The Fire Mages Author Guest Post

Author: Pauline M. Ross

Genre: Epic Fantasy Adventure / Romance

Kyra has always been drawn to the magic of spellpages. She is determined to leave her small village far behind and become a scribe, wielding the power of magic through her pen. Halfway through her training, she has a mage as patron and her ambitions are within her grasp. But a simple favour for her sister goes disastrously awry, destroying Kyra’s dreams in an instant.

Devastated, she accepts an offer from a stranger to help her find out what went wrong. The young man sees growing power within Kyra, potentially stronger than spellpages or any living mage. The answers to unlocking that power may lie within the glowing walls of the Imperial City, but its magic is strong and the unwary vanish without trace on its streets. Thirsty for knowledge and desperate to avoid another accident, she feels compelled to risk it.

While she focuses on controlling her abilities, a storm of greed and ambition boils up around her. Kyra is a pawn in the struggle for dominance between unscrupulous factions vying for rule of her country. Trusting the wrong side could get her killed–or worse, the potent magic she barely understands could be put to unthinkable evil.

Author Bio

Pauline lives in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland with her husband, her grown up daughter and a mad cat. She likes chocolate, whisky, her Kindle, massed pipe bands, long leisurely lunches, watching TV with her daughter, chocolate, going places in her campervan, eating pizza in Italy, summer nights that never get dark, wood fires in winter, chocolate, the view from the study window looking out over the Moray Firth and the Black Isle to the mountains beyond. And chocolate. She dislikes driving on motorways, cooking, shopping, hospitals. ‘The Fire Mages’ is her second published work. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ was published in September 2014.

Links

http://paulinemross.co.uk/

Oh no! There’s romance in my fantasy!

Or should it be: there’s fantasy in my romance? Fantasy romance (or romantic fantasy) is a difficult genre. I can’t even decide what to call it, so that’s not a great start.

I used to get flummoxed when people asked what genre my books are. “Well, it’s sort of fantasy,” I’d say, floundering a bit. “Swords and magic and stuff. And then there’s romance…” And then I’d get asked about werewolves and vampires and such like. But fantasy romance is much broader than that. The urban setting with non-humans and the feisty young woman is just one aspect. There are more and more authors now writing stories that are very much in the tradition of epic fantasy, with kingdoms and wars and quests for the magic McGuffin, but which also have a romantic subplot more developed than the princess produced in the final chapter for the new king to marry.

I love reading epic fantasy stories that also have romance in them, but for me, they need to have three things to work well:

1.    Deep, thorough world-building. That means all the details of the background world need to be properly worked out, and need to be consistent. I find it much harder to get into a story if there are moments that have me going: but wait, why are there dragons here, but nothing else? What do they live on when there are no questing humans passing through? And why is this world entirely forest or desert, right up to the city walls? Where are all the farms to feed the population?

2.    The characters have to be fully fleshed out and feel like real people, with believable motivations and reactions to events. And sometimes this clashes with the romance aspect. I’ve read books where the tension ramps up and up, and war (or some other major catastrophe) is imminent, and what do the characters do? They put on their party frocks and have a ball, that’s what. Erm, really? Wouldn’t they be sharpening their swords, perhaps? Checking they have enough arrows and boiling oil? I realise that authors love to have the big romantic moment, but please, be a bit creative. Place that romantic moment while our doughty couple is sheltering from a hail of arrows on the battlements or hiding from the bad guy.

3.    The romance needs to be more than a perfunctory insta-lurve. As in real life, love at first sight is a bit rare, and it’s not always the best foundation for a lifetime of happiness, so I find it more believable if the couple are also friends, or at least have something in common. The prince marrying the peasant girl? The farm-boy marrying the princess? Not going to work. Or at least, it will take more than eyes meeting across a crowded room to convince me.

My own books are fantasy through and through. There’s a world still recovering from a magical catastrophe, there are numerous different countries, all with their own social customs, there are border disputes and tensions and the occasional outbreak of war. But at the heart of it are people, with all their emotional hangups and dreams and insecurities and fears and needs. It’s inevitable that they fall in and out of love, but they tend to do it slowly, gradually getting to know each other.

The romances I write are of the three steps forward, two back variety, and it may even be the very last chapter before the heroine realizes that this man is truly for her. And although I love a happy-ever-after as much as the next romance fan, I also like it if my characters decide for themselves just how that’s going to work out. Don’t want to get married? No problem? Don’t want to choose between two men? Still no problem. Don’t want to give up the career or the man? Absolutely fine.

Just so long as it all works out well in the end. Because that’s what romance is all about, even when there are sword-wielding guards outside the doors, images in the basement and dragons in the sky.

Guest post Divine Scales author Jennifer Blackstream

Title: Divine Scales

Author: Jennifer Blackstream

Genre: Fantasy Romance

A warrior with a hunger for sin . . .
Driven by a terrible hunger for the black souls of evil men, Patricio, divine executioner of the gods, patrols the kingdom with blood on his hands and ice in his heart. The families of his victims sing his praises–the result of a witch’s cruel curse that condemns him to be forever surrounded by false adulation. When the curse sours the first hint at romance Patricio has had since becoming the king’s heir, his rage is all consuming. Disgusted, he leaves the mermaid in the sea and returns to the palace…only to be shocked when she bargains for the legs to follow him.

A mermaid out of her element . . .

Marcela’s world has been turned upside-down–literally. Once a proud member of her father King Triton’s royal guard, she’s now the victim of an angel’s curse. Enchanted into false adoration bordering on obsession, she traded her tail–and her voice–to the sea witch for the legs she needed to pursue the object of her desire. In a cruel twist of fate, the very magic that gave her the means to pursue her passion also broke the spell that caused it. Now she’s in the angel’s arms, but how can either of them trust the desire churning inside them when so much magic has muddied the waters?

Trust isn’t easy when nothing is as it seems . . .

A mermaid with legs and no singing voice. An angel with a curse. A witch with a chip on her shoulder. The world is full of magic and mayhem, and for an angel and a mermaid, it will take more than a kiss to balance…the Divine Scales.

Author Bio

Jennifer Blackstream is a psychology enthusiast with both a B.A. and M.A. in Psychology. Her fascination with the human mind is most appeased through the study of mythology and folklore as well as any novel by Sir Terry Pratchett.

Jennifer enjoys listening to Alice Cooper, trying new recipes (to which she will add garlic whether it calls for it or not), watching television with her family, and playing with her woefully intelligent young son. She lives in Ohio.

Jennifer spends most of her time drinking coffee from her X-Men mug and desperately trying to get all her ideas written down before her son can find that all magical button on her laptop to make her latest work vanish.

To learn more about Jennifer Blackstream and her novels, visit her website athttp://www.jenniferblackstream.com.

Guest Post

I get a lot of questions about inspiration. What inspires my characters and plot? To be honest, it’s hard to say. Usually, the ideas just come to me out of the blue. But every once in a while, something I’m reading will spark an idea. I’ll read something another author’s done and think, “Now, if it were me, I would have done this a little differently…” And then my muse takes the idea and runs with it. So, I suppose what I read has a great deal to do with my inspiration. With that in mind, here are a few of my favorite authors. I’ve tried to stay in the fantasy/paranormal romance genre in case my readers would like to try them out.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Technically, Laurell is urban fantasy. However, her books (particularly later ones) have a great deal of romance (and an even greater deal of sex), so I’m counting her. Laurell is not for the faint of heart. Her gore is outmatched only by her eroticism (again, this is mostly later books, her earlier ones were much less romance/sex and more mystery/horror/paranormal). Her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series is about a necromancer (Anita) who helps the police solve crimes when there is a paranormal element involved. She is also a necromancer for hire, and those cases can get very interesting as well. To top it all off, Anita has a protective streak, and often finds herself involved in someone else’s mess because she simply isn’t willing to walk away and leave someone who needs help. I love the combination of mystery/paranormal/romance, and I highly recommend the series.

What I love about Laurell’s books:

·         The mystery keeps the suspense very high, which makes the books hard to put down

·         Jean-Cladue, her vampire, is deliciously Machiavellian

·         The erotic scenes are incredibly well-written and very intense

·         Her plots are usually complex enough, that the books can be re-read over and over and you still won’t predict everything that happens

What I love less about Laurell’s books:

·         She tends to have whiner-men. There’s almost always a man in there that’s emotionally needy, and he usually takes up a lot of screen time. It becomes a bit tiresome when there’s more than one.

·         In later books, the sex gets a bit more attention than the plot

·         Anita has become something of a Mary Sue (again, in later books, she starts off beautifully). Honestly, to save the series, Anita is going to have to be stripped of some serious power.

Katie MacAlister

I love Katie’s Aisling Grey: Guardian series. They are about a human, Aisling, who discovers she’s a guardian. She also discovers that she is apparently the mate of the head of the Green Dragons. Oh, and she’s accidentally claimed a demon servant who appears as her dog. As Aisling struggles to figure out just how all this paranormal stuff works, she ends up involved in various plots and mysteries that happen in that new world.

What I love about Katie’s books:

·         They are laugh out loud funny

·         Her mythology is very entertaining, as are her dragon politics

·         I enjoy the mysteries she infuses in with the romance, they really pull you through the book

What I love less about Katie’s books:

·         I found some of the description a bit confusing, but it wasn’t confusing enough to turn me away. Specifically, I’m a bit unsure of how draconic Drake (the leader of the Green Dragons) is?

·         Sometimes I’m laughing so much that it keeps the mystery from being as suspenseful as it might otherwise be

·         The books usually end with something tearing Aisling and Drake apart (romantically speaking), so that they can get together again in the next book. Sometimes, the break up seemed a little thin

I could go on an on about other favorite authors, but I’d hate to completely take over my host’s lovely blog, so I’ll leave you with these two. Check out the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series and the Aisling Grey: Guardian series. You’ll be glad you did!

Guest post for "The Wraith"by Arielle Strauss

Arielle Strauss is a twenty-two year old author, actress, and percussionist originally from Freehold, New Jersey. She graduated with a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where she began to write “The Wraith Trilogy.” She’s pleased to finally share her first novel, “The Wraith,” with the world, and is currently working on its sequel.

The Wraith – Ophelia Weller never believed in ghosts until the night she became one. But when the aftermath of a frat party on the most haunted campus in America leaves her face to face with her own naked corpse, she really has no other option. Now a wraith, Ophelia is a spirit hidden amongst the living. Forced to conceal her undead identity from the world, and struggling to remain visible to the humans around her, how will she ever manage to convince her dearest friend of the truth? Or muster the courage to tell her beautiful gym partner that she just may be in love with her? And, with no memory of her death, how will Ophelia solve the mystery of her murder?

Guest Post 

NaNoWriMo...With A Twist

I always admired people who successfully completed National Novel Writing Month. I mean, to write an entire 50,000 word novel in 30 days is hugely impressive. But what if you only had 28 days? And it had to be a young adult paranormal romance novel? 

February is Antwinowrimo, Anti Twilight Novel Writing Month. Now, don't get me wrong; I read the complete Twilight Saga. And I enjoyed it. Yes, there were aspects of the series I didn't appreciate, but as a whole I had a great deal of fun reading those books. The challenge of Antwinowrimo is to write a novel that's better. On February 1st 2010, I began to attempt this crazy task.

I had no idea what I wanted to write about at first. I figured since there were so many stories about vampires and wolves, I would write a story about a ghost. Her name would be Ophelia, after the Shakespearean heroine. And her love interest would be a living girl she met at school. To this day, I've never read a young adult paranormal romance novel where the lead character is bisexual. Sure, I've seen bisexuality represented in television and in movies, but never in the form of a book geared toward people my own age. So I wrote Ophelia in the hopes that young people like her might finally see themselves represented.

Let me tell you, the first draft of this book is vastly different from the published version. I wrote "The Wraith" my freshman year of college. It was published three months after I graduated. Needless to say, the editing process was a long one. But during those four years, I completed the trilogy as schoolwork. 

If you're a creative writing student, I urge you to try and convince your professors to oversee the projects you want to focus on. I know I wouldn't have come as far as publishing if my professors hadn't lent me their guidance every step of the way. "The Wraith" is a story of a tortured soul who comes to find love and meaning all around her. I hope you enjoy the first two books. Book 3 will arrive before you know it!

http://escapeartistpress.com/author/arielle