Tainted Blood is now out on the Kindle and the Nook, and it's also in paperback. I'm pretty happy with that. In case you didn't know, Tainted Blood is part two of my Fallen series. The first book being “Fallen Blood.” The story takes off six months after the last story ended. There maybe a few spoilers ahead, so you might not want to continue. Things didn't go exactly the way that Brian had hoped. In fact, nothing has went the way he planned. To make matters worse, Brian finds himself in a cat and mouse game between an uncle hell bent on revenge for the death of his nephew, and a local Vampire out to pick up a little insurance against the two.
The book has only been out a few days but it has already gotten a 4 star review. If you're interested you can check it out at Goodreads. Here's a link: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/136174579
Now the question is, what do I want to write now? I have a partial vampire mystery already started, a sequel for Shades of Twilight already with a chapter in the works, or one of several other stories I've been playing with for the last year. Decisions decisions. I always find it hard to make them. On the one hand I should do another sequel. People are waiting, and yet I'm not sure I'm ready to go back to those worlds yet. There’s so many other worlds to explore! There's a little romantic fantasy I've been thinking on. Have the story completely outlined, about a teen who discovers he has the power to control the dead, but is shunned from his village and the girl he loves. The story is about how he tries to win his love to him and at the same time he tries to learn to control his strange powers.
Sounds cool to me and I've been thinking about writing it. Geez...Never enough time to write. Anyways that’s whats been going on with me. Hopefully by the time you see me again, I'll have made up my mind. Til then, cya.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Don't have an e-reader yet? Win one here!
E-readers are becoming more and more popular. Since their prices have come down tremendously over the last year, they've turned into popular gifts. I heard from many readers this year who received either a Kindle or a Nook for Christmas.
Considering that many independent authors only e-publish due to the high cost of print publishing, this is good news for all of us indie authors.
And here are two authors who want to add to the readership who own an e-reader: Bella Andre and Tina Folsom are raffling off a Color Nook each. You can find the links to their giveaways below. Each giveaway involves a few questions about their books, but answers to these questions can be found in the free samples you can read on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
So, what are you waiting for? Head over to their websites and enter the contests!
Good Luck!
Considering that many independent authors only e-publish due to the high cost of print publishing, this is good news for all of us indie authors.
And here are two authors who want to add to the readership who own an e-reader: Bella Andre and Tina Folsom are raffling off a Color Nook each. You can find the links to their giveaways below. Each giveaway involves a few questions about their books, but answers to these questions can be found in the free samples you can read on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
So, what are you waiting for? Head over to their websites and enter the contests!
Good Luck!
Thursday, December 23, 2010
The Urban Myth of Santa Claus
by
Luna Lindsey
Long ago, I wrote a comedic essay on the parallels between Santa Claus and Satan. I was surprised to find quite a few things in common, though I was really only joking. I finished the piece "...and the North Pole is as cold as hell!"
Back then, I didn't even know that "Nick" or "Old Nick" is also another word for The Devil in some parts of the world. It is also the root of the name for several types of fairies in different regions (neck, nykk, nissie, nixsie, nyx, etc. This itself may have come from the Roman "nymph".) When we accept that many of our Christmas traditions have pagan roots, it's easy to see where all the confusion might have come from.
I've studied a lot of world mythologies this year. And in doing so, I have taken a step back from my own culture's mythologies and seen it anew. To us, we are a rational culture which has abandoned actual belief in strange tales of gnomes with funny names who spin straw into gold and gods with hammers who strike lightning out of the sky. What silly nonsense! Yet we have a large number of our own myths, that when viewed from outside, are just as silly. When it comes to Christmas, those myths are borrowed from the same kinds of people who believed in giants and gods who live on Mt. Olympus. And we find we are no different.
Think about it. We cut down a tree and put it in the living room and place a star on top. We hang socks from the fireplace. Then we place cookies and milk out all night for a fat man in a red suit, who will come down the chimney at midnight and fill the socks with treats, then pull brightly colored packages (made by elves) out of his sack and place them under the tree. But only for children he has judged worthy. Then he will climb back up the chimney, hop on a flying snow-craft pulled by a team of reindeer, and fly back to his home in the North Pole.
If you hadn't grown up with that story, you would laugh, and say, "People really believed that crap?" And yet parents tell the tale to their children as if it were fact, take their children to the "marketplace" to sit on his lap, then stay up on Christmas night to enact the ritual. We put statues and images of Santa and all his followers all over our houses and marketplaces and sing songs about him. Revealing the secret to children is taboo.
Have we really changed all that much? In the future, when antiquities scholars will tell of our God and our Demigods, Santa will be highest on that list, akin to Thor in his second-place status next to Odin. He will be the god associated with giving, kindness, children, winter, snow, the cardinal direction of "north", and the color "red". The Easter Bunny and cupid and leprechauns and ghosts will be right up there, too, and academics will debate whether we held them as gods or animistic spirits. For all our science, we haven't really left our myths behind.
Everything about the Santa myth is a fairytale. With actual fairies. It's so ingrained in our culture that we often miss it. But all the elements are there:
Given the great distances back then, words evolved over time. The nixies became nykks which became "Nick" (the devil), which became "to nick something" (meaning to steal). Saint Nicholas' name is most likely a coincidence, but he was actually from Turkey waaaay back in 270CE. He didn't wear a fur lined coat at all, but he did give things away, year round. Most notably, he saved women from prostitution by giving them dowries and prevented children from being butchered by cannibals by raising them from the dead. Not a very familiar image when thinking of Father Christmas...
But we are pretty sure that the Germanic peoples associated Saint Nick with the god Odin for some reason. In Odin we see a more familiar figure: one who was celebrated at the pagan winter holiday of Yule with the practice of leaving carrots outside in boots for his flying horse to eat. In exchange he left treats for the children.
It is easy to imagine the Church trying to re-label the pagan nykks as devils, and their god Odin as the devil, and them hearing the name Saint Nicholas, and then deciding it was ok to celebrate him during Yule, and since he was a "Nick", and so was Odin, and they both gave things away, then it was all one and the same.
Maybe. That last bit was just a wild guess, but in seeing how Roman nymphs evolved into European fairies in the first place, it's easy to imagine how these things can happen.
We can read recently-written stories about vampires and werewolves who wander among us, but few, if any of those will achieve the status of myth: beliefs about how the world is, or how we'd like it to be, that are passed along from parent to child, slowly evolving through the ages, until no one can quite remember just exactly where it came from. When we think of urban fantasy, we can't forget that the old stories are just as alive today as they always were; the living, breathing spirit in the body of our culture.
Luna Lindsey
Long ago, I wrote a comedic essay on the parallels between Santa Claus and Satan. I was surprised to find quite a few things in common, though I was really only joking. I finished the piece "...and the North Pole is as cold as hell!"
Back then, I didn't even know that "Nick" or "Old Nick" is also another word for The Devil in some parts of the world. It is also the root of the name for several types of fairies in different regions (neck, nykk, nissie, nixsie, nyx, etc. This itself may have come from the Roman "nymph".) When we accept that many of our Christmas traditions have pagan roots, it's easy to see where all the confusion might have come from.
I've studied a lot of world mythologies this year. And in doing so, I have taken a step back from my own culture's mythologies and seen it anew. To us, we are a rational culture which has abandoned actual belief in strange tales of gnomes with funny names who spin straw into gold and gods with hammers who strike lightning out of the sky. What silly nonsense! Yet we have a large number of our own myths, that when viewed from outside, are just as silly. When it comes to Christmas, those myths are borrowed from the same kinds of people who believed in giants and gods who live on Mt. Olympus. And we find we are no different.
Think about it. We cut down a tree and put it in the living room and place a star on top. We hang socks from the fireplace. Then we place cookies and milk out all night for a fat man in a red suit, who will come down the chimney at midnight and fill the socks with treats, then pull brightly colored packages (made by elves) out of his sack and place them under the tree. But only for children he has judged worthy. Then he will climb back up the chimney, hop on a flying snow-craft pulled by a team of reindeer, and fly back to his home in the North Pole.
If you hadn't grown up with that story, you would laugh, and say, "People really believed that crap?" And yet parents tell the tale to their children as if it were fact, take their children to the "marketplace" to sit on his lap, then stay up on Christmas night to enact the ritual. We put statues and images of Santa and all his followers all over our houses and marketplaces and sing songs about him. Revealing the secret to children is taboo.
Have we really changed all that much? In the future, when antiquities scholars will tell of our God and our Demigods, Santa will be highest on that list, akin to Thor in his second-place status next to Odin. He will be the god associated with giving, kindness, children, winter, snow, the cardinal direction of "north", and the color "red". The Easter Bunny and cupid and leprechauns and ghosts will be right up there, too, and academics will debate whether we held them as gods or animistic spirits. For all our science, we haven't really left our myths behind.
Everything about the Santa myth is a fairytale. With actual fairies. It's so ingrained in our culture that we often miss it. But all the elements are there:
- Magic.
- Elves.
- Flying.
- Leaving out food to appease him.
- Inexplicable gift giving (remember the shoemakers elves?)
- Time dilation to get around the world in one night.
Given the great distances back then, words evolved over time. The nixies became nykks which became "Nick" (the devil), which became "to nick something" (meaning to steal). Saint Nicholas' name is most likely a coincidence, but he was actually from Turkey waaaay back in 270CE. He didn't wear a fur lined coat at all, but he did give things away, year round. Most notably, he saved women from prostitution by giving them dowries and prevented children from being butchered by cannibals by raising them from the dead. Not a very familiar image when thinking of Father Christmas...
But we are pretty sure that the Germanic peoples associated Saint Nick with the god Odin for some reason. In Odin we see a more familiar figure: one who was celebrated at the pagan winter holiday of Yule with the practice of leaving carrots outside in boots for his flying horse to eat. In exchange he left treats for the children.
It is easy to imagine the Church trying to re-label the pagan nykks as devils, and their god Odin as the devil, and them hearing the name Saint Nicholas, and then deciding it was ok to celebrate him during Yule, and since he was a "Nick", and so was Odin, and they both gave things away, then it was all one and the same.
Maybe. That last bit was just a wild guess, but in seeing how Roman nymphs evolved into European fairies in the first place, it's easy to imagine how these things can happen.
We can read recently-written stories about vampires and werewolves who wander among us, but few, if any of those will achieve the status of myth: beliefs about how the world is, or how we'd like it to be, that are passed along from parent to child, slowly evolving through the ages, until no one can quite remember just exactly where it came from. When we think of urban fantasy, we can't forget that the old stories are just as alive today as they always were; the living, breathing spirit in the body of our culture.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Indy help
One of the hardest things about deciding to become an Indy, is knowing what to do. As a writer, writing can be hard or easy. Sometimes it's a little bit of both. In the end however, because I am a writer, I write. No ands or buts about that. Still, once I finish writing and editing my work, what then? There's a great big world out there and no real road maps to follow. At least there wasn't when I started over a year ago. Today, however there are several road maps that have been put together by authors that, like me, started out when there were none.
They have cheerfully put together their experiences, both the good and the bad, and have done their utmost to help you to avoid the pitfalls that they had to learn from real world experience. If you're thinking about pursuing a career as an Indy author, but don't have a clue as to where to start after finishing that manuscript, then I would recommend three different books for you. All of them have there own merits and each one will give you a little something different. So if you're serious, then please take the time and read at least one of these, as they will surely make your trip into Indy publishing that much easier for you.
Are You Still Submitting Your Work to a Traditional Publisher?--- By Edward C. Patterson
http://www.amazon.com/Still-Submitting-Traditional-Publisher-ebook/dp/B001O9BERY?tag=dogpile-20
The Newbie's Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know)---JA Konrath
http://www.amazon.com/Newbies-Publishing-Everything-Writer-ebook/dp/B003I6496Y/ref=pd_sim_kinc_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Becoming an Indie Author (Smart Self-Publishing)---Zoe Winters http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Indie-Author-Self-Publishing-ebook/dp/B004AYD90U/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1293029386&sr=1-6
They have cheerfully put together their experiences, both the good and the bad, and have done their utmost to help you to avoid the pitfalls that they had to learn from real world experience. If you're thinking about pursuing a career as an Indy author, but don't have a clue as to where to start after finishing that manuscript, then I would recommend three different books for you. All of them have there own merits and each one will give you a little something different. So if you're serious, then please take the time and read at least one of these, as they will surely make your trip into Indy publishing that much easier for you.
Are You Still Submitting Your Work to a Traditional Publisher?--- By Edward C. Patterson
http://www.amazon.com/Still-Submitting-Traditional-Publisher-ebook/dp/B001O9BERY?tag=dogpile-20
The Newbie's Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know)---JA Konrath
http://www.amazon.com/Newbies-Publishing-Everything-Writer-ebook/dp/B003I6496Y/ref=pd_sim_kinc_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Becoming an Indie Author (Smart Self-Publishing)---Zoe Winters http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Indie-Author-Self-Publishing-ebook/dp/B004AYD90U/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1293029386&sr=1-6
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