Release Day Goodies

It's Temper Sanguine's release day at last! It feels such a long time in the making—I submitted the MS to my Samhain editor last December. If patience is a virtue, I'm a wicked tart of impatience. But the book is out and the moment is almost anticlimactic. I should probably be beating pots and pans, figuratively speaking, but I hate author spam when others do it. Maybe I'll just clink some glasses instead.

I just made Temper Sanguine's Pinterest board public. Being highly visual, during writing I do a lot of research for visual representations of the places and things that appear in my books. It makes sense to share some of them with whoever is interested. This board contains a few snippets some might consider spoilerish, so peruse at your own risk!

Temper Sanguine available:

Samhain Publishing +++ Amazon +++ Amazon UK  +++ Barnes & Noble

Saturday Snippet

Just wrapping up line edits for Temper Sanguine. The book has a fair bit of Hungarian, and I feel sorry for my editors who had to deal with it. Hungarian it's not an easy language, some say it's one of the hardest ones to learn. Harvey is certainly not having an easy time with it:

Thwap! The book hit the wall, bounced and landed on the floor, pages flailing like the arms of men slipping on ice.

“Your language is fucking impossible!” Harvey snarled from his spot on the couch.

Gabe played dumb. “What’s wrong with English?”

“Hungarian! It’s…” Harvey sputtered out in frustration but quickly gathered steam again. “The grammar must’ve been invented by a sadist. Your people simply take a word and stick more letters to it from both ends to make it mean whatever you want. It’s like a syllabic orgy, and there are all these stupid rules about vowels and stuff, and the whole thing’s about as straightforward as three-person chess.” He stood and picked up the book. He leafed through it till he found what he’d been looking for. “Take this, for example. How the hell is elmehetsz supposed to mean you may leave? And the root word is megy! What the fuck? This language is ridiculous.” He flung himself back on the couch.

I have cover!

(Design by Angie Waters)

So nice to have a cover--it makes the book feel real.

Status Update – The Return of Harvey and Gabe

My next book with Samhain will be Temper Sanguine, due out in June. All the content edits are done, and I've even seen a comp for the cover. It's a great feeling to be at this "OMG, I actually finished this thing!" stage. Temper Sanguine is a sequel to Spirit Sanguine and picks up a few months after where the first book left off. Without giving away too much, I can tell that there's some traveling, nasty bad guys, fighting, gore, and a colorful cast of supporting characters.

While Temper Sanguine is a sequel, I wrote it to work as a standalone. It takes extra work sum up the world and the relevant details from the previous book without turning it into an info-dump, but it's worth the effort.

Sometimes I'm amazed I finish anything at all. When I'm in the middle of a project the end seems hopelessly far away and I often despair. Fortunately, I've realized writing is a lot like climbing uphill—all you need to do is focus on your next step and you'll eventually make it to the top.

I wrote this book in layers, more than any other book before. The first draft was incredibly rough and it took multiple passes of edits to fill the wholes and smooth out the rough patches. Now that it's done, I'm truly pleased with the results.

In other news: I plan to publish the slightly re-edited version of Academic Pursuits in early March, and I'm currently working on a Dead Man story.