an agent who liked that name pretty well. Now I'm seeing how I feel about The Norn Convergence: Bad Blood, which would allow me to keep the theme I wanted for the first three books in the series...Bad Blood, Bad Faith, and Bad Name.

I'm also going back and forth over what to do with the novel when I've finished it. Self-publish? Hope a small press like Ridan is open for submissions by then? Or take an agent or two up on partial requests I got off the pitch? So undecided. Of course, that's really putting the cart before the horse until the book is finished.

(In case people are wondering, this is not my first novel. I've been writing novels since I was thirteen. This would be my sixth or seventh completed novel, plus a handful of partials. Hard to keep track, though, because I frequently destroy manuscripts after a few years, though the ideas remain filed away in the back of my mind.)

So anyway, that's where I'm at writing-wise right now.

Hmmm, I think maybe I'll wrap up by sharing the first few paragraphs of the draft opening of the first Colbie Moss novel...whatever I end up calling it.


Of all the omens and ill portents that should have warned me - recurring dreams of tangling tree roots, peripheral glimpses of a large dog everywhere I went, consuming fascination with a new crate of Scandinavian artifacts from the Stenberg Collection – it was the fact that I winced at the angry clack of Winnie’s stiletto heels on the concrete floor that should have told me I was wearing down, nearing my end.

I had ignored the slamming door and the slight British accent Winnie Naughton used when she shouted. It was false. She hadn’t lived there long enough and had been back in the States too long for an accent. Holding my breath and reaching out as if to steady empty air, I focused on the interns trying for the third time to install the 50x60 photograph of Eld House on the ecru wall of the museum’s main exhibit hall. Not much time left.

“Colbie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

At least she hadn’t said ‘bloody hell’ this time, perhaps because of the smiles all the staff had bitten back last time she’d pushed the Brit Snit routine too hard. I still wasn’t breathing. The print swayed on its hooks.

Blog Vacation

Happy Canada Day (so my oddly international and somewhat unreliable wall calendar says)!

For the next two weeks, I am on a Blog Vacation. In addition to having some big events going on right now in my personal life, I have been feeling the need to spend less time on blogs and Twitter and Facebook and more time on reading and writing. It's time for a blogging vacation to recharge and get some good work done.

If you'd like to read something in the meantime, I recommend "Dis". But I would, wouldn't I? :)

I plan to be back on Friday, July 15th. Hope to see you then!