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The neighbouring kingdoms of Oscia and Arcathia have been at a tentative peace for three years after centuries of warfare. Prince Severin of Arcathia has been brought up to put duty before all else and as the only son of the King and Queen, it is his duty to marry and produce an heir. His parents want him to marry an Oscian princess to cement that tentative peace. Unfortunately Severin isn’t interested in princesses. Now, if he had his pick of princes that would be another matter.

Havyn has been a slave all his life. When his aptitude for wizardry is discovered, he finds himself purchased and freed by Prince Severin and apprenticed to the royal wizard, Ildar. His duty is to stay chaste to keep his powers strong, but his feelings for Severin sorely test his resolve.

With kingdoms at war, the throne hanging in the balance, magic in the air, and outside forces trying to keep them apart, can the two men find happiness together, or is duty more important than love?

The Chosen by Annette Gisby
M/M Fantasy Romance Novel
Available from Smashwords | Allromance

…Obsessed with being ‘young’ again as if those times were best
As if Alice stayed down that hole and never left again.
Frozen in tea party time
Madhatters, mice and children’s rhymes
Never women, girls for life
Lollipops and glittered icing…

I’m not going to start spamming my Twitter feed with BUY MY BOOK NAO, THE BEST BOOK EVER!!! tweets…a good thing, too, as everyone that I know on Twitter is either a fellow gamer or someone that I’ve done cover work for in the past. If you see me indulging in obnoxious self-promotion just slap me down. Not in an over-the-top red wedding* style of course, but more as you would a inebriated friend who was making a tit of himself.

That said, if you would like to send a link my way, or read it for a review, let me know. I’ll give you all the information that you need. If you want to review it, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I have a few things for a giveaway, which I’ll be posting in a week or so. Until then…crickets. :D

And now, back to the sequel…because I’m going to get a handle on this writing thing or die trying.

BUY MY BOOK NOW, BEST BOOK EVER! IF YOU LIKED HARRY POTTER, STEPHEN KING, SHAKESPEARE, PABLO NERUDA OR TWILIGHT, YOU’LL LOVE THIS!

Amazon US / Amazon UK

*Wasn’t that the most entertaining meltdown on the interwebs EVER?

PS: I do have to admit that there is a huge thrill in just seeing it out there on Amazon and everything. It seems all…real.

One of the books that my dad used to read to us when we were little was The Children’s Bluebird. The book had been his as a child and eventually was passed on to me; of course I lost it during my footloose early twenties when I was moving from city to city. I managed to lose a lot of things during that time. I always remembered that story, though, and have always wanted to write my own version of it. The original is a product of the era in which it was written; loaded with sentimentality and saccharin emotions it hides an extremely warped and twisted core. I wanted to write a version which stripped away the sentimentality and kept the twisted bits, a version updated and streamlined for more modern readers.

Several years ago my mother died from complications associated with ALS. My father was diagnosed soon after with cancer, which started in the bladder and then spread all over, bowel and spine and so on. It was incurable, but he was strong – having been given a matter of months to live, he survived for two years. During that time I rather abruptly went freelance with my artwork and when NaNoWriMo rolled around decided to participate and finally write the book that I’d been thinking about for ages. It’s dedicated to him and although he was too sick to read it at the end, he did read the dedication. I’m thankful that I had a chance to at least put it in his hands before the end…he is such a huge part of who I grew up to be. He taught me about being brave and doing the right thing, even (or especially) when that is hard to do. He gave me my moral code and my honesty. Oh, sure, I’ve been a fuckup in the past, and will most probably be one again, but I I do try to be strong and do good in the world.

So. Back to this book.

The Clockwork Bluebird is a steampunk, or clockwork-punk, fairytale retelling of The Children’s Bluebird set in an alternate-universe Victorian England. The main characters, Maia and Tyler Lemarchand (every name has a meaning – I had fun with this) are the mixed-race children of an inventor and the daughter of the Moon; they get caught up in the middle of a clandestine war between the Fae Courts. There are goblin markets and black dire wolves, a gang of clockwork-limbed children called the Tatters that live in the lost Underground tunnels beneath the city and even a talking dog. Working on this was pure fun from start to finish and I hope that it is equally fun to read.

I’ll post more about this later…mainly I just wanted to tell my father that I loved him. I miss you so much, Dad. And all of this is for you.

I’ve gotten back into Rift in a big way and this weekend I spent hours try to build a dimension (in-game character housing). My house really sucks. I’ve always thought that I had a certain amount of artistic talent, and certain sense of aesthetics in relation to visual design, but those talents definitely do not translate to 3D design. My walls are wonky and I spend ages building loft platforms only to realise that I haven’t left any space for stairs to reach them. I can take a gorgeous starting environment and turn it into a tarpaper shanty in a matter of hours, which is quite disappointing.

Here’s an example of someone who has some actual skillz in 3D environment design. This house is not mine.

 
Becoming a Legend by B. Kristin McMichael
Coming soon on June 6th, 2013

Synopsis:

Arianna Grace is about to turn seventeen and her life has been very complicated lately. She is the leader of four clans of night humans: dearg-dul, baku, tengu, and lycan. While the four clans seem to get along better with each other, there is internal conflict on both sides of her family, not to mention the three boys vying for her attention.

Edward Lucan is making a chase for the power to lead the baku clans and is playing his cards by using his nephew Andrew to lure Arianna into a trap. Unfortunately for Lucan, Andrew has his own plans. He has spent the last year waiting for Arianna to see him as more than a friend, and he now finds it necessary to make a move for her affection, despite his uncle.

In the dearg-dul estate, Arianna discovers that the ambitious Lord Seeger has been laying his own strategies for power and is slowly poisoning her. After getting away with her grandfather’s murder, he is setting his sights on her. Luckily for Arianna, her team is on to all of the plans and is making some plans of their own. Will it be enough to keep Arianna safe? Several people close to Arianna have been keeping secrets. If Arianna is to take power and control of the night, she will need to know the truth. Will someone finally tell her what it truly means to become the legend everyone is waiting for, before it is too late to turn back?

It’s been dust and tears all round for the past week. And madness, obviously, as per the post title. The follow-up story to The Clockwork Bluebird is a complicated one, very dark, with intertwined fairytale retellings. I left it partially written with pages of notes several months ago when my book cover art workload got too heavy to even think about it. I was working late each night and also weekends and getting very stressed out. So I went on a hiatus of sorts and gradually worked my way through all of the existing cover work until I reached a point where I only had a few left to do. Yes, I as a working freelancer got rid of all my paying work. Yikes.

That madness aside, once I was able to go back to the second manuscript I found a pile of rubbish and pages of notes that no longer made any sense to me. You have to understand that in this book I have intertwined main stories based on the Goose Girl and The Red Shoes. There are notes relating to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (don’t ever let anyone tell you that your reading habits as an angst-ridden goth teen won’t serve you well in later life), Commedia dell’Arte and the exotic animal trade in Victorian England. We have a King of the Cats subplot and steampunk technology fueled by Fae magic.

And I don’t remember how much of it fit together. It all made sense at one point…but now? Dust and tears.

I think most people have seen this image of JK Rowling’s plot spreadsheet for the Harry Potter books. I have something a bit more high-tech but just as messy in Scrivener right now and I’ve been trying to beat the whole thing into submission or die trying.

After a week of literally hurting my brain (incurring stress headaches) I think I have most of it again. The moral to this story is write while it’s hot, don’t wait until the time is right. You’ll never have that span of interruption- and responsibility-free writing time, so just make do. Write the goddamn thing at the point when it wants to be written, or risk losing it.

Part of what it makes me remember is growing up and being a massive sci fi reader, idolising Robert Heinlein and all the other science fiction authors who were so much a part of my childhood and teens. I kept a scrapbook of every NASA-related article that I could find and wanted more than anything else in the world to be an astronaut. Christa McAuliffe was one of my personal heroes. Would I, as a regular person, have taken the chance to enter space even if I knew what would eventually happen? Yes, in a second. I would still do it.

So once again, here it is…

“Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror’s Maze, as if parts of someone’s life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.”
- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Mirror Maze was the most dreamlike part of the Carnival. It lived one level underneath the main midway area in the forgotten deep runs of the Underground. There was a very ornate sign hanging above the tiled archway leading down to the maze, and its bright gilded curlicues and rich paint belied the dim hallway that led down to the maze.

Arriving in the maze was like entering a dream which starts innocently, but gradually darkens to nightmare. The first room was charming, a rotating room with multiple mirrors that spun to tinkling music as though one had stepped into a kaleidoscope, or walked through the small door in the centre of a carousel into its reverse world. Light shattered into shards of light and spun through the room, showering over the upturned faces of the entranced visitors to the maze. The small crowd laughed, entranced, and then wandered through side passages into the maze.

There was a room furnished in opulent Victorian style, brocades and velvets and thick red oriental carpet underfoot. The mirrors in this room, however, reflected dark things moving in the shadows that one could only see out of the corner of one’s eye. Looked at directly, they disappeared into comfortable normalcy but as soon as one looked away the shadows rose, stalked, grew behind uneasy visitors.

A long, dark room was filled with tall, thin shards of mirror that rose into the darkness of the ceiling like a forest of cruel trees. The mirrors were set close, at odd angles to one another, forcing the person traversing the room to weave their way through the mirrors, each reflective surface circumnavigated leading only to more of them until the whole became oppressive and disorientating. This was an unpleasant room, and most preferred to traverse it as quickly as possible, breathing a sigh of relief upon reaching the other side.

A young couple could be seen slipping into a small side room, presumably in hopes of finding a corner quiet enough for a stolen kiss. This room featured an assortment of various distorting mirrors of the type that can be found in most travelling carnivals and the boy and girl posed in front of several of them, laughing.

“Oh, look! How thin we are.”

“And this one…my dear, you’re fat as a goose!” She pretended to slap him and he caught her wrist, placing a kiss upon the back of her glove. His arm around her waist drew her closer, daringly close, as they moved to the next mirror.

This mirror showed two strangers, two older people. Since it is impossible for the young to believe that they will eventually become old, it took them several minutes to realise that they were looking at aged versions of themselves and gradually their laughter turned to appalled silence. His thick hair had thinned and receded, and his eyes showed the pouchiness of dissipation and excess. He looked mean and small, like a man who had forgotten kindness. She looked at a woman who had aggressively attempted to retain a fading youth, with bright hennaed hair and rouged cheeks which could not hide the frown lines that rode parallel between her eyes. The tight-laced corset couldn’t hide the thickened middle, and her bright lips turned down at the corners in disappointment and resentment. The older couple stood together like a couple who had spent decades making each other miserable, blaming the other for missed opportunities and unrealised expectations.

Silently the young couple left the room, no longer interested in stolen kisses. They didn’t hold hands, as though each believed that the other could pass the contagion along that would someday turn them into the person in the reflection. The next couple entered, laughing.